[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
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Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
Author : kashnote
Score : 133 points
Date : 2023-02-13 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paperlist.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (paperlist.io)
| aliqot wrote:
| I really like the UI, very visually striking without too much
| whitespace, and without getting in the way.
| kashnote wrote:
| Appreciate it!
| chrisshroba wrote:
| This looks awesome! FYI You may have a bug where you treat
| unicode as ascii. Notice the " apost-symbolica" here [1]
|
| [1] https://paperlist.io/paper/724614047
| kashnote wrote:
| Ah interesting. I'm using LaXeXML to translate LaTeX to HTML.
| Might be something up with that. Will take a look at it!
| rsfern wrote:
| Cool idea! One of the great things about HN is the high quality
| discussion. Maybe you can think of some ways to bootstrap that?
| Like ask submitters to leave a micro review saying why the result
| is cool or something they learned or some way they applied the
| work? Ideally not just repeating the abstract
| teddyh wrote:
| HN has a set restricted topic: "Anything that good hackers would
| find interesting." (from the guidelines). But, for PaperList, are
| there people interested in research papers - i.e. _any and all_
| research papers? Or would it be appropriate to narrow the focus
| on some subfield, or perhaps on "groundbreaking papers",
| "practical papers" or even "controversial papers"? That last one
| ought to get some traffic, at least.
| xrisk wrote:
| a site I would be interested in is: "papers a hacker would be
| interested in" (aka papers you could nerdsnipe someone with)
| which is unfortunately not what this website seems to be.
| kashnote wrote:
| This is actually what I'm going for, which is why I described
| it as "Hacker New but for research papers." I think it'll
| definitely be possible with proper moderation
| rvbissell wrote:
| Thoughts:
|
| * Allow logged in users to add tags to submissions (maybe
| after reaching some karma threshold). Tags could either be
| a private feature, or a shared feature.
|
| * Allow filtering of all submissions by one or more tags
|
| * "Favorites" feature for logged in users
| mteam88 wrote:
| Need some users and your set!
| babbledabbler wrote:
| This is so cool. Simple concept, clean interface. Nice job. I
| hope it takes off.
| danielecook wrote:
| A few years ago I created upvote.pub (source code:
| https://github.com/danielecook/upvote.pub)
|
| It never really caught on - but it was a fun project. I do hope
| something like this takes off. It was able to import publications
| using DOIs, PMIDs, PMCids, Arxiv, and Biorxiv.
| username3 wrote:
| Are you using pure white?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34684761
| Aromasin wrote:
| I know someone else has said there's not too much whitespace, but
| I disagree. Comparing HN to this, I'm seeing 9 links per page
| compared to 26 for HN. Even Reddit fits 10 per page, and that's
| with thumbnails. It goes up to 18 with compact view. It needs
| much more content. Love the concept, but the UI leaves a lot to
| be desired in my eyes.
| pictureofabear wrote:
| Would like to see a tag showing the subject of the paper. Many of
| the titles are not very descriptive.
| eternalban wrote:
| I wanted to signup but then saw that email textbox.
| afandian wrote:
| I know these are all arxiv.org so far, but if you want to include
| research papers beyond that plaform, can I encourage you to use
| DOIs for links? It'll make links persistent and easy to cross-
| reference with citations and other systems. I did a spot check of
| the 14 links you have so far all have DOIs. I'm happy to give
| advice!
|
| (I work at Crossref.org)
| sideproject wrote:
| Related, but I created Scholars
|
| https://www.scholars.io
|
| Where researchers and others interested can create "reading
| rooms" of papers and discuss. I have also been thinking about
| something similar to this where a list of papers that people are
| currently discussing is shown.
|
| This looks great too!
| amir734jj wrote:
| Is there a way to see what other people are reading and if I
| could join/collaborate with them?
| tchock23 wrote:
| Suggestion: if/when this expands to include life science papers
| add an 'in mice' tag.
|
| It's frustrating to read amazing research paper titles only to
| find out it was done with mice.
| voidbound wrote:
| Looks super clean! I'll definitely be trying to use this.
| overview wrote:
| Filter tags would be very helpful.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| What you'll discover is that the moment this falls off the HN
| front page, your traffic goes to zero. You'll need to manually
| recruit users, every day, typically by going to wherever they
| are.
|
| Twitter is your friend here. DM everyone you can, and keep
| checking in with them to see if they're getting value out of it.
|
| My personal experience was that I showed up, was delighted to see
| so many relevant papers, but then lost interest due to zero
| discussion.
|
| That doesn't mean that it's not interesting. It is. But when
| you're making a social network, you're fighting a massive amount
| of inertia. The default case is for no one to come.
|
| Give us a reason to keep coming back, and we will.
|
| FWIW I speak from experience, having spent a few years running an
| HN clone that eventually tapered off.
|
| EDIT: Also, your upvote algorithm needs a bit of work. The most
| upvoted papers are currently hidden on the second page. And in
| fact, at this stage, pagination doesn't make a lot of sense --
| just show all the submissions.
| kashnote wrote:
| All good points. To be honest, I hate Twitter so I don't know
| if I'll be trying to share it on there, but I agree that
| promoting discussions is the way to go.
|
| PS Fixed the voting algorithm (was using ASC instead of DESC).
| Probably needs more work but thanks for pointing it out!
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Yeah, the reason people keep coming back to HN is that there
| are different stories every day. That's the heart of its
| success. If you want this to succeed, you can't rely on
| simply sorting by asc, nor can you rely on community upvotes
| to do the work for you. You'll need to manually place papers
| on the front page, just like HN does (in its semi-automated-
| but-human-driven way).
|
| And get ready for it being a slog. It's seriously soul-
| grinding to try to curate a collection of new things each day
| and see only a handful of people come. But you _have_ to do
| it if you want to succeed long term; there 's no other way. I
| was able to keep up with HN for about four months, before
| basically collapsing of exhaustion. Then traffic growth
| stopped, and never resumed.
| JieJie wrote:
| An RSS feed would be helpful. That's how I follow Hacker News
| (news.ycombinator.com/rss).
| trehans wrote:
| This is cool! I suggest adding some more hints to indicate how
| important/relevant different papers are. Maybe some tags to
| classify papers in different fields, and number of citations or
| amount of discussions online as a metric of how big a paper is?
| (I know that's not a great metric but I think it's still better
| than seeing a bunch of papers and not knowing which ones are
| worth reading). You can also spark discussions. Seeing "0
| comments" discourages anyone to look at the comments, but even
| having an AI-generated summary as a comment can be encouraging
| and spark discussions. Just a thought.
| riku_iki wrote:
| why would you create separate site and not subreddit where you
| can get way more traction from existing users?..
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| An HN clone, not reddit.
|
| But one _huge_ perk of not having a subreddit is you don 't
| have the mass of users come from other subreddits where the
| standards of comments tend to be more copypasta troll-like than
| HN.
| afandian wrote:
| There's also the risk of _not_ getting that halo effect and
| passing footfall.
|
| There was something similar a few years back, upvote.pub:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273171
|
| I don't know the reasons for it folding, but I imagine it was
| difficult to sustain.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > users come from other subreddits where the standards of
| comments tend to be more copypasta troll-like than HN.
|
| I somehow didn't notice this on relevant subs
| (machinelearning, singularity, etc)
| joshmn wrote:
| Looks great. I think if there's one thing this could benefit from
| it would be Genius-style comments and annotations.
| https://genius.com/Genius-how-to-annotate-and-edit-on-genius...
| afandian wrote:
| Take a look at https://web.hypothes.is/
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| Sweet! I signed up :) Hope to see it do well
| albertzeyer wrote:
| The problem is, there are way too much papers, even if you focus
| already to some domain, like deep learning. But this seems to be
| completely open to any topic?
|
| For machine learning, https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/
| is currently a good place, or Twitter and following some of the
| authors you are interested in, or just set some Google Scholar
| alerts.
| eddsh1994 wrote:
| It doesn't have to be every paper, just papers people find
| interesting. HN is even larger, it can be _any_ subjects
| _including_ papers but still survives.
| MrLeap wrote:
| Hard disagree. If a user submits a paper, chances are it's
| because they're interested in it. I'm interested in this
| precisely because I might find myself reading about something
| in a topic I know nothing about that's interesting to somebody.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I actually enjoyed that the topics are broad. I studied
| physics, but worked as a software developer my whole life.
|
| The topics on the site are stuff that I was interested in at
| some point in my life: python, GRBs, code style, whatever GPT,
| thermodynamics and communication.
|
| I used to read papers but I don't anymore, and this site lets
| me keep discovering topics even if I'm not a scientist anymore.
| I don't need 25 posts a day on gamma ray bursts, I want one
| post a week and a fun discussion (which isn't there yet).
| cobertos wrote:
| Is that a problem though? HN covers a very broad spectrum yet
| it still functions.
|
| Keeping it broad by allowing any topic but raising the bar to
| require a peer reviewed paper might even decrease the velocity
| of conversation, allowing better quality conversation. That is,
| if the lower velocity can allow a community to form still
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(page generated 2023-02-13 23:00 UTC)