
Ask HN: Whitepaper v Academic Paper: What’s the best way to share breakthroughs? - hsikka
Hey HN,<p>I’m a graduate student and I’ve been working on an interesting side project: building brain inspired modular neural nets. I’m not doing this under the purview of a professor, but there are some interesting preliminary results.<p>Generally, is it the sort of thing I should just share as a White paper or try to formally publish. Or should I just share a blog post about it
======
mushufasa
Fortunately, this may be a false dichotomy.

Many journals are fine if you post something on a blog or a 'working paper' on
an open site like arxiv while you put it through the peer review process.

if you are doing something that is timely, be aware that academic journals can
take over a year to go through the peer review + revision process (months to
hear back, month to revise, months to hear back, scheduled for several issues
ahead -- not uncommon).

you're definitely better off having gone through the other side, though --
even if the paper doesn't turn out to spread virally (most ideas, even good
ones, don't) -- the validation of the academic review can stay with you + your
CV.

------
iflp
(trying to) publish in CS conferences isn't as painful as in other
disciplines, but without help from someone with an academic background, it's
likely your work will not receive much attention, as you might lack paper-
writing skills / knowledge of prior work.

If you can't find a local professor whom you can trust and who is willing to
help (which you should try _first_ ), you might want to ask on
r/MachineLearning. Many users there are grad students / researchers working in
ML/AI, and I've seen someone in a similar situation (asking for endorsement to
submit on arXiv) received help.

------
irvingprime
I've published a couple conference papers. I found the process to be slow and
frustrating. The quality of feedback from reviewers was extremely low. The
effort to write a paper in the ultra-dry, tedious style of academia was great
with the payoff of making the papers almost unreadable while obscuring the
ideas presented.

Also, there's some expense involved. When I wrote papers I had an employer
that paid my way to conferences. That is no longer the case. Journals don't
require the same expenses, unless you want your work to be available through
open access rather than locked into a single issue that will be read by maybe
three people, ever. Open access usually costs the author money, meaning it's
not really open.

For my next publications, I'm not going to go the academic route. It looks
good on the CV but otherwise doesn't serve my purposes. YMMV of course but
think about what you want before committing to an approach that these days
appears to be designed more to boost the publication credits of academics than
to actually spread knowledge.

------
paraschopra
I recommend going through the academic paper route and aiming for the highest
journal first. This process will give you free feedback from the experts in
the field. You can always fall back and publish a blog post but you won’t get
the high quality feedback that going through peer reviewed journal does

------
totoglazer
By graduate student do you mean masters or PhD. If PhD clearly (try to)
publish academically. If masters, and you have interest in a PhD, also
academic.

If you’re a masters student with no intention of serious further academic
activity then it doesn’t matter much, arXiv + blog post seems reasonable.

------
rococode
Are you working with a professor on other things? They are probably interested
in seeing what you have. As a grad student you're definitely in a position to
reach out to someone relevant and ask them what they think about your work.

If you're not planning to spend more time on it, and are just looking to share
your interesting preliminary results, then a whitepaper might be the way to
go. But if you have the time and believe your design has potential then it may
likely be worth pursuing. Who knows, maybe some of us will be reading about it
a year or two from now.

------
blt
I would suggest publishing it if you think it can get accepted at a refereed
venue. It's never bad to add an extra paper on your CV as a grad student.

------
kapauldo
White papers are not peer reviewed so are faster. If your goal is speed, white
paper. If your goal is ip or prestige or sharing knowledge, academic.

