

Where is the innovation in software? - abossy
http://www.adambossy.com/blog/2009/03/20/where-is-the-innovation-in-software/

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narag
Computing is a field where integration matters a lot and bottlenecks (many of
them in the human-machine interface) are often not even recognised as such,
but seen as "the way things are". I mean there are a lot of good ideas that
nobody has found the way to implement with enough usability so people wants to
use them. Was YouTube a new idea when it "exploded"? I don't know, but I
believe that it represents an innovation, maybe not in the idea, but in the
right way to implement it. I guess there are a lot of innovative ideas in the
"implementation pending" state.

~~~
10ren
Just on the YouTube example, it was more an that its time had come, and
YouTube just happened to be the one who got popular.

The factors included: multimedia-capable PCs, broadband and cell-phone
cameras. All driven by Moore's Law.

A great deal of compsci seems to be like this (even including new ways of
multiplying numbers) - not surprising, since Moore's Law dwarfs all other
forces. No other industry has anything anywhere near comparable.

This can be used predictively: what obviously great but ridiculously
infeasible idea will Moore's Law soon make feasible?

Examples: spherical TV (you sit inside); golf-swing analysis by brute-force
matching with 3D recordings of every possible swing (to arbitrary resolution);
literal recording and playback of 3D cerebral cortex activity (to arbitrary
precision).

~~~
narag
Displays are tricky. A 1280x960 is _four times_ the 640x480 that was typical
some years ago. We need more memory, more buses bandwidth, bigger and faster
everything in different levels (without talking about colour depth), so I'd
say that the power needed would be 20x or 30x. My gut feeling is that displays
only have consumed Moore's gift for the last ten years.

~~~
10ren
You mean for spherical TV? Taking your 20x estimate, it's due mid-2015:

log 20 / log 2 * 1.5 + 2009 = 2 015.48289

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derwiki
> We must bridge the gap between the techies and the rest of the population.

This is sooooo important. Blogs existed before blogging platforms; it just was
too hard for non-techies to do. Look how long email was around before AOL made
it easy and fun. Wikipedia was possible before the wiki had been invented, but
the wiki made it more accessible for everyone.

Sure, people are gaining competence in computing, but we need to make things
easier to use or consume as well! There's already a lot of great CS/technology
out there that has so much potential if we can get more people to embrace it.
It's half on people to adopt the new technology, but half on use to make the
technology easily adoptable.

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asciilifeform
It is dead:

[http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch....](http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html)

[http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html)

~~~
jimbokun
That second link is pretty good as a rant, but I don't find it very good as an
argument.

The whole argument about macros as a replacement for "static higher order
programming," which is supposedly better than "dynamic higher order
programming," which evidently nobody needs, was lost on me. He also seems to
be saying, though, that "dynamic higher order programming" does not include
closures, so I really don't know what it is. If a closure is anything, it is
certainly a function created at runtime.

He also seems to say a function composition operator is obviously bad, without
any justification. I guess if justification were required, it wouldn't be
obvious. I don't see the clear advantage of carrying around a data structure
with multiple functions and a third function that composes them, versus just
using a compose operator. I suppose it's a little more opaque, but that is
often a good thing (a kind of encapsulation).

"Of course, it may be slightly easier to optimize the result of dynamic code
generation"

But maybe it's a lot easier? Can we get a huge speedup, or just a little one?
I have no idea, because he doesn't say, and it's not even clear if he knows.

"Whatever problem we are solving by constructing h(x), it is probably better
solved by a macro, which would perform the same composition statically."

I highly doubt any serious Lisp programmer agrees with this statement.
Dynamically constructing functions at runtime is an extremely common lisp (pun
unintended, but fortuitous) technique.

I have not programmed in Haskell, but reading this gives me no legitimate
reasons to think it is a bad language, let alone an indictment on CS research.

~~~
blasdel
Without having read his other posts it wouldn't be quite as obvious, but the
author of the second link (at least in his blog persona of 'Mencius Moldbug')
is legitimately insane.

His writings are crafted to shock the hell out of any socialized person, no
matter their world-view. He actively despises representative democracy,
functional bureaucracies, and anyone advocating policy (the state department,
the NYT, NGOs, etc.). You could denounce him as a fascist libertarian, but
neither of those groups would have any idea what to do with him either.

Unfortunately you'll have to read several hundred thousand words of blog-
essays to even begin to understand him (and you thought Yegge was a
bloviator!).

~~~
kiba
He's not insane. He's an anarchist.(Or seem to be one)

You would do well to understand an anarcho-capitalist's position regarding the
incentive of government insitutions versus market based insitutions. Than it
become less shocking to read his work because well, you understood where he's
coming from.

As for me, I am an anarcho-capitalist myself so I am not shocked. Figures.

~~~
bokonist
Have you read his posts? He's an authoritarian. He actually made up the word
"archist" and called himself that.

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snitko
Interestingly, I had similar thoughts inspired by the same comment:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=524212>

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MaysonL
To answer the question asked by the title, three ambitiously innovative
projects going on now:

vpri.org

newspeaklanguage.org

fluidinfo.com

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known
Napster was really innovative stuff. We all know what happened to it.

