Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

cs.cmu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 62 posts

Re: Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

#2

Post by kbenson »

At first I thought the author was purposefully eschewing any useful formatting to make a point later about how this work itself would be easier to read if a minimal amount of formatting was provided to make it more palatable to those reading it, but no, upon checking other pages of theirs, and even loading up developer tools in case some CSS file was failing to load (and finding none), it seems this author is blind to their own shortcomings in communication.

Re: Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

#3

Post by porcoda »

I agree these are annoying patterns, but I honestly don’t notice them. I don’t read research papers like a book, front to back. Often I skip the abstract, skim the intro, skip to the conclusion to skim what they say I’ll find, and then read the core. The table of contents paragraph I skip without thinking about it.

I’m more bothered by people who use bizarre notation, don’t provide sufficient definitions/background, and don’t give enough information to reproduce the results myself (and I’m not talking about a git repo). I could care less if they have useless sentences and repetition if the content and methodology is complete and understandable.

Re: Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

#5

Post by 049e18103424 »

kbenson wrote: post #2

At first I thought the author was purposefully eschewing any useful formatting to make a point later about how this work itself would be easier to read if a minimal amount of formatting was provided to make it more palatable to those reading it, but no, upon checking other pages of theirs, and even loading up developer tools in case some CSS file was failing to load (and finding none), it seems this author is blind t…

This seems somewhat ungenerous. This article was written in 1997, barely a year after the CSS standard was released. If anything, it's a failing of browsers to not render basic html in a palatable way.

One day, I truly wish to come to hacker news and not have this type of comment be the first thing that people decide is worth posting.

Re: Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

#7

Post by swayvil »

Unnecessary verbosity should be at the top of the list. Without clarity (brevity being the soul) the rest fails.

They say that the google crawler won't take you seriously unless you include your life story as prelude to that recipe for pb&j. Is this making everything less clear?

Re: Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

#8

Post by skytreader »

kbenson wrote: post #2

At first I thought the author was purposefully eschewing any useful formatting to make a point later about how this work itself would be easier to read if a minimal amount of formatting was provided to make it more palatable to those reading it, but no, upon checking other pages of theirs, and even loading up developer tools in case some CSS file was failing to load (and finding none), it seems this author is blind t…

Extremely basic HTML pages (is this brutalist? minimalist?) is pretty much the fashion for CS people isn't it? I mean, I get it if it's not your cup of tea but it's pretty much standard formatting, dark font on light background, readable font size. The only thing I can complain is the long lines but I resize my browser window and, voila!

Again, each to his own, but I find it pretty ironic to find this comment here of all places. HN isn't that far in terms of design either. This site spent a bit more time choosing colors but font is too small, and lines run a similar length.

Curious to know what minimum formatting you expect.

Re: Three sins of authors in computer science and math (1997)

#9

Post by jgwil2 »

kbenson wrote: post #2

At first I thought the author was purposefully eschewing any useful formatting to make a point later about how this work itself would be easier to read if a minimal amount of formatting was provided to make it more palatable to those reading it, but no, upon checking other pages of theirs, and even loading up developer tools in case some CSS file was failing to load (and finding none), it seems this author is blind t…

This is how HTML renders by default - I guess it's an artifact of times when not everyone had a 2 foot wide screen. Fortunately many browsers/extensions can fix this for you with reader mode.
Post reply on HN