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Comment by michaelmior | Hacker News Reader

> I never even read the measurements section in papers. I'm only interested in the ideas.

Genuinely curious, how do you identify if an idea is of any practical use without caring about measurements?

An idea doesn't have to be practical and it certainly doesn't have to be immediately practical. I think useful is a locally greedy optimization and that is not in itself at all bad. I just think that an idea might be able to take you a little further, sometime, just not right now.

That's a fair point. I probably overemphasized the word practical in my original comment. I didn't mean immediately practical. (I assume you meant "doesn't" in your comment.) And I do agree that even ideas or systems which perform poorly could be imminently useful. But I personally find looking at measurements helpful to give me some sense as to whether or not the approach being proposed is suitable for solving problems I care about.

For example, if you are reading the classic papers in a seminar, are you really even interested in their measurements? Well, if you are looking forward at new papers, I think the ideas come first. Remember, there's a ton of stuff to read. A buddy said he read two papers a day in grad school.

If you're reading classic papers then presumably they've already proven themselves worthy (by being considered classic)

Exactly. The thought process I go through in evaluating a new paper is certainly different from when I am reading older, proven work. But in both cases, I still personally care about the measurements.

I think you meant "doesn't have to be immediately practical".

Measurements presented in a paper are not a good indicator for whether an idea is practical. If the results weren't good, the paper wouldn't exist.

Unfortunately, I've found this isn't always true, but I see your point.

Some ideas can be great in the small even if they won't scale. Not everything needs to be built for massive scale.

I agree not everything needs to be built for massive scale. I didn't mention anything about scale in my comment.

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