Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zokier | Hacker News Reader

tbh I feel bad for the kid, his thesis supervisor should have helped him more here to scope and direct the work in some sensible way. now it is bit of a mess :(

like just doing a review and comparison of existing boot verification mechanisms would have been already good scope for a thesis. Instead they are barely even mentioned as a side-note, which puts this in a awkward position.

or if crypto was focus, then putting more work on designing and implementing the crypto scheme would have been relevant. Now they got so tangled with the nitty gritty boot details that the crypto ended up also as questionable side-note.

or if rust was focus, then just implementing clean pure-rust bootloader could have been already enough for the thesis, avoiding the stumbling over on misguided crypto bits.

or many other ways this could have been more successful. overall it now feels the author ended up biting far more than what they can chew. also they should have imho spent less time coding and more time on editing the actual thesis. the text is all over the place.

You have rather high expectations towards the supervisor there ... maybe you were one of the "unlucky" ones who had a genius supervisor ...

There aren't that many people in the world who write bootloader code daily for a living, an even smaller subset of those would ever have done one entirely from scratch (vs. just board-porting U-Boot), and even of those, the likelihood of someone having done a secureboot capable one wouldn't be high. Assuming you have such a person as a thesis advisor is a huge stretch ...

That said though, a thesis is (or should be) a learning exercise. Even a complete fail (to achieve the "initial" objective) can make a great thesis if new knowledge - even negative proofs, "this isn't possible because ..." - come out of it. It's just my opinion maybe, but a graduate should never be taught "fake it till you make it"; rather, describe and document failures thoroughly, explain the observations, highlight and justify the parts that work or are breakthroughs. That can make a much better readable and much more useful thesis than one that skims over one-time lucky else nonreproducible results and delivers uncommented sources that fail to compile for anyone but the original author. In that sense, I would argue that a good thesis advisor will focus on the scientific process, documentary evidence, clarity of experimental setups and tests/checks/benchmarks performed, not whether the outcome would be "great enough" to pitch as a founder to VCs.

I feel we agree far more than disagree. I'm not sure where you got the impression that I expected the supervisor to be some sort of genius or deep domain expert on bootloaders. I just expected them to be expert in writing theses, which includes those things you mentioned.

> In that sense, I would argue that a good thesis advisor will focus on the scientific process, documentary evidence, clarity of experimental setups and tests/checks/benchmarks performed, not whether the outcome would be "great enough" to pitch as a founder to VCs.

Exactly! And in this case I feel the exact opposite happened; the advisor let the student work overly fancy project with lot of buzzwords ticked and with minimal rigor; from the result I think it's is pretty obvious that way too big part of the whole project was spent on coding, and too little on those things. That's why I blamed the advisor/supervisor in my parent comment, they should have intervened at some point in the process.

Of course I do realize that in practice these thesis supervisors might have gazillion students under them and minimal time allocated per student, so most likely they just weren't very involved at any stage. And academic institutions have pressure to get students to graduate which creates its own set of problems.

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