4 ms·

Write a blog post. Don't waste time doing a more exhaustive search of the literature, but also don't go too heavy on the claims that it's totally novel. Novelty

by jsnell 9y ago

Write a blog post. Don't waste time doing a more exhaustive search of the literature, but also don't go too heavy on the claims that it's totally novel. Novelty might matter for an academic publication, but it's completely irrelevant for a blog post. You had a problem to solve, didn't like the solutions you could find, and came up with something better. That's what matters, not whether it was already first published 50 years ago. One of the more popular things I ever posted was just pointing out a an implementation trick for a data structure that was known but not widely used. Why would the readers care that it wasn't novel? What they cared about was a) that they didn't already know about it, b) after reading the post they could understand why this was a useful/interesting optimization.

locacorten 9y ago
"Write a blog post. Don't waste time doing a more exhaustive search of the literature". No wonder the Internet has such a low SNR.
- jsnell 9y ago
  Implying that the original poster's blog post is going to be lowering the SNR of the Internet is a really shitty thing to say. There are four options: 1. This is a truly novel. The author writes a blog post. 2. This is not novel. The author finds some prior art, and writes a blog post about his own work but referencing the earlier work. 3. This is not novel. The author doesn't find out, and writes a blog post. Someone possibly responds pointing them to the relevant prior art. 4. This is not novel. The author finds the earlier research, is discouraged, and decides not to write a blog post. The only bad option here is 4. So exactly what is additional research going to achieve at this point? (There is of course a point to doing the research before inventing your own algorithm. Or you can do it because this kind of CS archaeology is fun. But it doesn't really have a lot of value).

by jsnell 9y ago

locacorten 9y ago

"Write a blog post. Don't waste time doing a more exhaustive search of the literature". No wonder the Internet has such a low SNR.

jsnell 9y ago
Implying that the original poster's blog post is going to be lowering the SNR of the Internet is a really shitty thing to say. There are four options: 1. This is a truly novel. The author writes a blog post. 2. This is not novel. The author finds some prior art, and writes a blog post about his own work but referencing the earlier work. 3. This is not novel. The author doesn't find out, and writes a blog post. Someone possibly responds pointing them to the relevant prior art. 4. This is not novel. The author finds the earlier research, is discouraged, and decides not to write a blog post. The only bad option here is 4. So exactly what is additional research going to achieve at this point? (There is of course a point to doing the research before inventing your own algorithm. Or you can do it because this kind of CS archaeology is fun. But it doesn't really have a lot of value).