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Comment by citilife | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I wish all research papers were written this way. Easy to understand, kept me entertained, and presented meaningful results with a way to reproduce (on a single GPU).

I grant all research papers on deep learning can't be reproducible with a single GPU in a reasonable time, but it should happen more often IMO. It seems lazy to just toss out a paper saying "we hit new benchmarks, by increasing the parameters and throwing more compute". I'd like to see "we hit new benchmarks with a new design, the old ones had this issue, etc.

Anyway, great read, recommend. Also, happy for the author haha

"The author has also moved to a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco, removing themselves from proximity to the alley of questionable odors and unsavory noises."

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Now imagine reading papers is your job and you try to skim through dozens of wannabe stand up comedians each day.

As opposed to wannabe tax lawyers? I'll take the comedians thank you very much.

Is dozens of papers per day how academics work? Holy crap.

Notice the word skim. Yes when I'm trying to figure something out I often have 10 tabs with papers open and I'm flipping between them.

Depends. If the paper is dense you're taking hours per paper, rereading many times and rederiving details. You can skim through many you don't want to dive deeply though (if it's a topic you just need a feel for).

The author is very intelligent and is doing three things differently from a 'standard' paper:

1) Reducing the density of information per paragraph (vs. packing information in)

2) Clearly outlined motivation and context (vs. just referencing some other papers and assuming they've been read)

3) Deploying comedy (vs. professionalism)

The first two improve the paper, the third is a step backwards because the reader has to spend effort separating fact & fiction. The combination in this case works and is a lot of fun but it would have been a catastrophic and cringeworthy exercise if the execution of (1) and (2) hadn't worked out so well.

The real trick here is excellent writing and the comedy is simply draws attention to it. Much like how an army marching in a silly way draws attention to its discipline. The silly march itself is not a good idea.

I'm not sure reducing the density of information is a good thing. It probably makes it easier to read for someone who is not entirely familiar with a field but makes it slower for the people for whom the paper is written. (Too dense papers are really hard to read, but that's relatively rare)

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