4 ms·

> An honest title would be "Compiling a subset of F* to partially Safe Rust, Partially Formalized" Sadly that is the name of the game in conference publishing.

> An honest title would be "Compiling a subset of F* to partially Safe Rust, Partially Formalized" Sadly that is the name of the game in conference publishing. Make a big claim in the title and hope the reviewer does not read the fine print. > If I may translate from the language of academia. "We present beautiful rules in figure 4. But in reality, our implementation relies on a large number of hacks." Er, this I can understand. Every conference paper only presents you with a simplified view of the contributions. There is no way to describe every corner case within the page limits of a conference paper (specifically, I bet this was submitted to POPL 2025).

light_hue_1 2y ago
> Er, this I can understand. Every conference paper only presents you with a simplified view of the contributions. In my group I don't allow hacks. Most other good papers I can think of don't do that. It takes new students a while to get used to not maximizing performance at all costs. And if a hack must exist, then it's explained, not as a hack, but as part of the method. Don't you hate it when you implement some beautiful idea from a paper only to discover that it hardly bares any relationship to the actual method that works? > There is no way to describe every corner case within the page limits of a conference paper (specifically, I bet this was submitted to POPL 2025). You're probably right. But POPL allows for unlimited pages in an attached appendix. They can and should describe the full method. Particularly if they're going to play the game of saying that they formalized this. > Sadly that is the name of the game in conference publishing. Make a big claim in the title and hope the reviewer does not read the fine print. It's a form of namespace squatting. Do the worst job possible to claim a title that you couldn't execute on, so that when people figure out that problem, they will be forced to cite your non-working solution. I loathe this approach to publishing. We should punish people for doing. Reject for lack of honesty and your paper can't be published in related conference for X years.
- lou1306 2y ago
  Well in this case (and if it was POPL, but it's a pretty safe bet considering the format and the timing) it looks like reviewers have indeed rejected it. And I completely agree, it is namespace squatting. Sadly every once in a while it does work (and very effectively), so there is little incentive for the community to punish it. Sorry if my previous comment came off as dismissive, it's just that I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with the state of things in this space.
jeltz 2y ago
As someone who recently reviewed hubdreds of abstracts for a mid-sized open source conference: our committee would have declined that talk due to the misleading title. Has academia really that low standards?
- lou1306 2y ago
  Not to be dismissive, but you reviewed hundreds of abstracts. A top conference in this area receives hundreds to thousands of papers. So there is a non-negligible chance your submission trickles down to some PhD student who is still learning the ropes of peer review. And then, there is a non-zero chance they won't fully understand the fine print and give you a thumbs up. Again, this does not seem the case here (this one was likely uploaded to ArXiv after being rejected) and I thnk the opposite (good papers being rejected) is way more common in academia, so I wouldn't frame it as "low standards". Just an unfortunate outcome of "publish or perish" in a conferences-first community that highly values a small subset of all venues.

light_hue_1 2y ago

> Er, this I can understand. Every conference paper only presents you with a simplified view of the contributions. In my group I don't allow hacks. Most other good papers I can think of don't do that. It takes new students a while to get used to not maximizing performance at all costs. And if a hack must exist, then it's explained, not as a hack, but as part of the method. Don't you hate it when you implement some beautiful idea from a paper only to discover that it hardly bares any relationship to the actual method that works? > There is no way to describe every corner case within the page limits of a conference paper (specifically, I bet this was submitted to POPL 2025). You're probably right. But POPL allows for unlimited pages in an attached appendix. They can and should describe the full method. Particularly if they're going to play the game of saying that they formalized this. > Sadly that is the name of the game in conference publishing. Make a big claim in the title and hope the reviewer does not read the fine print. It's a form of namespace squatting. Do the worst job possible to claim a title that you couldn't execute on, so that when people figure out that problem, they will be forced to cite your non-working solution. I loathe this approach to publishing. We should punish people for doing. Reject for lack of honesty and your paper can't be published in related conference for X years.

lou1306 2y ago
Well in this case (and if it was POPL, but it's a pretty safe bet considering the format and the timing) it looks like reviewers have indeed rejected it. And I completely agree, it is namespace squatting. Sadly every once in a while it does work (and very effectively), so there is little incentive for the community to punish it. Sorry if my previous comment came off as dismissive, it's just that I'm getting increasingly disillusioned with the state of things in this space.

jeltz 2y ago

As someone who recently reviewed hubdreds of abstracts for a mid-sized open source conference: our committee would have declined that talk due to the misleading title. Has academia really that low standards?

lou1306 2y ago
Not to be dismissive, but you reviewed hundreds of abstracts. A top conference in this area receives hundreds to thousands of papers. So there is a non-negligible chance your submission trickles down to some PhD student who is still learning the ropes of peer review. And then, there is a non-zero chance they won't fully understand the fine print and give you a thumbs up. Again, this does not seem the case here (this one was likely uploaded to ArXiv after being rejected) and I thnk the opposite (good papers being rejected) is way more common in academia, so I wouldn't frame it as "low standards". Just an unfortunate outcome of "publish or perish" in a conferences-first community that highly values a small subset of all venues.