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Comment by loevborg | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

But those aren't as funny.

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