Show HN: Paperkast

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17756242

by dogancan • 8 years ago

121 59 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.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• 8 years ago

Try resubmitting this as Show HN: Paperkast

It might get more attention

mrzool2• 8 years ago

Show HN is for the author of a project. How do you know he/she is the author of this thing?

mikeyouse• 8 years ago

The 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.

dang• 8 years ago

We've added that bit above. Thanks!

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Thanks guys!

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Thanks!

g5095• 8 years ago

is this opensource?

DoctorOetker• 8 years ago

not sure how many modifications were made but the About page states:

Paperkast.com built on lobste.rs open source news aggregator system.

seltzered_• 8 years ago

Funny, 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 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.

TACIXAT• 8 years ago

This 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.

dogancan15• 8 years ago

I 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.

toomim• 8 years ago

Wondeful! We need something like this. I hope it takes root.

themmes• 8 years ago

Signed 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

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Exactly, 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• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Maybe the abstract should automatically be fetched when posting and shown with whatever the poster wants to add?

Sreyanth• 8 years ago

Getting a controller exception.

    Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised:

    no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Should be OK now.

dmateos• 8 years ago

TypeError in Home#index

Showing /opt/lobsters/app/views/layouts/application.html.erb where line #85 raised:

no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Should be OK now.

bullfightonmars• 8 years ago

It 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• 8 years ago

I am still having similar issues: https://paperkast.com/feed

eterps• 8 years ago

I 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-functi... you get redirected to: https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta-sesta

Anyone else who is missing something like this?

andai• 8 years ago

I 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• 8 years ago

Eh, 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).

BeetleB2• 8 years 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.

weavie• 8 years ago

Me. It has been something on my todo list to develop for a little while now.

brennebeck• 8 years ago

Likewise. If you’re (or GP) interested in collaborating on this I would be open to further discussion and can be reached via the email in my profile.

pps• 8 years ago

On goodreads.com you can review book yourself and also discuss with other reviewers. There are also groups (https://www.goodreads.com/group) which works like forum.

BeetleB2• 8 years ago

I personally prefer LibraryThing. Goodreads has been very diluted, and there is a rather large amount of rating inflation there - the rating of a book is almost meaningless now.

ada19812• 8 years ago

Throwing an error!

bgdkbtv2• 8 years ago

Awesome site, love the brutalist design!

Edit: post to https://roastmy.site to get some design feedback if you like!

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Definitely. But in general, the design of news aggregator sites is pretty minimalist which is so important as you don't want any disruptions.

bgdkbtv2• 8 years ago

True, but you never know what your users think could be improved until you ask ;)

dave84• 8 years ago

I think it’s a Lobster installation, a copy of the old Joel on Software board.

dogancan15• 8 years ago

It is

amelius• 8 years ago

This is nice.

But what I don't understand is why e.g. Google Scholar doesn't provide a service like this.

stilley24• 8 years ago

Excellent! May I suggest a tag for imaging research? And/or radiology?

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Yes. Any user can suggest a tag by creating a post with ‘meta’ tag. And according to the comments from other members, it can be added.

stilley24• 8 years ago

Ah gotcha. Ok I'll do that then. Thanks

bocklund2• 8 years ago

One 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_pre...

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Good 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.

bocklund2• 8 years ago

Specific 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• 8 years ago

Interesting! 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

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Yes, Fermat’s library is amazing. But I wanted have a community exactly like lobsters and HN. It’s super easy to read and post.

nsedlet2• 8 years ago

Really 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).

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Thank you very much for the feedback. Do you think it has to be in the front page -under each link, perhaps?

nsedlet2• 8 years ago

That'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/sa...

But obviously that would have a big impact on UX for submitters and readers which I haven't thought through in detail!

Pr3fix• 8 years ago

Can't access your app. Looks like it has crashed.

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Looks good now

mattmilten• 8 years ago

There is also https://paperhive.org/ which works really well with comments directly within the document.

stilley24• 8 years ago

Any particular reason for the 100 character title limit?

dogancan15• 8 years ago

Fixed to 150 characters. Thank you man!

stilley24• 8 years ago

Thank you! I really hope this takes off.

Show HN: Paperkast

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