We are sorry to inform you | Hacker News Reader

We are sorry to inform you

fang.ece.ufl.edu

185 pointsiamabhi952 comments

This article is taken from Simone Santini[0]'s paper "We are Sorry to Inform You..."[1]. Simone is a major critic of the Semantic Web. Watch this talk by him regarding his opinions on the matter[2].

Also, as some of you might know, Larry and Sergey's paper on the architecture of the Google Search Engine was rejected. It is one of most highly cited tech reports today.

  [0] http://arantxa.ii.uam.es/~ssantini/
  [1] https://noppa.aalto.fi/noppa/kurssi/mat-1.2991/materiaali/Mat-1_2991_6._rsa-kommentteja.pdf
  [2] http://videolectures.net/samt08_santini_cnod/

there is a dangerous tendency to say "someone told me my idea is dumb, but lots of smart people have had their ideas ridiculed and later gone on to success".

it's true, many good ideas have been ridiculed by simple minds. however, you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere", and that has (probably) happened far more than the ridicule of world-changing ideas ...

so while it is probably useful to your ego and mental health to respond to negative criticism with "they just don't understand", you should probably be prepared to accept that your idea is just not that good ...

That might happen once or twice, but if you are stubborn, you don't give up and keep trying.

Someday you would have run through sufficient iterations of failure/success and internal feedback loops. After some time by the virtue of all this the person will succeed.

* you never hear about "I had a dumb idea, people laughed at it, and then it went nowhere"*

Silent evidence.

It pays to consider your audience and how well you've presented it to them. Gödel mentioned his first incompleteness theorem in the presence of a bunch of mathematicians at a conference, and nobody present paid any attention to him, except John Von Neumann, who caught on immediately. Everybody else required a little more time (and a fuller presentation of the idea) before they understood what he was working on.

Whether we are Kurt Gödel or just some schmuck, I think it's fair to say that we all are surrounded by a fair share of idiots but know at least one person who is capable of understanding anything we understand, assuming we understand it well enough to explain it to them.

I'm pretty sure this isn't actual rejection notices for these papers, but made up ones in jest.

It would be VERY interesting to know if that's the case.

The meme of what seems to be a brilliant idea being pooh-pooh'ed by the then-current intelligentsia is almost as common as funny cat pictures with silly quotes.

"In 1962, Smith entered Yale University. While attending Yale, he wrote a paper for an economics class, outlining overnight delivery service in a computer information age. Folklore suggests that he received a C for this paper, although in a later interview he claims that he told a reporter, "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C", while other tales suggest that his professor told him that, in order for him to get a C, the idea had to be feasible. The paper became the idea of FedEx (for years, the sample package displayed in the company's print advertisements featured a return address at Yale)."

--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_W._Smith

I'm pretty sure that nobody would have rejected the RSA paper with a note that argued that there was some 32-bit limit. If I've got my history correct, the Diffie-Hellman _New Directions in Cryptography_ paper had already been published, and it already used the same basic mathematical operation (exponentiation modulo a large number). Everyone knew that, sooner or later, a full public-key encryption algorithm would be found.

Yeah, a few of them are a bit too un-subtle on the satire, referencing future events in a wink-wink sort of way, which gives it away imo.

With only 4 comments, no one is winking back.

With respect to the RSA "rejection," I would add the impracticality in hindsight is known to be, why the hell would you want pretty good signatures on your email? A few moments thought, provides examples where one would rather that the bits at the end were not present.

You're referring to repudiation?

Note that PKI offers two independent options: - Encryption, by any entity (repudiable) against a well-known public key. - Authentication, by a single entity (non-repudiable), using a secret private key.

I get the impression you're trying to say that there are times when a person would want some reasonably plausible claim at repudiation. THis is also available, and can benefit from PKI as well.

I really hope so. The notion that someone might be serious about the first one is rather depressing.

Yes, and as a result I'm afraid I find the whole joke rather uninteresting.

Historical irony is only fun if it's historical. Otherwise it's just fiction. It's easy to imagine a bunch of philistines who unfairly reject a piece of brilliant work. Indeed, plenty of academics imagine that every day. It's a cliché.

Agreed. This reads to me like an attempt by a professor to show that his research being rejected makes him no different from all these other greats in the field. In reality, the vast majority of great papers are acknowledged as such soon after their release.

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that great papers are always recognized. There's a lot more variety than that.

Some great papers are recognized in manuscript. Some are hailed within the year of their publication. Some are rejected because the reviewer is an archrival of the chairman of the author's department. Some are rejected because the author is of the wrong religion or ethnic group. Some are published to moderate applause and then forgotten about for thirty years, at which point someone accidentally finds them and realizes that the authors were decades ahead of their time. Some would have been immediately given prizes if their authors were half as good at writing as they were at thinking. Some are recognized as interesting, but people with a vested interest in a different viewpoint try to pretend they're not interesting for as long as possible. Some are universally recognized as true but the authors are burnt at the stake anyway...

History is more interesting than fiction. Fiction which doesn't find an audience simply disappears, so it must generally be believable, and it must not make its audience too uncomfortable. History is under no such constraints.

Plus, the reviewer is right about Codd. ;)

It's funny because it imagines what the reviews would be like if these papers were reviewed today. The object of ridicule is the current state of peer review in computer science.

The link is the text of an article [1] by Simone Santini that appeared in: Computer, Volume 38 Issue 12, December 2005

It's a parody piece, although the author declared that "Many of the sentences that I use in the article are from actual reviews." (quoted by B. Meyer review in [2])

[1]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1106763 [2]: http://bertrandmeyer.com/2009/08/14/rejection-letter-classic...

As far as I know the page/brin pagerank paper was also rejected by SIGIR (the main information retrieval conference) before being published in WWW.

Any citation?

"In early 1998, Page submitted his first paper, an overview of the PageRank algorithm, to the Special Interest Group on Information Retriviel of the Association for Computing Machinery (SIGIR-ACM). But the paper was rejected. One peer reviewer wrote of the paper, "I found the overall presentation disjointed…. This needs to focus more on the IR issues and less on web analysis."

http://books.google.com/books?id=G4KfbOt7OYcC&lpg=PT81&#...

Cool! Thanks.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Saint Carl Sagan

As an uncompensated journal reviewer, I have to say that these look like genuine reviews to me.

If the journal you work for is behind a paywall, why do you do it?

I mean it as an honest question, I've always wanted to know why someone would work for free for an organization that works for profit. I understand why the academics submit their papers; it's necessary for career advancement, but why do people review for free?

Good question. There are some institutional pressures--the person who lobbied for your appointment happens to be an editor of a paywalled scientific journal publisher. It's also a way to learn about the literature. But increasingly I'm turning down requests to referee for such publishers, in favor of open access journals and conferences. The opportunity cost in refereeing a paper is a subsidy to publishing companies--one I can't afford to pay.

Although this is satire, let's not confuse the quality of the idea or it's implementation, with how well the paper is written. Those are very different criteria.

Most of these rejection would have happened because there a lot of people who randomly take a decision and then try to justify it backwards with whatever reason they can come up with.

This happens for a lot of reasons eg : Bias, partiality, over confidence in self, under estimating the candidates ability.

I don't think these reviews are real, but similar things have happened. One example: Stephen Cook was denied tenure at Berkeley (before the NP-completeness paper). Another: Svante Arrhenius barely passed his PhD defence (before getting a Nobel prize for the same work).

(Edit: I thought those rejections were genuine. Nevertheless, my point stands. Kudos to the author for the vivid illustration of this infuriating bias.)

> Structured programming is a nice academic exercise, which works well for small examples, but I doubt that any real-world program will ever be written in such a style.

This is not the first time I recall hearing this fallacious argument. If something works better than the "standard" approach for toy examples, the correct answer is to investigate, especially if you can't explain how the new approach would break down when actually used in the "real world".

Sure, an intuition that it wouldn't work is evidence against the new approach, but (i) this intuition may be motivated by the refusal to change habits, and (ii) toy examples that work is a stronger evidence in favour of the new approach anyway. Not definite, just stronger than intuition.

Orwell's "Animal Farm" was rejected by one publishing house on the grounds that it was "impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.".

In the same spirit (but not the same), one reviewer wrote on a conference paper about PyPy (paraphrased), "this covers some exceptional engineering results, but we wish there was more novel conceptual work". We were very proud of that paper :)

This is one of the reasons I didn't pursue a PhD after getting a Masters. Getting published is about very incremental work. Really breaking the mold for revolutionary stuff is actually shunned. Not the kind of reward system worth pursing.

Meh. Some of the criticisms are related to the paper itself and are probably valid. "You need to show why we would care" is a rejection of the way the paper is written, and not of the concepts it contains.

It would be more interesting to point out who rejected them.

Reminds me of Slashdot comments.

Similar story about Kalman.

Are those real, or should I hold back my AMAZEMENT?

There is a famous rejection, not in CS but in econ, that I know of: Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the 21st century, winner of the John Bates Clark ('51) and Nobel ('76), and preeminent monetarist was fired by the econ department at the University of Wisconsin Madison for being jewish and too data driven. They did not advertise this fact at the department when I was there =P He went 90 minutes south to Chicago and it seemed to work out for him. It would be nice of UW econ apologized though, even if a bit late.

err 20th century?

I'd say he will be the most influential economist of both centuries. For those who don't who he is, the man is a fantastic public speaker on top of everything and there are a ton of videos on YouTube to get you familiarized.

I highly recommend the video series "Free to Choose", regardless of your politics or background in economics there is something to be learned from it.

http://www.freetochoose.tv/

Do you even know when the 19th century was? How can he be the most influential Economist of the 19th century if was only born in 1912?

To be fair though, I think that almost everyone has made a few off-by-one errors.

The two centuries mentioned are the 20th and 21st.

people edited their posts without signing their changes.

Actually, they didn't.

Sadly, you mean "was".

No, I mean will. The 21st century isn't over yet.

Well, he's dead now, which I'm pretty sure is what raldi was getting at :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com