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Comment by Freedom5093 | Hacker News Reader

Is this article roughly the application of the startup mindset to research? With the major downsides that you're giving away your insights for free, and potentially actively help other companies profit from your work. You don't go as far as to productize the research, but just make it really easy for others to do so by building "artifacts" for it.

I'm not a researcher, but have thought about doing a PhD in the past.

It's probably a lot more nuanced that this. Show progress but don't make it easily accessible. *Hide* something important for yourself. Kind of like modern day "open source".

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This used to be very common but nowadays it's more and more expected to release the code with the paper. This makes it harder to obfuscate big parts of the method. Arguably, this also has lowered the bar for doing incremental research. Just get the code of the sota from github, implement a new feature, test it, if it's 1% better then publish it.

Previously there was a natural gatekeep ing effect that you had to be able to understand and translate to code all the math and equations in the paper and be familiar with the dark knowledge details that everyone in the field knows but isn't spelled out explicitly in the papers. Boring bits like how to exactly preprocess, normalize, clean the data, how to precisely do the evals etc.

> Is this article roughly the application of the startup mindset to research?

Somewhat but a few crucial points are missing for it to be that. For example,

- hire a lot more people (PhD candidates, postdocs) than you have funding to pay till they finish. Keep growing and getting more grants until you get a Nobel prize (or equivalent) or go broke

- fake your data and publish in the top journals/conferences

- don't do any research yourself, just get others to do everything and "coordinate" them. Make sure you get all the credit for the publication. The way to get others to do things is to "collaborate" with them or maybe (promise to) pay them.

Once you got that ball rolling your name becomes a "brand" and collaborators will beg you to put your name on their papers so it gets more exposure.

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