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Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

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Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#41
post #30

Ah cool… I also took a stab at something similar several years ago: https://github.com/ecausarano/heron Also at the time I was considering IPFS. But I guess the real trick is implementing a WOT to implement peer review and filter out the inevitable junk that will be published

What do you mean by junk? Spam and Abuse, or scientific papers that the reviewer simply doesn't like?

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#42
post #38

Slightly OT, but how is IPFS these days? Every time I've tried using it the past few years it seemed very WIP. Cool sounding protocol though.

I got turned off it because things that I'd pinned, and knew I'd pinned, would eventually become mysteriously inaccessible unless accessed through the node that I pinned it on, and I couldn't work out why. It's a great idea, but I found it too flakey to satisfy me.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#43
post #38

Slightly OT, but how is IPFS these days? Every time I've tried using it the past few years it seemed very WIP. Cool sounding protocol though.

It's still very slow - retrieval times >30s for files that aren't cached on cloudflare or ipfs.io. Also, those two providers each have multiple periods of downtime every year.

If the files are cached and the services are up, it's plenty fast for static data but dynamic data (IPNS) is still very slow.

We've built a competitor called Skynet that is much faster (less than 200ms for files that aren't in the cache) and scales better. It's currently hosting tens of millions of files across 200+ TB of data.

We really like the vision that IPFS had and we think decentralized data is the future of the Internet. We're proud to have put in the legwork to make it practical.

https://docs.siasky.net/

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#44
post #3

Not to be confused with viXra, which is a sci-fi alternative to arXiv

viXra is full of nonsense but then again so is arXiv (see: 750GeV debacle). viXra desperately needed a voting system and if it did it would likely have been much more useful and become a viable alternative to arXiv.

arXiv does not accept papers from authors with no institutional affiliation and viXra was the only (and ugly) alternative. There is an opportunity there to fix both sites.

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#45
post #44
post #3

Not to be confused with viXra, which is a sci-fi alternative to arXiv

viXra is full of nonsense but then again so is arXiv (see: 750GeV debacle). viXra desperately needed a voting system and if it did it would likely have been much more useful and become a viable alternative to arXiv. arXiv does not accept papers from authors with no institutional affiliation and viXra was the only (and ugly) alternative. There is an opportunity there to fix both sites.

What was the 750GeV debacle? That thing were some people said LHC had found a new particle maybe?

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#46
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I don't think science has democratic nature. Yes we do somehow do that as a theory would still need to be accepted widely. But in reality one person can have the correct idea while all others disagree. Still this person is doing it right.

Scientific consensus is democratic in nature (even though votes are not distributed evenly). The ideal is that through reproducible experiments and application of the scientific method the scientific consensus moves to increasingly accurate models of reality over time. But obviously the speed at which that happens varies, and some right ideas took annoyingly long to get accepted into scientific consensus.

Sure the right answer will eventually prevail but the process is much worse than we like to admit. Many breakthrough advances were outright rejected by contemporary peers when first proposed.

"Fermi first submitted his "tentative" theory of beta decay to the prestigious science journal Nature, which rejected it "because it contained speculations too remote from reality to be of interest to the reader." Nature later admitted the rejection to be one of the great editorial blunders in its history. ... Fermi found the initial rejection of the paper so troubling that he decided to take some time off from theoretical physics, and do only experimental physics" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi%27s_interaction

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#47
post #30

Ah cool… I also took a stab at something similar several years ago: https://github.com/ecausarano/heron Also at the time I was considering IPFS. But I guess the real trick is implementing a WOT to implement peer review and filter out the inevitable junk that will be published

"Help compare Comment and Annotation services: moderation, spam, notifications, configurability" executablebooks/meta#102 https://github.com/executablebooks/meta/discussions/102 :

> jupyter-comment supports a number of commenting services [...]. In helping users decide which commenting and annotation services to include on their pages and commit to maintaining, could we discuss criteria for assessment and current features of services?

> Possible features for comparison:

> * Content author can delete / hide

> * Content author can report / block

> * Comments / annotations are screened by spam-fighting service

> * Content / author can label as e.g. toxic

> * Content author receives notification of new comments

> * Content author can require approval before user-contributed content is publicly-visible

> * Content author may allow comments for a limited amount of time (probably more relevant to BlogPostings)

> * Content author may simultaneously denounce censorship in all it's forms while allowing previously-published works to languish

#ForScience

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#48
post #43
post #38

Slightly OT, but how is IPFS these days? Every time I've tried using it the past few years it seemed very WIP. Cool sounding protocol though.

It's still very slow - retrieval times >30s for files that aren't cached on cloudflare or ipfs.io. Also, those two providers each have multiple periods of downtime every year. If the files are cached and the services are up, it's plenty fast for static data but dynamic data (IPNS) is still very slow. We've built a competitor called Skynet that is much faster (less than 200ms for files that aren't in the cache) and sc…

Are you able to “pin” files yourself like IPFS? Or are you required to pay hosts to store it?

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#49
post #45
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

viXra is full of nonsense but then again so is arXiv (see: 750GeV debacle). viXra desperately needed a voting system and if it did it would likely have been much more useful and become a viable alternative to arXiv. arXiv does not accept papers from authors with no institutional affiliation and viXra was the only (and ugly) alternative. There is an opportunity there to fix both sites.

What was the 750GeV debacle? That thing were some people said LHC had found a new particle maybe?

A spurious signal at LHC (that disappeared in later runs) that spurred a cottage industry of arXiv submissions trying to explain it. Authors, mostly grad students, quickly submitted hundreds of low quality articles trying to get in on the "discovery". Later articles would cite over 400 previous articles and it became one giant circle jerk. There were even blog posts complaining about the blatant "ambulance chasing".

https://motls.blogspot.com/2016/06/ambulance-chasing-is-just...

http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-...

Re: Show HN: Arxiv.org on IPFS

#50
post #18

"You can upload your research and publish it on the open web. Members of the community will be able to vote on your research to raise its visibility." Oh dear.

How would you set it up? The decentralized world doesn't really have a great system for curation at this point (unless you can point to a counterexample!), and so I'm in favor of any sort of playing around with decentralized voting/curation until we find something that seems to be working well.
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