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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Thanks so much for this link. I remain convinced that papers are so much more understandable with an accompanying talk by the creators. I wish papers would just come with a video talk included.

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Exactly, the authors get to eschew the formalism required in papers. Often the core ideas of research are simple in themselves and the real complexity lies in formally proving the results.

Also, I'd not be surprised if someone already invented and used this funnel hashing technique in say the 80's in some game or whatnot but just never realized what they had stumbled onto. Not to diminish the research, it's very ingenius.

Academic papers are terrible at knowledge transfer. A more casually spoken blog post is 100% more effective at communicating ideas imho.

Academia is a weird and broken place.

Disclaimer: work in a research lab full of awesome PhDs who largely agree with me!

I think papers make good references. I think of it more like the equivalent of a "datasheet" for an electronic part, say. Once you understand the intricacies, it's a valuable reference but more often than not, it's not very good and conveying motivation or intuition.

They're usually not very good as a reference either - they miss out key steps due to oversight or lack of time.

Great way to see it, papers should not be your first point of contact.

> Academic papers are terrible at knowledge transfer.

Well, at least they are better than patents.

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