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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder - is there really any prestige to be had from publishing anonymously?

It is not an anonymous publication!

1. The article is based on a paper submitted to the prestigious CVPR, which is obviously not anonymous. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828 ) They mention this at the end of the post.

2. The blog's "journal" name is misleading. It means "journal" in the sense of a record of some of the stuff happening at Apple. My guess is that the blog post does not name authors because it was written by an Apple representative who manages public communications---probably because Apple is very very particular about managing their brand and what they say publicly. I wouldn't put it beyond Apple to hire someone well-versed in ML just for this role.

So, while they are starting to allow researchers to publish, they have quite some distance to go to encourage their researchers to communicate freely. One step at a time, I guess...

PS: Somehow the SNAFU of deliberately calling it a "journal" is very reminiscent of Steve Jobs's chutzpah.

Well, the "journal" in the sense of academic publishing and in the sense of a blog derive from the same root: a continuing first-person description of one's activities, updated periodically over a stretch of time.

> It is not an anonymous publication!

So who wrote this? You say it's "based on a paper" written by known authors, but did they write this publication? Why not put their names not on it? Or did a representative write it, as you suggest? We don't know. It's anonymous.

> The blog's "journal" name is misleading

The usage seems similar to that of "Bell Labs Technical Journal" or "Lincoln Laboratory Journal."

> You say it's "based on a paper" written by known authors, but did they write this publication?

I'm confused - for me the answer is quite obvious. The authors listed on the CVPR paper wrote the published paper or are you suggesting otherwise?

That's how it seems, but OP suggested it was written by a communications department. I'm not sure. Why leave out the authors' names?

The question is who is the author of this post.

It is unattributed, and while clearly based on the CVPR it is different enough that if it were a traditional publication it would be counted separately. If someone wanted to cite this post, what would they cite?

By comparison, distil.pub is a properly citable journal: https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/#citation

No, none. I suppose they want researchers to be motivated merely by the ability to contribute knowledge to the ML community?

> I suppose they want researchers to be motivated merely by the ability to contribute knowledge

I might phrase it more as "They want researchers who are already motivated by the contribution of knowledge"

I know that if I were an ML researcher I would not be happy with all my findings being horded by a single company when the field overall is making lots of progress.

All of them can claim the credit for any given article when looking for another job later!

I would think the proper way is to say you worked for that department and mention articles published from there.

One hand if ALL papers were forced to be published without authors then all shity papers would dissapear (which is 80% of current lot), there will be no "publish or perish" and lot of eliteness and egoism will go away.

On other hand, how do you decide if person is worth talking to? worth collaborating? worth giving tenure? The problem exacerbates when supply side dominates many magnitudes over demand side. This is precisely why we as human always keep establishing trust relationships that allows us to filter out signals from noise. You monitor writings of people you know have produced stuff on interests, not every random thing out there.

Who the hell publishes for prestige? Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research.

> Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research?

The intended audience is other researchers in your field, not the general public.

Your reputation as an academic or researcher rest on your publication record (plus your ability to land funding). If you publish highly-cited papers in prestigious journals or conference proceedings, you're considered among the best in your field. This opens the door to promotions, better job offers, etc.

Researchers at Apple have historically forgone the ability to publish. They have no reputation in the field. This significantly harms their ability to get a job elsewhere as a researcher.

Professional prestige. If you need an ELY5 answer plese just request one...

When you get to college, you'll be very disappointed to discover that's that's literally the only reason people publish in most cases. It ain't for the money, that's for sure. It's how you make a name for yourself amongst your peers in the same field.

You might get a sneak peek at the publish-or-perish dynamic to a lesser degree when you get to high school- sometimes you can get into special programs where you have a chance to help out with research being done by college students. If you get into a really good program and really distinguish yourself, you can even get your name alongside theirs on the paper.

Unfortunately, you will find that believe it or not, those college students are not already working out which color of Ferrari to buy with their sweet advance from SIGGRAPH or wherever. I think they deserve it personally, because I really care really hard about pushing science and engineering forward, but sadly the big bucks are still going to NFL players and pop stars instead.

> Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research.

This is what lead me to get out of research and start my first company.

I was in a research group at PARC doing work on programming language epistemology and semantics. The group papers were typically mostly predicate calculus. At a POPL our group lead presented a paper; I was in the audience. After the paper we got polite and even enthusiastic applause, but two people in front of my in the audience spoke during the applause: Q: "Did you understand that?" A: "Not a single word"

I realized there were perhaps a dozen people in the world who even understood what we were working on, and of those 12 at least 10, if not all 12 of them were smarter/understood the subject much better than I.

It really didn't seem like it was going to make a difference to the universe.

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