Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

abdullahkhalids

Of all the possible HN alternates that have been proposed, this one is probably the one that makes sense. I don't think there is any alternate at the moment. I have a couple of thoughts and queries.

1. You put grad students in the title. But you only mention natural sciences and mathematics in the text. What about social science? What about the humanities? I am a physicist but I would personally like to know about progress on major problems in all academic fields. If you limit yourself to only some disciplines how will draw the line and why? HN has the line "interesting to hackers", which makes it very very broad. It relies on undemocratic voting, and occasionally moderation, to separate the good from the bad.

2. The reason the quality of arguments at HN is relatively high, is primarily the software behind the HN scores system. It very effectively kills of many techniques that are used by people to raise their scores. Arguably, getting on HN front page is directly correlated to the visits/money you get, while on an academic forum people will only care for egoistical reasons. The problem will be less, but it will still exist. If the community takes on and starts to grow, it will need access to the HN points software which is not public at the moment as far as I know.

3. Discussion surrounding links to papers, news articles or essays are generally serious and 'valuable'. This is what HN does primarily. You are proposing a forum where people can talk about their own thoughts and ideas. There are many such internet forums for this purpose. Most of them degenerate into homework problem threads and how to get into grad school questions. Why? Because what you thought over breakfast this morning is usually not brilliant enough, while a paper/essay/news has had many hours of professional thought behind it.

4. It might be possible to piggyback over HN. Any link on HN relating to grad students can be manually resubmitted on the community website. The discussion happens on HN. The community website only serves as a curated list. This will solve the problem of drowning in the noise of software. Of course, the limitation will be that all posts submitted will have to conform to the "interest to hackers" criteria.

The reason the quality of arguments at HN is relatively high, is primarily the software behind the HN scores system.

This observation drastically undervalues the fact that this is a business space and part of the business model for Y Combinator, so for some people, participation here is significant to their career and potentially worth millions of dollars. It cuts way back on the assholery. Plus, since it is part of a business model, the forum owners work pretty hard on the social piece. There is, no doubt, still room for improvement but my experience has been that forums that are part of a business model are generally dramatically better than those run for free by idealists who frequently get really crabby about being underappreciated, the forum turning into too much work, etc.

It'm not sure its the business model, but that it is attached to an enourmous pile of assets/cash. That might be parsing your comment a bit, but the distinction is both relevant and important if you are trying to replicate it.

There are other business models that work (like MetaFilter -- very different model but still a business). HN is part of the Y Combinator business model in that you must have (last I checked) a Hacker News handle to fill out the application for Y Combinator. Every founder has to have their own handle. So it is a funnel and things you say here are kind of de facto part of the application. Thus, being a jackass here on a routine basis can hurt your chances of getting in. For other people, who have no plans to apply to Y Combinator, there is still, yes, a lot of money of the table for many people. Also, because it is part of their business model, they now have a full time paid moderator, something boards done out of the goodness' of someone's heart cannot afford. The difference in quality shows.

I think a good thing to hope for in starting the proposed community would be that enough researchers and graduate students pay attention that being a jackass could affect your academic career in similar ways (less likely to get a postdoc or grant, etc., if someone on the committee knows your reputation).

1.'Grad students' is a misnomer. I should've known better.

2.Ideally HN would've been the internet utopia that the intelligentsia turned to for respite and nourishment. But if HN(algorithm+users) performs a filtering function on all the posts submitted, then it has evolved to consistently rank posts relating to web-based software development over anything else. Now this previous sentence is rather harsh. There are many wonderful articles on physics , social sciences , philosophy, history etc that are featured on a daily basis. But for each such article upvoted there are a multitude of github.io's .(Which,again is great. HN is after all for hackers and entrepreneurs). Every now and then though I come across a post linking to a blog that provides such delightful insight , a visualization of vectors , a new perspective on chemical analysis ,a novel line of questioning on the usefulness of reason and logic that I wonder if there is a multitude of such material 'out there' that I may be missing out on.

3.By grad student I meant anyone pursuing a rigorous(again dodgy semantics) scientific education(whether enrolled or on their own) while trying to fit the pieces(the various dependencies,if you will) together.

4.As for the whole possibility of creating such a site , I was merely checking(at least at the time of posting) if I was the only one that felt the necessity .

> fit the pieces(the various dependencies) together

Something that would work is a platform for writing review papers collaboratively. I'm imagining a review would be a mix of 30% original content (written in blog-post language) and 70% links to research articles. In the end, the results could be publishable as a review paper in a journal, or exported as an annotated bibliography (a .bib file, e.g. [1]).

[1] I started a review paper on github last year, but I haven't touched it since, will do this summer https://github.com/ivanistheone/LDAreview/

In the beginning, before there were non-students, Facebook was about solving that issue, wasn't it? I'd also heartly appreciate such a platform. Most stuff I find really interesting won't be interesting at all for HN, thus I end up sharing less.

It's not a social network scientists need, but a kind of organized knowedge-rating, sharing and curation site.

I agree on (3) that such a community should mostly be restricted to things not thought of over breakfast. If it comes in the form of a submitted link to a blog post, on the other hand, that should be fair game even if the blog post author just "thought of it over breakfast."

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