[HN Gopher] An opinionated take on how to do important research ...
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       An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters
        
       Author : mad
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2026-03-09 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nicholas.carlini.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nicholas.carlini.com)
        
       | Xcelerate wrote:
       | I've always thought the issue was a bit less "Find the
       | interesting research problem" and more "Find the resources,
       | network, or skills that get you into the position of being able
       | to work on the interesting research problem."
       | 
       | If you asked a bunch of researchers working on the "boring" stuff
       | to predict what the hot papers of the year will be about, do we
       | really think they'll be that far off base? I'm not talking about
       | groundbreaking or truly novel ideas that seem to come out of
       | nowhere, but rather the high impact research that's more typical
       | of a field.
       | 
       | Even in big tech companies, it's quite obvious what the
       | interesting stuff to work on is. But there are limited spots and
       | many more people who want those spots than are available.
        
         | bo1024 wrote:
         | Interesting. I don't quite agree. It's one thing to predict
         | what general topics will be hot and popular this year. But
         | that's not the same as what particular research problem will be
         | important and have lasting influence.
         | 
         | There are a few kinds of important research. One is solving a
         | well-defined, well-known problem everyone wants to solve but
         | nobody knows how. Another is proposing a new problem, or a new
         | formulation of it, that people didn't realize was important.
         | 
         | There is also highly-cited research that isn't necessarily
         | important, such as being the next paper to slightly lower a
         | benchmark through some tweaks (you get cited by all the
         | subsequent papers that slightly lower the benchmark even
         | further).
        
         | hyperman1 wrote:
         | In the book The Cuckoo's egg, Cliff Stoll talks to I think Luiz
         | Alvares. I don't have the book handy here, but Alvarez
         | basically told him to nit get distracted by grants, bosses, ...
         | Here is interesting science to do, so go for it. Just run
         | faster than the rest of the world.
         | 
         | In a way, it was a sidetrack of the book, but for me the
         | attitude speaking from that text was interesting and inspiring.
         | When I could pull it off, it tended to work.
        
       | rakovsky89 wrote:
       | mandatory: 'You and Your research'
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776480
        
       | cjbarber wrote:
       | This is an exceptional read.
        
       | yodsanklai wrote:
       | The actual title is "How to win a best paper award", which is
       | quite different from doing "important research that matters".
       | Most researchers work in very niche and specialized fields,
       | sometimes for their whole life. They grant themselves all sorts
       | of awards within their community, but it doesn't mean their
       | research "matters".
        
       | nxobject wrote:
       | For non-CS people - if you're a little confused by "conference
       | paper", CS is a little idiosyncratic in that papers are often
       | primarily disseminated through conferences, rather than
       | independent journals. The advice is good in general, though!
        
         | bananaflag wrote:
         | Yeah, and I always find the phrase "publish in a conference" to
         | sound vaguely oxymoron-ish.
        
       | batterylake wrote:
       | Very insightful! I found the section on killing papers to be a
       | helpful reminder. As a Ph.D. student, this can be particularly
       | challenging as your environment expects somewhat steady progress
       | (annual reviews, advisor meetings, etc.), and you're encouraged
       | to finish papers rather than starting over.
       | 
       | This might also be of interest:
       | https://karpathy.github.io/2016/09/07/phd/
        
       | JanisErdmanis wrote:
       | > Another reason ignoring the literature can be helpful is that
       | sometimes a bunch of work tries to solve some problem, and so
       | everyone assumes it must be hard---just because no one has solved
       | it yet, even though no one has really tried a fundamentally
       | different approach
       | 
       | How does one approach collaborators in this situation? Like, hey,
       | I have this idea that solves the problem you have been trying to
       | solve in a fundamentally different way that invalidates all the
       | legacy approaches you have invested in, BTW. My emails that
       | follow this spirit tend to get ghosted.
        
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