4 ms·

The I know it's on-vogue on HN to complain about academia, but the blog post is not making a good argument. The post could have probably gotten the point acro

The I know it's on-vogue on HN to complain about academia, but the blog post is not making a good argument. The post could have probably gotten the point across in less than 1/4 of the overall length (probably even less than 1/8th), instead the author wrapped the the post into lots of informalisms and a thinly veiled complained about academic publishing. The result of this is reflected in the discussion here, nobody actually writes about the result/idea behind the post, instead we have ~200 comments discussing the merits of academic publishing vs blog posts and formal vs informal writing. So I guess if you want to get your blog-post on the front page of HN it's a good writing style. If you want someone to consider and discuss the merits of your idea, maybe not so much.

gsatic 3y ago
Thats the fundamental reason we end up with an Attention Economy - People have limited Attention to pay to everything, But unlimited capacity/need to receive Attention (via Michael Goldhaber). This plants the seed for the info explosion (those 200 bikeshedding comments or those 6 billion videos on how to boil an egg). To counter it we have rankings of comments and links and news feeds from google to fb to hn. But its just another layer of bullshit cause most of the pool of what is being ranked is bullshit. We are yet to design Information systems that take into account what Goldhaber said about Attention 3-4 decades ago.
sheepscreek 3y ago
For what it’s worth, someone pointed out that PyTorch has an optional workaround for it in the Multihead Attention API. But yes, I had to skip over 200 comments ranting off-topic that was mildly annoying (to me).
Zetice 3y ago
You sneer at “getting on the front page of HN” but when you rephrase it to, “discuss something you’ve observed informally” your dismissal loses its oomph. The point may be to entertain as well as inform. Many humans enjoy the unfocused discussion around the main point, and perhaps the author prefers it to the clinical and formal tone an academic paper tends to take.

gsatic 3y ago

Thats the fundamental reason we end up with an Attention Economy - People have limited Attention to pay to everything, But unlimited capacity/need to receive Attention (via Michael Goldhaber). This plants the seed for the info explosion (those 200 bikeshedding comments or those 6 billion videos on how to boil an egg). To counter it we have rankings of comments and links and news feeds from google to fb to hn. But its just another layer of bullshit cause most of the pool of what is being ranked is bullshit. We are yet to design Information systems that take into account what Goldhaber said about Attention 3-4 decades ago.

sheepscreek 3y ago

For what it’s worth, someone pointed out that PyTorch has an optional workaround for it in the Multihead Attention API. But yes, I had to skip over 200 comments ranting off-topic that was mildly annoying (to me).

Zetice 3y ago

You sneer at “getting on the front page of HN” but when you rephrase it to, “discuss something you’ve observed informally” your dismissal loses its oomph. The point may be to entertain as well as inform. Many humans enjoy the unfocused discussion around the main point, and perhaps the author prefers it to the clinical and formal tone an academic paper tends to take.