Academic Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Academic Hacker News

cs.toronto.edu

136 pointsambition37 comments

Like the idea, but a few problems:

- Sites that aren't super active yet for me must have RSS. RSS is my callback mechanism. There are probably only 10 sites that I visit on a routine basis, but I subscribe to 45 (mostly low volume) RSS feeds. Alternative for me these days is Twitter.

- As others mentioned green color is bad. I can barely read the title.

- "Academic" is too vague. Academic for what? Computer science? Any papers on anything? Professor's union meeting write-ups? Specials in the U. Toronto snack bar? Note: Current "Hacker News" ousted the previously more specific name, "Startup News".

- Is this different from http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/ ?

A memorable domain name would be helpful too, even if it just redirects.

hnacademic.com should start redirecting as soon as DNS propagates.

This is an incredible idea! I second the RSS feed!

See www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/rss.

I've also added a link at the bottom of the list pages.

Green is not bad, black text on green is.

For text use white, a very light yellow or a very very very light green and see the difference.

I lightened up the green, I hope it helps.

Go there and type this script in the address bar:

javascript:void(Array.filter(document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop")[0].getElementsByTagName('a'), function(e){e.style.color='white';}))

looks nice, #CCFFCC too

btw works on this page too

Thanks so much for the ideas.

- RSS is actually built in to the news.arc software. I've added a link at the bottom.

- I lightened the green. I think it's more readable now.

- I'm hoping for great tech papers. I think the seed community will see to that but I'm open to new name suggestions

- I think a different community and different vibe will emerge from reddit. We'll see.

Makes me wonder what's wrong with posting them here - I'd welcome some "great tech papers" (as they put it) here.

I don't think I've ever seen an actual technical paper on the front page of Hacker News. I remember trying to post some of my favorites when I first came to HN, but people rarely responded to or upvoted them. Also, it's a lot more work to read a technical paper than most forms of online writing, and I hope that this new one has a much slower pace than Hacker News.

This is a good niche to try and fill. Thanks.

You are right about papers. But someone has posted a paper from Stanford about Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests and I was so glad to see that.

Half of me wants this to be successful because it's such a great idea. The other half hopes it crashes and burns simply because I don't need another hacker news to eat away my time.

I think it will be a slower site than HN because it takes longer to read full papers than articles.

If you manage to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of building a community site, let us know.

Marketing, perseverance, and a few sprinkled fake posts to build a sense of community will suffice.

There you have it, the golden rule of building communities.

Well, it's up, we'll see where it goes.

I don't actually know anything about building communities. Basically the plan is to keep an open mind and keep learning.

I like it.

Where can I find the chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics, and physics versions?

If you can't you can make them.

http://arclanguage.org/

Since our interests overlap almost exactly (not a huge chemistry fan), I'd be interested in putting together a subject-specific suite of versions.

Would love such a site!

http://newmogul.com for economics + general business

This is an excellent idea, and I love the comments so far. It's great to see how open the community is to the idea of others taking a great technology/idea and applying it in new ways. I hope ideas from Academic Hacker News will be able to flow back and influence the original hacker news.

Nice. I'll try to get some of my friends to check it out as well.

An about page would be nice, to know what kind of content will be accepted. CS Papers only? Or all academic papers? Or anything of interest to CS people?

Here's the about page:

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/academic-hacker-news.html

You can see it by clicking on the (empty for now) favicon. I'll add a more obvious link.

I found a really cool domain that you might want to use. I couldn't reserve it for various reasons.

I don't want to display it because otherwise a squatter might take it. If you want to know what it is, look on your own site for the username SapphireSun and check the email field. Email me and I'll tell you it.

Posting with this username to get around the noprocrast feature ;-). Normally I wouldn't, but this might be a time sensitive issue now that you've broadcasted your existence to the world.

Nevermind, I see the contact information. Feel free to downmod this into oblivion.

This is a really good idea. Maybe this will generate a lot of public discussion about some recent papers...

Can you add an rss feed?

It's built in to pg's source code. See http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/rss

I also added a link.

This is just fantastic, thank you!

Invest in a favicon :-)

Turn the Y upside down, presto!

This is very nice... but please change the green color of the bar to any other color, or change the color of the items in the menu... like make it white to appear! About marketing... don't forget to tell your friends and every student at your class about it and encourage them to join.

EDIT: I also advice you to check out this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 so you can know "what people want".. and the features that should be added.

Try to be creative, and look at the link above, so you can get more ideas about enhancing it.

I agree that black text against dark green is difficult to read. This Firefox Stylish hack changes the top bar to a medium green, which works nicely for me:

  td[bgcolor="#2b5500"] { background-color: #6c6 !important }

Color changed to be lighter.

Thanks for the link. I plan to specialize the site features for papers as I get ideas.

Thanks, but #49960a is still too dark for me to read black against. I'm sticking with my #6c6 hack for now.

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