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Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#131

Post by dredmorbius »

sitkack wrote: post #126
dredmorbius wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Reddit doesn't allow subreddits to limit who can moderate posts or comments except by taking the subreddit private and limiting the membership . It's actually a bit of a major pain, particularly for smaller public subreddits. Reddit's moderation system in general is just hugely problematic. It kind of works, but it really doesn't, and has received very little love. The first question for any such system sho…

Great writeup. Too much of these web "platforms" and use the word loosely with air-quotes, don't support the level of compositional delegation that could/would enable what you are looking for w/o having to make your own platform. The only thing I can suggestion w/o understanding your needs on more than a superficial level would be to create bots that have admin access, that attach "flair" that denotes rank that the b…

Thanks, and largely agreed.

What Reddit does offer, and woeprks fairly well, is moderation tools and teams sufficient to scale out pretty well.

A bigger problem is that conversation sinply doesn't scale well, something old-timers have been realising for a while. I've got a Dave Winer quote somewhere to tthat effect, and was rereading Shiky's "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" which suggest what I'm increasingly concluding: with the right people, from 2-3 through maybe 50-100 people can actually discuss something. More than that and it's broadcast or a large number of comingled side conversations.

I'm coming to appreciate Wordpress and blogging platforms' capabilities, and sheer size. There's a ton of blogged content out there, it's mostly that finding and commenting on it is challenging.

Another element that's lacking is filtering tools, for which I think randomness and/or community ought play a larger role -- filtering content up through smaller groups.

Also both implicit measures and known trusted quality "roots" (vetters / editors).

I'm coming to appreciate Wordp

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#132

Post by sitkack »

dredmorbius wrote: post #131
sitkack wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great writeup. Too much of these web "platforms" and use the word loosely with air-quotes, don't support the level of compositional delegation that could/would enable what you are looking for w/o having to make your own platform. The only thing I can suggestion w/o understanding your needs on more than a superficial level would be to create bots that have admin access, that attach "flair" that denotes rank that the b…

Thanks, and largely agreed. What Reddit does offer, and woeprks fairly well, is moderation tools and teams sufficient to scale out pretty well. A bigger problem is that conversation sinply doesn't scale well, something old-timers have been realising for a while. I've got a Dave Winer quote somewhere to tthat effect, and was rereading Shiky's "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" which suggest what I'm increasingly conclud…

In the Reddit model, it would be nice to have sub-sub-reddits, where a splinter group can discussion a facet. For example, given a Redis subreddit, there could be a Lua-Redis sub-sub-reddit with a smaller audience and whose best posts bubbled up to the parent. I find that a smaller but more active community is preferable over a larger anonymous, passive one. People are quicker to help each other out, share w/o feeling stupid and don't blend into the background, keeping snark and insult to minimum.

As you mention, it is broadcast vs discussion.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#133

Post by dredmorbius »

sitkack wrote: post #132
dredmorbius wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, and largely agreed. What Reddit does offer, and woeprks fairly well, is moderation tools and teams sufficient to scale out pretty well. A bigger problem is that conversation sinply doesn't scale well, something old-timers have been realising for a while. I've got a Dave Winer quote somewhere to tthat effect, and was rereading Shiky's "A Group is its Own Worst Enemy" which suggest what I'm increasingly conclud…

In the Reddit model, it would be nice to have sub-sub-reddits, where a splinter group can discussion a facet. For example, given a Redis subreddit, there could be a Lua-Redis sub-sub-reddit with a smaller audience and whose best posts bubbled up to the parent. I find that a smaller but more active community is preferable over a larger anonymous, passive one. People are quicker to help each other out, share w/o feelin…

That's a big element of it.

I'm trying an experiment (and am way behind schedule) at /r/MKaTS and /r/MKaTH along these lines. There's a private and a public subreddit, one for more closed discussion, one for more open. The idea is to build these out.

Using flair, you can get something like the related-subtopic discussion. See /r/dredmorbius (a solo bloggy effort) or any of the big subs with flaired discussion (/r/AskHistorians or /r/AskScience) for examples -- you can look at the full sub, or dive into a specific flair's topics.

A significant problem with Reddit is that establishing these structures is difficult. Setting up post flair -- the names, the styles, the sidebar search, etc. -- is a major PITA. FSM help you should you want to revise the scheme later.

And you're still stuck with the problem that it's not possible to filter out a flair to report only posts above some arbitrary cutoff (you can sort by "best" or "top"), not that the moderation system gives you any particularly good mechanism for doing that in the first place.

Reddit (as with many discussion systems) is a bit too focused on the now and not sufficiently on the good. I'm particularly annoyed that it's not possible to revisit old posts for discussion (the six month comment freeze), a feature of G+ which actually turned out to be really useful.

There's also the whole Notifications dynamic which ... simply doesn't work well. Yes, you see if someone's mentioned your name, specifically, but you can't get a general notification of discussion on a post (unless you've specifically subscribed to it, and that only for 48 hours). That's utterly unworkable for larger discussions, but works well for small ones.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#134

Post by syntaxing »

needcaffeine wrote: post #43
syntaxing wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be off topic but would you mind sharing how you wrote the website and if you have any tutorial that you can recommend? I want to design something extremely similar for a different application but I do not have much knowledge in web development (I am more experience in programming for numerical and data analysis). I figure this might be a good project to get my feet wet. Thanks!

Not the OP, but this looks like an nginx-powered API (which may be coming through a reverse-proxy) that returns JSON, and Bootstrap 3 + KnockoutJS for the client side to render it all. That doesn't answer your questions about the OP's thought and design processes but maybe it'll give you something to read up.

Thanks! It gives me at least a direction I should start!

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#135

Post by syntaxing »

stenl wrote: post #70
needcaffeine wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but this looks like an nginx-powered API (which may be coming through a reverse-proxy) that returns JSON, and Bootstrap 3 + KnockoutJS for the client side to render it all. That doesn't answer your questions about the OP's thought and design processes but maybe it'll give you something to read up.

Exactly. The API is written in Go (because I wanted to learn it), and there's a Postgres database behind it, and a background Go process that scans the journals for updates. I recently rewrote the client in React as a learning exercise, but haven't made the switch yet If I restarted from scratch I would do the server-side in Python because there's just a lot more good libraries available.

Hmm, I've been thinking about learning Go or Rust since they've been almost on the front page of hacker news lately. Is it worth it or should I stick with Python?

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#136

Post by stenl »

return0 wrote: post #125
stenl wrote: post #28

I made a simple service for myself ( http://paperfeed.io ) which is a feed of all the new papers in journals I care about. I can "star" papers for reading later. Works extremely well for my habits. You're welcome to try it (not sure if the signup workflow still works; let me know). I'll be happy to hear your feedback. Edit: you can upvote papers, and they'll float to the top just like on HN.

Great! How did you manage the different feeds? I did something similar for my field but its a nightmare since some journals violate the rss, or dump metadata in the feed (my shameless plug is http://sciboards.com )

I have slightly different parsers for each family of journals. I use the DOI to get the metadata where possible. Then I reformat to show title, authors and journal consistently. I also create a direct link to the PDF where possible because I prefer to get at the paper with a single click.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#137

Post by needcaffeine »

syntaxing wrote: post #135
stenl wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The API is written in Go (because I wanted to learn it), and there's a Postgres database behind it, and a background Go process that scans the journals for updates. I recently rewrote the client in React as a learning exercise, but haven't made the switch yet If I restarted from scratch I would do the server-side in Python because there's just a lot more good libraries available.

Hmm, I've been thinking about learning Go or Rust since they've been almost on the front page of hacker news lately. Is it worth it or should I stick with Python?

It's always worth learning something new. I don't mean to sound like a dick when I say that, but it's true; build yourself a little API in Go with the help of https://gobyexample.com and see if it's right for you. We really cannot tell you if it will be worth your salt for your particular project. Structure your application in a manner that if you decide to throw it out and replace it with C# tomorrow, your client won't know the difference.

In my case, I really enjoy Go, but certainly not all the time. It has its place. You may find either that it's the best thing ever, or that you cannot stand how it does X, and Python does it so much better. Some comparisons are objective, but the things that make or break it for you may be subjective.

Re: Ask HN: How do you get notified about newest research papers in your field?

#138

Post by harry_puttar »

karpathy wrote: post #55

I wrote http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/ (code is open source on github: https://github.com/karpathy/arxiv-sanity-preserver ) as a side project intended to mitigate the problem of finding newest relevant work in an area (among many other related problems such as finding similar papers, or seeing what others are reading) and it sees a steady number of few hundred users every day and a few thousand accounts. It's meant to…

Thanks. This is an interesting approach to get the needed.
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