Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long time HN'er college dropout and I read a LOT of scientific papers. Probably an average of 4 a week over the past couple of decades, sometimes reading 40 in a week. I probably averaged 20 a week back in March when open source AI was booming in the wake of Llama and on the heels of GPT-4.
> Long time HN'er college dropout and I read a LOT of scientific papers. Probably an average of 4 a week over the past couple of decades, sometimes reading 40 in a week. I'm guessing that you don't actually dive into each paper to 100% understand it? I find it takes me at least 10 hours of reading/looking things up per paper before I could consider that I fully understand it. But that would mean, if I want to do 4 pa…
Depends on the paper's content but there's often sections that you don't need to 100% understand to get value. For example, in survey papers, there's typically a section that is basically "what queries we typed in at the library." I skip those and I think you can too =)
For practical papers, sometimes the evaluation can be skimmed. Author's benchmarks are usually designed to be the most favorable to the paper's novel approach, so I don't spend too much time thinking about them.
Similarly, Related Work sections can be skimmed. If you're well read in the field, you probably won't learn anything from it, and if you're entirely unread "its like X but different because Y" isn't helpful as you have no idea what X is, beyond the one dense sentence the paper just gave you.
> And how much of the content would you estimate gets retained and can be recalled when you wish?
If I really want to remember a paper, it goes into Anki flashcards. This is rare, personally. Usually only for tech I support in prod.