Top all-time · #4194
Maxwell Forbes
Personal blog · maxwellforbes.com/posts · on HN as mbforbesprogrammingwriting
Maxwell Forbes's personal blog at maxwellforbes.com covers programming and writing. Since 2019, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “The PhD Metagame: Don't Make Things Actually Work”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Maxwell Forbes's essays on academic publishing and PhD life, which argue that research papers work as advertisements and cover how to get papers accepted and the 'Science 2' side of research.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hello it is I, Max
Most-linked posts?
- The PhD Metagame: Don't Make Things Actually Work4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-03-18
- Your Paper Is an Ad3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-03-18
- Getting a paper accepted3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-06
- The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-15
What Hacker News says?
Agreed! I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back.[1] A few things I think are going on: - layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!) - the lines are often too long - the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing. I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I…
Comment linking /posts/web-justified-text/
on “Microfeatures I love in blogs and personal websites”Submitted Getting a paper accepted as a story · 219 points
HN discussionFor anyone beginning a phd for some reason (there can be some good reasons; there are many bad reasons), this will save so much time: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/
Comment linking /posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/
on “Foundations of Computer Vision (2024)”Submitted The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThe author has many other posts with solid advice, like "Don't Make Things Actually Work" https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-make-things-actually-wo... It seems to go 180 degrees against what a smart starry-eyed junior grad student would believe. Surely, it's all about actually making things work, right? We are in the hard sciences, we don't just craft narratives about our ideas, we make cold hard useful things th…
Comment linking /posts/dont-make-things-actually-work/
on “Getting a paper accepted”Submitted Calorie Counting × Meal Planning as a story · 56 points
HN discussionThe author elsewhere cautions “I write this because PhDs seem to attract a lot of smart, idealistic kids who are interested in doing Science 1 and don’t realize that they’ve signed up to do Science 2.” https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-try-to-reform-science/
Comment linking /posts/dont-try-to-reform-science/
on “Getting a paper accepted”Submitted Who Has Been Speaking? as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI think the professional sciences has, for a long time, been a social game of building ones career but it does feel like it's metastasized into something that's swallowed academia. From the first article in the series [0]: > Insiders ... understand that a research paper serves ... in increasing importance ... Currency, An advertisement, Brand marketing ... in contrast to what outsiders .. believe, which is ... to sh…
Comment linking /posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/
on “Getting a paper accepted”Submitted Force Click for Layer Selection as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI recommend reading this article which explains how you can get your papers accepted, and explains that a catchy title is the #1 most important thing: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/how-to-get-a-paper-accepted/ (not a plug, I just saved it because it was interesting)
Comment linking /posts/how-to-get-a-paper-accepted/
on “From multi-head to latent attention: The evolution of attention mechanisms”Submitted Automating Screenshots: Relishing Making One's Own Tools as a story · 10 points
HN discussionWith the author's emphasis on Science 2 , I found quite provocative an earlier post of his: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/ Submitted it for discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43403596
Comment linking /posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/
on “The PhD Metagame: Don't try to reform science – not yet”Submitted The PhD Metagame: Don't Make Things Actually Work as a story · 8 points
HN discussionI use Sketch to export SVGs, and animate them with anime.js. Here's an example of some illustrations where I did this [1]. It's not without issues though; using external (i.e., not inlined) SVGs is surprisingly tricky, and you quickly run into edge cases with groups and transforms---some notes here [2]. I like this approach because it decouples drawing and animating, and with SVG it is resolution and bandwidth-frien…
Comment linking /garage/animating-svgs-from-sketch-with-anime.js/
on “Ask HN: How to quickly animate system sketches and 2D diagrams?”Submitted “Every PhD Is Different” as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI wrote a tutorial for fixing this issue, in case it might help: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/fixing-mobile-page-layouts
Comment linking /posts/fixing-mobile-page-layouts
on “Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows”Submitted A Modest Proposal: Let’s Stop Lying to Each Other in Our Research Papers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionRelated, from the same author: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-make-things-actually-wo... As potent and productive as the combined perspective sketched out by the author might be, it makes me wonder whether this might also point to the root of certain problems with research publishing in machine learning / artificial intelligence. I anticipate that this opinion might be polarizing, and I'm curious to hear other…
Comment linking /posts/dont-make-things-actually-work/
on “Your Paper Is an Ad”Submitted Sparking Joy with Python as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to Get Your Paper Accepted as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Don't Make Things Work as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Try Even a Little at Conferences as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Your Paper Is an Ad as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Delete Your Backlog as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Misclicking Live Search as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Use Examples as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Taipei as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building an ECS in TypeScript, Dirty Component Optimization as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Misclicking Live Search (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
