4 ms·

A website for annotating and discussing research papers. I am quite surprised that this project hadn't existed already. It seems to be an obvious use of collect

A website for annotating and discussing research papers. I am quite surprised that this project hadn't existed already. It seems to be an obvious use of collective mind of the Internet. Research papers can often be difficult to understand and I had always wanted a way where it was something was clarified in a simple language or platform where questions about it could be asked.

Swizec 9y ago
It’s been around for a couple years already. Really great stuff, I just wish I had more time to read and participate.
pvg 9y ago
It's quite popular on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fermatslibrary.com&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fermatslibrary.com&sort=byDate... There's an occasional annotation that's about rapgenius level which, if nothing else, lines up with 'the collective mind of the Internet'.
amelius 9y ago
But it seems the discussion is highly redacted and the papers that are up for discussion are chosen by a panel. So, as I understand it, it's not like you can ask questions about a random paper you are currently reading, and ask the community for help.
- alister 9y ago
  > it's not like you can ask questions about a random paper you are currently reading In the early days of the web, I remember a service that allowed you to comment on any page on the web. I think it used frames. It embedded the page you were looking at into a frame and allowed anyone to comment in the margins -- it looked a lot like Fermat's Library. Unfortunately I can't remember what the service or start-up was called. I thought it was a great idea and very democratizing. You could comment on a newspaper article even if they didn't allow commenting. You could comment on Coca-Cola's page or anywhere on the web. What killed it wasn't spam, advertising, trolling, or inane YouTube-style comments. Certainly those would have been problems to deal with if the service got really popular. What killed it was copyright. Some company sued them out of existence because they were ostensibly violating copyright by embedding someone else's page.
  - Groxx 9y ago
    Sidewiki was another approach, I don't think copyright killed it. A bit of googling shows something pretty similar though: https://epiverse.co/ https://epiverse.co/ Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess.
    - amelius 9y ago
      > Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess. Yeah, but that means three standards, and thus dilution of the usefulness.

Swizec 9y ago

It’s been around for a couple years already. Really great stuff, I just wish I had more time to read and participate.

pvg 9y ago

It's quite popular on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fermatslibrary.com&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fermatslibrary.com&sort=byDate... There's an occasional annotation that's about rapgenius level which, if nothing else, lines up with 'the collective mind of the Internet'.

amelius 9y ago

But it seems the discussion is highly redacted and the papers that are up for discussion are chosen by a panel. So, as I understand it, it's not like you can ask questions about a random paper you are currently reading, and ask the community for help.

alister 9y ago
> it's not like you can ask questions about a random paper you are currently reading In the early days of the web, I remember a service that allowed you to comment on any page on the web. I think it used frames. It embedded the page you were looking at into a frame and allowed anyone to comment in the margins -- it looked a lot like Fermat's Library. Unfortunately I can't remember what the service or start-up was called. I thought it was a great idea and very democratizing. You could comment on a newspaper article even if they didn't allow commenting. You could comment on Coca-Cola's page or anywhere on the web. What killed it wasn't spam, advertising, trolling, or inane YouTube-style comments. Certainly those would have been problems to deal with if the service got really popular. What killed it was copyright. Some company sued them out of existence because they were ostensibly violating copyright by embedding someone else's page.
- Groxx 9y ago
  Sidewiki was another approach, I don't think copyright killed it. A bit of googling shows something pretty similar though: https://epiverse.co/ https://epiverse.co/ Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess.
  - amelius 9y ago
    > Close one door, and three plugin frameworks shall open, I guess. Yeah, but that means three standards, and thus dilution of the usefulness.