Distill Hiatus • Hacker News Board

Re: Distill Hiatus

#11

Post by AyrtonB » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:28 PM UTC

stared wrote: post #9

Too bad. In my opinion, Distill was the best thing that had happened to publish in the last 5 years. I do understand that there is a lot of burden for editors. Also, from what I see - a lot of serious research now ends up on arXiv, and it does not matter if it gets published in a reviewed journal. (At least, in the last 2 years in deep learning, some breakthroughs are only as a PDF on OpenAI or as a website by Nvidia…

I can't help with regard to editorial help from COlah but in terms of a DOI you could save your blog to a Zenodo repository and get the DOI from that. Alternatively if you're building your blog directly from GH repos you can link Zenodo to them and have it update the DOI automatically with each version change.

Re: Distill Hiatus

#12

Post by ludwigschubert » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:39 PM UTC

Thank you Chris, Nick, Sam and Janelle for putting things so eloquently. Distill is probably my favorite project I've had the fortune to contribute to, and that's largely due to you and everyone else involved. I'll continue to do my best to keep our "beautiful artifact" online indefinitely. <3

Re: Distill Hiatus

#13

Post by colah3 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 3:18 PM UTC

munfred wrote: post #4

> Another significant risk factor is having unachievable goals. We set extremely high standards for ourselves: with early articles, volunteer editors would often spend 50 or more hours improving articles that were submitted to Distill and bringing them up to the level of quality we aspired to. This invisible effort was comparable to the work of writing a short article of one’s own. It wasn’t sustainable, and this lef…

Thanks for the kind remark!

> I don't think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing "few" things at all.

Unfortunately, I think it's tricky to do this in a journal format. If you accept submissions, you'll have a constant flow of articles -- which vary greatly in quality -- who's authors very reasonably want timely help and a publication decision. And so it's very hard to go slow and do less, even if that's what would be right for you.

> Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? ...

I don't think funding is the primary problem. I'm personally fortunate to have a good job, and happily spend a couple thousand a year out of pocket to cover Distill's operating expenses.

I think the key problem is that Distill's structure means that we can't really control how much energy it takes from us, nor chose to focus our energy on the things about Distill that excites us.