Comment by gnat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnat | Hacker News Reader

Computers and the Internet started with academics. Distributed systems were theoretical before they were practical. The first sites of the Internet were universities and the first non-academic site was a milestone. Harvard and Dartmouth and MIT all contributed to computer design and programming advances. UNIX is a product of a quasi-academic research lab.

The Center of Gravity shifted in the late 90s/early 2000s, I reckon. Real world needed distributed systems, and neural networks, and crypto math, and hardware design, and …

There’s still a place for academic research but it’s a much different place in the Gilded CPU Age. It’s the god of the non-commercial gaps: for a while there if it seemed like it’d make money, someone .com giant with gigabucks of free cash had someone on it. Why work for a university if gigabucks.com is hiring?

Not saying USENIX didn’t have factions. I just question the word “capture” about academics, who invented all this stuff before there was money in it. It feels like retiring the Annual Technical Conference is the final step in Usenix’s capture by industry.

> Computers and the Internet started with academics.

Only if one categorizes academics as a research arm of military funded research goals. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but let's be intellectually honest.

> UNIX is a product of a quasi-academic research lab.

A wholly owned subsidiary of the commercial entity AT&T as far as the UNIX trademark is concerned. The BSD family would have something to say about Unix (note case difference) however.

> The Center of Gravity shifted in the late 90s/early 2000s, I reckon. Real world needed distributed systems ...

Distributed systems and the networking protocols now assumed (TCP and UDP) was a battle fought before the late 90's. See Novell[0] for an alternative many espoused at the time and Sun's "The Network is the Computer" mantra from the mid 80's.

> Not saying USENIX didn’t have factions. I just question the word “capture” about academics, who invented all this stuff before there was money in it.

There was always "money in it." Academic funding is, by definition, justifying the allocation of money for the advancement of knowledge often pitched as relevant to the benefactor. Again, not that there is anything wrong with this.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novell

I think what they're saying is this:

USENIX ATC at its best was always focused on operations and real use of Unix. It was the Unix User's Group.

But academic CS has a shortage of real publishing opportunities, causing less immediately practical things to flood USENIX ATC and smother it.

Academic CS has no shortage of prestigious or even good publishing venues. Just within systems and networking, there is SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys, PODC, DISC, FAST, SIGCOMM, CIDR. If you extend to databases there's also VLDB, SIGMOD, etc. These are all Tier-1/Tier-1.5 venues.

Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of venues.

You made this comment twice, so I guess I'll reply to it twice, but the reality is that the acceptance rates of ATC was very, very low (again, under 13% in 2004). Low acceptance rates actually do indicate a shortage of good publishing venues (certainly relative to the number of submissions), but it would be interesting to look at the ATC acceptance rate over time; if it was much (much) higher in its final years, it would be easier to accept your assertion.

17% in 2024. More submissions than other conferences. Attendance numbers probably skewed by cross-registration with OSDI.

https://github.com/emeryberger/csconferences indicates that ATC acceptance rate has averaged 20% in the last five years, so better than ~13%, but not by too much.

However, at least speaking as an academic, I wouldn't say that ~20% acceptance rate is necessarily indicative of a shortage of good venues. There is plenty of not-so-good research that is submitted to top places that has no hope of getting in. (My experience is from computer security research, where the acceptance rate of security conferences has gone down, but the fraction of good papers has also actually gone down, so the fraction of good papers getting in has roughly stayed the same.)

That being said, ATC seems to indeed have been a high-prestige conference back in the day, and hence indeed competitive. My experience is from recent years, where it was viewed as a good-but-not-tier-1 conference in systems research.

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