Comment by dynm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dynm | Hacker News Reader

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I think the example of how to "correctly" cite a paper actually makes this issue seem smaller than it is. In reality, these conferences have very complicated (and unstated) "rules" for how a paper is supposed to look. If an "outsider" wanders in and submits a paper with new ideas, it will be very obvious that they are not a "member of the community" and their paper will usually be treated much more harshly as a result. This adds a huge amount of friction to research.

And what's particularly frustrating is that many organizers will try to combat this by writing papers saying they "particularly encourage" papers that are interdisciplinary, or focused on less fashionable topics, etc. It's good that they are trying to change things, but I think the main effect in practice is to encourage people to spend their time writing papers that have little chance of being accepted.

This issue isn't at all unique to computer science, though. Try publishing a paper in a top economics journal as an outsider!

I am fairly certain this rule was there against an obnoxious citing style of "The lambda calculus [1] was intended as a foundation for mathematics". It is especially obnoxious in the case of CS because when you cite e.g. "as Johns comments in his article about future developments of the programming languages [1963a]" it is quite important to know that this paper is actually from 1963 and can be mostly disregarded except as a historic curiosity; yet I've seen people vehemently defending this "[1]" style.

Is citation style really an issue? Even if they don't state which style they expect, surely you can tell their expected style from their existing publications? With proper tooling (e.g. LaTeX+BibTeX) it's pretty painless to switch styles.

Here's that rant of a blog from D.J. Bernstein [0] about how "[3, 7, 42]" citation style is superior and promotes scientific progress that I was thinking about when I wrote my comment. I personally find most of his reasoning pretty unconvincing; and so while I understand Meyer's irritation, I have to say I have to side with OOPSLA here. After all, you'd also probably want the submitted papers to be written in somewhat better than 5th-grade-high-school-student's English, and don't have way too many typos (I talk like ~15 typos per page).

[0] https://blog.cr.yp.to/20240612-bibkeys.html, previously discussed on HN here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40662056

Opinions vary on citation styles, my point was that it seems reasonable for a publication to standardise on one citation style, i.e. to require its use. I'm not sure it's what dynm meant by very complicated (and unstated) "rules" for how a paper is supposed to look. That article by DJB mentions that every author really ought to be using a citation-management solution like BibTeX, so that regardless of your preferences, it's easy to change your whole paper to a different citation style.

There's a slight (but only slight) irony in your use of the HackerNews convention for handling multiple links without breaking up the body of the main text. In this short-form medium it works great. I see someone made this same point in the thread you linked, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673426

By complicated and unstated rules, I meant sort of norms about how you talk about previous work, how you caption figures, what order you have for the sections, how self-congratulatory vs. humble you are, etc. Theoretically, there are no rules for these things. But in practice, insiders seem to adopt a (deliberately?) complex ruleset and use it to signal to each other that they insiders.

The only time I like numbers is writing proposals and I only like it because it saves space. Other than that I much prefer (name, year) if I am to have a preference at all.

Adding to the frustration, (the lack of) these shibboleths partially undermine double-blind reviewing, which is on the rise in prestigious conferences. A reviewer from the in-group may immediately spot that a submission comes from the out-group.

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