Hacker News Reader

Comment by k2enemy | Hacker News Reader

A list of the synonyms...

  Therefore,
  Hence,
  So,
  It is trivial that
  Clearly,
  Behold!
  Ergo,
  And verily it goes that
  Thus,
  By logical extension,
  And verily,
  It is the will of the Gods that
  We find
  It can be shown that
  It transpires that
  As an exercise, prove that
  Wherefore said He unto them,
  As must be obvious to even the meanest intellect,
  The power of logic reveals the conclusion that
  This implies
  As Gauss proved,
  As Euler proved,
  And it was handed down from the heavens that
  It pleases the symmetry of the world that

It just needs to be content aware so that it can use "As an exercise, prove that" for the most difficult step.

View on HN

Of course, most of these are far from being synonyms of "therefore", whose function is to express that the following sentence is a logical consequence of what was said before. The following are real substitutes:

    Hence; So; Ergo; This implies that; Thus

and also

    As a consequence; It follows that; This means that; From this we can infer that; This could not be true unless

But those aren't as funny.

I always enjoy the 'From this we can easily infer that' as I on more than one occasion had to work pretty hard to get to that easily inferred result. Either, being experts in the field the result is indeed not difficult for them to get at or the authors mock my intelligence. I assume the latter as I enjoy a little humour in my math books, even if it is at my expense.

Russian physics papers from a certain era are notorious for skipping vast and none-too-obvious swaths of derivation, making do with a terse "it follows that" or some such. Some of my colleagues assumed that this was some sort of machismo; I thought maybe they were just smarter than me. Later I had the chance to mention this to an emigre physicist from the former USSR, and he said that it was just to reduce the number of pages to save on the costs of publication.

In my field (computer vision), conferences have strict page limits. Your paper had better be six pages or less because each page above the limit costs you $100 more to publish per extra page. Further, if your paper spills onto the 9th page, it will be rejected without review.

Most papers I've seen are edited to an inch of their life to fit within that extended 8-page limit and readability certainly suffers.

...therefore, conferences are essentially broken.

A system that rewards incomplete publishing and lack of details is essentially useless for science. Isn't science about sharing efforts instead of providing headaches?

I'm very frustrated at the current state: scientist pay both to publish and access. The publish-or-perish mechanic puts researchers in a very unfair position against the big players.

Why are researchers not publishing in open access?

Wrt conferences, "lack of details" is solved by supplemental material; "incomplete publishing" is solved by splitting your efforts into multiple papers. Most authors do this anyway if the idea is big enough/if they can get away with it. ("Oh goodie, more papers! More citations!")

See, I'm of the opposite opinion. If you can't fit your idea into page limits, it's not worth my time reading it because it shows that you don't care enough to exrpess it concisely. I can get much more value for my (limited) time by getting the gist of ten papers than if i took the time to fully understand the implementation details of three.

Papers are documentation. Would you rather read a 60-page man page that says "How to do $X" or a 5-page one? If you have important details, publish them in a journal.

I wasn't only referring to conferences but also journals. AFAIK journals have page limits too.

My opinion: if something is long... well, it's long! Peer reviewers should also judge if the length is reasonable, right? I'd rather read a 60-page detailed manual than a 5-page "press release".

You're presenting a false dichotomy: concision and details are not incompatible.

    It pleases the symmetry of the world that

I have to say that I lost it there.

Good, because that's the last one :)

Not so; The author committed some more entries just a couple hours ago:

    Consequently,
    Accordingly,
    For this reason,

> "As an exercise, prove that" for the most difficult step

No, no, that just gets you questions when someone attempts it. The most difficult step is prefixed by "Obviously", "Clearly", or words to that effect, for example "Expanding either side and resolving, we get" or "Using Gauss's reflexion identity".

"Obviously" and "clearly" are huge red flags that the writer is trying to bluff (esp. in student work). Just write: "Then"

"As is apparent to even the most mentally deficient child...."

"Anyone with an elementary background in physics can see that...", or the real kicker, "As is apparent to introductory students, "

This will just point out, that you want to hide something. If you want to make sure that no one checks, use "After an easy, but somewhat tedious, calculation"

How about you start with a simple proof and then write "Similarly, we can show"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com