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Comment by genidoi | Hacker News Reader

From that information, I would actively want to check SciHub out if I had never heard of it. Academia + notoriety sounds novel and useful.

Part of why SciHub has succeeded is just how easy it is. Copy/pasting an arbitrary DOI from any source will always beat most journals arcane login systems (especially on mobile) and their divine mission of obscuring "Download PDF" buttons.

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SciHub is amazing. I'm not in academia or industry, and I was working on trying to find some eutectics of simple ionic halide mixtures with some software that was missing some of the activation energy coefficients for some of the ion interactions. Must have looked at at least 30+ papers, which if university-publishing house cartel have their way, would have cost me thousands of dollars just to look at. Between sci-hub and all the open source code from labs and individuals around the world, it's just breathtaking what can be explored now outside the confines of academia.

Curious what the application was?

Mostly exploring molten salt mixtures for thermal energy storage with a larger working temperature range and a reasonable melting point compared to what's used typically.

Do you work at a molten salt energy storage company? What's the industry landscape there like? Like still primarily R&D, or is it mostly about production now.

No I don't, just a renewable energy hobbyist since about a decade ago when I interned at P&G chemicals researching transesterifcation/industrial processes for biodiesel production. I mostly want to experiment my own micro CSP system, but never really had to tools to explore salt combinations theoretically in a way that was fun for me.

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