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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

This is cool enough. But I find the "celebrification" style of the piece a bit off putting. Did I really need to see multiple posed shots of this young man reposing in various university settings? It's like we need our own version of La La Land to glorify the survivors of computer success to motivate more to participate.

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This is a cool and important one. I was happy to see the article celebrating the young scientist. This is well deserved. Congratulations to him. And I hope this inspires other undergraduates as well.

I presume you've never read any quanta magazine pieces before. They like to talk about & emphasize the human side of these discoveries too, instead of merely focusing on the abstract.

"It's like we need our own version of La La Land to glorify the survivors of computer success to motivate more to participate."

lol what

Specifically, they focus on the human interest part, and a pop science into to the field, and avoid discussing the actual result, because the closer they get to the actual piece of research, the more mistakes they make in describing it.

It wouldn't be so cringe if they talked about the technical side too. The article says nothing about what "tiny pointers" are. Andrew Krapivin doesn't have a GitHub with any code. His paper is gated so I can't read it. Do they expect me to venerate this kid on faith? We should be celebrating developers whose work is open source, but instead the establishment relegates them to the lowly thankless role of janitors. The only reason a pop science journo would write an article about an open source developer would be not to lionize them but rather put them in their place for a code of conduct violation.

First link is to arxiv

That's exactly why I'm here scrolling, finding your comment, yes. TFA is way too 'pop sci', but I know the paper will be too much for me at midnight, if not ever, so where's my 'explain it like I know what a hash table is' story?

That's Quanta for you.

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