Ask HN: Translating Academic papers

[Ani]

I see a lot of academic papers which tackle everyday computing problems.Most of them are hard to read for the average person, let alone implement them.As a college student, I read a lot of these papers and feel there is a lot of wasted potential there. Do you think it is a worthy endevor to take some of these papers , dissect them and implement them? Are there any websites already doing this?

Also, do you think people would be willing to pay to have well documented working code for some of these papers? If yes, how much ? If not, why not?

Thanks!

[jacquesm]

I run in to this every now and then, I really want to read a paper but either it is in a language that I don't have enough skills in, or, alternatively the paper requires so much background terminology that I can't work my way through it without spending half a day in dictionaries and reference material.

Whether I would pay for it or not would be dependent only on whether or not I was being paid to understand the paper. I read plenty of stuff that is interesting but outside of my main field of interest (IT), but since I won't be making any money on collecting that knowledge it is not worth more than my investment in time.

For those papers that I can't get through there are plenty of alternatives, the amount of interesting information out there is staggering. It isn't rare at all to come out of the week with a much longer reading list than going in to it.

HN is quite a large contributor to that :)