Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 280 posts

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#211

Post by TeMPOraL »

FabHK wrote: post #102
msandford wrote: post #3

I'm not sure how that fits within the counterfeit rule. If they weren't the real papers at scihub wouldn't it be all OK? The issue seems to be that the problem (according to publishers) is that the real papers are available not behind a pay wall. The issue here isn't that the users of scihub are being defrauded by thinking they're ordering Prada and instead getting knockoffs. Not saying I endorse scihub BTW, just tha…

Interesting point. You could argue that a (good) counterfeit Louis Vuitton bag or Rolex provides the same functionality as the original, without the 90% tax to the rights holder. So, maybe the situation is quite analog: The paper you download is actually more or less the same as the original, but you haven't paid the rights holder, so it's counterfeit.

It isn't. You're getting literally the same paper.

It's like I bought a bunch of Louis Vuitton bags and, for some reason, decided to sell them off for a fraction of a price. If you bought one from me, you'd buy an original bag, not a counterfeit one.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#212

Post by TeMPOraL »

yoz-y wrote: post #5
mam2 wrote: post #2

I can't imagine some working on banning sci hub and thinking it's "a good thing".

Why? For somebody not familiar with how research publishing works it might just look like xeroxing books.

Ironically, xeroxing books is a pretty similar case, in that it's commonly done to school and university textbooks, because publishers are running similar rackets. It's hard to ethically justify fighting that either.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#213

Post by tchalla »

specialp wrote: post #186
tchalla wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facilitating peer-review, being selective, indexing content, archiving and copyediting does indeed cost money. Publishers only archive and index. The rest is done for free by scientists.

If that was true we would not have any physics journals and many math journals. We'd just have people peer reviewing arXiv. Peer review is a lot more complicated than people think to find the right reviewers, minimize conflicts of interest, prodding reviewers, reviewing their reports. Also having editors read submissions first to see if it is even worth sending to peer review. This costs money and is not free. And it…

> This costs money and is not free

I have been a reviewer at Elsevier, Science and many of this journals for a better of the decade. I personally know the editors of many journals including IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, Science etc. They don't get paid for their time. So yeah, the scientists voluntarily review for free. Most journals only archive and index, they do not do anything more than it.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#214

Post by agiroth »

kahrl wrote: post #181
mainstreemm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election. Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink? 0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/sta…

Please check the url at the top of your browser. If it begins with "news.ycombinator.com" you're in the wrong place. Try posting here instead: https://parler.com/

This is uncalled for. Pointing out Twitter's political bias on a technology forum is relevant, whether you agree with the comment or not.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#215

Post by jimbob45 »

mainstreemm wrote: post #49
cute_boi wrote: post #34

Twitter is slowly being more dangerous day by day. Scihub is too valuable and I haven't seen any high level researcher who haven't used scihub. We need to stop oligarchy . Knowledge should be avail free to those people who can't afford. Government, Corporation please stop pushing humanity to backward direction.

Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election. Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink? 0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/sta…

I've got a weak conspiracy theory that Twitter has to take drastic action like this because they're not relevant anymore. I don't know a single person who uses Twitter. I don't know that there's a single proprietary thing about their platform that Parler/Gab couldn't copy. I don't know anyone who thinks Twitter is well-designed.

If they aren't centered in the news like they are constantly, I'm not sure that they wouldn't just fade away to competitors.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#216

Post by alisonkisk »

mainstreemm wrote: post #49
cute_boi wrote: post #34

Twitter is slowly being more dangerous day by day. Scihub is too valuable and I haven't seen any high level researcher who haven't used scihub. We need to stop oligarchy . Knowledge should be avail free to those people who can't afford. Government, Corporation please stop pushing humanity to backward direction.

Under the new Administration Twitter will assuredly ban anyone who doesn't appropriately mouth the narrative. The bans are already picking up steam, and have been since the election. Trump: gone. Khamenei? Still tweeting about how America is the devil and the Holocaust wasn't real. Where's the explainer under this tweet [0] telling me that this information is disputed wrongthink? 0 https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/sta…

It's a bit silly to link directly to something that doesn't support your claims. You'd be more persuasive by having no links at all.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#217

Post by TeMPOraL »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #199
TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content organization is key. It isn't, except in narrow domains where a strong taxonomy makes sense. The success of Google and social media platforms is built directly on this fact.

You don't think it makes sense that on the page for a paper, you can click an authors name and see their other papers? Or that you can see the revision history of a paper? Because both of those are supported by e.g. arXiv and not by Sci-Hub. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Sci-Hub. But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/al…

Revision history is very nice, but arXiv has only a subset of papers. There are other easy ways to go from an author's name to the list of their publications; often copying and pasting the name into Google is enough.

My point is that a search interface is usually more convenient. And as you noted, "We have ArXiv, BioRxiv and MedRxiv (...)" - that's already too many places to click through, particularly if all you have is a title and/or DOI. It's a standard UX problem - single interface to all data of interest is always better than multiple specialized interfaces to subsets, particularly if you're not initially sure where to look for a thing. I mean, it's manageable when there are three, but it'll become a huge burden when there's 20.

> But if it was legal to operate, do you think it would be exactly the same as it is now, and that it would have no popular competitors/alternatives?

Of course it would be different and there would be competitors. There's a lot of space for quality-of-life improvements in SciHub model. But in that reality where it's fully legal, I'd still prefer for the competitors to compete just on UI, and not on the data set. Exclusivity is bad for users. I wouldn't want scientific papers to become a repeat of video streaming (half a dozen competing services with garbage UX and mutually exclusive collections) or IMs (have to install half a dozen apps to cover all my acquaintances).

And to extend my thought from prior comment:

> Why don't we have one single webpage where all journalists write all their articles without any organization other than a search box?

Notice the modern media consumption patterns. The publisher doesn't matter. Only individual articles do. People land at articles through Google queries and links shared on social media. I believe scientific papers show the same pattern to a large degree.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#218

Post by hobofan »

mncharity wrote: post #149
joelthelion wrote: post #7

At some point we need to stop the hypocrisy, recognize that SciHub is too valuable to the community to be shut down, and fix laws so that it becomes either legal or useless. That's no easy task, but it's much better than having scientists from all over the world rely on it while simultaneously pretending they are dangerous criminals.

> scientists Not only scientists need sci-hub. Educators need sci-hub. People writing education content. Or trying to understand existing content, steeped in misconceptions. Students. A science-literate public. When I hobby work on OER science education content, or even when I answer a "ask a science/history/whatever question" on reddit, I use google scholar, open access. and sci-hub . And "I'd really like to see pap…

> Students. A science-literate public.

It's crazy to me that so many students don't know about sci-hub because educators are careful not to mention it in any official settings, but from more private settings it's apparent that _everyone_ is using it.

This also sometimes leads to (small?) differences in academic performance, where the sci-hub-oblivious students can't factor in a highly-relevant paywalled article in e.g. a presentation because they couldn't access it.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#219

Post by snvzz »

wongarsu wrote: post #162
biggc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 55 TB ... > smallish What a time to be alive

55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish. Storage is indeed progressing a lot.

There's progress indeed, but 4x 16TB isn't cutting it. You'd need extra disks for redundancy, extra space for filesystem overhead (including data and metadata checksums), and a sizable amount of ECC memory.

Re: Sci-Hub Founder Criticizes Sudden Twitter Ban over “Counterfeit” Content

#220

Post by cambalache »

illustriousbear wrote: post #25

Hackernews comments were generally onboard with Twitter banning Trump for controversial tweets that can be considered as incitement. As much as I like Sci-Hub, it is clearly a service that disregards and breaches copyright. If you advocate for Twitter exercising a heavy hand on greyer areas (Trump), you shouldn’t be surprised when they do the same for clear breaches of their TOS/Laws (SciHub). It scares me that these…

You are being downvoted because you are hurting the hypocrites here.

Twitter banning Trump/conservatives= good. Twitter banning people I dont like= Bad.

BLM violent protests= good. Trump violent protests = bad.

HKers assaulting the parliament= good. Americans doing the same= bad.

Assange exposing conservatives=good. Assange exposing democrats= jail the bastard.

The horseshoe model is more alive than never before.

Post reply on HN