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Not really on topic, but question about papers: when viewing the linked paper, at the top it says title and names of authors and universities, but no date. The

Not really on topic, but question about papers: when viewing the linked paper, at the top it says title and names of authors and universities, but no date. The way to guestimate the age is to scroll to the bottom to the references and see the most recent date visible in the references. But of course that method is not fool proof if the references happen to be all older. Putting author names but no date at the top seems to be some sort of standard template or convention that every single paper author or institution everywhere uses since forever, since I never see dates at tops of papers. Why is date not part of the standard template? Knowing the date is so incredibly important to know the paper in context, and in relation to other science. Especially for science I just don't understand why they don't have a convention to date their stuff. --- Anyway, why I was interested in the date was because the article said "Why aren’t we all SIEVE-ing?". Well turns out the paper is from 2023 or newer, so that could explain why.

paulluuk 3y ago
I never noticed this before, but you're right, it is very weird!
- deleted 3y ago
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junon 3y ago
I was thinking this same thing the other day when reading a paper. Seems like a critical piece of information that is often left out.
xyst 3y ago
I just use the publication date. Just looking at NSDI ‘23, I can see the first published paper in the Spring: https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi23/presentation/liu-tianfeng https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi23/presentation/liu-ti... Looking at the BibTex metadata can give you a better idea of how recent/relevant the paper is: year = {2023}, … month = apr But since this is not yet published (to appear in 2024 of NSDI), I use a similar method you describe. Most of the time, can also infer from the paper itself (sometimes in the abstract or the discussion)
xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
> Well turns out the paper is from 2023 or newer, so that could explain why. TFA and the paper both wonder why this extremely simple algorithm was not discovered sooner. Both posit that no paper should be prerequisite to applying this modification. The question in TFA is less about the paper and more about the concept -- is there some reason why this has evaded us? Is it too good to be true? The article does a better job than the paper digging in to the details IMO.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  Asking why humanity didn't invent an invention earlier, given that we had all the prerequisites, is kind of a banal question. Why didn't we invent cars sooner? Why didn't we invent the internet sooner? We had all the prerequisites, or else they wouldn't have been invented. Why didn't we invent them faster? The answer to all these questions is that having the prerequisites for inventing something doesn't mean we instantly invent that thing, a la Sid Meier's Civilization. The expectation that we would is actually what's kind of odd here. Humans doesn't even all share the same info, much less automatically know all the possibilities of all combinations of all humanity's knowledge. Another factor might be that Yet Another Eviction Algorithm isn't necessarily one of humanity's top focuses for inventions at the moment. We could ask any of us here on HN, for example, why we didn't think of it, and sooner. The answer is likely that we were all working on something else we found more important than YAEA.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    That banal question is in the original paper. The paper spends significant time explaining that this because this is such a simple modification they find it difficult to believe it's been overlooked until now. The article's question "why aren't we SIEVE-ing?" follows this theme. No one is asking the equivalent of "why didn't we invent cars sooner?" here.
    - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      I don't doubt that the banal question in question, is in the original paper. My point was how banal the question was, and how easily answered it is, not where it was. Many inventions in humanity were "simple modifications" of other things. Why didn't we invent them sooner? The answer is in the post you replied to: because it's totally normal for "obvious" inventions to not be invented for a long time, even when somebody thinks, after the fact, that it's a "simple modification". Indeed, what percentage of humanity is currently searching for Yet Another Eviction Algorithm, and what percentage of that percentage is looking in this direction, instead of one of the hundreds of other directions? So yes, the question is indeed equivalent to "why didn't we invent [X] sooner", replacing X with any invention that at least 1 person out of billions in the world finds "obvious" or a "simple modification".
chaosite 3y ago
Papers usually use publication date, and this is a preprint - it is to be published in NSDI'24, which will be in 3 months from now. Usually the final paper PDF, from the conference proceedings, contains the publication information.
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- Aardwolf 3y ago
  Articles are being written about it now, cool that it's in NSDI'24 in 3 months, but that seems almost irrelevant if we're talking about it now. Wouldn't the target audience of a preprint also benefit from knowing a rough date?
jamessb 3y ago
> Putting author names but no date at the top seems to be some sort of standard template or convention that every single paper author or institution everywhere uses since forever, since I never see dates at tops of papers. The year usually appears in the bottom left of the first page, and in the header or footer of subsequent pages. The first linked PDF [1] says only "14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation" (without the year), but does have the year on an initial cover page. The second [2] says "HotOS ’23, June 22–24, 2023, Providence, RI, USA". The third [3] says "SOSP ’23, October 23–26, 2023, Koblenz, Germany" in the bottom-left of the first page. However, this information may be missing from an author produced files/preprints, as it may be inserted along with page numbers when the conference proceedings or journal issue gets created. This seems to be the case for the fourth linked PDF [4]. [1]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-yang.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-yang.pdf [2]: https://jasony.me/publication/hotos23-qdlp.pdf https://jasony.me/publication/hotos23-qdlp.pdf [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3600006.3613147 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3600006.3613147 [4]: https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  Links like https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf is the one we can actually read though, relying on a third party to put this critical piece of information seems suboptimal, rather than make the paper self-contained. I noticed that arxiv at least puts the dates in vertical on the left side of the PDFs there, but it seems that too is something arxiv puts there, not the paper itself. If it's about subtleties like "what is exact publication date", at least put some date, at least let us know it's from the 2020's or the 2000's, it's not guaranteed to be easy to tell. It should be possible to put a year during which the text is being typed there.
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vidarh 3y ago
> or newer, so that could explain why. The title is more raising the question of why an algorithm that performs this decently and is so simply doesn't seem to have been invented earlier.

paulluuk 3y ago

I never noticed this before, but you're right, it is very weird!

deleted 3y ago
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junon 3y ago

I was thinking this same thing the other day when reading a paper. Seems like a critical piece of information that is often left out.

xyst 3y ago

I just use the publication date. Just looking at NSDI ‘23, I can see the first published paper in the Spring: https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi23/presentation/liu-tianfeng https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi23/presentation/liu-ti... Looking at the BibTex metadata can give you a better idea of how recent/relevant the paper is: year = {2023}, … month = apr But since this is not yet published (to appear in 2024 of NSDI), I use a similar method you describe. Most of the time, can also infer from the paper itself (sometimes in the abstract or the discussion)

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

> Well turns out the paper is from 2023 or newer, so that could explain why. TFA and the paper both wonder why this extremely simple algorithm was not discovered sooner. Both posit that no paper should be prerequisite to applying this modification. The question in TFA is less about the paper and more about the concept -- is there some reason why this has evaded us? Is it too good to be true? The article does a better job than the paper digging in to the details IMO.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
Asking why humanity didn't invent an invention earlier, given that we had all the prerequisites, is kind of a banal question. Why didn't we invent cars sooner? Why didn't we invent the internet sooner? We had all the prerequisites, or else they wouldn't have been invented. Why didn't we invent them faster? The answer to all these questions is that having the prerequisites for inventing something doesn't mean we instantly invent that thing, a la Sid Meier's Civilization. The expectation that we would is actually what's kind of odd here. Humans doesn't even all share the same info, much less automatically know all the possibilities of all combinations of all humanity's knowledge. Another factor might be that Yet Another Eviction Algorithm isn't necessarily one of humanity's top focuses for inventions at the moment. We could ask any of us here on HN, for example, why we didn't think of it, and sooner. The answer is likely that we were all working on something else we found more important than YAEA.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  That banal question is in the original paper. The paper spends significant time explaining that this because this is such a simple modification they find it difficult to believe it's been overlooked until now. The article's question "why aren't we SIEVE-ing?" follows this theme. No one is asking the equivalent of "why didn't we invent cars sooner?" here.
  - ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
    I don't doubt that the banal question in question, is in the original paper. My point was how banal the question was, and how easily answered it is, not where it was. Many inventions in humanity were "simple modifications" of other things. Why didn't we invent them sooner? The answer is in the post you replied to: because it's totally normal for "obvious" inventions to not be invented for a long time, even when somebody thinks, after the fact, that it's a "simple modification". Indeed, what percentage of humanity is currently searching for Yet Another Eviction Algorithm, and what percentage of that percentage is looking in this direction, instead of one of the hundreds of other directions? So yes, the question is indeed equivalent to "why didn't we invent [X] sooner", replacing X with any invention that at least 1 person out of billions in the world finds "obvious" or a "simple modification".

chaosite 3y ago

Papers usually use publication date, and this is a preprint - it is to be published in NSDI'24, which will be in 3 months from now. Usually the final paper PDF, from the conference proceedings, contains the publication information.

deleted 3y ago
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Aardwolf 3y ago
Articles are being written about it now, cool that it's in NSDI'24 in 3 months, but that seems almost irrelevant if we're talking about it now. Wouldn't the target audience of a preprint also benefit from knowing a rough date?

jamessb 3y ago

> Putting author names but no date at the top seems to be some sort of standard template or convention that every single paper author or institution everywhere uses since forever, since I never see dates at tops of papers. The year usually appears in the bottom left of the first page, and in the header or footer of subsequent pages. The first linked PDF [1] says only "14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation" (without the year), but does have the year on an initial cover page. The second [2] says "HotOS ’23, June 22–24, 2023, Providence, RI, USA". The third [3] says "SOSP ’23, October 23–26, 2023, Koblenz, Germany" in the bottom-left of the first page. However, this information may be missing from an author produced files/preprints, as it may be inserted along with page numbers when the conference proceedings or journal issue gets created. This seems to be the case for the fourth linked PDF [4]. [1]: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-yang.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi20-yang.pdf [2]: https://jasony.me/publication/hotos23-qdlp.pdf https://jasony.me/publication/hotos23-qdlp.pdf [3]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3600006.3613147 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3600006.3613147 [4]: https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf

Aardwolf 3y ago
Links like https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf https://junchengyang.com/publication/nsdi24-SIEVE.pdf is the one we can actually read though, relying on a third party to put this critical piece of information seems suboptimal, rather than make the paper self-contained. I noticed that arxiv at least puts the dates in vertical on the left side of the PDFs there, but it seems that too is something arxiv puts there, not the paper itself. If it's about subtleties like "what is exact publication date", at least put some date, at least let us know it's from the 2020's or the 2000's, it's not guaranteed to be easy to tell. It should be possible to put a year during which the text is being typed there.

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vidarh 3y ago

> or newer, so that could explain why. The title is more raising the question of why an algorithm that performs this decently and is so simply doesn't seem to have been invented earlier.