
Academic Hacker News - ambition
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/academic-hacker-news.html
======
wheels
Like the idea, but a few problems:

\- Sites that aren't super active yet for me _must_ have RSS. RSS is my
callback mechanism. There are probably only 10 sites that I visit on a routine
basis, but I subscribe to 45 (mostly low volume) RSS feeds. Alternative for me
these days is Twitter.

\- As others mentioned green color is bad. I can barely read the title.

\- "Academic" is too vague. Academic for what? Computer science? Any papers on
anything? Professor's union meeting write-ups? Specials in the U. Toronto
snack bar? Note: Current "Hacker News" ousted the previously more specific
name, "Startup News".

\- Is this different from <http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/> ?

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tlrobinson
A memorable domain name would be helpful too, even if it just redirects.

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ambition
hnacademic.com should start redirecting as soon as DNS propagates.

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pmjordan
Makes me wonder what's wrong with posting them here - I'd welcome some "great
tech papers" (as they put it) here.

~~~
antiform
I don't think I've ever seen an actual technical paper on the front page of
Hacker News. I remember trying to post some of my favorites when I first came
to HN, but people rarely responded to or upvoted them. Also, it's a lot more
work to read a technical paper than most forms of online writing, and I hope
that this new one has a much slower pace than Hacker News.

This is a good niche to try and fill. Thanks.

~~~
thepanister
You are right about papers. But someone has posted a paper from Stanford about
_Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests_ and I was so glad to see that.

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fgimenez
Half of me wants this to be successful because it's such a great idea. The
other half hopes it crashes and burns simply because I don't need another
hacker news to eat away my time.

~~~
ambition
I think it will be a slower site than HN because it takes longer to read full
papers than articles.

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henning
If you manage to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of building a community
site, let us know.

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ambition
Well, it's up, we'll see where it goes.

I don't actually know anything about building communities. Basically the plan
is to keep an open mind and keep learning.

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Dilpil
I like it.

Where can I find the chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics,
and physics versions?

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nsrivast
Since our interests overlap almost exactly (not a huge chemistry fan), I'd be
interested in putting together a subject-specific suite of versions.

~~~
anshulk
Would love such a site!

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emilam
This is an excellent idea, and I love the comments so far. It's great to see
how open the community is to the idea of others taking a great technology/idea
and applying it in new ways. I hope ideas from Academic Hacker News will be
able to flow back and influence the original hacker news.

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paulgb
Nice. I'll try to get some of my friends to check it out as well.

An about page would be nice, to know what kind of content will be accepted. CS
Papers only? Or all academic papers? Or anything of interest to CS people?

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ambition
Here's the about page:

<http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/academic-hacker-news.html>

You can see it by clicking on the (empty for now) favicon. I'll add a more
obvious link.

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workaround
I found a really cool domain that you might want to use. I couldn't reserve it
for various reasons.

I don't want to display it because otherwise a squatter might take it. If you
want to know what it is, look on your own site for the username SapphireSun
and check the email field. Email me and I'll tell you it.

Posting with this username to get around the noprocrast feature ;-). Normally
I wouldn't, but this might be a time sensitive issue now that you've
broadcasted your existence to the world.

~~~
workaround
Nevermind, I see the contact information. Feel free to downmod this into
oblivion.

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clay
This is a really good idea. Maybe this will generate a lot of public
discussion about some recent papers...

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johnswamps
Can you add an rss feed?

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ambition
It's built in to pg's source code. See
<http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/news/rss>

I also added a link.

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hhm
This is just fantastic, thank you!

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simianstyle
Invest in a favicon :-)

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TweedHeads
Turn the Y upside down, presto!

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thepanister
This is very nice... but please change the green color of the bar to any other
color, or change the color of the items in the menu... like make it white to
appear! About marketing... don't forget to tell your friends and every student
at your class about it and encourage them to join.

EDIT: I also advice you to check out this post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363> so you can know "what people want"..
and the features that should be added.

Try to be creative, and look at the link above, so you can get more ideas
about enhancing it.

~~~
ambition
Color changed to be lighter.

Thanks for the link. I plan to specialize the site features for papers as I
get ideas.

~~~
ewiethoff
Thanks, but #49960a is still too dark for me to read black against. I'm
sticking with my #6c6 hack for now.

