4 ms·
The problem with books is that they are long (hundreds of pages each), sparse and have very important things interleaved with trivia. Makes me prefer to read s
by guard-of-terra 15y ago
The problem with books is that they are long (hundreds of pages each), sparse and have very important things interleaved with trivia.
Makes me prefer to read some fiction instead. Helps personal development also.
The tech book of future would probably look like a list of narrow theses each unwrapping into a list of smaller things and so on eventually to a long and exhaustive explanations.
Same with science papers - findings first, explanations on demand.
- grncdr 15y agoI wrote a post-mortem for a research spike at $work yesterday with a tl;dr at the top, the president loved it. (it's a very small company)
- petercooper 15y agoVery nice! Though academic papers have had tl;drs for a long time now, they're called the abstract. (I wish technical blog posts would use them more.)
- guard-of-terra 15y agoAbstracts have two problems: They are very short and the only way of getting a bit more details is to read the whole article. It should zoom smoothly. For some reason authors tend to withhold something important from the abstract. If they write what they did, they don't tell what they got; if they tell the result, no clues on how they figured it out.
- omaranto 15y agoI don't know about other fields, but math papers have an abstract, then a section called "Introduction" which has some background and motivation and ends with an overview of the rest of the paper, and then the remainder has the details.
- tomjen3 15y agoIt believe that is -- or used to be -- the standard and is/was called the executive summary.
- tomjen3 15y agoThat is a brilliant idea, which is properly also the first radical invention of the book since scrolls were first cut into pages.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoWikified hypertext is not less radical and it already works and brings huge rewards.