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Show HN: I made Hacker News but for research papers
- aliqot 4y agoI really like the UI, very visually striking without too much whitespace, and without getting in the way.
- kashnote 4y agoAppreciate it!
- afandian 4y agoI know these are all arxiv.org so far, but if you want to include research papers beyond that plaform, can I encourage you to use DOIs for links? It'll make links persistent and easy to cross-reference with citations and other systems. I did a spot check of the 14 links you have so far all have DOIs. I'm happy to give advice! (I work at Crossref.org)
- pablomendes 4y agoHey @afandian, can I interview you about the tech stack you all used to build search at Crossref.org?
- afandian 4y agoAlways happy to share more details about how we build open scholarly infrastructure! Can do here, or reply with contact details.
- sitkack 4y agoI came here as well to recommend the DOI. So many nice things can be had by using this rather than your own IDs, it means that site now becomes a tool that composes with other tools.
- afandian 4y agoI'm always interested in hearing about less-than-mainstream uses of DOIs.
- sitkack 4y agoThe DOI is a natural foreign key, look at semantic scholar and the integrations that arxiv is doing in the bottom 1/3. You are generating your own IDs, so you won't compose with the rest of the ecosystem. Your keys mean nothing and given a handle to a paper, they can't reference your site.
- mteam88 4y agoNeed some users and your set!
- forgotpwd16 4y agoThe hardest part for any new site really.
- trehans 4y agoThis is cool! I suggest adding some more hints to indicate how important/relevant different papers are. Maybe some tags to classify papers in different fields, and number of citations or amount of discussions online as a metric of how big a paper is? (I know that's not a great metric but I think it's still better than seeing a bunch of papers and not knowing which ones are worth reading). You can also spark discussions. Seeing "0 comments" discourages anyone to look at the comments, but even having an AI-generated summary as a comment can be encouraging and spark discussions. Just a thought.
- riku_iki 4y agowhy would you create separate site and not subreddit where you can get way more traction from existing users?..
- eddsh1994 4y agoAn HN clone, not reddit. But one huge perk of not having a subreddit is you don't have the mass of users come from other subreddits where the standards of comments tend to be more copypasta troll-like than HN.
- afandian 4y agoThere's also the risk of not getting that halo effect and passing footfall. There was something similar a few years back, upvote.pub: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16273171 I don't know the reasons for it folding, but I imagine it was difficult to sustain.
- riku_iki 4y ago> users come from other subreddits where the standards of comments tend to be more copypasta troll-like than HN. I somehow didn't notice this on relevant subs (machinelearning, singularity, etc)
- joshmn 4y agoLooks great. I think if there's one thing this could benefit from it would be Genius-style comments and annotations. https://genius.com/Genius-how-to-annotate-and-edit-on-genius-annotated https://genius.com/Genius-how-to-annotate-and-edit-on-genius...
- afandian 4y agoTake a look at https://web.hypothes.is/ https://web.hypothes.is/
- eddsh1994 4y agoSweet! I signed up :) Hope to see it do well
- albertzeyer 4y agoThe problem is, there are way too much papers, even if you focus already to some domain, like deep learning. But this seems to be completely open to any topic? For machine learning, https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/ is currently a good place, or Twitter and following some of the authors you are interested in, or just set some Google Scholar alerts.
- MrLeap 4y agoHard disagree. If a user submits a paper, chances are it's because they're interested in it. I'm interested in this precisely because I might find myself reading about something in a topic I know nothing about that's interesting to somebody.
- eddsh1994 4y agoIt doesn't have to be every paper, just papers people find interesting. HN is even larger, it can be any subjects including papers but still survives.
- cobertos 4y agoIs that a problem though? HN covers a very broad spectrum yet it still functions. Keeping it broad by allowing any topic but raising the bar to require a peer reviewed paper might even decrease the velocity of conversation, allowing better quality conversation. That is, if the lower velocity can allow a community to form still
- ketozhang 4y agoIt works on HN for at least the reason that HN post titles are often relatable. The same can't be said about paper titles even if you're in the field.
- serial_dev 4y agoI actually enjoyed that the topics are broad. I studied physics, but worked as a software developer my whole life. The topics on the site are stuff that I was interested in at some point in my life: python, GRBs, code style, whatever GPT, thermodynamics and communication. I used to read papers but I don't anymore, and this site lets me keep discovering topics even if I'm not a scientist anymore. I don't need 25 posts a day on gamma ray bursts, I want one post a week and a fun discussion (which isn't there yet).
- chrisshroba 4y agoThis looks awesome! FYI You may have a bug where you treat unicode as ascii. Notice the " âpost-symbolicâ" here [1] [1] https://paperlist.io/paper/724614047 https://paperlist.io/paper/724614047
- kashnote 4y agoAh interesting. I'm using LaXeXML to translate LaTeX to HTML. Might be something up with that. Will take a look at it!
- teddyh 4y agoHN has a set restricted topic: “Anything that good hackers would find interesting.” (from the guidelines). But, for PaperList, are there people interested in research papers – i.e. any and all research papers? Or would it be appropriate to narrow the focus on some subfield, or perhaps on “groundbreaking papers”, “practical papers” or even “controversial papers”? That last one ought to get some traffic, at least.
- xrisk 4y agoa site I would be interested in is: “papers a hacker would be interested in” (aka papers you could nerdsnipe someone with) which is unfortunately not what this website seems to be.
- kashnote 4y agoThis is actually what I'm going for, which is why I described it as "Hacker New but for research papers." I think it'll definitely be possible with proper moderation
- rvbissell 4y agoThoughts: * Allow logged in users to add tags to submissions (maybe after reaching some karma threshold). Tags could either be a private feature, or a shared feature. * Allow filtering of all submissions by one or more tags * "Favorites" feature for logged in users
- Aromasin 4y agoI know someone else has said there's not too much whitespace, but I disagree. Comparing HN to this, I'm seeing 9 links per page compared to 26 for HN. Even Reddit fits 10 per page, and that's with thumbnails. It goes up to 18 with compact view. It needs much more content. Love the concept, but the UI leaves a lot to be desired in my eyes.
- username3 4y agoAre you using pure white? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34684761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34684761
- sideproject 4y agoRelated, but I created Scholars https://www.scholars.io https://www.scholars.io Where researchers and others interested can create "reading rooms" of papers and discuss. I have also been thinking about something similar to this where a list of papers that people are currently discussing is shown. This looks great too!
- amir734jj 4y agoIs there a way to see what other people are reading and if I could join/collaborate with them?
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- voidbound 4y agoLooks super clean! I'll definitely be trying to use this.
- danielecook 4y agoA few years ago I created upvote.pub (source code: https://github.com/danielecook/upvote.pub https://github.com/danielecook/upvote.pub) It never really caught on - but it was a fun project. I do hope something like this takes off. It was able to import publications using DOIs, PMIDs, PMCids, Arxiv, and Biorxiv.
- eternalban 4y agoI wanted to signup but then saw that email textbox.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoWhat you'll discover is that the moment this falls off the HN front page, your traffic goes to zero. You'll need to manually recruit users, every day, typically by going to wherever they are. Twitter is your friend here. DM everyone you can, and keep checking in with them to see if they're getting value out of it. My personal experience was that I showed up, was delighted to see so many relevant papers, but then lost interest due to zero discussion. That doesn't mean that it's not interesting. It is. But when you're making a social network, you're fighting a massive amount of inertia. The default case is for no one to come. Give us a reason to keep coming back, and we will. FWIW I speak from experience, having spent a few years running an HN clone that eventually tapered off. EDIT: Also, your upvote algorithm needs a bit of work. The most upvoted papers are currently hidden on the second page. And in fact, at this stage, pagination doesn't make a lot of sense -- just show all the submissions.
- kashnote 4y agoAll good points. To be honest, I hate Twitter so I don't know if I'll be trying to share it on there, but I agree that promoting discussions is the way to go. PS Fixed the voting algorithm (was using ASC instead of DESC). Probably needs more work but thanks for pointing it out!
- N3cr0ph4g1st 4y agololl if you're not willing to do whatever it takes to promote your site and get engagement it'll die. I also dislike Twitter, but it is the perfect place to promote this.
- JieJie 4y agoAn RSS feed would be helpful. That's how I follow Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com/rss).
- sillysaurusx 4y agoYeah, the reason people keep coming back to HN is that there are different stories every day. That's the heart of its success. If you want this to succeed, you can't rely on simply sorting by asc, nor can you rely on community upvotes to do the work for you. You'll need to manually place papers on the front page, just like HN does (in its semi-automated-but-human-driven way). And get ready for it being a slog. It's seriously soul-grinding to try to curate a collection of new things each day and see only a handful of people come. But you have to do it if you want to succeed long term; there's no other way. I was able to keep up with HN for about four months, before basically collapsing of exhaustion. Then traffic growth stopped, and never resumed.
- babbledabbler 4y agoThis is so cool. Simple concept, clean interface. Nice job. I hope it takes off.
- tchock23 4y agoSuggestion: if/when this expands to include life science papers add an ‘in mice’ tag. It’s frustrating to read amazing research paper titles only to find out it was done with mice.
- overview 4y agoFilter tags would be very helpful.
- rsfern 4y agoCool idea! One of the great things about HN is the high quality discussion. Maybe you can think of some ways to bootstrap that? Like ask submitters to leave a micro review saying why the result is cool or something they learned or some way they applied the work? Ideally not just repeating the abstract
- pictureofabear 4y agoWould like to see a tag showing the subject of the paper. Many of the titles are not very descriptive.
- forgotpwd16 4y agoWhy some papers have HTML representation and some not? Would expect the way it worked was if a link points to arxiv it'll automatically generate one.
- godmode2019 4y agoYou need to fake users to get the network effects to start. Use a LLM to generate comments maybe finetuned on HN When real people start showing up they will see comments and assume its not a wasteland. As real people come reduce the bot comments.
- olivierduval 4y agoNo search ? :-( Sorry, I won't use it: search is the only way to let your users discover the content that THEY ARE LOOKING FOR (and maybe to engage) instead of JUST CONSUMING content pushed by others or algorithm...
- aliqot 4y agoYou're on a site with no search
- rsfern 4y agoHN has a search bar at the bottom of the page
- aliqot 4y agowoah I stand corrected, my apologies
- rsfern 4y agoPersonally I didn’t find your tone really warrants an apology, and anyway the search feature is pretty unobtrusive :) Also for what it’s worth I kind of disagree with the top level poster, search can come later after there’s enough discussion to actually index.
- olivierduval 4y agoWell, I'll be happy to use it when some kind of search will be implemented (even google search!) The thing is: as mentionned in other comments, research papers may spread really different fields... so some kind of either search or category may help to find good content wrt specific knowledges.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoThat's cleverly worded. HN does not have search, however.
- eointierney 4y agoGreat idea but you should include every field of Science
- kaetemi 4y agoPull down to refresh is not working on mobile for some reason.
- honorious 4y agoI got out of academia, but I'd love to keep reading the new hot and influential papers to keep up with the research trends in the research communities I am interested in. So I like this idea! However, there are so many junk papers that the paper title itself is rarely useful. Too much context is lacking: where was it published? How strong is the conference / journal? When was it published? How many citations so far? What sub-sub-sub-field is it in?
- spencerchubb 4y agoThis website is promising. Here are some suggestions/questions. For some reason, I can't use the trackpad to navigate forward and backward. Did you disable this somehow? Just a minor annoyance. In your html-rendering, it would be nice to see an outline similar to the PDF renderer in Chrome. It is a very nice feature to quickly see the sections of a PDF or paper. Suggestion: Allow people to comment on a specific line in the paper, and include a link to that line. Good work!
- pablomendes 4y agoAre you planning to implement search and filter tags?
- Euphorbium 4y agoHow can I follow the feed? Rss or email news?
- xypage 4y agoI personally am a fan of using lobste.rs and filtering for pdf only [0], it's not *just* research papers but that is the lion's share of it. Plus they've already got a community so (to the people complaining about lack of discussion there) maybe check it out. [0]: https://lobste.rs/t/pdf https://lobste.rs/t/pdf
- nadermx 4y agoThere is horizontal scroll on mobile
- ianai 4y agoIs this meant for only CS/ML research? It’s a great idea either way! I look forward to keeping up with it.
- SanjayMehta 4y agoAny plans to add RSS?
- ploum 4y agoSame here. That’s how I follow HN. Would definitely follow paperlist if there was a RSS feed.
- cygnion 4y agoThis is really nice - the simplicity of the interface and ability to read papers without sacrificing the readability of math equations is awesome. Congrats on publishing it. Do you mind sharing how you convert from pdf to html (if at all)? I'm building a tool for reading, curating, and visualizing personal knowledge [1]. Apps like yours and others mentioned in this thread are nice ways to discover papers and address blind spots during literature reviews. [1] https://www.knowledgegarden.io https://www.knowledgegarden.io
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- boppo1 4y agoI went to sign up, but it doesn't work without an email. That's an important part of the HN experience.
- eimrine 4y agoPlease allow me to share my favorite paper: bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf Most of great papers I have read are located not on arXiv. And maybe consider to do the paperlist.io a torrent tracker because of availability issues of some papers over time like there is happening with links on Wikipedia pages.
- rldjbpin 4y agoam i alone in thinking that the people sifting through research papers are least likely to spend time sharing it with the crowd?
- qwerty456127 4y agoNice. I dream one day someoe would build HackerNews with tags so I could easily filter the news by subjects.
- tpoacher 4y agoHow do you intend to combat spam? My own immediate response was "great, I'd shove all my shittier papers on there", and I wouldn't even particularly consider myself a spammer for doing that. Let alone proper spam (i.e. non-papers)
- mkenny 4y agoI wonder if there might be a way to incorporate metrics like h-index, which I would think that many researchers themselves would be interested in. Perhaps something like that might detract from the posts standing for themselves, but I just thought I'd throw that out there if you find it might be useful. Great work though, seems like a great idea to me. I hope you can draw in a community around it successfully.
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- gHeadphone 4y agoI like the site, but because you only support arxiv, you are issuing out on lots of great research. You should consider supporting doi, i tried to load one of my papers (not on arxiv) and its rejected - now im sad!