[jwr]

> * Most papers are useless (to you at the time you are reading them) - the sad truth about research is that 90% of the stuff you devote yourself to understanding will be wrong, outdated or not useful to what you are working on.

This is very important advice. Do not assume that just because it's a published research paper it is valuable, correct, or useful. In fact, especially in applied CS, I found that authors will sometimes make what looks like an intentional effort to obfuscate the methods so that the paper is publishable (peer reviewers will not try to reproduce the results anyway), but the methods are not implementable, or at least not easily.

This makes sense when you think about the competition in academia, authors doing consulting work for companies, or intending to start businesses of their own.

[seanmcdirmid]

Usually the idea is bunk and they are trying to obscure that, more often than that the idea is great and they are trying to protect their IP for a startup.

If you know something is possible, then it is not impossible to replicate results even with obscure directions about it. Except for Paxos, you really need good instructions at that point (that guy should get an award).

[striking]

Hah. I'm pretty dumb myself. That'll teach me. (I'm leaving the link, though. Great paper.)

[1]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

[tokenrove]

Leslie Lamport is a man. You could argue something about Barbara Liskov's Viewstamped Replication, though, I guess.

[striking]

Whoops. Thanks, I messed up pretty badly, didn't I.

[tokenrove]

It's an easy mistake to make. It's interesting, though, because there are at least three important women who were involved in related work at the same time -- I'm thinking of Liskov, Dwork, and Lynch.