Hacker News Reader

Comment by javitury | Hacker News Reader

This ugly son of a b____ is optimizing super hot algorithms and you are f______ stupid. How?... Just read this free paper >>>

I wonder how long it will take until academical papers are published with clickbait titles.

View on HN

>I wonder how long it will take until academical papers are published with clickbait titles.

Seriously. It's the exact opposite of an abstract, which is to give a quick TL;DR summary so you can know if it's worth your time reading more about the paper.

It doesn't matter if it is worth your time. It was worth their time to throw it together so you better generate the eyeballs to pay for it.

Add more pictures, remove any set-theory notations, rewrite in "explain like i'm 5" basic English, and people might actually start reading academic papers.

Startup idea?

I agree that the language of most papers is needlessly obtuse. In fact I doubt that reviewers understand the full concept when evaluating paper submissions.

Having said that, even if most papers were vastly simplified I doubt that many topics could be lowered to ELI5.

I work for a scientific publisher. For April fool's this year we sent an email to all staff saying that to adjust to the realities of today's publishing industry, we would now start rewriting article titles into the more fashionable style. If they could also rework the contents into listicle form, that would be great.

It was not well received, so it worked as expected?

http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.5997

I skimmed through the article and didn't click the links. So there is that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com