Derivatives of Regular Expressions | Hacker News Reader

Derivatives of Regular Expressions

lambda-the-ultimate.org

35 pointsfogus9 comments

All of the links to the paper in the comments are bitrotted; here's one that works http://lcs.ios.ac.cn/~chm/papers/derivative-tr200910.pdf .

Screw the ACM for paywalling this and many, many other papers.

This is a different paper. Did you even glance at the author name? It is from 2010 whereas the paper the article is talking about is from 1964.

Google to the rescue!

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=A0F...

my bad. Nope, I went to reading the abstract and skipped the author's name. Stupid.

The ACM has a moral imperative to create and edit journals and make them freely available on the web?

I'm a member of the ACM, and I every year I gladly pay a few hundred measly bucks to have access to their archives. I see no reason to begrudge them their business model.

By demanding copyright assignment and then paywalling, they are directly reducing the social utility of this research work by drastically limiting its audience. They have even threatened web authors for merely linking to copies which belonged to the authors rather than themselves: http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=101

I refuse to be a member of the ACM for this very reason---I don't think people should be expected to pay a few hundred bucks a year to access scientific papers. I think the ACM does more to obstruct progress in CS than to advance it, in general, due to policies like this.

When I had a free student membership due to participating in a programming contest I found out that I couldn't read almost any paper I wanted without also subscribing to some SIG. Some of my professors have also expressed frustration when trying to dowload papers from ACML DL even though they've been members for decades.

I don't think people should be expected to pay a few hundred bucks a year to access scientific papers

Well, people can go to libraries, of course. But what kind of a business model do you recommend for the ACM, if you don't approve of the one they've got?

Bizarre. I've been a member for over a decade myself, and never had a problem. I just pay for the "Digital Library" subscription ($99, if I remember correctly) and the world's my oyster.

I'm not sure I agree that they have a right to exist, hence to have a business model. A good inspiration (on a smaller scale) can be the ACL and the recent open access journals (JMLR, JAIR, etc), that are mainly university-sponsored or university-consorcium-sponsored, have very low operation costs (not having to send all that spam and publish empty magazines like communications was for a long time certainly helps), and volunteer-run (which is not a problem in academia if you attach some prestige to running things).

Maybe a subscription model that gives discounts to events for those who pay for the annual membership, with something like discounted book deals and informational emails sent periodically.

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