A dissenting voice from the positive reception here on HN, I thought that this paper was a joke. Single author, no affiliation, snarky language. Why not be civil instead?
I'd say that all of these are factors that don't add or detract from the value of the paper itself - it's a "hey I tried this and it works ok despite not going in the obvious direction". So, limited experiments but IMO competently done and with usable information.
It's a pity that all papers nowadays have a gazillion authors, from well-funded research labs, with as-dry-as-possible language that hides the real research behind a "we knew this all along rather than figuring it out along the way" facade. OTOH that's what you get in a large fairly mature research field, where most competent people get hired by research labs and then do lots of collaborative research that scales well and subsequently need to show publication counts to secure further funding.
I strongly prefer papers written in this style. Not only are they more enjoyable to read, but they are often easier to understand and more geniune as well. Papers written in a formal style often obscure the real motivation and instead provide a fancy-sounding retroactive justification. It makes the authors feel smarter, and I guess some readers feel smarter as well, but it belies the reality of research.
What’s wrong with single authorship and no affiliation?
At the end of the day, if the paper proposes some idea or method, and achieves the stated claims (with reproducible code), then I don’t care who wrote it, how many authors there were, and who the authors work for.
He has worked on YOLO (computer vision) and NLP related problems.