Ask HN: HN, but for Scientists? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: HN, but for Scientists?

58 pointstoombowoombo38 comments

Are there platforms/communities such as HN but mostly with scientists instead of CS/engineering people?

I'd also love an HN-like community for scientists.

The closest I know of is SciRate [1], where arXiv papers are posted. Users can then upvote and discuss them.

I don't feel it has reached critical mass, so it's still of limited appeal to me. Though I know some quantum computing researchers that use it, so maybe it's dependent on the field.

[1] https://scirate.com/

I’m a scientist on HN. It’s mostly fine here, but sometimes the articles on science can get a little cringey (armchair scientists proposing theories of quantum gravity in the comments, etc).

However, having seen the science community on Twitter, I don’t think a “HN for science” would be enjoyable.

When you say "the science community on twitter", are you referring to a group of actual scientists, or the group of "science communicators" and misc academic hangers-on, plus non-scientists who interact with them?

Not OP, but I would refer to the actual scientists on twitter. It’s become a popular platform for sharing new papers or thoughts that might once have been blog posts.

However it can be very toxic and self-aggrandizing, even (especially?) among more senior faculty.

Science twitter is the reason I’m still on twitter, but there’s definitely days where I wonder if it’s worth it.

>However, having seen the science community on Twitter,

What's the problem with that community?

IMO, the content can often be unrelated to science, as many tweets even by established scientists are about politics or other topics. There is also a large contingent of early career scientists trying to use twitter to get their name out there. Having a strong twitter presence can help assistant professors when to comes time for their tenure review, as peer name recognition does play a part in the decision (but there are other, better, non-Twitter ways to do this, too).

I assume he means it's made up entirely of armchair scientists. From what I've seen it's a lot of 12 year olds reposing mother jones or Vox articles who think they've discovered the solution to climate change. Science communities tend to be a lot more political and tend to attract more kids in my experience

No, the academic scientists on Twitter. It’s all PR and circle jerk, very little real scientific discussion.

Imagine a bunch of professors trying to be “influencers” instead of real scientists and you’ll not be far off.

I've written an AGPLv3 no-js link aggregator with tags in Django/sqlite3 which I self host at https://sic.pm but without an active user base. You can self host it for your own community however: https://github.com/epilys/sic

There are orders of magnitude more CS/engineering people than practicing scientists. And as an experimental physicist who does a lot of technical things, I probably have more in common with the people on HN than with biologists, for example.

Part of the reason HN works is, in my opinion, the fact that its demographic is already terminaly online. (Or at least terminaly at the terminal, lol.) It's also a larger demographic than scientists. But as others have said there are scientists on HN. I imagine a "science HN" would for the most part just be links to journals with comments? That could be interesting.

Not so sure, https://www.biostars.org is like stackoverflow for bioinformatics. For Physics learning discussions - https://www.physicsforums.com

My personal recommendation is finding subreddits that are science centric, there’s r/physics r/chemistry r/science etc and I’ll bet my left but that any science subject you can think of has a corresponding subreddit you could subscribe to or browse.

Some more than others. A lot of academics are also active on Twitter. (Not me. One day maybe I'll follow all the right people to generate what op is looking for, but I haven't really succeeded at that yet).

There are a fair number of scientists on HN actually, obviously with a bias for more computationally-heavy fields.

If you had a specific (sub-)field of science that you were looking for, you might have better luck with your search.

I have considered launching something similar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25853298

The problem is that bootstrapping takes significant effort without full time funding from a VC or institution. Most of the applied sciences are done right now on private/semi-private Slack groups.

Not similar to HN, if you mean a replica like Lobste.rs.

Then again, the following communities have reached some critical user count:

- https://mathoverflow.net/

- https://biology.stackexchange.com/

- https://physics.stackexchange.com/

- https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/

There are lots of scientists on HN, though.

HN is essentially for CS people. The number of non-CS engineering, even electrical/hardware engineering, discussions done here is abysmal.

There is Hackaday but that is more like a blog...

Would be awesome especially if people’s expertise or qualifications could be vetted by the community somehow…

I understand what you mean, but this sounds like it could quickly degenerate into gatekeeping: "You're not a scientist [by my definition]! No posts for you"

Authors should be accredited (as GP requested) , posts must cite sources (we are a scientific community after all!), reposts are low-effort so new posts must contain new content, posts should checked for quality.. hmmm sounds familiar doesn't it?

Actually not bad to disproportionately favour experts when making posts on particular subjects. I guess this could be explored by a startup, I always love it when the community here comments on science stuff and give extremely informed examples. Formalising that is a good thing IMO.

Totally. I think more freedom is better. The good comments from experts will be upvoted.

But if you have comments on quantum physics from a quantum physicist there’s no harm in boosting them or showing them to the community for longer at the top of a post.

Have you tried r/science and r/askscience? It's still reddit, but more scienc-y than most of the web, at least. Also if there are specific subfields of science you're interested in, the smaller subs tend to be higher quality too.

As a scientist on HN, I usually start scrolling from the bottom of threads to find those overlooked comments by domain experts. Then upvote them even if I’m not certain that they speak the truth. Maybe that is unethical but I want to encourage scientists to participate even if the general atmosphere is kind of oppressive. I wish there were a way for scientists to tag themselves, maybe by getting shadow banned?

>even if the general atmosphere is kind of oppressive.

Can you explain further and give some examples?

Dark humor would be to downvote this post :)

Depending on the science, but i often see amas or replies from scientists or paper authors on reddit (space, biology, history, etc).

That's a different dynamic though. It's one where there is a central authority (even if a questioned one), whereas HN is more of a flat & direct democracy.

ResearchGate?

Eh—it wouldn't really work.

Do you want to hear about a 1mm thick polymer when overlaid on a w-section of a certain size and brought up to a certain temperature has certain properties that make it better for loading patterns of structural members of a floating ship?

Me neither.

HN works partially because almost all of us code and almost all of that code, code at least some of the time with concern for the network. This unites the focus to certain types of companies and subjects.

Scientists go down their own, squirrely rabbit holes.

You wouldn't be the target audience. That sounds pretty interesting to me, and I'd be particularly interested in the science that underpins physical engineering — structured and systematic knowledge, rather than ad hoc engineering.

Science HN would be for scientists, first and foremost, not hackers

If you're generally interested you would benefit a lot more from reading about the old stuff that everyone knows.

This is kinda what I'm getting at with my original, downvoted post.

It's a giant forest of tiny little details that scientists talk about. There is nothing close to the "we're all on the same(ish) page" that software developers have. The example I went with was one I had some partial familiarity with as a former structural engineer, but ever that I found boring, let alone what type of enzyme a specific frog in the amazon uses to evade the poisons of a given snake.

The graph is too large for science to have any sort of meaningful discussion these days.

Yep. Sounds cool, especially if others in nearby fields have read the article and upvoted it. Which polymers do work well for that purpose?

If HN had a tagging system for submissions, it'd probably be possible to have a quiet undercurrent of specialized fields working within HN itself.

#HN_Science.

> Scientists go down their own, squirrely rabbit holes.

At the risk of taking the analogy too far: I'd wager that most people go down rabbit holes, but still enjoy general discussion on how to best dig said holes.

Also, please do report scientists putting squirrels down rabbit holes to the appropriate animal ethics authority. No one should be making squirrely rabbit holes.

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