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HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

hessix.com

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Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#101

Post by whunting »

whunting wrote: post #92
daveFNbuck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their guidelines [1] state that they need your e-mail because "an algorithm uses it to determine if you are a genuine PhD candidate in math/stat." It seems that the site is meant for PhD students rather than PhD recipients. [1] https://www.hessix.com/guide

PhD recipients are very welcome too. The registration is put on hold for me to check manually. The algo to auto verify works for PhD candidates in several universities (US and abroad, not only .edu)

This is now clarified in the user guide

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#102

Post by throwawaymath »

genidoi wrote: post #98
mmmmpancakes wrote: post #43

I don’t know how much discussion one hopes to generate by simply posting links to recent arxiv pre-prints. Posters don’t even seem to be giving a reason for posting them. It is very non-sequiter and unengaging. Honestly i would never use this. A better post format: Title: not the title of the paper (which will almost always sound super specific) but something more general abstract: a brief description at a high level…

I'm assuming that the value of these papers are self evident from the title if you understand the topic/context of the paper, much like HN with many of the white papers published here.

I actually follow a lot of the math-y papers that get posted here, but I'm still routinely perplexed when I see them on the front page. Many of the math papers posted here do seem like they lack a context, especially since they mostly receive a huge number of upvotes but have almost no discussion.

I think it's a little weird on HN, and I can see why it seems like some of them are out of place even on a specialized math forum.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#103

Post by gpm »

sampo wrote: post #82
jtanderson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, yeah. Came here to say the same. I could understand somewhat making a distinction between emails that end in .edu and those who don't -- at least during the early days -- but this system does seem excessive. I do think the ideas in the paper are pretty cool! One question: have you considered or attempted some sort of generative models based on this system? You'd have to do some clever symbolic manipulations to d…

> emails that end in .edu Only universities in the United States have emails that end in .edu. Most of the universities in the world have domain names that end with their respective country code.

> Only universities in the United States

Not strictly speaking true. Univeristy of Toronto (Canada) will give you a toronto.edu email if you're a CS student (even undergrads) or faculty.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#104

Post by matthewwiese »

xamuel wrote: post #58

Nice idea, +1 for LaTeX titles! But the registration system should be way more open, you're discriminating against many math PhD's who are no longer in academia. I would have posted my paper there but I guess "@math.ohio-state.edu" isn't elite enough so I'll post it here and probably get more traction than all the papers on OP's entire site combined. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2869.pdf "Infinite graphs in systematic…

I've only just skimmed the first section, and already I feel like I'm in for a trip. The math is indeed as approachable as you suggest. I'm only a philosophy major (though our logic department is seriously the bees knees, shout-out to Tennant!) yet I'm still able to pick up what you're putting down. Very fascinating paper, thank you for sharing.

Also, one of the many nerds across the street in University Hall says hello :)

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#105

Post by throwawaymath »

hkol3 wrote: post #65
mlurp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MO is definitely high level, but like all SO/SE, I've always found their format to be really restricting. Not everything can be phrased as an objective question. Sometimes the best stuff have come out of something like "I was thinking about xyz, here are some things I noticed, thoughts?" I've even had/seen actual questions closed on SO/SE sites closed because of reasons I think are pretty silly. It's also just not me…

This is possibly why Jeff Atwood went off and made Discourse. If the StackExchange sites provide an allied discussion forum where I can specify what level of users I want posting on my thread that would be great. Where level can be verified grad/phd in subject X or anyone who has more than N accepted answers in subject X... Come on CS folk make it happen. Right now I have to wander around labs and conferences to find…

> We can find ever single one whether they are sitting in Cambridge or Congo and lay out a subject before them and yet we haven't got that to work right.

I think if you asked most academics their opinion on this (in math/CS at least), they'd tell you they think the system works fine. They don't really have problems collaborating - their universities send them to conferences where they meet people working in the same (narrow) subfield as them.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#106

Post by throwawaymath »

nilkn wrote: post #13
markkm wrote: post #12

The research mathematics community on the internet is fairly small, and a lot of them are over at MathOverflow, math.SE, and personal blogs. What does this site offer that would lure people away from them?

I imagine the main differentiator would be open-ended discussion that's not necessarily trying to answer a well-defined question (or any question at all for that matter). Stack Exchange and MathOverflow are both fairly bad at supporting this at best and openly hostile towards it at worst.

Yeah but the /r/math subreddit is already very good for that, and is well moderated. There are plenty of tenured professors from excellent math departments around the world contributing to discussion there.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#107

Post by mmmmpancakes »

whunting wrote: post #93
mmmmpancakes wrote: post #43

I don’t know how much discussion one hopes to generate by simply posting links to recent arxiv pre-prints. Posters don’t even seem to be giving a reason for posting them. It is very non-sequiter and unengaging. Honestly i would never use this. A better post format: Title: not the title of the paper (which will almost always sound super specific) but something more general abstract: a brief description at a high level…

Sounds great. You can do that with a self post but it seems that arxiv url with auto fetched titled is the path of less resistance so far, not optimal for discussions, agreed. I'll probably change the submission format

One thing that might be cool is to have extended discussions of some popular MO posts.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#108

Post by gh02t »

ssivark wrote: post #73
xamuel wrote: post #58

Nice idea, +1 for LaTeX titles! But the registration system should be way more open, you're discriminating against many math PhD's who are no longer in academia. I would have posted my paper there but I guess "@math.ohio-state.edu" isn't elite enough so I'll post it here and probably get more traction than all the papers on OP's entire site combined. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2869.pdf "Infinite graphs in systematic…

Math has a culture where author affiliations are often mentioned only as a footnote, at the end of the paper, and not at the front of the paper. For a field with such culture, where it has repeatedly been shown that quality work can come from many places, this kind of coarse gatekeeping creates a very unpleasant environment. I'm trying to imagine the motivation of the platform creators, but drawing a blank. Maybe it'…

Their about page says that they use an algorithm to verify if you are a PhD candidate in math/stat. I don't really think that is a good requirement for the exact reasons you say, but I would guess it's set up like that to make this automatic verification more practical.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#109

Post by mmmmpancakes »

nilkn wrote: post #13
markkm wrote: post #12

The research mathematics community on the internet is fairly small, and a lot of them are over at MathOverflow, math.SE, and personal blogs. What does this site offer that would lure people away from them?

I imagine the main differentiator would be open-ended discussion that's not necessarily trying to answer a well-defined question (or any question at all for that matter). Stack Exchange and MathOverflow are both fairly bad at supporting this at best and openly hostile towards it at worst.

Sure, but then "open-ended discussions" don't provide much value to academics with many more pressing things to do. On the other hand, crowd-sourcing answers to specific research question is extremely valuable to them.

For a point of reference, I've been thinking lately about the value a mathematician in a research career gets from blogging (I am thinking specifically about researchers and /not/ people focused on primarily education or popularization oriented careers). My conclusion is that the answer is "not much." Apart from a few small blogging communities and very famous mathematicians' websites, most math blogs get very little or no engagement that would be valuable to their career. Time is much more efficiently spent working closely with the people in your immediate spheres or focusing on making connections with specific researchers you want to collaborate with in the future.

Re: HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s

#110

Post by graycat »

whunting wrote: post #92
daveFNbuck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their guidelines [1] state that they need your e-mail because "an algorithm uses it to determine if you are a genuine PhD candidate in math/stat." It seems that the site is meant for PhD students rather than PhD recipients. [1] https://www.hessix.com/guide

PhD recipients are very welcome too. The registration is put on hold for me to check manually. The algo to auto verify works for PhD candidates in several universities (US and abroad, not only .edu)

The application and approval process, filtering, certification, authentication, etc. sounds like a separation problem. Since the site is about math, IIRC there's some math for separation problems??

Uh, since the site is for "math/stat" and there have to be rates of false positives, that people are already complaining about, and false negatives, I don't see people complaining about spam, then we're into statistical hypothesis testing, right? Sooo, to do better on the rates of false negatives, we want more data for a more powerful test. Sooo, we need a multi-variate test. Since no way can we justify assuming probability distributions for all the relevant data, we need a distribution-free test. So, where can we find one of those???

Disclosure: This question is just an exercise. For an answer, I published one of those. So, it's an applied probability calculation based on an algebraic group of measure preserving transformations! It may be a rationalization of resampling theory. Crudely the result is obvious, but a proof is tricky. It may be that the work is a stimulation for and or connection with approximate independence, e.g., maybe as in some work of Choquet student M. Talagrand.

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