Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

> to share the load with every brain on the planet willing to give a try at science

This is what a lot of scientists love to tell themself or talk about in celebratory speeches.

The truth is: a lot of science is kept behind journal paywalls, so that only "officially approved" (in the sense of: working at a university or an governmental research institute) scientists can easily access it.

View on HN

You know how I read new papers back in 1994? By going to the library, finding one in bi-annual publication list and requesting it through the University system. And it better be necessary because the uni had to pay both the catalogue and each reprint of an article. The access is most certainly easier today.

This was a lot because of the technological restrictions of that time.

Also be aware that the world wide web was actually conceived by Tim Berners-Lee for the exchange of information between scientists.

People are working on using LLMs to regenerate experimental data from the text of journal papers.

Surely you understand that this is impossible in the general case?

I did try asking one of the PIs whether they were doing it to demonstrate that it doesn't work in order to get paper authors to provide their real data but didn't get a reply.

Will be going to a conference at the end of the month where there will be several presentations on the use of LLMs for this.

s/regenerate/hallucinate/ but go on ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com