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by tikhonj 5325 days ago
This might be true of Apple, but it is definitely true of both the software industry and theoretical CS. The industry is expanding--computers are getting cheaper and more plentiful so we need more and more software. Since we also have more computational power in our hands, we can do more and more interesting things with computers.

Theoretical computer science is also in an exciting time--it is a nascent field with many exciting discoveries and inventions to be made even without gigantic budgets. I think it's something like physics in the early 20th century, before they started needing gigantic particle accelerators and the like (I'm sure physics is still exciting and I'm just showing my ignorance, but I think there's a parallel nonetheless).

Right now is a perfect time to be a developer or computer scientist anywhere, not just at Apple.
1 comments
possibilistic 5325 days ago
I'm just curious (and hope I don't come off as being ignorant), but what kind of exciting theoretical CS developments have occurred in the last few years? If you can list some really groundbreaking papers that aren't too advanced, I'd love to read them.

Most of the stuff I see in academia is incremental improvement. Not that this should ever be downplayed.

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snotrockets 5325 days ago
All of academic output is an incremental improvement (it may differ for the social sciences. I don't have experience with that.) Newton famously acknowledged it in his letter to Hooke.

We also have the misfortune of struggling with the deep unknowns, as all of the trivial theorems have already been proven before (consider Feynman's definition of trivial in 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!', New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 69-72, 1997.)

But some improvements are greater than others. The question is where you draw the line. And I hold that most researchers' line encompass more then yours. Consider, for example, Jiří Matoušek's opinion of Computational Geometry in 2010 (to save you the reading, he called it no less than an annus mirabilis. You can read his reasoning here: http://kam.mff.cuni.cz/~matousek/mor.pdf)

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