Lol my thesis – Summing up years of work in one sentence | Hacker News Reader

Lol my thesis – Summing up years of work in one sentence

lolmythesis.com

194 pointsanigbrowl28 comments

This is awesome! Some of these "honest" titles are much more clear than the original, academic ones. We tend to use buzzwords/keywords to try and get noticed or even "respected", but it is all complete bullshit. Research should be informative. My submission:

"Acoustic treatment materials for aircraft engines work (sort of), but we are not sure how; airplanes still loud as f..k"

(On the modelling and characterization of acoustic liners under grazing flow.)

See also the Annals of Improbable Research's 24/7 lectures:

"Each 24/7 Lecturer explains their topic twice:

"First, a complete, technical description in 24 seconds

"Then, a clear summary that anyone can understand in 7 words"

http://www.improbable.com/ig/24-7/

Decisiveness is overrated. - Philosophy, University of California, Santa Cruz

Rocks that are next to each other in Massachusetts now were also next to each other 400 million years ago. - Geology, Amherst College

Rats will go to great lengths to earn a pellet of sugar, and even more so when on the right kinds of drugs. - Neuroscience, University of California, Los Angeles

Older favourites from lolmythesis, in my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

This is clearly a superior format for explaining papers. Research should be accessible and it isn't. It really doesn't make much sense to have the academic profession riddled with "abstractese." That is, language that even educated people have trouble understanding without a definition sheet.

This site would be a lot more interesting if it could link you directly to each thesis.

Yep, that would be awesome. I bet a lot of them are behind auth walls, though.

I'd expect you could at least get a formal abstract, as with published academic papers.

I agree. I see many papers there that I would be interested in reading or at least bookmarking for reference.

"""I made some nearly imperceptible changes to a piece of software, and then I wrote a paper about it.""" Yeah those are pretty common :D

This one seems relevant: """If you stop being such an arrogant asshole, your startup may succeed"""

Interestingly, I find these blatantly honest short sentences more informative than abstracts.

If you like this, you might like http://tinytocs.org also (computer science papers with a 140 character limit).

My fave:

"People can’t even with 'I can’t even.'

I Can’t Even Because Language: Investigating Attitudes and Spoken Use of Internet Phrases

Linguistics, Emory University"

I mean - linguistically speaking, it's fascinating. I really want to read this paper.

Here's mine: "A graphics hardware feature added to support texture virtualization is really helpful for implementing texture virtualization".

(relevant OpenGL spec: EXT_sparse_texture2)

if someone notices a sound designer’s work, they’re doing it wrong so therefore nobody ever recognises good sound designers which makes them sad

Depressingly accurate, which is why I decided to get out of the sound department.

The one I'm writing now: "Creating and implementing deterministic multithreading programming language significantly harder than hoped"

Finished this five years ago: "Stepanov-style generic programming is the bees knees; we don't understand why."

It's not that hard. I'm thinking the song "let it go" can help (define determinism as an eventual goal; at least, that is the approach I find that works for me).

It's not that it's theoretically hard, but writing a compiler with typechecking and all is just a lot of work. It's a master thesis, btw, not a doctoral one.

My own project, Glitch uses replay to work out glitches (bubbles of non determinism in a deterministic execution), it incidentally also makes writing incremental compilers easy (see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...), and I recently used it for a new type checker (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__28QzBdyBU&feature=youtu.be). Ok, it's still a lot of work, but if you look at the problem you are solving, solving it can make the compiler writing aspect easier also.

Mine: "Can you sequence DNA by unzipping it? No."

Mine is: "Plants in cooler regions do not like hot weather"

Some of these are better than the actual titles...

Isn't the thesis title supposed to do just this?

Unlike the title this also include the main result and a bit of derision.

"I just wanted to write about Kanye, idk." doesn't even have a link to the paper ;(

Starting graduate school in the Fall! Looking forward to contributing to this site.

Seems like this would be a good format for buzzfeed as it leaves out all relevant context, completely stamps on all the hard work put into these thesises and packs it into a nice less-than 140 characters sharable format.

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