Hacker News Reader

Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

Coming up with something that is new, original, and actually works better than anything before it is quite hard. It does not happen often. When it happens, it should be embraced and cherished. Because without these discoveries, science is not worth anything at all. These discoveries are what science is all about. Yes, making sense of the discoveries is also science, but that is the easy part of science.

View on HN

It happens every day. The job description of an engineer is basically to apply their knowledge of fundamentals to design and improve products, not simply copy the existing products. Products in every field must incrementally and monotonically improve in some way in order to compete. It is often not even science at all, just development.

We are talking about different things. Incremental engineering can definitely be part of it, but at some point something different happens: the discovery.

I don't think that this is what GP wrote about. They complain about the paper and not the software. Imho, most scientific papers are really badly written, because most scientists (and most people) are bad writers.

If you want beautiful writing, read poetry. You should give the best paper award to the paper with the best invention / discovery. Because as much as I like a well-written paper, I like a paper with a great invention / discovery even better, even if badly presented. Remember, you get what you incentivise. There are too many papers out there that, while nicely written, do not move the needle at all.

I would certainly appreciate beautiful writing, but I want something far more basic: Good writing. I want a text that is pleasant to read. That does not mean that the text should be dumbed down or that I expect it to be easy. A good text avoids unnecessary jargon and is simplified to make it very clear what the reader should take away from reading the text. A lot of the technical details can be delegated to the supplement so that the main text can remain clear and focused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com