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> I noticed people from hacker news routinely read scientific papers. Highly doubt that. It’s very hard to actually read scientific papers when you are not act

by brmgb 3y ago

> I noticed people from hacker news routinely read scientific papers. Highly doubt that. It’s very hard to actually read scientific papers when you are not actively doing research. You can’t just read a research paper in isolation. It’s next to useless. You need to understand its context, where it stands with regard to its sources and what it brings which is actually new and valuable. It’s nearly impossible to do properly if you are not fully immersed in a research subject. I don’t even know how you would scheme introduction and sources to filter articles which are immediately obviously useless without being immersed in a field. I guess you can obviously go though lists of papers which have be deemed worthwhile by someone else or got prices. That solves the filtering issue but then nearly every time you will be better served reading a text book presenting the ideas in said papers. I fully expect the HN readership to contain a significant amount of students and actual researchers which explain why you encounter people reading papers but these people aside I would be surprised if the habit is common.

cypress66 3y ago
You don't need to be doing research to read an ML paper. With some general knowledge in AI you should be able to understand most papers. And even then, sometimes you don't understand or care about their procedures, and you just want to look at the pretty results (check out this song they generated using AI!). There's even a very popular YouTube channel that focuses on this (two minute papers). Finally, you usually hear about these cool papers via Twitter / X
- brmgb 3y ago
  > You don't need to be doing research to read an ML paper. With some general knowledge in AI you should be able to understand most papers. I have a degree which involved reading some ML papers and I seriously doubt that. The field is flooded with papers which looks good when you quickly read them but are actually worthless because they misrepresent the state of the art or intentionally don’t compare their methods with other papers they should know. > And even then, sometimes you don't understand or care about their procedures, and you just want to look at the pretty results That’s fair but I wouldn’t call that reading a scientific paper.

by brmgb 3y ago

cypress66 3y ago

You don't need to be doing research to read an ML paper. With some general knowledge in AI you should be able to understand most papers. And even then, sometimes you don't understand or care about their procedures, and you just want to look at the pretty results (check out this song they generated using AI!). There's even a very popular YouTube channel that focuses on this (two minute papers). Finally, you usually hear about these cool papers via Twitter / X

brmgb 3y ago
> You don't need to be doing research to read an ML paper. With some general knowledge in AI you should be able to understand most papers. I have a degree which involved reading some ML papers and I seriously doubt that. The field is flooded with papers which looks good when you quickly read them but are actually worthless because they misrepresent the state of the art or intentionally don’t compare their methods with other papers they should know. > And even then, sometimes you don't understand or care about their procedures, and you just want to look at the pretty results That’s fair but I wouldn’t call that reading a scientific paper.