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Comment by lumost

6 hours ago

Deep tech fields have a more complex relationship with academia than other industries. Engineers often need license to test ideas that may not see adoption for years, or require tens of millions to build-out.

A "research" arm is exactly this license, although it comes at the cost of potentially killing innovation in the rest of the company.

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lumost

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ForHackernews  6 hours ago

C'mon, databases are great but they are not in any way a "deep tech" field. Databases exist today in a zillion production forms as commercial products and free software.

Deep tech includes things like nuclear fusion, solid state batteries, quantum computers. I know everyone wants to feel cool, but just because your new javascript framework will be in beta for the next ten years doesn't make it "deep tech".

  • jandrewrogers  5 hours ago

    The databases we use today in production have severe limitations and are not even close to what is theoretically possible. Many traditional parts of a database (indexing, caching, scheduling, et al) are AI-complete algorithm problems. Entire sub-classes of database (e.g. graph or spatial) famously have persistently poor scalability and performance because of open questions in the foundational computer science.

    Just the fact that increasing the generality, scalability, and performance of databases asymptotically converges on designing AGI suggests that it is, in fact, "deep tech". And this property has to mesh with other practical constraints on database behavior. Many problems in databases are hard with little forward progress in decades.

    It is true that most database research is not deep tech but there is ample room for it to be if one is sufficiently ambitious.

    • andriy_koval  4 hours ago

      I personally built quite several specialized hyper-performant DB engines, and studied most popular OSS projects, and believe most DB questions are theoretically answered long ago(decade back). The puzzle is mostly to assemble pieces together to fit specific tradeoff of performance/simplicity/functionality and not overengineer system.

    • bedman12345  5 hours ago

      Could you explain what practical research there is to be done? The heavy theory I know does not seem to be very useful in practice. Optimal join algorithms, Yannakakis adjacent algorithms, tree decomposition of queries all seem to be worse than well implemented naive algorithms. But maybe the implementations of the new algorithms just are not good? I really don’t know.

      4 replies →

  • mamcx  2 hours ago

    Maybe only an OS can be close to how MUCH deep you can go with a DB engine.

    And I bet DB engines can go far than normal OS.

    You don't know how much is still waiting for somebody to try, and how much is not applied. And how many of that DBs are not even doing, because all are constrained be being "apps" with so poor interface (sql).

    Fun fact: Not exist a viable true relational DBs implemented, neither exist one with a viable programming language AND apis that is for developers.

    ZERO.

    • ForHackernews  2 hours ago

      At the risk of arguing about semantics (and not interesting database semantics) it seems half the commenters here think "deep tech" just means "like, technology you go really super DEEP into, like really dig into that DEEP DEEP HARDCORE TECHNOLOGY"

      but that's not what this term has historically meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_tech

      > Deep tech innovations are often radical and may create new markets or disrupt existing ones. Deep tech companies often address big societal and environmental challenges and have potential to impact everyday life. Silicon chips are an example of innovation that enabled calculation at previously unimaginable speed and scale.

      Database research is good, important, critical, even! But it's not creating something new that has never existed before. It's not inventing the transistor or the integrated circuit.

  • lumost  6 hours ago

    I'd ascribe "deep tech" to anything that you can reasonably get a PhD in and have it not be unusual. There are dozens of academic conferences on DBs pushing the frontier forward.