
HN-like math research discussion for Ph.D.s - whunting
https://www.hessix.com
======
xamuel
Nice idea, +1 for LaTeX titles! But the registration system should be way more
open, you're discriminating against many math PhD's who are no longer in
academia.

I would have posted my paper there but I guess "@math.ohio-state.edu" isn't
elite enough so I'll post it here and probably get more traction than all the
papers on OP's entire site combined.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2869.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2869.pdf)
"Infinite graphs in systematic biology, with an application to the species
problem" (printed in Acta Biotheoretica). This paper is as fun as a barrel of
monkeys. Its results are mind-blowing even though the math is approachable. By
the time you finish the first section, you'll be thinking to yourself,
"Charles Darwin should have been a computer scientist!"

~~~
jtanderson
Wow, yeah. Came here to say the same. I could understand somewhat making a
distinction between emails that end in .edu and those who don't -- at least
during the early days -- but this system does seem excessive.

I do think the ideas in the paper are pretty cool! One question: have you
considered or attempted some sort of generative models based on this system?
You'd have to do some clever symbolic manipulations to deal with the
"infinities" that crop up, but it seems like it could be interesting.

~~~
sampo
> emails that end in .edu

Only universities in the United States have emails that end in .edu. Most of
the universities in the world have domain names that end with their respective
country code.

~~~
gpm
> _Only_ universities in the United States

Not strictly speaking true. Univeristy of Toronto (Canada) will give you a
toronto.edu email if you're a CS student (even undergrads) or faculty.

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mmmmpancakes
I don’t know how much discussion one hopes to generate by simply posting links
to recent arxiv pre-prints. Posters don’t even seem to be giving a reason for
posting them. It is very non-sequiter and unengaging. Honestly i would never
use this.

A better post format:

Title: not the title of the paper (which will almost always sound super
specific) but something more general

abstract: a brief description at a high level of the discussion the poster
hopes to generate, i.e. why.

Probably they should all be text posts with some ability to add an external
link.

Also, posting some blogs would probably fare better for general discussion
than just papers.

~~~
whunting
Sounds great. You can do that with a self post but it seems that arxiv url
with auto fetched titled is the path of less resistance so far, not optimal
for discussions, agreed. I'll probably change the submission format

~~~
mmmmpancakes
One thing that might be cool is to have extended discussions of some popular
MO posts.

~~~
whunting
What are the most popular MO posts you are thinking of? I might add a comment
on those posts to let people know that they can continue the conversation on
Hessix

------
v64
I've found MathOverflow [1] to be the best high-level math discussion forum
out there right now. Many prominent mathematicians are regular posters, and I
think the question-and-answer format suits mathematical discussion very well.

[1] [https://mathoverflow.net/](https://mathoverflow.net/)

~~~
mlurp
MO is definitely high level, but like all SO/SE, I've always found their
format to be really restricting. Not everything can be phrased as an objective
question. Sometimes the best stuff have come out of something like "I was
thinking about xyz, here are some things I noticed, thoughts?" I've even
had/seen actual questions closed on SO/SE sites closed because of reasons I
think are pretty silly.

It's also just not meant for discussions; if there are more than a couple
comment replies, they "move it to chat", which I've never used.

Specific forums or subreddits can often have good discussion, but often not as
much traffic.

~~~
hkol3
This is possibly why Jeff Atwood went off and made Discourse.

If the StackExchange sites provide an allied discussion forum where I can
specify what level of users I want posting on my thread that would be great.

Where level can be verified grad/phd in subject X or anyone who has more than
N accepted answers in subject X...

Come on CS folk make it happen.

Right now I have to wander around labs and conferences to find the right
people and have these discussions. A gigantic waste of time when most of these
folk hang out on MathOverflow but can't have these disccusions.

Most of the progress in science came through 2-3 people finding and
corresponding with each other. Here we are at a moment in time, where we don't
need to find just 2-3 people.

We can find ever single one whether they are sitting in Cambridge or Congo and
lay out a subject before them and yet we haven't got that to work right.

~~~
throwawaymath
_> We can find ever single one whether they are sitting in Cambridge or Congo
and lay out a subject before them and yet we haven't got that to work right._

I think if you asked most academics their opinion on this (in math/CS at
least), they'd tell you they think the system works fine. They don't really
have problems collaborating - their universities send them to conferences
where they meet people working in the same (narrow) subfield as them.

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no_math_phd
As I see, that you require a math phd address. Why do you think that only PhD
in math might contribute to the discussion? You are just making it impossible
for people with non standard background to participate. You are reinforcing
opinion widespread in academia that only people from the right background
could do any meaningful research.

~~~
whunting
I dont believe that. Its open for anyone to read, and for math PhDs to quickly
register. All other addresses are put on hold for manual check, not rejected.
Some people have requested to join in this thread and have received an account
without a PhD. Its not meant to be elitist at all, just focused on the quality
content (wherever it comes from)

~~~
elihu
In the "user guide" it says it's a platform for math/stats PhDs, and describes
a process for checking email addresses. It certainly gives the impression of
unwelcome to people who are neither PhDs nor currently enrolled in a PhD
program.

If you want people who don't have and aren't trying to obtain a PhD to
participate, I think you should say so explicitly.

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markkm
The research mathematics community on the internet is fairly small, and a lot
of them are over at MathOverflow, math.SE, and personal blogs. What does this
site offer that would lure people away from them?

~~~
nilkn
I imagine the main differentiator would be open-ended discussion that's not
necessarily trying to answer a well-defined question (or any question at all
for that matter). Stack Exchange and MathOverflow are both fairly bad at
supporting this at best and openly hostile towards it at worst.

~~~
philipov
None of the articles on the front page have even a single comment.

~~~
nilkn
That's a separate issue. The content here appears far too specialized and
restricted even for math PhDs (while I don't have a PhD, I do have an
extensive background in math and have published research).

------
usgroup
This feels a bit overly specialised, and the average article is hard. I’m sure
a maths researcher can handle it and all but it does seem rather taxing.

I think for something like HN to be broadly interesting it needs volume and
variety, because people’s interests are a long tail phenomena. I imagine that
is probably true for maths too.

~~~
mkl
> I’m sure a maths researcher can handle it

No, not at all. Each maths researcher will understand (and care about) only a
fraction of these. Maths research (like most subjects) is broken into highly
specialised subfields, and experts in one often cannot readily understand
research in others.

New research papers are the cutting edge of the field, pushing out the
boundary between known maths and unknown maths, and this boundary is huge.
Things there are understood by very few people, at first just those who
developed them, and the prerequisites for understanding any individual area of
new maths are substantial. Known maths is also huge, far too big for any one
person to understand it all.

Source: have maths PhD.

~~~
roenxi
Mathematics has a problem that also crops up on the fringes of programming; if
a genius creates something at the limits of their understanding it is
typically very hard to follow.

Academics as a whole doesn't really tackle the issue of taking knowledge and
bedding it down into digestible form. Individually a lot of people do great
work, but as a body they don't seem to see as that as their role. So far the
solution is to throw clever people at academic papers and assume they will
sort out something comprehensible as they go.

It always struck me as a very hard, very high-value problem. How do we measure
ease-of-learning in a systemic way? Can we cheaply and reliably rate one
explanation of a topic as superior to another of the same material?

~~~
usgroup
I think that you make some excellent points.

I think we need to stop conflating maths and abstraction with genius and
general intelligence: it's too important to be politicised. I also think we
should assume that any healthy adult can learn to do maths well by virtue of
nothing other than having a human brain. If the normal healthy adult does not
do maths well then that should be treated as a pedagogical problem rather than
a reason to stratify society.

I think that maths in many ways can be treated analogously to language, and I
think what we need to do is express maths in a way better suited for normal
human language faculties. I very much like the artificial language Lojban as
an architecture ingraining combinatorial and first-order logic into regular
self-expression. Imagine speaking Lojban your whole childhood and having this
rich vat of lived logical analogies to draw on when learning.

Effecting minds in this way and focusing on median improvements in the
functionality of the majority is in my opinion has many many times more
potential than any sort of elite screening or stratifying programme.

~~~
Retric
Better tools are also going to shift the frontier.

To use Neural Networks as a poor analogy. Given identical training data and
different random starting weights you end up with different end results. Thus,
even with identical potential at conception people would end up with different
strengths naturally.

Better training clearly shifts the median, but when you start talking about
populations of extreme outliers from a billon+ people that’s going to be
meaningful. Especially as differences compound over time.

Currently their is a trickledown effect where useful techniques end up
shifting the landscape. RSA encryption pushing little bits of what would
otherwise be abstract number theory into a few high school classrooms etc.

------
tasseff
I cannot register with my University of Michigan email. It states, "You are
not listed as a PhD candidate." What's the algorithm that determines if I'm a
Ph.D. candidate?

~~~
whunting
Matching a database of current PhD candidates among other things. This message
just puts the registration on hold temporarily, and you will be able to
register once manually verified

------
mazsa
Search is hidden behind registration wall AND I was not allowed to register
(without affiliation). You should open search or registration.

~~~
whunting
Agree on search, it is now open for non users. Affiliation is to avoid content
dilution. Any alternative ideas are welcome (and as you can see with search,
implemented)

~~~
hombre_fatal
> Affiliation is to avoid content dilution.

You don't any users, you have an incredibly tiny niche, and starting a new
forum these days is already ultra hard.

You should be working on getting users at all costs, not planning for the
glamorous problems you might have if your moonshot happens to land, like
having too many math novices cluttering up the high brow academic discussion.

lol, c'mon.

You need to understand that right now your forum is about as enticing as
installing vBulletin on localhost to talk to yourself, just without the
arxiv.org bot.

I started a large forum over a decade ago when it was easier. I spent almost a
year sockpuppeting with myself so the first users didn't arrive at an empty
forum. And that was in a popular forum-faring niche.

I look at your forum and you couldn't even be bothered to write a single
comment on launch day. What's the plan?

As for affiliation, make it optional. Affiliated users get a little icon next
to their username.

~~~
whunting
It's now open to everyone with an email account, PhD highlight is optional.
Thanks

------
bmc7505
You should check out ShortScience, which is (IMHO) a better format for
academic discussions:
[https://www.shortscience.org/](https://www.shortscience.org/)

------
nimish
Boy do I have to have a) Ph.D. b) academic email?

You'd be discriminating against everyone with a DPhil and not doing research
in a university ;)

I'm neither so I guess I shouldn't bother.

------
xorand
Who are you? I can't find any information about who made Hessix or who is
Hessix.

~~~
amelius
It seems the whois information is protected by "WhoisGuard (tm)". That service
seems to protect site owners against spammers, at the cost of taking away the
trust that visitors can have in a website.

~~~
xorand
"I just got the same email (I assume) and all the links look about as
suspicious as things come. I'd say to approach with caution at the very least"
[https://mathoverflow.net/questions/324400/thoughts-on-
hessix](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/324400/thoughts-on-hessix)

------
th0br0
What does sth like this need 'leaders' (i.e. rankings) for? Isn't it exactly
the lack of such rankings that makes HN so nice?

~~~
lainon
Actually, there's the same for HN -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

~~~
th0br0
Huh, TIL - thanks.

------
znpy
Cool, how is it implemented ? Did you customize the news app from the arc
repository or have you implemented it from scratch ?

~~~
whunting
PHP from total scratch, I'm actually thinking of open sourcing the project

~~~
explore
That would be great, thank you! Cf.
[https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters](https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters)

~~~
djsumdog
Haha, I was going to mention lobsters. I don't understand why everyone tries
to re-implement HN. I guess the interface is pretty minimalist, simplistic and
recognizable, but Lobster just has so many more useful features and is pretty
mature. I'd highly recommend it rather than try and reinvent the wheel.

------
contradictioned
What else is there? Is there an equivalent for CS research?

~~~
AlexanderDhoore
Lambda the ultimate? [http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-
ultimate.org/)

~~~
vinay427
Browsing the discussions and research papers sections of that site, it seems
great for programming languages. However, that's only a small fraction of CS
research.

------
angel_j
[https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.AP](https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.AP)
[https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.NT](https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.NT)
[https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.NA](https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.NA)
[https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.OC](https://www.hessix.com/?show=math.OC)

etc..

------
gus_massa
Does this support $\LaTeX$ code in the titles and comments?

~~~
whunting
Yes

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HNLurker2
Hn succeeded in spite of his CMS not because of it

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thebooktocome
How annoying.

Not all math doctorates have university e-mails.

------
stilley2
Reminds me of [https://paperkast.com](https://paperkast.com)

------
_emacsomancer_
I'm guessing it's also using Arc?

(It's too bad that it is limited only to people in Maths PhD programs.)

~~~
whunting
PHP, math or stats PhD. You can send an email to hsx at hessix dot com if you
want an account

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kevinventullo
I'm confused, it's meant only for current math PhD candidates? Also, the front
page has some numerical stuff about the goldbach conjecture from a chemist...

------
ksynwa
Does anyone know of a website like this but for economics?

~~~
0815test
econjobrumors.com is fairly well known, AIUI.

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phkahler
Why are all the links to math.XX sites? Did someone buy all those up?

~~~
i-am-what-i-am
That is the category. For example, math.GT is Graph Theory and math.NT is
Number Theory.

------
tejassanap
Does anyone know of a similar website for mechanical engineering?

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WhuzzupDomal
Interesting who have opened it. And does it have relation to HN.

~~~
whunting
No relation

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liamcardenas
I only use forums made by PhD computer scientists, sorry.

