The gossipy narrative style of the article is kind of jarring for an article on a topic like this. It took several paragraphs before it touched on the matter.
I dunno about gossipy, but the narrative style is standard at Quanta. It's written for the subscriber who is reading for leisure, and wants a good story as well as some amount of technical depth, not for the HN reader who wants to quickly judge whether figuring this thing out is worth their time, and will abandon it if not.
I always wonder what a popular science/math magazine would look like if it were oriented towards hackers. In this I mean people who have little background in the field but also the type of person who is used to bluntness and knows to RTFM.
I would subscribe to one. Journal articles are often opaque to people who aren't already in the field, and popular science falls too often into the storytelling trap seen here.
For this particular article, I'm not sure a hacker version could be much better. I'm slightly familiar with this area of research, I'm not sure a more "true" explanation couldn't be done in much less than 20 pages of fairly hard maths, and I don't imagine anyone would want to chew through that.
You could trim this down, but I personally find the background as interesting as the result.
The gap is very hard to close because there is a chasm between the two. RTFM here means years (typically 5+ for research math) of very focused study to follow what it says. While the popular science tries to convey something that is meaningful to the majority of people without any background exposure. The gap between the two is huge.
> I always wonder what a popular science/math magazine would look like if it were oriented towards hackers. In this I mean people who have little background in the field but also the type of person who is used to bluntness and knows to RTFM.
OK, assuming that there are enough people like you to make that a going concern now we just have to solve the problem of getting this level quality distributed through the population that wouldn't care for it enough to send it on to their friends, that is to say through the global network of humans with 1 in 10000 being one of the people willing to pay 1 dollar and the other 9999 people saying "what the hell, who cares"
I always wonder about what something in between popular science/math and academic journals would look like. Something oriented towards people that know a nontrivial amount but are not researchers. E.g., you can assume they know calculus and have a conceptual understanding of what things like manifolds and homotopy but are fuzzy on the details.
For a topic like in the article, you need a lot of words to give a very vague understanding if you are aiming for a general audience. Not clear it is worth it for the reader. For that more targeted audience it could be a lot shorter and give a little more detail.
Probably too small a market, but I would definitely enjoy that type of content a lot.
I hate reading quanta mag because of the narrative, and didn't have the patience to weed through this to learn something conceptual. But I'm glad there are people who enjoy it.