[delocalized]

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.

[CJefferson]

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.

[pa7x1]

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.

[smaddox]

> 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.

Expensive.

[Nevermark]

I would pay $1 per article whose title & byline interested me if I could count on the quality matching this [0] …

… [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37171553

(This comment reads faster with tail recursion.)

[bryanrasmussen]

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 think it may not work out.

[Nevermark]

Ok, I can say this with complete conviction.

Any source that filtered their articles so only that quality was released, I would pay $5.

And instead of filtering out their writers work, it would mostly be about telling them to rework, do more homework, get it right.

90% of quality is simply recognizing when you haven’t hit the bar yet and stepping up. Repeatedly if necessary.

The subject is rarely the problem.

[aeahajji]

Queue in archive.org links in this forum of entitled high earning s/w eng 1-percenters and the business model collapses. Sadly.

Downvote me as much as you like. It's painful to take an honest look into the mirror.

[toth]

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.

[bawolff]

> Journal articles are often opaque to people who aren't already in the field

To be fair, manuals are often pretty opaque without the requisite background knowledge.

[tomcam]

There was one, once, and it was glorious: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

[tqi]

> I always wonder what a popular science/math magazine would look like if it were oriented towards hackers.

ne supra crepidam

[kandel]

It looks like math blog posts. They are written for other mathematicians but not experts in the fields, and a layman will find them unreadable.

[nixpulvis]

Perhaps enroll in a solid EE class? Holding a soldering iron at ~700 degrees may help with patience too… or not, in my case.