Show HN: Paperkast
http://paperkast.com
Hello everybody,
I just wanted to share a link aggregator website: paperkast.com. It's a article sharing and discussion hub.
It's opened recently. I think it was a need for the academia. I don't think there is an online community for paper discussion. Twitter is good for publication sharing but there is no central discussion around a paper. It's all over the place. Seperately, we know that the link aggregation style has a good reputation. It's a good stimulation for discussion.
What do you think of it?
61 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadIt might get more attention
I think we're in the clear here.
> Paperkast.com built on lobste.rs open source news aggregator system.
Didn't get very far due lack of motivation and other parallel projects, but it's been neat to see things like this (and fermat's library, and peerpub, etc.) spring up over the years.
Basically like getting punched in the gut.
Not sure if that is good because it keeps me motivated to ship, or if your perspective / wiring is better.
You might want to edit your post / title. I don't think I would have known that it was for academic papers if I hadn't have opened the link.
One note, generally I think academic papers are heavier than articles on HN. Maybe the person sharing a link should be encouraged to add a note/summary/reason-for-sharing/personal-take-away
That being said, I'd be afraid it would discourage people from posting. And when it comes to papers, shouldn't the abstract serve this purpose?
Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised:
no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer
You are exposing internal error messages to users.
Especially since the official site of a book is usuallly not suitable for that (no forum or separate login per publisher etc.)
Or in the case of Pragmatic Programmers not accessible, if you click on discussion forum at https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functi... you get redirected to: https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta-sesta
Anyone else who is missing something like this?
Edit: looks like it's just for reviews.
But as for the comment above yours, that is Goodreads. It doesn't sell the books, but is a central place to discuss books. Unlike Amazon.com comments, you don't need to verify anything to be able to comment on a book.
And lastly, it's kind of difficult to say that it's an independent source of reviews, considering that Amazon purchased GoodReads back in 2013, GoodReads offers Amazon-only discounts, and Amazon is always the preferred seller (while the rest of the sellers are hidden behind a dropdown).
LibraryThing has that feature, although the algorithm is not super smart. When I first created an account, I put in all the books I could remember that I had read. Then I clicked on the link to find other users most like me. The top one had a whole series of books that I had read and completely forgotten to add to my catalog. It was uncanny - I couldn't think of any heuristic - they were all mystery novels, and I had almost none in my collection.
Edit: post to https://roastmy.site to get some design feedback if you like!
But what I don't understand is why e.g. Google Scholar doesn't provide a service like this.
This looks neat otherwise and I joined.
[1] https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_pre...
I work in materials science, which there is a tag for, but I work in a super narrow slice of materials (it’s a broad field) and I imagine many others are the same. Even on a list of about 10 journals I keep RSS feeds for, I have a hit rate (of a paper I will read) if no better than 10%. And these are journals that I have already selected as “my flavor” of materials.
Specific tags are bad in that they could harm discoverability. It would be neat if the tags could be hierarchical. E.g. a tag for quantum mechanics shows up in materials science and physics so that the discoverability is there from the general tags, but the narrow slices are available as a filter.
One useful feature might be for the index to show one-sentence blurbs about each paper (in addition to the title of the paper itself). Unless I'm reading papers very specific to my subfield, I need some context to know what I'm looking at & why it's important. Otherwise I fear that only articles with the most accessible titles (or disciplines whose titles tend to be most accessible) will be clicked, read & upvoted.
I would hope that the nature of the type of people who read scientific papers is to avoid sensationalizing too much (like popular science journalism does).
I'd been remembering how Marginal Revolution, which despite having a fairly educated/technical audience, still often writes its own link text when linking to papers: e.g. item #1 here https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/sa...
But obviously that would have a big impact on UX for submitters and readers which I haven't thought through in detail!
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)
I strongly recommend that you implement and design a semantic, controlled vocabulary for the subjects in order to keep it from being and hoc. It would be pseudo-hierarchical, but not strictly so. For instance, Physics would include Classical and Modern and both of those would break down into things such as biophysics and quantum chemistry. The question is begged, "But if we put biophysics in the Physics category, it would not be in Biology unless biology were also to be included within Physics." To this, there are two follow-up statements. The first of which is that you could include Biology in Physics. The second of which is the more relevant point in that the beauty of semantic organization of information is that things can belong to multiple groups. Biophysics could be under biology and physics. One doesn't have to choose.
This brings us to modifiers? For each of these, you could have, for instance, a "Quantitative", "Analytical", "Numerical", etc. variant of the discipline. Should you have tags for "Quantitative Physics", "Quantitative Biophysics", and "Quantitative Biology"? I argue, No. Instead, take advantage of semantic structuring of information and simply attach the "Quantitative" descriptor to articles having to use quantitative methods or categorizing themselves as the "Quantitative" variant of the discipline. The end result of this is that you can "build up" to disciplines that we know by using tags, but you aren't limiting yourself nor are you generating duplicate or excessive tags in the long run.
A final question, Is the above overkill? I argue, No. If you are trying to be a hub to discuss any and all academic publications, then your site will eventually expand beyond its initial STEM focus to include the humanities, the arts, and so forth. You will be confronted with the task of trying to essentially categorize all knowledge. I argue that you should just plan for that from day one and take advantage of semantic structuring of information to not only allow discoverability of disciplines we know exist, but to eventually generate insights into combinations of disciplines of which we as a society have not yet conceived.