Hit men, click whores, and paid apologists: Welcome to the Silicon Cesspool - <AUTHOR> http://www.realdanlyons.com/blog/2012/02/13/hit-men-click-whores-and-paid-apologists-welcome-to-the-silicon-cesspool/ <comment><USER3> Oh... My... God.... Lyons is a fucking god. As a journalist in the valley, I can just say that the first paragraph he's written here hits the nail right on the fucking head.

\---"It's tough being a journalist, especially if you're covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you're stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What's worse is that all these people who are getting rich don't seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don't seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous. And then you start thinking maybe you could find a way to cash in on this gold rush. But how do you make gobs of money when your only marketable skill involves writing blog posts?"

I feel this way all the time! But there's a distinct difference between acting on these feelings and just feeling them. Arrington would be just fine and above reproach, these days, if he'd keep his fucking mouth shut now that he is ludicrously compromised and un-objective.

If he'd quite being a "journalist" he'd not look like such a douche...

Perhaps this is why I haven't jumped the fence yet... I don't think I could give up the journalism. It just gets in your blood. And once it's in, the thought of compromising yourself is sickening. Unless you're Arrington.

<comment><USER4> But that's the whole point of the article: the whole _value_ of the CrunchFund (and its ilk) is that Arrington (and his ilk) will be a douche on your behalf. If it were just the money, it wouldn't be worth it for the companies they invest in: the amounts are too small. It's an alternative compensation scheme for a PR flack who masquerades as a journalist. There's no ethical way to run the fund, because it would be worthless if it were ethical.

<comment><USER3> Yah, obviously that's the value he's adding. I think it's a zero sum game, however. Shilling isn't going to help a crappy product out in the long term, only the short term.

And it brings up all manner of ethical grey areas: is blogging journalism? Do influencers lose influence when they lose objectivity? What the fuck is an influencer, anyway?

If a journalist is ever an influencer, he or she is doing it wrong...

Buh, I could go on a giant rant here about how journalism is dead, or at least, extremely sick... How am I going to write about people places and events when those people places and events are writing about themselves?

Fortunately, it would seem there is still a consumer for quality, deep journalism on specific topics.

I don't even know what I'm really saying here, anymore... Just that Lyons really hit a nerve. It's super frustrating to be in an interview with someone who makes 10X what you make, and is completely unaware of what's really going on in their industry.... All too common an event.

<comment><USER5> _> And it brings up all manner of ethical grey areas: is blogging journalism?_

I believe the crux of the problem is that 'influential bloggers' want all the credibility of journalists ("we're writing and reporting on things!"), without any of the responsibility ("we're just blogging our opinions!").

This is what leads to situations like below:

 _Then there's the post in December where MG [...] thought he'd uncovered some kind of huge conspiracy when he accused Google's Android chief, Andy Rubin, of deleting a tweet. A few days later Siegler had to recant (sans apology, of course) when it turned out that, um, nope, Rubin hadn't done that. Of course there's a simple way to avoid bonehead moves like this — you do the reporting before you publish the accusation, not after._

<comment><USER6> There already are bloggers with the credibility of journalists (and more) who assume all of the responsibility (and more). We all know this and read these people all day every day.

Dan Lyons is not one of them (SCO), and neither is MG, but MG (and more) is just telling us he is neither a good VC nor journalist, but his (and his friends') wallet would like you to think he was.

tl;dr: MG is innovating the huckster niche.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's tempting to dismiss this as just e-lebrity gossip, but I think that this kind of rottenness is probably more dangerous to the Valley than threats from Washington or talk of bubbles. If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble.

If somebody is an unscrupulous douchebag, don't to business with them, don't read their blogs, don't upvote their articles. Treat them like the trolls they are.

<comment><USER8> _If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble._

For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up. Pretty much any industry creates an economic flow, and the flow is a source of power (some would argue the only real source in peace time), and one can harness that power by having influence over the flow.

Back when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting and Steve and Steve were there and nerds gathered at the ByteShop to see the latest S-100 board that Geoge Morrow had dreamed up, the total flow was measured in less than a million dollars a year. Few 'professional' power brokers even noticed. Today the total economic impact of 'tech' is approaching a trillion dollars by some estimates, with that kind of flow comes real power. You also get a different class of players in the game.

We joke about people who would sell out their families for a million dollars, however that number gets uncomfortably large as you go up in decimal orders of magnitude. 10 million, 100 million, a billion ?

The stakes are higher today, some people _are_ the barrier to entry you have to get past. It hasn't been a "gentleman's game" for some time now. Kinda sad really.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure. Sleaze tends to correlate with easy money. Before 1997 or so most of the people I knew that were in tech were in it primarily for love but when all the easy capital started flowing in suddenly the quick buck hucksters started coming out of the woodwork. Very few of the latter stuck around after the first dotcom crash.

Right now a lot of dumb money is pouring into tech because there's nowhere else for it to go. I'm seeing a lot of the same kinds of low class opportunists popping up as a result.

<comment><USER8> I believe you are thinking about the rent-seekers. About that time when someone in business school realized 'hey, these guys are defining new fundamental concepts, if we could patent those we could just sit back and roll in the cash!' There was a tremendous shift from open disclosure of all the technology to 'just the necessary bits to operate' around that time. Comparing the PC/AT technical manual (with BIOS listings!) to the PS/2 manual? DEC went from publishing system schematics to just 'diagnostic notes'.

I had hoped that the open source wave that hit after the dot com crash would have reminded people about why openness leads to growth not stagnation but I don't think it has.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've never understood the enormous popularity of M.G. Siegler. His articles are often published without any attributions or even basic spell checking. Yet somehow he's ridden on the coattails of Apple's ascent by positioning himself among the fandom as a "champion of good taste". In interviews he doesn't even come off as particularly pleasant.

<comment><USER11> Fanboys on either side of the aisle love to pat themselves on the back and reaffirm--almost daily--that yes, they did buy the best product imaginable. It's the same reason Gruber makes half a million a year writing snarky one liners.

Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing.

<comment><USER12> The "fanboy dismissal" is here, as usal, a cop out. It's the same copout that 2/3 of the commentariat falls back on whenever the subject comes up of why Apple is so successful. Must be those fanboys, that pixie dust, that RDF...

"Some sort of subconscious need to find superiority in consumer purchases and brand loyalty. It's kind of disturbing."

Or maybe it's just a good blog?

Despite happily not owning a Mac for almost a decade I've continued to read Gruber all this time because his signal to noise ratio is off the charts compared to any other tech blogger. His voice is unique and entertaining. The entire layout is clean and sparse. It's one of the few tech RSS feeds you know isn't going to be knee deep in repackaged press releases and bullshit false equivalence analysis.

If all you had to do to make a half million dollars a year was turn out snarky one liners there'd be a lot more millionaires in the world.

<comment><USER13> I don't think this can be construed as 'fanboy dismissal', though the term 'fanboy' itself is controversial.

Post purchase dissonance reduction is a well known cognitive bias[1]. And what can be better for dissonance reduction than someone telling you that you have good taste, and anyone who buys the competition is a philistine?

I should point out that this does not impute anything to the quality of the products themselves. I just posit that blogs such as Gruber's play a active part in the ecosystem due to our cognitive biases. They are not merely a passive observer.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-purchase_rationalization>

<comment><USER14> This might be one of the best comments I've ever read on the web.

These gadgets are EXPENSIVE. If you're clearing $15.00 an hour and you buy a smartphone, that's 15-40 hours of your life that you've dedicated to that little machine. You can see why there would be fervor over those devices, especially for those enthusiasts that have to work so hard to afford them in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on._

Silicon Valley has not fundamentally changed over the decades and I can say that from the perspective of someone who has lived here for over 40 years and who has been in the thick of the startup world since the early 1980s. Opportunism has always existed and always will. But great ventures are not fundamentally built upon opportunism. They are built upon incredible skills, daring forms of risk-taking, amazingly hard work, and like traits that are quite admirable. Those traits showed themselves strongly here in the Valley 30 years ago and they continue to do so today. Indeed, the heart of the Valley consists of _anything but_ the "upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers" that the author here attempts to depict. Sleazy elements exist as they do whenever money is at stake but to suggest that they are what most defines the Valley is to slander a lot of good people who are doing great things and who have nothing whatever to do with the world of which the author writes.

The author is an excellent writer but this piece is seriously flawed by an intemperate tone, extreme _ad hominem_ attacks, and gross overstatement. In my view, such flaws seriously weaken it as a piece of advocacy. And the lurid headline does not help either, especially when one writes to criticize "click whores." It is not that the piece is bad on substance. It just could have been so much better had the author chosen to strike a more judicious tone.

<comment><USER16> It seems to me that someone is whistleblowing on mafia-like behavior... and you comment on the tone.

<comment><USER17> Lyons sounds more like a rival mafioso to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Investors in PandoDaily:

Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures

Many of these are top class investors and certainly don't expect a return on their money from a startup tech blog. But they might expect favorable reviews of their portfolio companies when launch time comes or when shit hits the fan.

<comment><USER19> Exactly, I fear this too. I like Sarah Lacey, and I think she does have integrity.

But I can't help but feel this is the investors simply moving up the food chain to protect their startups. Rather than rebutting against the media when their own startups are attacked, they have obtained an inside position at source.

I don't believe Sarah thinks this will happen (or she feels she can push back and mitigate) but I'm [sadly] confident this kind of internal pressure will occur at some point.

Fuck it, if I'd invested in her media venture I'd want preferential treatment. And I'm ex BBC with a 'no bias' agenda beaten into me it hurts.

<comment><USER20> But the BBC gives preferential treatment to the BBC. It's not about to print all of its own internal emails.

All news channels are "biased". You can only integrate and filter.

<comment><USER19> I spent 6 years reading internal BBC emails. Can't comment for the rest of the BBC, but nothing comes close to the integrity of BBC News.

>But the BBC gives preferential treatment to the BBC

Go read any BBC news story right now and scroll to the bottom. They even link out to other news sites covering the same story. I can't think of another news website that links to competitors like that.

BBC News certainly doesn't give preferential treatment to BBC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Although this was a beautiful piece I can't help but feel Dan Lyons just gave Uncrunched, ParisLemon, TechCrunch and PandoDaily another million pageviews between them for the many rebuttals we're about to see.

<comment><USER22> It's like the Republican presidential debate rules -- anytime you mention an opponent, the opponent gets airtime to respond.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dan isn't innocent here - some of his older posts are sickeningly obvious puff-pieces or hit jobs... of course, he's not excusing himself here or claiming he's not part of the muck he's deriding.

But every once in a while (esp. when he did FakeSteveJobs), Dan hits it out of the park, and this is one of those articles. The crunchfund conflict of interest is concerning.

</comment><comment><USER24> The interesting thing to me here is how the story is no longer about Path and whether their actions were right or wrong. In the course of attempting to defend their portfolio company, Arrington and Co. have created a new debate about the role of journalism in the tech world, pitting the VC-backed insiders and their well-oiled hype machine vs the hordes of unconnected outsiders seeking to break down the gates. This dynamic is reflected by the passionate reactions coming fast and furiously from both sides. It could get ugly, but in the long run it's probably a good thing for everyone to have this discussion.

<comment><USER25> As Lyons notes, the debate around pay-to-play or other more subtle conflicts of interest in tech journalism has been around for a while, and is probably here to stay.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that _anyone_ publicly sided with Path after their app behavior was exposed. There just is no spin spinny enough for that job. That it was Arrington and MG giving it the old college try just adds some extra lulz/wtf to the scene.

<comment><USER26> People spin things that actually kill thousands of people every year. Why do you think your privacy is going to be more respected than your life?

EX: Clean Coal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So basically it's only a matter of time before the ideals of the "gold rush" go away and everyone's just in it for the money?

I came to Silicon Valley to escape that (the alternative, at the time, was Wall Street). Unfortunately, this kind of behavior (and these kind of people) seem to 'follow the money'.

*Note: This is both about the conversation that companies are abusing consumers and then apologizing later, and the tech blogger community and Lyons' accusations

<comment><USER28> "Gold Rush" is the definition of "in it for the money". It means people go somewhere / do something to "get quick rich".

And Silicon Valley has been "about the money" for 20-30 years now. When Wozniak left Apple is a good milestone for when it became "about the money".

<comment><USER29> I think the warning signs of a 'gold rush' are when ethics go out the window (most recent example is the mortgage industry). Capitalism is all about going where the money is but if the correct rules aren't in place and the culture isn't strong enough the whole system goes to hell like a badly moderated news forum. The key question about SV of today is: are the correct rules and culture in place to keep the gold rush healthy and sustainable?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm really surprised that Google trusts and would still let MG Siegler review their products before launch (like they just did with Chrome for Android), when 80% of his posts now are about trashing Google. It's like begging for attention from an abusive boyfriend or father: "Come on, MG..just one little nice word about our new product...please?"

They must think that it's better this way, than to give it to someone who already likes Google, because it's more "fair" and he'd be seen as more "objective". Seriously, MG objective? Does anyone still think that by now? There's not a paragraph in his reviews where he doesn't compare anything to Apple, whether it's necessary or not, and of course Apple always comes out on top in his view.

Apple on the other hand gives out their products before release only to people who are totally on their side like Pogue and Walt, so the initial reviews of the product always come out favorable, and they get to influence other laggard reviewers, too.

<comment><USER31> Because if they can get him to like their product that would be a huge achievement for them. They want to be the ones that win him over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hopefully more people will start realizing that this is what techcrunch has always done.

I remember watching a techcrunch50. I showed some people I knew the swype demo and everyone was blown away. That's so cool! What won? Yammer. Twitter for the enterprise.

There's no way Yammer could possibly have won other than silicon valley tunnel vision/influence circle.

That was the only tc50 I watched. I also only ever read tc very briefly because the quality was awful. For the occasional scoop they got (and fewer right) it's just wasn't worth wading through the drivel.

At least now they have a new business model I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER33> It started stinking from the time CrunchFund was announced and I couldn't understand all the "moral highground" support bullshit that Arrington was getting - most notably from the TC staff.

Journalism is a lot about perspective - I dont care if you occupy the highest moral grounds, your perspective changes dramatically once you have significant interest and money invested into something you are talking about. What you would normally call a Spade now becomes a Diamond.

Arrington's and MG's responses to the Path issue is proof enough for this - can you imagine both of them so mellow and supportive if Path was not CF funded was not around? I think not. And ohh yeah, I nearly puked reading MG's "rant" few days back. For someone who is so hypercritical of anything on the borderline of wrong (except if its from Apple - or any CF company it seems now), it felt especially nauseous.

To their credit, they do have disclosures - which definitely make a difference - if that is enough, I'm not sure.

Credibility is built by calling a spade a spade. It also tends to take the fast route down if you stop doing that.

</comment><comment><USER34> Personally, I'm really happy to see the tech blog echo chamber start slinging mud at each other instead of whatever the tech company to hate du jour is. The more they make themselves the story the more irrelevant they become.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Siegler is constantly mocked by readers as a laughable troll – a mean- spirited, egomaniacal buffoon who is not very bright but thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, and who, in all of his manic blogging, has left a string of cock-ups and false "scoops" behind him."

I feel you could replace the first word in that with Lyons and it would also be an apt description.

Is there any better mudslinging match in the tech-blogosphere than Lyons vs Apple bloggers?

<comment><USER36> I think the phrase you're looking for is "The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I feel like this is a part of the larger conversation of how the dynamics of Silicon Valley are changing (at least from my insulated perspective). I'm not going to sit in my arm chair and smatter Silicon Valley but I enjoyed and respected the culture and environment of SV much more 5 to 10 years ago. It may be untrue but I feel like SV is becoming increasingly dominated by hustlers and scheisters and it has become more difficult to effectively collaborate with the many true technologists there. Actually took a job last year outside of the traditional SV circle of companies to take a break from the atmosphere and have found it to be surprisingly more fun from a technological perspective than the consumer internet products I was building previously.

</comment><comment><USER38> Dan Lyons is afflicted with the combination of being a very talented writer, but a terrible journalist. He's late to a lot of stories--I mean, he's JUST NOW writing about Arrington's conflicts?? And, he's frequently 180 degrees wrong about the stories he does cover--see his coverage of SCO for the most infamous example.

I remember my reaction when it was revealed that Dan was behind the Fake Steve Jobs blog. It was approximately, "Huh? Who's that?" And every time I read a non-Fake-Steve-Jobs piece from Dan I am reminded of why I had that reaction. The guy is just not a good tech journalist.

He's an incredibly entertaining writer though. I wish he would take his talents south and put out a sitcom or movie or something creative.

<comment><USER39> > I mean, he's JUST NOW writing about Arrington's conflicts??

That is because he wanted to work at Techcrunch (there was a perennial discussion within TC on hiring him, and his wage demands were massive). now that Arrington can't give that to him any longer, he can speak out against him. Speaking of conflicts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I stopped reading techcrunch about 9 months ago, after realizing that the majority of articles were friends of the author - and realizing it was almost impossible to get featured on there unless you were connected in some kind of monetary way.

<comment><USER41> And finally, in 2012, after mocking and lambasting traditional reportage and journalistic standards for years, the Internet finally learns that journalistic standards, expectations, and ethics are a set of rules learned the hard way, that are as relevant on the web as they were in print.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for "it's just a blog, man".

<comment><USER42> It's not that proper journalism is irrelevant, and it's not even that not everyone should be expected to be proper journalists. It's that proper journalism is a very small niche, not the norm. There isn't much actual market demand for proper journalism compared to the other crap; most readers and viewers are undiscerning and everyone else is willing to pay, so why bother?

It was probably this way even before the internet. I mean, they award themselves the "Pulitzer Prize"--go look up the guy that one's named after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I agree with the overall argument and sentiment of Dan's article.

My ideal blog about technology startups would be about Silicon Valley as it is. It would be hard to run this blog. I'm not even sure it could be profitable, because most interesting information about what's happening in Silicon Valley is not written about. It's shared directly between people working here, and there's very little reason for those conversations to go public.

You see the same problems with journalists covering Washington and national politics. The journalists are willing to be used by politicians because it furthers their careers. It's so tempting to just give in. It's certainly more profitable.

On the other hand, if you take TechCrunch for what it is, I don't think it's unethical per se. You just have to know how to read between the lines.

Dan's article would be better if he didn't confuse angel and VC investment, though. Michael Arrington is certainly an angel investor, and he was one long before he started CrunchFund. He's probably an investor in CrunchFund's first fund, but as a General Partner he's acting as a VC, not an angel investor.

The key distinction being whether he's investing his own money (an angel investor) or LPs' money (a VC).

</comment><comment><USER44> How about we start to act on this by not posting and/or flagging every post from pandodaily, techcrunch, and uncrunched? I think we'd have a better HN experience all around.

</comment><comment><USER31> How about a few of us here get together, throw up a wordpress install, and start a self-serve tech/startup site. I've got RobotSays.com. Basically anyone can be an author, they create a guest post, upload their content and their picture, and submit the post for approval and we the editors fix up anything out of place and approve only the best content for the front page. A lot of design blogs allow guest post submissions and it works out very well.

Basically when it comes to tech/startup news this is all I want to know:

1 - when new startups launch

2 - important new game changing features that existing startups are implementing

3 - advice and interviews (Ask me anything) from startup founders

4 - new game changing gadgets coming out

5 - when startups are hiring

6 - when startups are sunsetting and why

That's it, no dirty laundry being aired, no drama, no egos, no kings, no divas.

<comment><USER45> Well, you just invented slashdot. It's fallen by the wayside now, because places like this, with (largely) unmoderated user generated content, can distribute news faster.

<comment><USER31> I do agree with you, but if HN were so go at news then why does TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, AllThingsD, Mashable, etc... exist? HN isn't really a content creator, it's a distributor of content that has already been created at those sites mentioned. HN is a great community of news commentators, but HN is terrible at allowing people to generate content and articles themselves.

And those types of content creators (editors) put so much hard work into their pieces they want to find a good home for their articles, a permanent place of existence. People writing guest posts for TC, RWW, GO, ATD, Mash, can just as easily make a post here on HN. But they don't. No one wants to put in so much hard work and research just for it to disappear into the jungle of links and never be found again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Glad to see Lyons getting in on the conversation. And by conversation I mean grab for pageviews.

</comment><comment><USER47> This kind of thing - not the exact events or people described, but the atmosphere conveyed - is exactly what's been turning me off from Silicon Valley. I've interned here twice, and I know that it's full of the top engineers in the world. Yet the underbelly seems to be full of these ridiculous cutthroat business practices and an atmosphere of self-indulgence, self-importance etc, most likely because Silicon Valley is where the money is. It seems like it's turning into the Hollywood of the tech industry, and not in a good way. T'would be a shame.

</comment><comment><USER48> I was with him until this:

 _The real secret to Siegler's traffic, however, is that he is pals with Gabe Rivera, who routinely drives traffic to Siegler by giving his pieces top billing on Techmeme. (That's right, kids. Techmeme is rigged.)_

Unlike his criticism of Siegler, Lacy, and Arrington, the statement about Rivera and Techmeme is not backed up by any evidence. If he has some -- an analysis of Techmeme placement of Siegler's posts, sources who have knowledge of the alleged "top billing", or some other information -- it should be stated or linked from the post.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a fantastic article. I think the start-up industry and the bloggers who report on them is increasingly tiring.

I'm glad this guy had the guts to call people out for who they truly are. Though I am sure this is far from the end of it all....

</comment><comment><USER50> <Quote> Not big investments — maybe $100,000. They don't need your money; they can raise money from anyone. </Quote>

I dont agree with this. Many startup companies have to prove their mettle to get an investor want to invest in them. Also, there are significant chance of any startup going bust. He does not supplement what the odds are in making 10x/100x returns. So its difficult to buy the concept that just investing in them will make you richer in a few years. However, I do think Michael Arrington is doing what he can to protect his investment. But I dont think its the other way round..i.e -> Startups are not necessarily filtering investors based on the influencing ability of the investor.

<comment><USER51> The real question is whether CrunchFund is leading or following. If they just follow, once other big names are committed, then frankly the value-added for startups is close to 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Michael Arrington's response: <http://uncrunched.com/2012/02/13/we-are-better- than-this/>

<comment><USER53> MG's here: <http://parislemon.com/post/17587323277/bat-shit-crazy>

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Good piece. I think of Arrington, Siegler, et al. as the Swift Boaters of tech journalism. They just throw FUD everywhere and they never clean up after themselves.

</comment><comment><USER55> Somewhere, Gruber, Lyons, Arrington, and Siegler are sitting back, smoking cigars around a poker table, and laughing at all the income from ads that their little "dispute" and junior-high name calling is earning them.

</comment><comment><USER56> Cool, so for the billionth example, makers make something -- good or bad -- that creates a commotion and the chattering class gets to ride the waves. This time, it's Path. What is this article in the OP, 3rd, 4th degree of separation from the actual event in question?

It's enough to toss it all in the shitter and just judge things on their own merits: products, apologies and whatever else. Journalists bickering at each other over what exactly? Who cares.

Ugh. I think my work life frustration is spilling over into my comments.

</comment><comment><USER57> Tech journalists sure do love writing about themselves.

</comment><comment><USER58> How do I pitch my startup to the Dan Lyons angel fund?

</comment><comment><USER59> let's get back to hacking/the technology.

</comment><comment><USER60> The key question that arises in my mind is simply this: why is perception so important in Silicon Valley? It seems clear that money influences tech reporting to a fairly high degree, but what is the economic incentive? In a universe of makers, shouldn't the things made speak for themselves?

<comment><USER61> _but what is the economic incentive?_

Getting users. Tech isn't the meritocracy everyone likes to pretend it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I wonder how do you think about Arrington being forced out of AOL now, after reading this.

<comment><USER63> They conned AOL... committed to staying there in exchange for a big pay then violated the spirit of their agreement by launching a tech fund: a clear conflict of interest.

<comment><USER39> you have no idea what you are talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> This is why I feel like a lot of startups raising their hands in a "ohhh write about me!!! write about me!!" frenzy of desperation seems to get them the users and followers (edit: and investors) they deserve. Sure, if your market is the tech crowd, go for it. If you're market is not the tech world, then I believe it makes sense to avoid the shitty tech press altogether.

Getting a Techcrunch piece about your app doesn't mean you're successful in any measure. Having a business model and making a profit _does_ make you successful. Sure Techcrunch is marketing, but in most cases it's the wrong kind...not all eyeballs are good ones. Know your market.

<comment><USER65> I totally agree. There's also hidden dangers involved. If you're a company like AirBnB or Path, and something disastrous PR-wise happens, it'll appear all over TC if you're a Silicon Valley darling. If you're not known among SV, maybe 1-2 minor publications will pick up the story, but there won't be a huge commotion. If they're not your target audience, is it really worth a write-up in TC?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Can anyone explain why this post got buried on reddit? I thought they live for controversial stories like this. Is Arrington a reddit investor too?

</comment><comment><USER66> Brave article by Dan. Please keep them coming.

</comment><comment><USER67> Very funny, but... isn't Lyons himself click-whoring with articles like this? He is (or has become) a part of the circus.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm curious how close this resembles the Payola scandal and if it would ever warrant legal/political intervention.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola>

</comment><comment><USER69> Funny to see that much praise for Lyons, which is far away from being a good writer. Many things coming from him are link bait articles and insulting for a reader trying to make up his mind.

</comment><comment><USER70> It's as if people think that any journalist is unbiased. At least MG, MA, and SL all share their bias so openly. You don't think Dan is biased in his reporting? Please.

<comment><USER54> I don't think Dan shares a direct financial stake in the targets of his punditry like MG, MA, and SL do.

Money makes for a powerful conflict of interest.

<comment><USER70> MA already pointed out that Dan wanted to work for TechCrunch numerous times. How much more direct do you want?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I fully agree with Dan!

</comment><comment><USER72> This post sure struck a chord. Good job, Dan.

</comment><comment><USER73> Brilliant piece.

</comment><comment><USER74> Needed to be said. Bravo Dan Lyons.

</comment><comment><USER75> You get what you paid for.

TC blog is free so all you get is simply product placement blog.

</comment><comment><USER76> And this is a click-bate title I'm not going to click out of principle.

<comment><USER74> It isn't click bait. If you follow the network of blogs Dan talks about you saw the blatant self-interest machine hard at work in realtime. I was disgusted by it, but I'm not a tech writer, thus no platform to weigh in on. I'm glad someone picked up on it and gave it to them, and you only have to glance at the comments he got to know that I'm not the only person who felt this way.

<comment><USER76> Article might be worthy, but this title gives me no insight into the content of the article and thus doesn't allow me to decide if I want to see it or not in a first place. How would I guess that it's about "network of blogs with the blatant self-interest machine"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> And now these writers occupy HN. 597+ upvotes. Seriously? Sigh.

<comment><USER78> Is probably more a sign that HN now has a much bigger diverse audience. Not so long ago it would be really rare to get 597 upvotes in a single story.

<comment><USER77> We should start flagging users who post sensationalist stories on HN. Not reward them with karma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Nasty little ankle-biting Matty the Angry Chihuaha, hoho how wonderfully droll :) It may very well be verging on the meta-hypocritical but unlike Siegler at least this man has a flair for the written word.

</comment><comment><USER80> I view all of that kind of thing as noise and try to filter it out.

</comment><comment><USER81> I'm surprised by the amount of cheering going on over this article. I found it in very poor taste, resorting to ad hominem attacks and slander. Even if it were in good taste, I don't agree with the general idea behind the post.

I don't understand this pent up hatred for Arrington, M.G. Siegler, and the other TechCrunch writers who, despite what people continually say, do genuinely seem to care about startups. Is this a case of wanting to knock successful people down a peg? Is it jealousy? What is it?

Sure, they are biased, but everyone is. At least they make it clear where their biases lie.

Please help me to understand this anger.

<comment><USER82> I think a lot of this anger stems from the way many tech bloggers write - <USER2> combination of a "fuck the haters" and a "told ya so" attitude. It's easy to breed hatred with thinly-veiled disdain for those who criticize you, and I think that's a good part of what's happening here.

A lot of dislike for TechCrunch and affiliates also forms because these bloggers are part of a "good ol' boys" crowd in Silicon Valley. While the article casts this effect as one of VCs indirectly paying for stories and conflict of interest, I think personal ties are more important. Most of these tech bloggers spend a lot of time with a small group of VCs and founders- turned-investors, and it shows in what they choose to write about (and in who funds them when they go to found their own sites). For many, especially those outside this close network who are founding a startup or those who choose to eschew venture funding, it's frustrating to watch an already quite small echo chamber (tech startups in general) grow even smaller thru the lens of the VC- affiliate media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> [http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxjlw4AnIX1rn1xxfo1_250.gi...](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxjlw4AnIX1rn1xxfo1_250.gif)

<comment><USER84> Please don't resort to these kinds of comments. Its hard enough to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high in "gossip stories" posts such as this one.

<comment><USER85> garbage in, garbage out</comment></comment></comment>


Rich Hickey's Keynote from the JVM Languages Summit (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hickey

<comment><USER2> I admire Rich Hickey and Stuart Halloway and I've been reading the prag programmer book on Clojure, but I still haven't been able to wrap my head around why I should replace my preferred language - Ruby - with Clojure.

I understand that if I was building a database, or a traffic control system or something with lots of concurrency, it's useful.

But if I'm building a web app, the appserver and database handle the concurrency issues for me.

So I haven't quite understood why Clojure is so important.

<comment><USER3> Clojure is important because it's a Lisp that runs on the JVM and uses existing Java libraries. It has taken big steps to improve Lisp's accessibility.

Do you like Lisp? If you like Lisp, Clojure is its most pragmatic dialect. I personally enjoy the simple, consistent syntax and functional programming style that Ruby lacks.

Note that while Clojure was designed with concurrency in mind, it's also good at other things — like Ruby, it's a general purpose language. However, you're going to be more productive writing a web app with Ruby right now because there are no libraries for Clojure that are as robust as Rails. That may change as Clojure's ecosystem grows.

<comment><USER4> Its more a case of _do you understand lisp_ , because it seems to me that few people who really understand it actually dislike it, while most people who don't understand it seem to dislike it (parentheses and prefix notation being the two things people seem to hate most). Its difficult to explain the benefits of Lisp to someone who doesn't already understand Lisp...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A bit off-topic, but I've been seeing more infoq lately, and I'm wondering if there's a pwnyoutube/deturl type thing for infoq. I found the conclusion to Rich's talk on youtube, but it looked like it was filmed with a cell phone and it was only the last few minutes of the talk. Any pointers to a download link would be much appreciated.</comment>


Ask HN: Housing for equity? - <AUTHOR>

I'm not sure if this is even considered to be a good idea in general.  Has anyone offered equity to get free rent?  Can it cause problems later down the road? <comment><USER2> During the Bubble in the late 90s (funny one now has to specify) some commercial landlords used to get paid partially in warrants, which are basically the corporate equivalent of stock options. It's not so common now, though, and it wouldn't be a good plan for a very small startup anyway, because landlords would have no idea how to value you.

<comment><USER3> I've heard many people say this happened, but very few examples (besides Paypal). Are there any other examples?

<comment><USER2> I think most of the time the landlords lost. That's why they don't do it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It works better the other way around: buy something and rent it out to get free equity.

</comment><comment><USER5> if the arrangement works for all parties involved, why not? get it in contract form.

</comment><comment><USER6> For fuck's sake, equity is not cash, stop using and thinking about it like cash.

And what kind of landlord would even go for this? Mortgages can't be paid in equity, either.

<comment><USER7> If someone is willing to buy your equity it's as good as cash.

You do need a buyer for it though...

<comment><USER6> > If someone is willing to buy your equity it's as good as cash.

Which means it isn't cash.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to publish papers as a non-scholar? - <AUTHOR> Is there a way someone who is not a PhD can publish papers without being marginalized by the community?<p>Do you have any advice on how to write better quality articles? <comment><USER2> As a recovering academic, I believe it would be good to examine _why_ you want to publish in an academic journal. Are you a consultant, for example, and you think it help you get clients? Are you trying to get a better job and you think the paper would help your resume? Or do you just want to increase the sum of human knowledge?

Peer review is a highly flawed process that has an empirically small effect on paper quality [0]. Moreso, rejection of an article is a poor or completely useless predictor of the ultimate impact of the article if it is published.

Getting a paper through peer review is slow and frustrating. You may get reviewers who reject a paper for incorrect or even bizarre reasons. If your paper casts doubts on an anonymous reviewer's work, you are going to have a hard time. It's just not fun.

What are the benefits? Tech employers generally don't care about publications, just the work involved. Clients probably don't care. NGOs and government don't care either. The only people who care whether something is published are academics, in my experience.

Perhaps you are in an industry where this isn't true, in which case you might have more incentive. But don't assume people will care.

You might have a microscopic chance of your paper becoming highly cited, but without a well-know co-author, that is unlikely even if your paper has important content. Most scientific papers fail to make any kind of splash, with numbers of readers numbering in literally the low dozens. After all that work, chances are that nobody would care.

A better solution is to put it all on a blog, and/or ArXiV or one of the other preprint services for other subjects. That way your research will be available unpaywalled for anyone.

[0] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2586872/)

<comment><USER3> Not OP, but I'm a former academic still doing research, and I appreciate peer review as gatekeeper. When I was younger, I wrote a lot of garbage on a blog that I wish had been better filtered. Worst case, if I publish a paper and it turns out to be garbage, I can pin the blame on the journal.

I find it especially important if the paper has any danger of being perceived as crackpot material. For example, my paper "A type of simulation which some experimental evidence suggests we don't live in" [1], recently featured on the HN frontpage, took years to prepare and finally publish, even though it's literally less than one page in the journal. With something as 'pop' as whether we live in a simulation, I wanted to be sure what I wasn't just deceiving myself or something.

[1] [https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEATO-6.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Traditional peer review can filter out complete crackpot garbage, but it empirically is not effective at improving paper quality. Just because it may have filtered out some wrong things you said does not mean it is effective at it in general.

Open, non-anonymous comments on preprint services hold much more promise. Peer review without anonymous gatekeepers.

<comment><USER3> I've had papers greatly improved by peer review. Maybe mathematics is an outlier. All my best papers were significantly informed by reviewers.

I've had cases where my initial thought was "this reviewer is an idiot!!!" When I calmed down and forced myself to give them the benefit of the doubt, I ended up realizing they were right, and they improved my papers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> (edit: my publication experiences are heavily biased towards biotech/biomedical/natural sciences fields. Your CS Experience May Vary, particularly w/r/t the prestige of conference papers.)

The obvious answer that you might not like very much is "write a paper and co- author it with an established group." If you share a lede with an established group, that's immediate credibility.

Journals happily accept manuscripts from first/corresponding authors who don't have PhDs. Graduate students publish regularly; depending on your program this is effectively obligatory.

Self-funding publication in a peer-reviewed journal will raise eyebrows -- so see my first suggestion, which offloads the often substantial publication costs onto a grant. (Our group's last publication cost was ~$4500, for a benchmark. That's higher than normal but it was open access with 6 color figures). Crediting a grant for the work also lends credibility; someone gave you cash to do this thing, so obviously they don't think you're totally nuts.

Publishing preprint-only on the arxiv is well established. I think you need someone to vouch for you the first time, but that shouldn't be too hard depending on the field.

Depending on the field, single-author maunscripts are either basically normal (parts of CS, much of mathematics, some theoretical physics), a giant red flag (experimental physics, biology-adjacent fields), or somewhere in between (economics?).

Do not ever use a vanity publisher for scientific articles. If the journal ever appeared in Beall's list, run, because it's a mark of shame.

Finally, don't necessarily attribute your marginalization to not having a PhD -- the politics of publication are ruthless no matter who you are.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about where you publish, but all the venues where I publish use double blind review. Therefore I'd say all this talk about how many authors and so on is a red herring.

Assuming double blind review, the barriers are going to be with respect to the contribution itself, or the writing. For a paper to get accepted in my field (CS, HPC, PL, compilers), first of all it needs to present a novel and interesting contribution. I occasionally see papers that are pretty obviously coming from industry where it's pretty apparent that the authors just have no idea what a contribution entails.

This is the sort of thing that you grow to just have a gut sense of by doing a PhD. Short of that, you could get some of this sense yourself by reading papers, though it would be far easier to collaborate with someone experienced in the field you can find a person who is willing.

<comment><USER6> > all the venues where I publish use double blind review.

But you still need to have your paper sent for review... Couldn't the editor reject it outright?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps this is an issue in journal based publishing, I don't know.

In CS, we publish in conferences. Conferences don't have editors in the sense that journals have. So there's no initial filtering step. Anyone can submit, and anything that gets submitted will be read by at least 3 or 4 reviewers (who don't get to see the author list). Anyone who does get to see the author list (e.g. the program committee chair) is not involved in any decision making about specific papers unless there is a very serious violation of some kind (which in practice happens very, very infrequently).

<comment><USER3> >anything that gets submitted will by read by at least 3 or 4 reviewers

Note to self: open a lucrative business submitting bulk spam to CS conferences! (Just kidding)

<comment><USER7> How would such spam result in anything lucrative?

<comment><USER6> Sell conferences a spam filter?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am a computer systems scientist and have participated in several peer-review processes.

I have never seen a case where an author who does not have researcher credentials is marginalized.

However, papers with bad science are rejected and in the worst-case, the authors are blacklisted. It does not matter if the authors have stellar credentials or none to start with. So aim to write papers with good science and forever stop worrying about getting marginalized.

There are several books that explain bad science. I recommend "Craft of Research", "They Say I Say", and "Demon Haunted World" to start with.

The most effective method to get your paper accepted is to make the experimental methods explicit and the data public. This will make your paper much more scientific than those published in conferences with poor- reproducibility checks.

Professors are hungry to write good papers. Conaact a professor who works in the same community to review your paper in return for co-authorship. They will gladly agree if your paper is aligned with their interests.

All the best!

</comment><comment><USER9> There is nothing magical about having a PhD of course. I've reviewed a few papers (for journals) from non-traditional sources, and also had some more direct submissions. The common issues you run into are

      1) The work is sloppy and/or has obvious errors.
      2) The work lacks clear context (i.e. citations and framing - "why should we care").
      3) The structure is not idiomatic.
      4) The writing is not idiomatic.

The 1st one is an easy rejection, but the next 3 are harder. If you are submitting through conventional editorial boards, you have to understand how much unpaid work it is to do a good review. If your paper is difficult to place in context, it's harder. If it is done in a non-idiomatic way it is both harder to understand, and - fair or not - reduces confidence (which means more detailed verification needed).

I agree having a "traditional" collaborator can help, not because of the credentials so much as avoiding issues 2-3. It also will help to read a large number of well written articles. At minimum, if you are thinking of publishing your own ideas you should have read every core/significant related paper done in the last decade or so, and as many of the other related ones you find interesting as you can. That will help you with both issue #2 and with improving quality.

If it's in an area with an active preprint server like arxiv, by all means submit there. If your idea is interesting and you've called it out well, you should get some feedback.

</comment><comment><USER10> Created an account just to respond to this. This might not be the answer you want to hear but my 2c would be blog. The internet is great publish your own stuff. Why should you care about being marginalized by a community who mostly plagiarize off each other and only think within the limits of what others allow them to think. The same people are the one's who never allow breakthroughs and call anything but incremental improvements pop science. Do things for yourself, for the human spirit. Stop worrying what others think about you. They don't think about you. There's nothing sad in that, it's actually liberating you are free to share and write and create how you want. If you want recognition you've failed before you start.

On writing better articles my advice is to simply start with the end in mind. Explain the idea how you would to a child without using childish language. Leave the thesaurus aside, don't use industry language just cause you have to. Don't not use it just cause you think you'll sound pretentious.

Hope that helps, hopefully I don't come off sounding like a knob. Good luck.

<comment><USER11> This was my favourite answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this really depends on your motivations. Are you trying to convey the information to the community? Trying to build a reputation as a researcher? Increment your citation count?

arXiv is a pretty good option for disseminating information, but most papers published there don't receive as much consideration as those that have gone through a peer review. Therefore, only the most obviously-groundbreaking papers end up accruing a lot of citations there.

If you want to build a reputation, you'll need to target peer-reviewed conferences, and probably those that have a double-blinded process. This will allow your work to stand on its own, although you'll need to ensure that it conforms to the structures/patterns/shibboleths of the academic community. They best way to learn these, if you don't already know them, is to read as many papers as you have time for in a domain as close to yours as possible, and then replicate those formats.

If you're looking to increase your citation count, this is difficult to do without really groundbreaking research. Some manage it by doing "citation sharing" with collaborators, but this is (A) frowned upon, and (B) difficult to get going if you're not in academia.

In any case, you'll probably want to learn LaTeX if you haven't already; this is a pretty necessary first step for publication, either at arXiv or an IEEE/ACM conference. Edit: This is because most conferences have a template that you must follow, and these templates are provided in LaTeX format.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would just put it on arXiv, or equivalents like biorXiv. You should read a lot of papers in the field and cite the relevant ones. Also, use conventions of the field--LaTeX two column format is frequently used in CS/ML papers.

In my PhD I put some work on biorXiv that I never bothered to put through peer review and was pleasantly surprised to see it cited by a peer-reviewed journal article.

<comment><USER14> Don't you need to be endorsed to post on the archive? [https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement](https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement)

<comment><USER15> I thought that as well, I would like to hear if its true in practice for arxiv

<comment><USER3> Not only do outsiders need endorsement, even if you get one, the arxiv is curated. I don't know why people assume it's just totally wide open like any random person can publish anything to it? It would be inundated with junk!

If you're a member of a recognized academic institution (as determined by email address I think?) then you can skip the endorsement step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Re: "any advice on how to write better quality articles"

My route to learning how to write quality papers: Find an expert in your field to tear your paper apart, and then get to work rebuilding it. Rinse and repeat 20 or so times. Additional experiments may be needed. You'll probably have a good paper at the end.

This of course is much easier to do in grad school. But can be achieved elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER17> Things like blog posts are playing an increasingly large part in scholarship. Granted, it's not part of the 'traditional' peer-reviewed journals publishing process, but there's lots of change afoot (e.g. open access, post-publication peer review, preprints etc).

One thing you can do is make sure you're still on the map. This could include, for example, making sure Crossref tracks your blog so we can record citations / references _from_ your work _to_ other work. Our service for tracking non- traditional publications, Event Data, is still in beta, but you could add your blog to the list:

[https://github.com/crossref/event-data- enquiries](https://github.com/crossref/event-data-enquiries)

[http://www.crossref.org/services/event- data](http://www.crossref.org/services/event-data)

You could also publish your article on FigShare, which means it will get a DOI and thereby be more easily citable by others.

If you hadn't guessed, I'm an employee of Crossref.

</comment><comment><USER18> Make sure you understand how a journal article is expected to be structured. This varies from field to field. In my field (not CS), it looks like this:

1\. Introduction. This not only lays out the problem you're addressing, but also locates it in the context of previous work. This is important for a few reasons, not least that the people reviewing your paper will probably expect you to have cited them there. But also, it shows that you understand your work in the context of a broader scholarly effort to advance your field. If you think your work is truly novel, you probably haven't done enough reading to find parallels in the literature. The introduction should also briefly state your results -- this isn't a mystery novel, you're not saving up for a big reveal.

2\. Methods. This section describes the new thing you did or made. What it is, how it works and why. You're still going to be putting a fair number of citations in here, but they'll be a good deal more focused than in the intro. Often I see people citing their own research group's previous work here, because you're building on something the group already did.

3\. Experiment. This section describes what you did to evaluate your work. This description should be detailed enough that somebody else should be able to repeat your measurements.

4\. Results. This section should have the most figures and the fewest citations in it. It describes what happened when you did your experiment.

5\. Conclusion. Here you explain what it all means and how it ties back to the broader scholarly effort to advance your field. Where the intro states your results, the conclusion restates them and puts them into context. The conclusion also usually talks about future research directions suggested by the work you've presented.

A lot of grad school is about learning how to write papers like this.

</comment><comment><USER19> How would you compare a blog to a paper? I personally read just about as much papers as blog posts, with both containing valuable information and important ideas. I have my own blog, but I'm currently sitting on some ideas that could maybe... maybe be a paper. Sure, peer-review is nice, but how many people are going to read about my idea as a blog post, vs in a (pay-walled?) journal. I'm inclined to think that outside academia, a blog post may actually have a bigger reach. The paper has more bragging rights maybe though.

</comment><comment><USER20> Taking the following steps should help:

1\. If you imagine the knowledge in your field as mountains (like the Rocky Mountains, or the Alps), then you need to describe very clearly where exactly your contribution is located. Which summit do you elevate further? What are the neighborhood summits (alternatives to your solution)? Pointing this out in the introduction shows the reader that you are part of the community. It doesn't matter then that you have no formal academic position.

2\. Choose the venue wisely. There are two factors to consider: a) it makes sense to publish where the work you build on and/or compete with was already published. You know these venues if you have done step 1. Some authors of your 'neighborhood' papers will probably be your reviewers. b) if you think that you have a significant contribution, select a tier-1 venue to maximize impact; if you think you have a minor contribution, it makes more sense to go for tier 2. Seek advice by a researcher in your field which journals and/or conferences in your field belong to which tier, and ask them for their opinion which venue would be suitable.

3\. When you have chosen your preferred journal/conference, identify the 10 most-cited papers from the past 5 years, and carefully analyze their structure and the used methods. Use them as role models for your own paper, together with your 'neighborhood' papers from step 1.

4\. Your paper will likely be rejected initially. Read the reviews carefully. Some reviewers are crappy and just "don't like" your work, but many reviewers raise helpful and constructive points. And even the crappy reviews give you hints on how the community works, so you can revise your paper and try again somewhere else (or the next year, for a conference). Don't give up quickly, but also expect that you will have to invest significant effort on improvements.

My experience is about publishing in CS, not sure if my suggestions would also apply to other sciences.

</comment><comment><USER21> A couple of suggestions.

\- Many conferences use blind peer-review.

\- After you've finished up with the work, you can ask a PhD to provide feedback/editing in exchange for co-authorship.

<comment><USER22> For the last point, never put your name on a paper that isn't yours, even if you help out with the editing. It isn't your works, if someone asks you about it later it will be awkward. That isn't even mentioning that the quality of the work still might not be up to your own standard. The only case where this doesn't apply is adviser-student relationships, but in that case the adviser should really be more than just an editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have reviewed and published several papers for conferences in Computer Science. You got good suggestions so far, I'd like to add one important thing:

* Choose and Know your community!

When you choose a venue like a conference, you are writing an article with the intent of being read by a very specific subset of the research community. You can imagine each subgroup having a set of "interesting conversations" around a narrow set of topics or methodology that are deemed important by the community.

So ... you have to convince your audience that you are contributing something to their conversation. Go look up papers in the previous edition of the conference, dig into their references, and frame your contribution in the term of the conversation they are having. In this way it'll be easier for everybody reading the paper to understand what you are doing.

In some cases, it might be that you are telling the community that they should care about this new problem of yours, but if it is completely unrelated to their discussion, it'll be an harder sell.

Also, be aware of the style of the community: are they interested in experiments backed by strong theoretical work? Or are they more interested in practical experiences, without caring much about theory? A decent paper accepted in a theoretical conference might actually be rejected by a more practical conference (and the other way around).

</comment><comment><USER24> It probably depends on the community and the journal but I was a reviewer for a journal (not blinded, not CS) and in my experience a good paper is everything, credentials are nothing. I read quite a few papers from university bprofessors who had hardly a clue of statistics and research design and didn't care to ask an statistician and submitted shitty papers and were rejected. As a reviewer, I was really happy when I got to read a well written paper with no really obvious flaws.

</comment><comment><USER25> Let's define here "being a scholar" as having a good sense of where your field is (and for anything people are interested in, there _is_ a field).

The standard way is that PhD students (often non-scholars) team up with more senior, well-read researchers (i.e. experienced scholars), with the latter at a minimum explaining and framing the work and in many cases guiding and shaping it.

You get marginalized by the community for bad scholarship just as proposing crappy conference talks will lead to "marginalization" by the conference organizers: there's already so much content to consume, and scholarship and other requirements serve to shape and organize people's contributions in a way that means the community as a whole can make progress.

As for advice on how to write better: Read a lot. Get rejected a lot and learn to read between the lines. If you want a friendlier environment, aim for workshops rather than major conferences. Don't be afraid of putting in the work that's necessary for a good paper.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think the answer may change a lot depending on which field are you thinking about; because "the community" will be quite different as well.

Regarding "how to write better quality articles?" one key part is reading a lot of high quality articles from the field. Of course, there are other things yo may want to do, but again, it will depend on the area.

</comment><comment><USER27> Other than closely reading the literature that informs what you are writing about, one way to write better quality papers is to reach out to the relevant academic researchers and engage with them. If they are interested in your ideas, they might be open to giving you their feedback. It's also impossible to write in a vacuum. I'm friends with a few people who were grad students when I met them, and are now either post-docs or working in industry; without them, I'd be lost.

Another thing to do is to hire an academic editor. Even though it might not get everything right, there is nothing like peer-review quality feedback on a paper that highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of your writing. One thing to keep in mind is that a peer reviewer will be less likely to tell you that your whole paper needs restructuring. They are often instead focused on "within-the-box" improvements.

Seeing that a paper needs to be completely restructured can stem from being a good non-fiction writer in general, rather than being a good "paper-writer." It's a general skill relating to effective and efficient communication, and it can be improved by writing blog posts, more feedback, and writer's workshops. Similarly, to publish a paper without a PhD, you are probably going to have to become, at the very least, a "lay-scholar" in the field you are thinking about anyways. Maybe you are already well on your way.

Also, I went through a phase of thinking that I was special due to what I was attempting to write and get published. I'm pretty sure that I was looked at oddly by academics during this time. Maybe this is common for those of us trying to publish a paper and who are right out of college. My point is that this phase gave me the energy to submit to peer review, which was great. At the same time, I'm very grateful to have outgrown it. I suspect this phase is something many people go through; it's common.

</comment><comment><USER28> I hope you read the many great responses to your question. I learnt quite a bit by reading them.

The key to having your work published is to know the field within which you are publishing very well, cite the other papers concisely and accurately and make a contribution to that body of work. This, in a nutshell, is the process of working to gain a PhD.

As a general rule most journal papers evolve from conference papers. Most conferences in CS/SE welcome "industry papers" aka non-academic contributions. You could join the IEEE and/or ACM and subscribe to journals that match your area of expertise.

Once you read widely you will identify who the key contributors in your field are. You could contact them with a synopsis of your proposed contribution and ask whether they might be interested or know of somebody who could be. In this way you could connect with people who will collaborate with you to increase the quality of your articles.

</comment><comment><USER29> Share your paper with a colleague for comments. If they're a fan, they can serve as an advocate with a journal if necessary.

Science is a social endeavor. If you don't have colleagues, go meet people!

As a referee, it doesn't matter at all to me whether you have a PhD. Your institution may matter a little bit as context, but not a lot. It is the science that matters.

As with any paper, I'll read the abstract, read the introduction, look at the figures and the captions, glance at any short equation, and read the conclusion. By the end of that process, I will know whether or not the paper is worth further attention. The refereeing process is generally an investment of several days of my time, so I do it with care.

Do the work, talk with people, get feedback, and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER30> Here are some maybe sort of out there ideas I came up with:

1\. Be in the process of getting a masters degree. No one really cares at the end of the day as long as you are a graduate student affiliated with a decent school (this may be field-dependent). In CS you can easily publish for example as a masters student at brown -- I have a friend who had no problem doing this with no co-authors and never went on to get a PhD, but he was at an Ivy League school.

2\. Find an academic friend or a former professor/adviser in your field and be his/her co-author. This has the added benefit of potentially increasing the quality of the research if they agree to edit/help you with it. Could be combined with option 4.

2\. Be a former academic and publish to ArXiv using your old academic email address (not really publishing, but at least people can cite it at that point).

3\. Publish to ArXiv without an academic email address. People will be able to cite it, but you won't be "published" per say (in the deep learning community many, many citations are to preprint servers). People not familiar with academia won't know the difference and will still be impressed if you say list it on your resume under publications.

4\. Form an LLC, make a good website about how your company does research in X field, and self-publish as a "white paper" (I took this approach a few years ago, but I no longer maintain the website). In some industries, much of the significant research is contained in white papers or company funded papers. It might also be possible to submit to a conference/journal under the auspice of a company -- I don't know how that works though.

5\. Get in touch with the journal/conference you want to submit to and explain your situation and ask for advice. Depending on the venue they might be very accommodating.

A note on "funding". At least in the CS community, funding is often not needed to conduct groundbreaking research as it's 99% of the time just you sitting at a computer. There are exceptions, but I think in CS being self-funded isn't going to raise as many eyebrows as in other fields.

</comment><comment><USER31> I review a bit (less than I did), and I occasionally publish (each time with the expectation that everyone will pick it up and start saying how important and significant this paper is, but each time to watch it being cited twice if I am lucky) so... fwiw

There must be a result or at least a clear contribution. Sans the result it's really a poster or a think piece, but really you don't have a publication. A publication is to demonstrate a new piece of confirmed knowledge; an observation, measurement, analysis or proof.

The quality bit is "how good is the way that you are conveying this new knowledge" is it sewn up, is every doubt closed, is the detail all there?

</comment><comment><USER32> The best way for applied science is do not publish & find a way to exploit your results commercially instead. That's why we sign NDAs while doing consultancy gigs indeed. There is no actual gain in putting your effort out on arXiv.org or conferences, only to be scooped by the numerous groups fighting for grants and the many more outsiders looking for impossible recognition or a fast buck from unscrupolous knowledge transfer. Just keep your results private, exploit them on your own and send them all whistling.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just curious: why try to publish in an academic journal if you're not an academic?

In many fields, if you have the resources to do the research you wouldn't be asking this question. And fields where single author, more creative (let's call it) work is acceptable also seem to be areas with a broader audience beyond readers of narrow, often paywalled journals and could be more appropriate as a book, talk, blog, or arxiv post. And if you're not trying to be an academic, you don't need publications for treading water in your career.

(I'm not being critical of the ambition. Even if the reason is just ego or getting accepted into a group of people you respect, that's good enough reason for me!)

</comment><comment><USER34> As a potential college dropout looking to publish my CS research, this is an extremely helpful thread. Thanks everyone for your contributions!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly why I started the thread: I dropped out of college a couple years ago as I had opportunities that a degree could not offer me (I still believe this was the good choice). But as I move forward and do more and more RnD at work, in my startup and as a hobby, I would like to share some pieces of information to the world.

All I would advise you is to embrace the unknown and strive to learn more everyday.

Whichever path you chose, I wish you good luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Just write one (or many) blog entries somewhere. People in the academy publish papers just because they are evaluated by the number of publications. Your blog will have much more reach than any specialized journal. If you still want to have a PDF mixed with the ones made by the academia, upload something to arxiv.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've published some papers in artificial intelligence as co-author. No one asked for educational backgrounds. And I've published papers in applied math as sole author: Again, no one asked about educational background. I do have a relevant Ph.D., but no one asked.

I suggest, write a good paper, look for appropriate journals, and submit to one of them. Maybe speed up the process a little: Send a copy of the paper (or PDF file, as they wish) to the editor in chief with a cover letter not making a formal submittal but just asking if, first glance, might this paper be of interest for their journal?

I never paid anything, no _page fees_ , etc. to publish.

None of the papers, co-author or my sole author papers, got rejected.

Here are some hints that might help:

(1) Write the paper, especially in the abstract and the first paragraphs, like you really know technically just what the heck you are doing. E.g., I started one sole authored paper where I mentioned that a derivative I was taking was a "dual vector" \-- not everyone who writes such applied math pays attention to duality.

(2) In each of my sole authored papers, some of the key topics, prerequisites, etc. were advanced and narrow enough that I'd guess that less than 10% of the editors had all the prerequisites.

(3) I suggest that write applied math, mathematical statistics, and computer science making important and appropriate use of some relatively advanced pure math.

(4) Generally I suggest that just write applied math, with nearly all the content in theorems and proofs, for mathematical statistics, computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc. The usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant", and new and correct theorems and proofs are big steps forward for these criteria. If the theorems are also, in the paper, relevant to some applications or an applied field, then that can help with "significant".

(5) Know quite well just how the heck to write math. A good way to learn this is to have the equivalent of a good undergraduate major in pure math.

A good, first start on such writing is a theorem proving course in abstract algebra, one that starts with sets and foundations and, then, all based on just sets, develops groups, rings, fields, the rational, real, and complex numbers, vector spaces, linear independence, linear transformations, subspaces, null spaces, quotent spaces, duality, the adjoint transformation, eigen values and eigen vectors, the Hamilton-Cayley theorem, inner products, Hermitian and Unitary operators, maybe group representations. Then have a good course in linear algebra, e.g., from the classic P. Halmos, _Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces_ (one of the best writers of math). Then a good course in analysis, e.g., from W. Rudin, _Principles of Mathematical Analysis_ , with highly precise writing. With a few more such good, pure math texts, courses, etc. where the homework is essentially all theorems and proofs and graded by a good mathematician who cares, one will no doubt learn how to write math, and the learning will show.

In my case, I got a good start in a course in abstract algebra, with a good prof who did well grading my papers, and then learned the rest just by studying really good writers, learning how they wrote, without more good grading.

How to write math is no big secret: There're a LOT of beautifully written math texts on the shelves of the research libraries.

<comment><USER31> There are quite a few very reputable journals (i.e. PLOS) which charge for publication. Conferences also charge, but the justification is that you get to go to the conference! The test for me is : is this for profit? The "proper" conferences and the "free to access" journals are (should be) non-profit or run by a not-for-profit foundation, money has to come from somewhere to keep these afloat, but so long as there is no one cashing in then I think you are good to pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Many communities are double blind. Your lack of affiliation won't hurt you in that case, because the reviewers won't know. You will, however, probably get dinged for not knowing the standards, practices, and nuances of the community.

</comment><comment><USER37> Most top conferences are double blind, meaning that reviewers cannot see who authors are and vice-versa. So _in theory_ it does not matter if you are professional researcher or not. However in practice, its almost trivial to identify a paper written by amature vs someone who has gone through the graduate studies. So if you want to get published your priority should be to avoid these mistakes. Here are some of things to remember:

* Read a lot of papers with a related work. Unless you have read and understood at least half a dozen of these, you are likely not ready to publish new work.

* Learn technical terminology and make sure how to use it precisely.

* Identify lose, unverifiable statements. Precision and clarity is super important.

* Know the history of the work. Make sure you note folks who came before you. Describe how your approach differs from others and/or builds on other. Failing to cite is one of the top reasons for rejection even for professional researchers.

* Get some theoretical grounding of your approach. Formalize your hunches and intuition in math equations that can be manipulated.

* Design experiments that shows your approach delivers better result than other under conditions you claim.

* Study the layout of other papers, their style and emulate them. Pay attention to how figures, data tables are describes, conclusions are made, claims are stated etc.

I often say that the primary job of researcher is to read papers and stay up to date and secondary job is to make new discoveries. The way developers are supposed to spend major chunk of their time to write code, researchers are supposed to read papers. So familiarizing current state of the art and knowing what has been done before, understanding pro and cons, internalizing techniques, learning related math skills etc must be your absolute top priority for the area you want to contribute.

If you have never published before, writing academic paper is a major chore. It can easily take up 2-3 weeks of your time in ironing out details _after_ you have good results. However publishing paper is also satisfying. You add the knowledge pool of humanity, your contribution can be built upon by others, you get noted as "first people who did X" and so on. However don't expect to build career as researcher - that _strictly_ requires PhD.

On a side note, there are bunch of non-academic or semi-academic conferences which have less rigorous demands. So you can try to publish there as well. I've seen lot of developers publish system design related papers at places like KDD.

</comment><comment><USER38> If you are pursuing that approach, why not publish it on Arxiv? Or put it up in a blog and get doi for it using figshare.

</comment><comment><USER39> 1) Own a domain. This is good to demonstrate your own views, values, work, etc.

2) Put PDF on your domain.

3) Put your domain behind something like cloudflare.

4) Publish links to PDF. Ensure you have a method of feedback: email is generally preferred and include your name and email in the PDF.

You could publish on third party services but consider them non-authoritive and ephemeral. If you use them as primary distribution you _will_ get burned in the future.

<comment><USER40> Posting PDFs on your own website is "publishing" in the literal sense of putting information out there, but it is hardly publishing in the academic sense of getting articles in print in a journal where other participants in the field are going to see and respond to your work.

Since many journals have double-blind peer review, if the OP's work is sound, then there is no reason he should not go for journal submission. In terms of building a reputation, that is a lot better than self-publishing, the domain of cranks. In my own field of linguistics I know several people interested in the subject who post their own PDFs on their own websites or on Academia.edu, and though they try to format those PDFs to look serious and respectable, these people creep most actual scholars out and we try to avoid those writings.

Finally, peer review is not just gatekeeping, it leads to better papers. If your work is publishable, then the peer reviews will often suggest ways you can clarify your argumentation, and they will point you to interesting citations that you might have missed. You miss out on all that by self- hosting.

<comment><USER39> If you think self-publishing is the domain of cranks then you'll never find the people worth looking at.

Submitting to a journal is fine, but own your work on your own site.

<comment><USER40> > If you think self-publishing is the domain of cranks then you'll never find > the people worth looking at.

Why you think that the people who self-publish are more worth looking at than people who publish in journals?

<comment><USER39> Why do you think people worth looking at are exclusively found in journals?

<comment><USER40> Because the examples of self-hosted PDFs in my field that I have seen over many years now, are so horribly crackpot that even if there is a magical 1% of tenable self-published work out there somewhere, it is not worth people's time looking for it when journals offer a better signal-to-noise ratio.

And while it may not be true of cutting-edge STEM fields, most of the must- cite literature in my own field is not available digitally and is in fact held at only a few libraries worldwide. People are unlikely to have access to it unless they are already closely involved in academia, and in that case they will be keen on journal publication for career advancement. Consequently, self-publication strongly correlates with not having an awareness of the standard literature.

<comment><USER41> it's still sad those 1% are being glossed over.

I guess a lot of experts in their respective domain still spend a fraction of their time reading other information sources with low signal to noise ratios: news riddled with advertisement and propaganda, perhaps sports, fiction books movies or television series. EDIT: addition: If they spent a quarter of that time sorting crackpot papers the signal to noise level could be fixed, and they'd still have 3/4 of the time for their usual news binge or whatver)

I'd actually be more than happy to see some tax payer money spent on the following system: authors withoud accreditation can sign up on a government hosted site, and provide their articles (or links or p2p hashes of them). Accredited domain experts can participate and earn money by getting assigned 2 or 3 random papers in the same domain but from probable cranks. They simply sort them in credibility. This way probably crank papers get scored, but the top 1% eventually floats up. Scientists/experts inbetween jobs, or out of office hours can earn money on the side, and BS gets seperated from intesting ideas or insights. Signal to noise level near the top is good.

Edit:

I hereby hand out the idea for free, if you feel like making a startup:

Crack Crucible:

\- host (openly tongue in cheek) "crackpots" and their papers, self- categorizing in domains

\- domain experts can sign up, the site generates a unique string, the expert inserts the string on his/her researchgate profile, the site scrapes the expert's researchgate profile. (hereby delegating 'expertness' to researchgate), they too self-categorize in domains?

\- the site randomly selects 2 or more papers for the expert's applicable domain, weighted by inverse word count of the paper (conciseness is rewarded with opportunity to be seen)

\- the expert reads the 2 or more papers and is only asked to sort/rank them, _without any implied support_ since most of the time all the papers wwere nonsense, yet the site demands sorting them by (in)credibility

\- the result is interesting outsider papers by domain (without the coming and going of news cycles, since the papers are selected at random, and hence undergo brownian motion up and down)

<comment><USER42> This reminds me of Twitter mixed with a dose of slave-wage Mechanical Turk labour. Although with Twitter, the signal to noise ratio is much lower than 1% but I think you get my drift.

Granted there are "gems" to be found anywhere but it's still largely far too much of a waste of time for most people.

See also: "the attention economy". What can _you_ offer that others want more of - news, publishing, self-publishing, tweets? What's the cost and reward for each party? Who is paying for the food and bills, and how?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great post, I've just spent the greater part of the morning reading everything. Shipdog had the best answer IMHO. My own approach follows his/hers. It's pretty intense and laborious but worth the payoff. I'd discovered some neat things to do with treating headaches during my master's thesis but have been too busy in clinic since then to jump through hoops publishing. I'm also very much against sitting in ivory towers with knowledge that needs to be used right now so I decided to go the own-way route first:

1\. Self-publishing the document under a CCO license (vital!) as an easily- navigable text on my own blog, snazzy PDF and datasets attached. Then I made an ~1h-long video summarizing the entire report and plopped that on YouTube (with proper timestaps that took forever but oh so worth it), linking it to my blog and back.

2\. Next I shared all these on ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and, thanks to this post, Figshare (for the DOI primarily). I had it up on Medium but that just looked ugly for such a huge piece so I took that down (~50 pages without citations). I also shared it on some other niche decentralized social networks I frequent (eg: Diaspora). I would probably also share it on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn if I was still there.

3\. The last steps I'll be doing shortly: emailing all my patients that I've treated with relevant issues over the years with the blog post (~1000 people), as well as all the main authors I'd cited (~25 folks) and all the therapists I've worked with over the years (also ~25 folks), plus the few relevant professional associations I'm a part of (at least 4, each of which has a reach of a few thousand therapists via newsletters).

I'm doing all this because, applying what I've found, I'm able to resolve muscle tension headaches in a matter of seconds instead of minutes, and I want others to learn how to do this too -- and build on it. Once conversation flourishes with all the above I might look into publishing with a journal (higher sphere peer review is still very useful!) but, as a clinician, this is a lot less important than its application. I'd already had some profs interested in helping me turn this into a journal article but it was crucial to me that this document I'd created remains 100% in my property, mostly so I could then release it under the CC0 license without penalty. Having published the official thesis on my terms like this now, I'm no longer worried about this ever being a threat.

Some more context: my MSc was from a little-known EU program in sport psych, and deals with the crossover between that field and massage, where I've been working for a decade now. And so I say what all the (mostly CS/eng/mathy) folks before have said: your mileage may vary. You can see where the rubber meets the road on [https://spmx.ca/trp](https://spmx.ca/trp), and the WP plugin that creates those great collapsible headings is [https://wordpress.org/plugins/olevmedia- shortcodes](https://wordpress.org/plugins/olevmedia-shortcodes). And why I strongly advocate a CC0 license wherever possible: [https://spmx.ca/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/00-headaches.png](https://spmx.ca/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/00-headaches.png) ; )

Regarding writing better: write more. Remember the famous pottery parable ([https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear](https://kk.org/cooltools/art-fear), Ctrl+F "ceramics") and the old go saying: "lose your first 100 games quickly". If rejection is a real fear, watch [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZXgApsPCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZXgApsPCQ). It really doesn't matter, especially if you're making this world a better place. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER43> From the popular answers to this thread, I think the next relevant question that arises is: How non-scholars can find opportunities to collaborate with scholars? We need some kind of "Who is open to collaborating?" threads similar to that of "Who is hiring?" threads.

</comment><comment><USER44> There are many publications which accept research paper, it doesn't require any degree.</comment>


Using Accelerometers to Protect Power Pole Networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.iotaustralia.org.au/2017/04/20/iotnewanz/meshnet-iot-enable-australias-power-poles/ <comment><AUTHOR> I stumbled across an interesting IoT enabled solution for monitoring the state of power poles (which in much of Australia are basically dead trees). By sensing movement via accelerometers (and possibly other sensors) you can detect movement in the poles that might be due to weakening of the timber fibre structure, forces of nature like storms or floods or even vehicle collisions. Half-jokedly there is even a suggestion that a lost adventurer could tap Morse code on the pole and be heard ;-) . A slide presentation with more detail is available here :-[https://www.slideshare.net/IanMeares/generic- safe-power-netw...](https://www.slideshare.net/IanMeares/generic-safe-power- networks-presentation-rev3pptx)</comment>


Ask HN: Whom do you want to meet? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN, I've been thinking about this issue of making new friends, especially for those of us who've been out of Uni for some time.
It seems the only online options are meetup.com, dating sites, and cold-emailing people.
(I know you can meet people in real-life through clubs, sports, etc., but I'm interested in online options).
Do you have an interest in meeting new people? What kinds of people would those be?
People who ... .could help you professionally? .are available for dating?
.are similar in culture? .have similar interests?
Any feedback is appreciated, thanks! <comment><USER2> This will sound too general, but it is the secret to everything: Selflessly Serve Others

Everything you want will flow out of that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very insightful, thanks. Maybe I can make a startup based on helping people help others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd like to meet you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, drop me an email.</comment></comment>