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by tjr
4772 days ago
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(Not necessarily directed at wmf...) In a lot of HN conversations pertaining to computer science research, it appears to me that a lot of folks equate doing computer science research with publishing papers. I suppose that if your job is to work as a researcher, or as a grad student, or as a professor, perhaps publishing papers is very important. But in the context of doing research independently (as this subthread seems to be about), why should we care? Isn't the more fundamental point of computer science research to develop new software systems that either do something totally innovative, or improve upon previous systems in novel ways? |
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(1) What you're solving has already been solved
(2) You have a bug in your solution
(3) You can get feedback from the reviewers such that the system is ultimately improved (this happens more often than you think)
(4) You have actually shown that it works better or just deluded yourself into thinking it does (because you happen to have done a lot of work and are convinced that it was good work).
Submitting a paper for publication is essentially independent verification and validation from (hopefully, but not always) impartial people. If you can convince a committee of peers that what you do is the state of the art and you can show this on some public benchmark, then it's a very different proposition from beating some internal benchmark, which may or may not be well-constructed/biased/etc.
The downside is that you have to write a paper, go through the reviewing process etc (i.e. what a boss at most companies would consider a waste of time).