On the other hand, papers/journals themselves could be seen as a ultra-high latency social network in which replies happen in the form of papers that reference the work they're replying to.
The high latency could be seen as a feature. The ability to post a reply instantly and without much thought definitely degrades quality.
I wonder if this is a good format though for discussing papers? - There are often lots of little sections of a paper to discuss in detail, and I think it's hard to do that with a linear format of comments controlled by up and down votes
- some database like arXiv for most all the results, obviously mirrored a few places
- multiple frontends like this!
- no more journals: replace journal review with an endorsement from a similar organization, on the arXiv (or similar) page
Thanks for taking one of the required steps to making this possible!
Universities often have “seminar” classes and “reading groups” to discuss influential papers, which sometimes includes older ones as well. The discussions are a bit like what this site is trying to accomplish, albeit in-person. Unfortunately the seminars and reading groups themselves aren’t usually public, but some of their websites are (and some past websites are still up) and they post the list of papers.
For PL specifically you can find a lot of notable papers in the history of the r/ProgrammingLanguage subreddit, and there are lists you can google such as https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatW... and https://github.com/imteekay/programming-language-research?ta.... I also found https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love for more genera computer science papers.
(1) A lot of research is trash and not reproducible. Over the last 5 years I've found it's usually not even worth my time to read half the papers I read unless its in Nature or a top journal. Even then the ROI is minimal.
(2) It takes quite a bit of knowledge to appreciate and read a paper. In grad school, it took 4-6 hours of work to go through a paper. Do I really want to have a discussion on the 10,000 ft view of a paper? Probably not. Do I want to spend 4-6 hours really appreciating the nuances of a valid paper? Probably not.
(3) As alluded to by (1) and (2), most researchers (at least in my anecdotal experience) are spread so incredibly thin, as someone who would want to provide insight on some incredibly niche topic, I am already overbooked for my time between work and outside responsibilities.
I think you're going to find that the garden you're trying to grow doesn't have the adequate catalyst/buy-in. You might be better off creating a version where the paper is summarized by a GPT model and that 10,000 ft summary is discussed by the general public.
Small bit of feedback: would it be possible to make the UI a bit more mobile friendly? Or, alternatively, is there an API that others could use to build different interfaces?
Again, this is a Thing That Should Exist, so thank you for bringing it into the world.
Something to consider, especially when your site is just serving text / aggregating links.
1. If you could add a button that makes a search on Google Scholar for the paper so I could find its main publication and reference counter, that would be awesome.
2. I don't like being linked directly to the PDF; I would rather go to the Arkvix page and download from there.
3. What would the policy of publications be? Only open-access papers allowed? Are pre-prints okay, or just peer review? Could one post a paper published in IEEE, with an extra field for where the paper is publicly accessible?
I like the idea of subcategories. Some notes on the experience:
- When I load the page, it takes 1-2 seconds for papers to load. This doesn't feel great.
- The grey colours in the list make the page hard to skim. I recommend a darker colour for the text.
- The colour of the navigation links is too light. It is hard to see the links.
- The information density is spot on. Amazing work!
On another note, the mobile browser version could be better - the rows exceed the width of the screen.
But other than that, you've got something cool over here, I'll bookmark it :)
Would be nice to see a category for electrical engineering. Things like digital/statistical signal processing, electronics, RF, etc. that don’t always fit into math/ CS.
Please let the text wrap. My phone is narrow and I want to read it. How it looks may not match your intent:
It’s a hard problem but could be a good platform for research discussions considering none exists today. Best of luck.
[1] https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending
Yours looks too nice for my use case honestly :) Weird complement but I really do like how it looks, you did a good job.
Also, would love to be able to search for articles from the same site e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=papertalk.xyz
Also, there's an issue with click propagation on the sort drop down. I had to click between Top Rated and back a few times because the click kept causing the underlying post to open. FWIW, this was on mobile.
UI Request: Make the font darker. That light font on a light background is extremely hard to read.
I’ve often seen papers have a list of keywords somewhere on the first page that could be helpful for indexing
But - why is the most important information, the title, in such a light, hard to read, font? The title should stand out, not the comments count etc. See... Hackernews! :-)
-- ability for user to add/delete/modify the topic tabs. Let me define the topics of interest.
-- Algolia or similar search box at bottom like HN has
Edit: law, taxes, accounting, physics, astronomy, communications, zoology, weather just to name a few more topics
firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pubpeer/
Especially the Active, and Best Comments pages.
Also, would love biological fields in there. We bio/med people really don't have much as to message boards
It can be hard to sift through the all the random papers on Arxiv or something, but I do try my best to keep up with current research. Obviously I don't have the time or ability to read every single paper (much as I wish I could!), but I do try and at least read the abstract, introduction, and conclusion to CS papers that are relevant to me, though the "relevant to me" part can be hard to figure out a lot of the time.
Having an "HN-like" experience for research papers could really help with that, I love the idea!
Out of curiosity, what did you build this in? Since I do think this has potential to get to HN-levels of success in the academic world, have you thought about scaling?
rather than open pdf directly, it would be better to take me to the arXiv page, since i can do more there (like use semantic scholar to find related papers quickly)
i like the potential
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Check also the autocomplete field. Chrome populates the email field in the sign in page as the username.
Guessing this HN launch went well for you :)
+1 for tags / categories.
The top level view seems to leave a bit too much margins on mobile.
Recently I've built something similar [0], but I struggled at getting people on board after initial HN launch
FYI. I tried signing up. Got: "Email rate limit exceeded"
I’m able to use almost every feature on HN without JS.
I went to the page, scanned the list to find something that has comments, but everything is listed as "0 Comments". I clicked on "Comments" for the AGI paper, but nothing happens -- it's not a link. There's no "Discuss" link. On HN clicking on the paper title opens the upstream link, not comments, but on your site I discovered that it opens the discussion page. Once there at https://www.papertalk.xyz/papers/2404.10731v1, I noticed that there are in fact 3 comments, but the comments counter at the top still says "0". The comments are also just random gibberish.
I hope you iterate on this project and that it gets massive traction!