Would love to see non-stem on there, especially history where there is so much exciting stuff going on as many historians are stepping one foot into Archaeology. We are discovering so many amazing things right now.
Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
191–200 of 209 posts
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#192I'm a career scientist and here's why I suspect this won't take off:
(1) A lot of research is trash and not reproducible. Over the last 5 years I've found it's usually not even worth my time to read half the papers I read unless its in Nature or a top journal. Even then the ROI is minimal.
(2) It takes quite a bit of knowledge to appreciate and read a paper. In grad school, it took 4-6 hours of work to go through a paper. Do I really want to have a discussion on the 10,000 ft view of a paper? Probably not. Do I want to spend 4-6 hours really appreciating the nuances of a valid paper? Probably not.
(3) As alluded to by (1) and (2), most researchers (at least in my anecdotal experience) are spread so incredibly thin, as someone who would want to provide insight on some incredibly niche topic, I am already overbooked for my time between work and outside responsibilities.
I think you're going to find that the garden you're trying to grow doesn't have the adequate catalyst/buy-in. You might be better off creating a version where the paper is summarized by a GPT model and that 10,000 ft summary is discussed by the general public.
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#193Cool concept
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#194I usually look for research papers in well-known conferences. I think you can google the conferences for other fields, but some of them for Programming Languages are SPLASH, ECOOP, PLDI, ICFP. So if you want important new papers, those are the places to look. Universities often have “seminar” classes and “reading groups” to discuss influential papers, which sometimes includes older ones as well. The discussions are a…
Thanks so much for this feedback
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#195Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#196Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#197Would love to see non-stem on there, especially history where there is so much exciting stuff going on as many historians are stepping one foot into Archaeology. We are discovering so many amazing things right now.
noted, thank you
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#198I think the ideal future for science publication would be something like: - some database like arXiv for most all the results, obviously mirrored a few places - multiple frontends like this! - no more journals: replace journal review with an endorsement from a similar organization, on the arXiv (or similar) page Thanks for taking one of the required steps to making this possible!
The quality standard of peer review, especially within computer science, is declining. I've read lots of papers only to discover obvious method flaws or dishonest statistics. With a simple comment section, this would be trivial to filter out. And don't get me started on the price for publication and for readers that supposedly fund this "detailed peer review process" that misses so many obvious flaws. The peer review…
> And don't get me started on the price for publication and for readers that supposedly fund this "detailed peer review process" that misses so many obvious flaws.
Readers don't fund the peer review process. People on the editorial board and peer reviewers do their job as a community service and have nothing to do with the inflated subscription prices.
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quality standard of peer review, especially within computer science, is declining. I've read lots of papers only to discover obvious method flaws or dishonest statistics. With a simple comment section, this would be trivial to filter out. And don't get me started on the price for publication and for readers that supposedly fund this "detailed peer review process" that misses so many obvious flaws. The peer review…
I agree. Journals have been publishing "responses" for ages, so there always has been a "comment section" of sorts. But it could be so much easier! Personally I haven't really seen or been involved in a response. It would not surprise me if that tradition is dying because it's so much easier to comment somewhere on the internet where some people will see it. But of course without an official endorsement from the jour…
An average paper from arXiv has 10 people in the world who can appreciate every detail of the text, half of them are the authors, their advisors, and paper's referee, the other half will be mentioned in the acknowledgements. This is especially true e.g. for mathematics. I want to point this out because papertalk.xyz features many texts like that.
Moderating some kind of "official" internet forum for papers will require a lot of time, and most researchers won't bother to follow it, because messages will be of low value, from crackpots and occasional ill-spirited anonymous commenters.
In 2016 arXiv run a survey about new features. Comment section, votes on submissions etc. were not popular. Many people were against this stuff, so it was not implemented.
There have been projects like PubPeer that tried to explore this territory and never really took off.
I see a value in a website like HN with links to papers of bigger interest and discussions for the general public.
E.g. someone posts a link to a new publication/preprint about cancer research, a supposed superconductor discovery, massive high energy physics experiments, etc. and users are free to discuss the meaning, beauty, impact, and credibility of the results.
But I'm not sure if this can work for mundane papers that are >99% of published research. I also think it will be much harder to market to the researchers. As someone who read, wrote, reviewed papers.
Re: Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers
#200I'm a career scientist and here's why I suspect this won't take off: (1) A lot of research is trash and not reproducible. Over the last 5 years I've found it's usually not even worth my time to read half the papers I read unless its in Nature or a top journal. Even then the ROI is minimal. (2) It takes quite a bit of knowledge to appreciate and read a paper. In grad school, it took 4-6 hours of work to go through a p…
I think the argument is that it's not for career scientists.
I gave up wanting to get into academia once I found how awful the working conditions are. Now I'm in a more comfortable life, I'd love to have access (ie: visibility) on recent developments and research.
I'm reminded of this story: https://spectrum.ieee.org/coordinated-robotics-winner-nasa-s...