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Show HN: Paperkast
http://paperkast.com http://paperkast.com
Hello everybody,
I just wanted to share a link aggregator website: paperkast.com. It's a article sharing and discussion hub.
It's opened recently. I think it was a need for the academia. I don't think there is an online community for paper discussion. Twitter is good for publication sharing but there is no central discussion around a paper. It's all over the place. Seperately, we know that the link aggregation style has a good reputation. It's a good stimulation for discussion.
What do you think of it?
- Phithagoras 8y agoTry resubmitting this as Show HN: Paperkast It might get more attention
- dang 8y agoWe've added that bit above. Thanks!
- dogancan 8y agoThanks guys!
- mrzool 8y agoShow HN is for the author of a project. How do you know he/she is the author of this thing?
- mikeyouse 8y agoThe about page lists a "Dogancan Ozturan" as the primary author and this post was submitted by a user named: dogancan I think we're in the clear here.
- mrzool 8y agoFair enough! In this case Show HN would have been the best way of posting this on HN. At the very least, the fact that the OP is the author should have been disclosed as soon as possible.
- dogancan 8y agoThanks!
- g5095 8y agois this opensource?
- DoctorOetker 8y agonot sure how many modifications were made but the About page states: > Paperkast.com built on lobste.rs open source news aggregator system.
- seltzered_ 8y agoFunny, years ago a friend and I were trying to make something exactly along lines of lobste.rs but for scientific papers. https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk was as far as I got. Didn't get very far due lack of motivation and other parallel projects, but it's been neat to see things like this (and fermat's library, and peerpub, etc.) spring up over the years.
- ivthreadp110 8y agoI know how you feel- It's always rewarding when you worked on something but never finished it- you knew it was a good idea when doing it-- then years later someone else does something very similar. No anger from it, not like they stole your idea- it just validates that your original idea was so good that it was just a matter of time until someone else did it. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
- ada1981 8y agoI have this happen all the time, but often I have the opposite experience and feel like I failed, lacked focus, missed an opportunity. Basically like getting punched in the gut. Not sure if that is good because it keeps me motivated to ship, or if your perspective / wiring is better.
- TACIXAT 8y agoThis is a great idea. It could really turn into a study group for new papers. You might want to edit your post / title. I don't think I would have known that it was for academic papers if I hadn't have opened the link.
- dogancan 8y agoI was thinking that, for example, if there is a neat discussion going on about really detailed stuff in the paper (like one sharp peak in one of the figures or one value in a table), it can be really good resource for the reader of the paper as well. They can look around in the comments. Seperately, if they couldn't find it, they can just ask.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- toomim 8y agoWondeful! We need something like this. I hope it takes root.
- themmes 8y agoSigned up right away, love the idea! One note, generally I think academic papers are heavier than articles on HN. Maybe the person sharing a link should be encouraged to add a note/summary/reason-for-sharing/personal-take-away
- dogancan 8y agoExactly, that's why I think is really important for the authors of a paper to post the paper directly to paperkast. It'll be hub for their paper.
- rplnt 8y ago/r/TrueReddit has a submission statement rule, it's interesting even for the poster to think about why they found given article interesting enough to share That being said, I'd be afraid it would discourage people from posting. And when it comes to papers, shouldn't the abstract serve this purpose?
- fredsir 8y agoMaybe the abstract should automatically be fetched when posting and shown with whatever the poster wants to add?
- Sreyanth 8y agoGetting a controller exception. Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised: no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer
- dogancan 8y agoShould be OK now.
- dmateos 8y agoTypeError in Home#index Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised: no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer
- dogancan 8y agoShould be OK now.
- bullfightonmars 8y agoIt looks like you are running the app in RAILS_ENV != 'production'. This is dangerous and not recommended You are exposing internal error messages to users.
- moredhel 8y agoI am still having similar issues: https://paperkast.com/feed https://paperkast.com/feed
- eterps 8y agoI was thinking of a similar thing for discussion about books as well. Especially since the official site of a book is usuallly not suitable for that (no forum or separate login per publisher etc.) Or in the case of Pragmatic Programmers not accessible, if you click on discussion forum at https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functi... you get redirected to: https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta-sesta https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta-sesta Anyone else who is missing something like this?
- andai 8y agoI often wish I could connect with people who are reading or have read the same books as me. I think that's what GoodReads is for, but I haven't really looked into it. Edit: looks like it's just for reviews.
- r3bl 8y agoEh, no. GoodReads is more about connecting to your existing friends and sharing books between each other, not really designed for you to meet new people based off of your shared interest in books. But as for the comment above yours, that is Goodreads. It doesn't sell the books, but is a central place to discuss books. Unlike Amazon.com comments, you don't need to verify anything to be able to comment on a book. And lastly, it's kind of difficult to say that it's an independent source of reviews, considering that Amazon purchased GoodReads back in 2013, GoodReads offers Amazon-only discounts, and Amazon is always the preferred seller (while the rest of the sellers are hidden behind a dropdown).
- lukka5 8y agoI think you have groups on Goodreads that are intended for discussing a specific topic, book, or author's books. But I agree in that it's not really designed for meeting new people.
- BeetleB 8y ago>I often wish I could connect with people who are reading or have read the same books as me LibraryThing has that feature, although the algorithm is not super smart. When I first created an account, I put in all the books I could remember that I had read. Then I clicked on the link to find other users most like me. The top one had a whole series of books that I had read and completely forgotten to add to my catalog. It was uncanny - I couldn't think of any heuristic - they were all mystery novels, and I had almost none in my collection.
- ada1981 8y agoThrowing an error!
- bgdkbtv 8y agoAwesome site, love the brutalist design! Edit: post to https://roastmy.site https://roastmy.site to get some design feedback if you like!
- amelius 8y agoThis is nice. But what I don't understand is why e.g. Google Scholar doesn't provide a service like this.
- stilley2 8y agoExcellent! May I suggest a tag for imaging research? And/or radiology?
- bocklund 8y agoOne piece of feedback I have is to be careful with tagging. What is physics to a biologist [1] is probably not physics to a physicist. If you want communities to build around this hub, then you need to be careful about flooding a small community with unrelated topics because a larger community is more active on the internet. This looks neat otherwise and I joined. [1] https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_predicting https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_pre...
- dogancan 8y agoGood point. I would say that as the community grows, there will be more and more tags and therefore specialization. Do you think it’s better to stick with broad tags like Physics or Genetics, rather than Synthetic Biology or Quantum Mechanics? I would say the latter would be much better.
- bocklund 8y agoSpecific tags are good to carve out communities as they really are in academia. I work in materials science, which there is a tag for, but I work in a super narrow slice of materials (it’s a broad field) and I imagine many others are the same. Even on a list of about 10 journals I keep RSS feeds for, I have a hit rate (of a paper I will read) if no better than 10%. And these are journals that I have already selected as “my flavor” of materials. Specific tags are bad in that they could harm discoverability. It would be neat if the tags could be hierarchical. E.g. a tag for quantum mechanics shows up in materials science and physics so that the discoverability is there from the general tags, but the narrow slices are available as a filter.
- cake_42 8y agoInteresting! My first thought went to fermats library, as that's doing something very (and quite well I think) but they don't have a voting system
- dogancan 8y agoYes, Fermat’s library is amazing. But I wanted have a community exactly like lobsters and HN. It’s super easy to read and post.
- nsedlet 8y agoReally great - I signed up. One useful feature might be for the index to show one-sentence blurbs about each paper (in addition to the title of the paper itself). Unless I'm reading papers very specific to my subfield, I need some context to know what I'm looking at & why it's important. Otherwise I fear that only articles with the most accessible titles (or disciplines whose titles tend to be most accessible) will be clicked, read & upvoted. I would hope that the nature of the type of people who read scientific papers is to avoid sensationalizing too much (like popular science journalism does).
- dogancan 8y agoThank you very much for the feedback. Do you think it has to be in the front page -under each link, perhaps?
- nsedlet 8y agoThat's what I was thinking - maybe something under the link. Could be optional as well. I'd been remembering how Marginal Revolution, which despite having a fairly educated/technical audience, still often writes its own link text when linking to papers: e.g. item #1 here https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/saturday-assorted-links-172.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/sa... But obviously that would have a big impact on UX for submitters and readers which I haven't thought through in detail!
- Pr3fix 8y agoCan't access your app. Looks like it has crashed. Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)
- dogancan 8y agoLooks good now
- mattmilten 8y agoThere is also https://paperhive.org/ https://paperhive.org/ which works really well with comments directly within the document.
- stilley2 8y agoAny particular reason for the 100 character title limit?
- MathematicalArt 8y agoThis site is a good idea, and the choice of tag-based navigation is great. As of now, your tags are mostly ad hoc and that will very quickly lead to a jumbled disaster. Already we are seeing people saying that their field's tag is not there. I strongly recommend that you implement and design a semantic, controlled vocabulary for the subjects in order to keep it from being and hoc. It would be pseudo-hierarchical, but not strictly so. For instance, Physics would include Classical and Modern and both of those would break down into things such as biophysics and quantum chemistry. The question is begged, "But if we put biophysics in the Physics category, it would not be in Biology unless biology were also to be included within Physics." To this, there are two follow-up statements. The first of which is that you could include Biology in Physics. The second of which is the more relevant point in that the beauty of semantic organization of information is that things can belong to multiple groups. Biophysics could be under biology and physics. One doesn't have to choose. This brings us to modifiers? For each of these, you could have, for instance, a "Quantitative", "Analytical", "Numerical", etc. variant of the discipline. Should you have tags for "Quantitative Physics", "Quantitative Biophysics", and "Quantitative Biology"? I argue, No. Instead, take advantage of semantic structuring of information and simply attach the "Quantitative" descriptor to articles having to use quantitative methods or categorizing themselves as the "Quantitative" variant of the discipline. The end result of this is that you can "build up" to disciplines that we know by using tags, but you aren't limiting yourself nor are you generating duplicate or excessive tags in the long run. A final question, Is the above overkill? I argue, No. If you are trying to be a hub to discuss any and all academic publications, then your site will eventually expand beyond its initial STEM focus to include the humanities, the arts, and so forth. You will be confronted with the task of trying to essentially categorize all knowledge. I argue that you should just plan for that from day one and take advantage of semantic structuring of information to not only allow discoverability of disciplines we know exist, but to eventually generate insights into combinations of disciplines of which we as a society have not yet conceived.