Show HN: Paperkast

[dogancan]

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?

[eterps]

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]

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.

[pps]

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.

[weavie]

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

[bocklund]

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...

[dogancan]

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.

[nsedlet]

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).

[dogancan]

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

[themmes]

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

[rplnt]

/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?

[dogancan]

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.

[mattmilten]

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

[bgdkbtv]

Awesome site, love the brutalist design!

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

[dogancan]

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

[dave84]

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

[cake_42]

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

[dogancan]

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.

[dmateos]

TypeError in Home#index

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

no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer

[dogancan]

Should be OK now.

[TACIXAT]

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.

[dogancan]

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.

[Sreyanth]

Getting a controller exception.

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

    no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer

[dogancan]

Should be OK now.

[toomim]

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

[Pr3fix]

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)

[dogancan]

Looks good now

[amelius]

This is nice.

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

[stilley2]

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

[dogancan]

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.

[stilley2]

Any particular reason for the 100 character title limit?

[dogancan]

Fixed to 150 characters. Thank you man!

[g5095]

is this opensource?

[DoctorOetker]

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

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

[ada1981]

Throwing an error!

[Phithagoras]

Try resubmitting this as Show HN: Paperkast

It might get more attention

[dang]

We've added that bit above. Thanks!

[dogancan]

Thanks!

[mrzool]

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