Comment by larodi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larodi | Hacker News Reader

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This is how we don’t do papers.

Even though my pal did a full Gouraud shading in pure assembly using registers only (including the SP and a dummy stack segment) - absolute breakthrough back in 1997.

We did a 4 server p3 farm seeding 40mbits of outward traffic in 1999. Myself did a complete Perl-based binary stream unpacking - before protobuf was a thing. Still live handling POS terminals.

Discovered a much more effective teaching methodology which almost doubled effectiveness. Time-series compression with grammars,… And many more as we keep doing new r&d.

None of it is going to be published as papers on time (if ever), because we really don’t want to suffer this process which brings very little value afterwards for someone outside academia or even for people in academia unless they peruse PHD and similar positions.

I’m struggling to force myself to write an article on text2sql which is already checked and confirmed to contain a novel approach to RAG which works, but do I want to suffer such rejection humiliation? Not really…

It seems this paper ground is reserved for academics and mathematics in a certain ‘sectarian modus operandi’, and everyone else is a sucker. Sadly after a while the code is also lost…

If you are not even going to bother writing them up properly, no one is going to care. Seems fair to me.

You don’t have to make a ”paper” out of it, maybe make blog post or whatever if that is more your style. Maybe upload a pdf to arxiv.

Half the job in science is informing (or convincing) everyone else about what you made and why it is significant. That’s what conferences try to facilitate, but if you don’t want to do that, feel free to do the ”advertising” some other way.

Complaining about journals being selective is just a lazy excuse for not publishing anything to help others. Sure the system sucks, but then you can just publish some other way. For example, ask other people who understand your work to ”peer review” your blog posts.

> Half the job in science is informing (or convincing) everyone else about what you made and why it is significant.

Additionally, writing is the best way to properly think things through. If you can't write an article about your work then most likely you don't even understand it yet. Maybe there are critical errors in it. Maybe you'll find that you can further improve it. By researching and citing the relevant literature you put your work in perspective, how it relates to other results.

the point was about the paper thing, not about the joy of writing one's thoughts down or publishing in the public domain. most of my work gets published these days - code, designs, teaching, translations... actually prefer it to keeping backups of obscure random. but of course, people sure do release a lot of cool stuff on github and where not. one of my repos has ±300 stars and going, thousands of papers are anyway near in actual impact.

BUT... the topic is not about releasing stuff in the wild. opensource being a vehicle for research is outside the scope of present discussion. the incentives and the barrier to writing what is called an academic paper is. wild stuff does not bring impact factor, and does not get you closer to a PhD in the practical sense.

the whole paper thing is intended for sharing purposes, yet it keeps people away very successfully. its a system, not a welcoming one, that all I'm saying.

“do I want to suffer such rejection humiliation? Not really”

The point of Terence Tao’s original post is that you just cannot think of rejection as humiliation. Rejection is not a catastrophe.

> Sadly after a while the code is also lost…

Get it included in the archives of Software Heritage and Internet Archive:

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Codearchiver

>Discovered a much more effective teaching methodology which almost doubled effectiveness.

Please, could you elaborate?

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