benl

That's really good idea.

As Richard mentions in another thread, search is not actually the primary discovery mechanism on Academia. The social features (the news feed, bookmarks, sharing, recommendations) are the primary discovery mechanism. These are all free and we want to keep them that way.

Yes, we don't want that to happen. That's one reason (but not the only reason) that we haven't paywalled any of the existing free features.

That's a good idea. It's already possible to search for author names separately and then find the papers on their profile (if they have one), and it's also possible to search for a research interest tag and find the papers tagged with it. It would make sense to unify those with the title search.

Hi, I'm Ben, CTO of Academia.

Everyone who works at Academia would love it if we were able to make advanced search free.

When we first decided to build a premium account, we also made the decision to not take anything out of the free account. Strange as it may seem, the free account never had full-text search because we couldn't justify the cost of building it (full-text search of 20MM PDFs at our traffic levels is expensive to operate). We built it for the premium account because people asked for it in our initial research - and we would love to be able to eventually move it into the free account.

On the team we all agree that we want to keep building premium features in order to make the platform sustainable. The author of this article takes the view that advanced search is not a feature that should be paid-for. My view is that we intend keep building features until we have something that is worthy of his support. The support of the academics who use and enjoy the platform, both in free and paid accounts, is what will keep it around and growing for the long term.

Academia.edu (San Francisco, CA) - Software Engineers, Designers, Data Scientists

At Academia.edu, we're trying to accelerate the scientific process by changing the way scientific research is shared. Right now publication is slow, un-innovative, and expensive - we want it to be fast, innovative, and free. We're a platform where scientists upload and share their research directly, and track metrics on the impact of their work. These metrics help when they apply for jobs and grants.

A leading climate scientist in Germany told us "Academia.edu shows the impact of your work that is not covered by Web of Science and citation indexes of that sort. With Web of Science you only learn how many people have quoted what. But with Academia.edu I can see what is viewed, what is actually read or not. Here I learn something additional, something I would not know otherwise.”

5.1 million academics have signed up to Academia.edu, and around 1 million join every 2 months.

We are a 10 person team based in downtown San Francisco. We just raised $11 million from Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital, and True Ventures. We are looking for full-stack engineers, designers and data scientists. Technologies we use include Ruby, Rails, CoffeeScript, Backbone, Postgres, Mongo and Varnish.

Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital writes "We believe open science is really important. We believe Academia.edu is going to have a profound impact on the world."

There are some core values that define the Academia.edu culture. Since everyone in Academia.edu is involved in running the company, we look for these values in everyone we hire:

* Being a do-er - "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena" - Theodore Roosevelt

* Being driven - "Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it." - Lord Acton

* Having equanimity - "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Gandhi

* Having humility - knowing what you know, what you don't know, and where you just have an instinct

* Being motivated to open up and accelerate science

See the founder, Richard Price, on Bloomberg TV: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/academia-edu-scientific-resea... Read the coverage of our recent funding round: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/26/meet-academia-edu-a-startu...

To learn more, take a look at http://academia.edu/hiring, and then email Ben Lund at ben [ at ] academia.edu.

Are they really more efficient, for real world uses?

The way I understand it, the argument goes something like this. To reach orbit you need to accelerate to very high speeds (Mach 25). To avoid crazy drag losses you therefore want to get out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible. So being able to use oxygen from the air on your way up is a marginal gain at best, and almost certainly not worth the extra complexity.

Papers uploaded to Academia definitely do get indexed by Google. And we show the full text of the paper inline on the page too, so the text is right there after a user clicks through from the search result.

The download option is shown to logged out users too, so you should see it. But you do have to be registered in order to compete the download.

With regard to your other point, we think that the conversion of the PDF to HTML 5 and a couple of other things we do on Academia.edu massively increases the visibility of your paper as compared to hosting it on a department webpage.

This is a huge benefit for the individual researcher in increasing the impact of their work and the number of people who find and use it.

Just want to point out that #3 is incorrect. Where users have uploaded PDFs to their profile, we show the full text of the paper as an HTML 5 conversion to all visitors, and offer the PDF as a download to registered users.

The HTML 5 conversion is shown to all visitors, but you have to be a registered user to download the file. You're being redirected to a login page here.

No, that is incorrect. If the user has uploaded a copy of the PDF, we both show it on the page as an HTML 5 conversion and offer the PDF file as a download.

"Hopefully not on impact"

The full-length interview this story is based on is on this page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17439490

Just skip the stories and listen to the audio, it's much more informative.

This is my favourite proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. I first came across it in Steven Baxter's novel Space -- he explores a few proposed solutions and the speed-of-light-limit-to-growth explanation is the most intriguing.

I fully agree. These are things that _can_ help you prevent yourself from suffering damage, but do not guarantee it.

Just as broken bones are a danger inherent in riding a motorbike, depression is one of the dangers inherent in trying to start a company.

Understanding this leads to two helpful realizations:

1. It's nothing to be ashamed of and should not be stigmatised

2. You would be wise to take precautions to protect against the danger (just like you would wear a helmet when riding).

The danger is particularly strong for solo founders, simply because of the lifestyle some have to live. Long periods of time spent on your own, slow progress toward your goals -- these are signals that the depression-triggering algorithms in your mind will latch onto.

Some things that may work to counter those signals:

* Socialise with friends, family or new people every day. If you can't socialise on a particular day, spend some time making plans with people to socialise in the near future.

* Be having sex, and regularly. Seriously, this is a very strong signal.

* Exercise a lot. Run, swim, work out -- even just walk around the neighbourhood.

* Plan your work to have near-term achievable milestones.

* Eat healthily and avoid alcohol. A weak immune system leads to frequent illness, which leads to slower progress.

I actually started building ROC before redis-objects was released. But I stuck with using and developing ROC for a couple of reasons:

1. TransientStore is really useful for testing and for re-using redis code in scenarios that don't require persistence

2. As well as implementing the Redis commands, the ROC objects also perfectly mimic the APIs of their Ruby-core equivalents (except for a few destructive methods that are not possible to mimic).

In addition, there's now a third reason:

3. I recently added eval/lua support, which I don't think redis-objects has yet.

"plus with a solar sail, how do you get back?"

This is actually really simple and not a problem at all -- you just have to understand orbital mechanics a bit. Basically, you angle the solar sail so that its force is directed against your direction of travel along your orbit. This slows you down, causing you to start spiraling in toward the sun. Then you change angle so that you start speeding up again and match orbital velocities just as you arrive at your destination.

But it's a separate issue anyway -- solar sail technology (or Vasimir, or Nuclear Thermal) is no more required for exploring Mars than jet airplane technology was required for exploring North America.

Does anyone know any details of the thrust and delta-v capabilities of the proposed combined launch abort / retro landing system?

Is it going to be just a bunch more Draco thrusters, or something else?

The reason it is dismissed is that group selection has been proposed and investigated many times in the history of evolutionary theory and found wanting, ironically because the mathematics don't hold up in realistic natural scenarios.

This article doesn't go into enough detail to tell us what is different in this new formulation of group selection. We'll have to read the paper to find out.

Of course, I fully agree. Please don't read any implication about space tourism into a simple FYI calculation. But a 6x cost reduction is a big deal, and this figure illustrates that very well. See the follow up comment I'd already posted here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2412096

Yes, indeed. And even disregarding the mass of the destination and of the ferrying craft, the mass of life support systems and consumables for each individual on the way up and down are likely at least double this anyway.

But, longer term, consider what happens if/when there is existing infrastructure in LEO and highly productive and profitable work for an individual to do there. The cost of actually getting to LEO will be a relatively minor relocation cost, even at these numbers.

The table here doesn't give cost comparisons for the other launch vehicles, but in the press conference Elon Musk said that the Delta IV Heavy costs roughly 3x the Falcon Heavy, meaning that the FH is approximately 6x cheaper in $/lb to low earth orbit.

The figures quoted on the page work out to $1,070 per lb to LEO. That's less than $200k to lift the mass of a 180lb human.

Discovering F.lux (via a previous HN thread) has had a dramatically beneficial effect on my life.

Before discovering it I would have difficulty falling asleep 3 or 4 nights a week. Now that hardly ever happens -- perhaps once every two weeks.

For anyone who is using Beanstalk as their message queue, I have an incomplete-but-functional node client and worker on github:

http://github.com/benlund/node-beanstalk-client http://github.com/benlund/node-beanstalk-worker

And we're hiring: http://www.academia.edu/jobs

We're based in downtown SF and we're looking for engineers to help us build a great product for researchers.

Here's another genuine way of asking the same question.

Why do people continue to believe that European social democracies have the highest quality of life, when people vote with their feet in the other direction?

I think approaching your work from the standpoint of "Learn from success, not failure" is a sure path to succumbing to confirmation bias and becoming a one-trick pony.

The 37s guys have done some wonderful work. But to me they are pretty much the embodiment of what I think of when I remember Paul Buchheit's great quote:

"Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice"

/Any suggestions?/

My suggestion would be to step back, realize that climate change is not a religion, and that you do not have to convert others to your cause.

If at that point, you still find it engaging and rewarding to debate the science and policy, go right ahead. But if not, you can ignore it all with no worries

Academia.edu is looking for developer interns in our San Francisco office:

http://academia.edu/jobs/developer_intern

We value enthusiasm, motivation and curiosity over experience in our interns, and we give you challenging projects to work on.