
Ask HN: Did you ever do any academic/hobby research? - IMAYousaf
Hi. I’d be curious to know what academic and hobby research people have done. I’ve met a lot of people who were researchers at one point and I’d be curious to know what the netizens of this board did.
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wmeredith
I once bought every kind of microwave popcorn at my local grocery store. It
was about 8 brands, if I remember. This was 10 years ago. Then I popped them
all for the same time in the same microwave. I weighed them before and after.
Did a blind taste test. Measured value and did a (label) blind ranking of
aesthetics. Put it all in some nice graphs and tables and threw the whole
thing on a micro site called thepopcornexperiment.com or something with a
handful of affiliate links. (It hasn’t been live for years.) I think it made a
couple hundred bucks over the course of like 3 years before I finally took it
down.

I’m not sure that’s what you’re asking about, but it’s the first thing that
came to mind :)

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design-of-homes
I used to write a blog about housing design. I had no connection with the
housing industry or the field of architecture, merely a strong interest in
high-density housing. As such, I read books, papers, went to the library to
dig up archived publications full of insights (but unavailable online). My
research was for filling my blog with topics and for using them as a
discussion or talking point.

The research never felt like a chore, quite the opposite. Because I was
writing down what I was learning, I felt I could fairly confidently speak at
length on some aspects of housing design. As is often said: if you write down
what you learn, you remember it better and it deepens your understanding.

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ohiovr
I tried to learn as much about thermionic converters in hopes of building one
but the fabrication problem was too difficult.

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mikelevins
About forty years ago I was a research assistant for a university physics
department. I supported two researchers, one a tectonophysicist who was
studying the geometry of shearing in viscous flows, and the other a
theoretical physicist who was studying practical applications of optics in
measurements at atomic scale.

Another assistant devised a clever solution to a problem in making practical
measurements of shearing. The physicist wanted a way to fit nearly-spherical
balls of clay into the middle of blocks of clay of a different color, so that
he could pop in the sphere, shear the block, and then compare measurements of
the resulting distortion with mathematical predictions. One problem was how to
get mostly-spherical balls into a smoother, more-nearly-spherical shape, and
the other assistant rigged up a clever device made out of some photographic
development equipment that rolled a near-spherical ball of clay around in a
bin for hours, resulting in a very-nearly-spherical ball.

More relevant to computing, about six or seven years ago I worked for about a
year and a half on a subproject of Peter Neumann's Clean-Slate computing
research project. The overall project was funded by DARPA, and pretty large.
(I don't know its current status). Its mandate was to examine a group of
proposed ways to address rampant security and reliability problems in
computing.

I worked on maintaining and extending an implementation of a novel programming
language intended to be the main system and application language of a new
computing platform. I didn't design the language, or any substantial part of
it; I just fixed bugs and proposed and added conveniences for programmers.

The language used both static and dynamic type disciplines, simultaneously, in
order to address the areas that each discipline handled best.

The language, called "Breeze," was meant to represent some security and data-
integrity invariants in the type system that are not normally handled that
way. For example, Breeze made it a type error to transmit privileged data to a
recipient or a process with the wrong privileges.

It was a terrifically interesting project. I enjoyed it a lot. I did notice at
least one problem with approaching it as an academic research project. It
sometimes seemed like the incentives to publish novel work made the
researchers less curious than I expected about related work that had
previously been done--I'm guessing because nobody wants to publish a paper
that basically just says, "these guys tried this thing and it worked pretty
well."

I can't be sure, but it seems like maybe this preference might have slowed
practical progress in some areas. On the other hand, it could also be that the
researchers had more substantial reasons for their lack of interest in some
older work, and I just didn't know about them.

