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Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

it's not a white paper, it's a full scientific publication.

It is not a full publication yet. The experiment section is left as to-do and that is a very important section in any paper. They will most likely publish it in the near future.

Do you mean this: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.04467v2.pdf

This is same as the one in the link. Section 8 is todo. Putting on arxiv is not exactly publishing, I meant publishing at a conference.

Literally the third line of the article says: "(Preliminary White Paper, November 9, 2015)"

The line is wrong.

If I'm not supposed to trust that line, how do I know what lines I'm supposed to trust.

The arxiv paper is just a repost of the preliminary paper, which is really more a design outline and rationale -- we may work on a more substantial paper later, we've been busy building the software.

It would be nice if you changed it from "white paper" to something more accurate, like "provisional".

The reason is that "white paper" has a very specific connotation, and this paper is not consistent with the white paper.

Personal opinion: in science the word publication now means "to make accessible" rather "to publish in a conference" (the conference = publication thing is mostly CS) or "to publish in a journal" (like biology and a lot of non-arxiv physics). Pre-pub peer review isn't even required any more. arxiv (and scientists putting preprints on web sites) changed this. Of course, this is personal opinion, based mainly my observations and doesn't necessarily represent the mainstream opinion (yet).

> it's not a white paper, it's a full scientific publication.

I believe the parent referring to the common usage of "white paper" to refer to B2B marketing materials that are not often written in an academic style.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this was a self-published scientific article and not what I and dekhn usually think of when we hear white-paper.

The name of the file on the server is "whitepaper2015.pdf"

Is it peer reviewed?

That doesn't matter.

It does if you are claiming it is a full scientific publication.

No. But in this case, it doesn't matter much - the paper isn't really making any claims in relation to other systems. The authors can reasonably be trusted to describe the design of their own system, particularly since the source is out there. Peer review would improve the paper, undoubtedly, but wouldn't have any effect on the system design itself or Google's reasons for building it. The latter two are the focus points of the whitepaper.

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