After all the discussion over masks it was nice to see an actual study done on them.
Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
161–170 of 197 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#162I was fascinated by this one:
"The Case for a Learned Sorting Algorithm"
i.e. invest in a little ML to sort faster afterwards ...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3318464.3389752
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#163This study is extraordinary in terms of the extent to which it reveals just how little we fully understand about what is actually taking place in the genetic process. Quote from the end of the paper's introduction section: "In particular, the demonstration of highly efficient splicing in mammals in the absence of transcriptional pausing causes us to rethink key features of splicing regulation."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.11.944595v1....
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But mostly I just love the name. Apparently PNAS had them change it for the final publication, sadly. Big game from an organization with that acronym.
We used to joke in grad school that PNAS stands for Paper Not Accepted in Science.
We used to joke it was Probably Not Actual Science
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#165"Wait, There's Torture in Zootopia?: Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies", 2019. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3342908
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
First, a note: math is one of the specific areas where humans generally peak really quite young. Math (quantitative reasoning/logic) is not the only area of psychometric intelligence testing (e.g., IQ) and not even a majority of it. So, it may be that it really is a bit harder for older mathematicians to make breakthroughs? I don't know. At any rate, citing mathematics as an indicator is probably not ideal, because m…
Specifically responding to the increasing average age of Nobel prize winners: this is in part due to the increasing complexity of problems to solve. With our current ways of solving problems, the new problems become harder and harder. The existing human knowledge is also becoming harder and harder to understand, requiring somebody working in a field to spend much longer studying and catching up to the state of the ar…
Maybe, but I somewhat doubt it. Nobel-level work is usually derivative of only a few basic concepts, but is otherwise quite daring. The academic guild system has become nearly impossible to get through, and all corporate or government research depends on passing through that system first. Nobody can just get to work. First you have to get in. 99% of applicants are mostly concerned with prestige or career opportunities. 1% wants to do research. Then you need funding. This comes by helping professors on their ideas, not yours. Then you need a job. Better pick a popular field and find ‘business value’. Now it’s time to buy a house. Maybe you’ll get back to that big idea you had once you pay it off. Student loan availability turned the academic pipeline into a job requirement, and a job is then required to pay it off. We’re just entering the era of Nobel winners that started school during the Vietnam boom. It seems to me that the Nobel will cease to have any meaning in a decade or so. The trend is that contemporary prizes are given to politically valued choices from a huge field of contributors, or as an honorarium for ‘famous’ professors. The last 20 years of minted professors are far more focused on job security than great research, and it would be surprising to see a lot of individual breakthroughs at the Nobel level. And then there are corporate labs, which are run by professional managers handing out nebulous quarterly objectives with a side of panic. Forget about it. The biggest hope for ambitious research may be self-funded entrepreneurs. There must be, somewhere along that path to human colonization of space, a Nobel for Elon.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#167A Conceptual Introduction to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (2017) https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02434
Good paper indeed. And here's a nice blog post with nice visualizations for MCMC and Hamiltonian MC.
https://arogozhnikov.github.io/2016/12/19/markov_chain_monte...
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#168https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.08381.pdf
A take on Josh Tenenbaum's hard problem of learning
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#169This Nature paper, Non-invasive early detection of cancer four years before conventional diagnosis using a blood test https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17316-z Major breakthrough in cell-free diagnostics. The methylation pattern of DNA can be used to identify early-stage cancer, i.e. circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) has a distinct methylation pattern. The results are based on data from a ten year study which mu…
So we could, in principle, selectively demethylate those regions of DNA and cure some cancers?
Re: Ask HN: What's the best paper you've read in 2020?
#170I think one of the most interesting papers I read this year was Hartshorne & Germine, 2015, "When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span": https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614567339 There are lots of good bits, such as: 'On the practical side, not only is there no age at which humans are performing at peak on all cognitive tasks, there may n…
Apologies for pasting all of this, but the excerpt has always stuck with me. It seem correct. Are there alternative explanations other than mental processing speed and so on? (For example, later in life, you're less likely to be in a position to do the same sort of work. But that seems to have been tested by e.g. the institute of advanced study.) As far as I can tell, this section might be one of those facts that peo…
>There was recently some headline news about an older mathematician that made a significant breakthrough. Other than that one outlier, have there been many important contributions made by people after the age of, say, 45?
There is one other effect beyond ability: people over 45 rarely take up new interests. There are plenty of cases of people who continue working in the same field through their 40s and 50s and continue to make advances, but there are many fewer cases of an individual beginning to work in a field after 40 and going on to make a major discovery. In pure math, possibly the most aesthetic-driven technical field (it is impractical by definition), this effect might be especially strong.
Richard Hamilton (not to be confused with William Rowan Hamilton of action-principle fame) initiated the application of the Ricci flow to the geometrization conjecture in 1982 at 39 and continued his work through the '90s, being credited by Perelman as making crucial contributions to the final solution of the Poincare conjecture in three dimensions. He's probably the most prominent example.
>It is very hard to find an instance of a first-rate mathematician who has abandoned mathematics and attained first-rate distinction in any other field.
Chomsky? Szilard? Maybe even Wolfram?