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Comment by elliptic | Hacker News Reader

The "{area/field/business} is broken" template is broken (well, I don't know if ever worked). Algorithm development is not broken - it's specialized work and it's largely done by people with specialized backgrounds. Maybe that's not ideal, and maybe you can improve it, but saying "it's broken" is lazy and false.

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Based on my experiences in grad school, I'm not sure it is an exaggeration to say that it's "broken". So much work done solving hard problems, that ends up in academic journals and never seen again. And there's no real incentive for that to change. I think that's broken.

So much work done solving hard problems, that ends up in academic journals and never seen again

Is this really the case? When I have to solve a particularly unusual or tricky problem, I often have a look at relevant academic papers and go from there – either finding existing solutions, or basing one on the contents of the paper. I kind of assumed most developers did the same.

Yeah, this seems bizarre. There is better access right now to cutting-edge algorithms than ever, as well as building blocks that make it easier than ever to implement the algorithms described. I've been doing this for years, and I've noticed it get progressively easier. Honorable mention to http://thepaperbay.com/ for making it easier to get around those occasional papers stuck behind paywalls.

Another honorable mention: http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar

And: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/index.php

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