
A Hacker News for grad students? - dcy
I love hacker news. The community . The unsaid agreement to uphold all that is clever and awesome. The shared intelligence of a stimulating community. But I often find myself wishing for a little more (Is there no limit to human desire).
Don&#x27;t get me wrong I&#x27;ve learned more here than anywhere else. But the relentless noise of software often drowns out interesting posts in math, physics and applied sciences . Maybe someplace where grad students and their ilk may share their experiments , thoughts , thought-experiments and engage in futile discussions on the definition of &#x27;insight&#x27; in mathematics .
Comment below with your thoughts.
======
j2kun
I am the author of a blog called Math Intersect Programming (and a graduate
student in CS theory), and I also would like such a community.

I'm not happy with datatau because I feel it's too focused on basic software
tutorials. I'm not happy with any of the subreddits I've looked at; I think a
large part of it is just that by being part of reddit the quality of
discussion is pulled down.

In more generality, I feel that people who want to engage in scientific
discourse at the graduate student level (I'm thinking of mathematics, physics,
and computer science) don't have enough tools to do this. There are
conferences, which are typically stuck in one field; and blogs by researchers,
which are great but often do too much conference/workshop/program advertising
for my taste. Most web spaces like reddit are too elementary (how many posts
do I read there about picture proofs of sums of squares!). I think the
subcommunity of HN users interested in mathematics, and the kinds of posts
that end up on HN, shows that there is real interest. I even know of
mathematics/CS researchers who keep an eye on HN because of the promptness of
dissemination and quality of discussion.

All this being said, I would be very willing to help run such a community,
getting it off the ground with interesting submissions and such. Right now the
closest thing I have is a Google Plus community I've formed around my blog
[1]. But again, very few people beside me post things that I consider up to my
standards.

[1]: plus.google.com/communities/101551468332631556735

~~~
chaoxu
Also a graduate student in cs theory and was a BSMer(huh, I realized I
attended your midwest theory day talk)

There is a facebook group, computer science real talk.
[https://www.facebook.com/groups/500102603385910/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/500102603385910/)
Things in there are interesting to grad students. It seems to start as a place
for cornell cs graduate students. There are people talking about STOC papers
in there, neat.

~~~
hoonose
Thanks for sharing! I founded the group since I was fed up with the Computer
Science Facebook group for Cornell -- while there was occasionally interesting
CS content, it was flooded by a lot of stuff that's either no longer
interesting to me (a lot of it is Cornell undergraduate centric, while I'm now
a graduate student at MIT), or just meme/jokish in nature. My goal was to make
a group with interesting, thought-provoking content and better quality
discussion. If this appeals to you, feel free to join and contribute.

------
EvanMiller
I would also like to see such a community.

I've found it somewhat in the Julia community, which tends to lean heavily
towards scientific computing and has a lot of Ph.D.s, grad students, and Ph.D.
dropouts. We just had JuliaCon last week, and the talks tended to be first
about a problem domain (statistical modeling, optimization, natural language
processing, finite element methods...) and secondarily about Julia. I loved
it.

If you're in the Chicago area, I'd encourage you to drop by our Julia Meetup
group, which has a similar format. Previous talks have been about solving
problems in climate modeling, machine learning, and molecular dynamics, and
I'm trying to line up talks later this summer about machine learning in
psychology and MLE modeling of longitudinal econometric data. (All using
Julia, of course.) The group is small, but the quality of discussion is very
high. Join the group and you'll get an email when the next meeting is added to
the calendar:

[http://www.meetup.com/JuliaChicago/](http://www.meetup.com/JuliaChicago/)

------
sktrdie
I find Academia.StackExchanage [1] and the entire StackExchange ecosystem [2]
quite awesome for learning, teaching and simply discussing about anything
related to specific communities.

For anything else there's always Mailing Lists (ML). What I've learned over
the years is that it doesn't really matter which technology or which format is
used to have a discussion online (IRC, Mailing Lists, Reddit/HN sites). What
matters is the community and the people behind it.

For example on IRC, specifically freenode, there's tons of channels with
tremendous quality of discourse because of the moderators being able to keep
the quality that way.

If you're looking for discourse about Math, try #math on freenode and signup
to math.stackexchange and see which mailing lists exist out there. Perhaps
even look into Math academic journals out there and see whether there are
mailing lists to start discussing things.

1\. [http://academia.stackexchange.com/](http://academia.stackexchange.com/)

2\. [http://stackexchange.com/sites](http://stackexchange.com/sites)

~~~
j2kun
This is a good point. I have found cstheory.stackexchange and
math.stackexchange a good place to field questions of mine (with the latter
mostly being for stupid questions that I should already know the answer to).

That being said, the stackexchange community was designed for the purpose of
quashing discussion, especially that which doesn't directly address the
question at hand, even if those discussions are productive and insightful.

------
DanAndersen
I don't really know of any spaces like that (and as a CS PhD student I would
enjoy something like HN for grad students), but just to latch onto this
general post -- does anyone have links to good Hacker-News-like sites for
various topics? There's a lot I like about HN but the whole startup scene and
"yet-another-web-framework.js" is less relevant to me.

~~~
Curmudgel
You'll probably like Lambda The Ultimate. It's a Programming Languages weblog
with discussions and forums, but their traffic and updates are miniscule in
comparison to news.ycombinator. If you're a busy PhD student, that's probably
not a bad thing.

[http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/](http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/)

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seltzered_
I'm trying to start such a thing with a post-grad friend with
[http://www.journaltalk.org](http://www.journaltalk.org). It's currently a
clone of lobste.rs (an hn clone with web-of-trust invite), but we want to
start a community where people talk about articles and they'll be tagged by
journal, similar to 'journal clubs' grad students and phd's have. If you email
me@vivekgani.com I'll give you an invite.

EDIT: just noticed the servers down right now, eek! I'll look into it later
tonight. we also keep source (again, essentially just a lobste.rs fork for
now) at
[https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk](https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk)

~~~
jcurbo
Sounds interesting! I like the idea of organizing it by paper/journal/article.
It could be an online version of a Papers We Love meetup.

------
abdullahkhalids
Of all the possible HN alternates that have been proposed, this one is
probably the one that makes sense. I don't think there is any alternate at the
moment. I have a couple of thoughts and queries.

1\. You put grad students in the title. But you only mention natural sciences
and mathematics in the text. What about social science? What about the
humanities? I am a physicist but I would personally like to know about
progress on major problems in all academic fields. If you limit yourself to
only some disciplines how will draw the line and why? HN has the line
"interesting to hackers", which makes it very very broad. It relies on
undemocratic voting, and occasionally moderation, to separate the good from
the bad.

2\. The reason the quality of arguments at HN is relatively high, is primarily
the software behind the HN scores system. It very effectively kills of many
techniques that are used by people to raise their scores. Arguably, getting on
HN front page is directly correlated to the visits/money you get, while on an
academic forum people will only care for egoistical reasons. The problem will
be less, but it will still exist. If the community takes on and starts to
grow, it will need access to the HN points software which is not public at the
moment as far as I know.

3\. Discussion surrounding links to papers, news articles or essays are
generally serious and 'valuable'. This is what HN does primarily. You are
proposing a forum where people can talk about their own thoughts and ideas.
There are many such internet forums for this purpose. Most of them degenerate
into homework problem threads and how to get into grad school questions. Why?
Because what you thought over breakfast this morning is usually not brilliant
enough, while a paper/essay/news has had many hours of professional thought
behind it.

4\. It might be possible to piggyback over HN. Any link on HN relating to grad
students can be manually resubmitted on the community website. The discussion
happens on HN. The community website only serves as a curated list. This will
solve the problem of drowning in the noise of software. Of course, the
limitation will be that all posts submitted will have to conform to the
"interest to hackers" criteria.

~~~
Mz
_The reason the quality of arguments at HN is relatively high, is primarily
the software behind the HN scores system._

This observation drastically undervalues the fact that this is a business
space and part of the business model for Y Combinator, so for some people,
participation here is significant to their career and potentially worth
millions of dollars. It cuts way back on the assholery. Plus, since it is part
of a business model, the forum owners work pretty hard on the social piece.
There is, no doubt, still room for improvement but my experience has been that
forums that are part of a business model are generally dramatically better
than those run for free by idealists who frequently get really crabby about
being underappreciated, the forum turning into too much work, etc.

~~~
001sky
It'm not sure its the business model, but that it is attached to an enourmous
pile of assets/cash. That might be parsing your comment a bit, but the
distinction is both relevant and important if you are trying to replicate it.

~~~
Mz
There are other business models that work (like MetaFilter -- very different
model but still a business). HN is part of the Y Combinator business model in
that you must have (last I checked) a Hacker News handle to fill out the
application for Y Combinator. Every founder has to have their own handle. So
it is a funnel and things you say here are kind of de facto part of the
application. Thus, being a jackass here on a routine basis can hurt your
chances of getting in. For other people, who have no plans to apply to Y
Combinator, there is still, yes, a lot of money of the table for many people.
Also, because it is part of their business model, they now have a full time
paid moderator, something boards done out of the goodness' of someone's heart
cannot afford. The difference in quality shows.

~~~
j2kun
I think a good thing to hope for in starting the proposed community would be
that enough researchers and graduate students pay attention that being a
jackass could affect your academic career in similar ways (less likely to get
a postdoc or grant, etc., if someone on the committee knows your reputation).

------
imurray
Someone did briefly run an "Academic Hacker News" about 5 years ago (on HN's
arc software).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506064)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20100107015442/http://hnacademic....](http://web.archive.org/web/20100107015442/http://hnacademic.com:40106/)

[http://web.archive.org/web/20100929184746/http://www.cs.toro...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100929184746/http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ad/academic-
hacker-news.html)

~~~
j2kun
It looks like this page focused mostly on posting introductory textbooks, and
not so much on discourse. If you used this site when it was alive, did you
feel this was characteristic of the site? (and not just a particular snapshot
that happened to have the front page full of books)

~~~
imurray
The intention (3rd link) was for papers and discussion. There were probably
more comments in the first few days before interest fizzled. Gaining critical
mass is hard.

~~~
j2kun
I think a site organized around "links to papers" would have an even harder
time gaining critical mass because people find out about papers in so many
ways (word of mouth, conferences, blogs, arXiv), and the "best" ways to find
out about papers that you'd then devote a long time to reading usually need
serious motivation (great talk, met an author, know you need to learn a
technique) rather than a random link.

------
ihnorton
ResearchGate's Open Review [1] and PubPeer [2] have some of what you might
want. Both had excellent discussion/criticism about the acid-bath stem cell
paper a few months back, for example. However, at least for PubPeer, the
active papers seem to be mostly biomedical.

[1]
[http://www.researchgate.net/publication/259984904_Stimulus-t...](http://www.researchgate.net/publication/259984904_Stimulus-
triggered_fate_conversion_of_somatic_cells_into_pluripotency/reviews/103) [2]
[https://pubpeer.com/publications/F0CFE0360002C25DC0BEFE28987...](https://pubpeer.com/publications/F0CFE0360002C25DC0BEFE28987D70)

------
dave809
I'd recommend LessWrong [1], It's an active community around discussing
rationality, AI, self improvement, and many more intellectually stimulating
topics.

[1] [http://lesswrong.com/](http://lesswrong.com/)

------
skadamat
DataTau is what I recommend. Even though there's a lot of posting of how to
learn basic data science and so forth, occasionally papers from ArXiv on
physics and math concepts show up. End of the day, the content that shows up
is a function of the community, which is small. Since it is small, it's not
difficult to influence the type of content posted. I guarantee you if you and
a few colleagues start posting more about research related topics, they will
surface well.

~~~
dcy
I agree. The site does seem a little one-dimensional but (assuming the
moderators are okay with it) I can see it grow into a "hacker news for grad
students" .

------
meritt
I'd try some specific subreddits such as
[http://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/](http://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/)
or [http://www.reddit.com/r/physics](http://www.reddit.com/r/physics) or
[http://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion)

------
sideproject
Hi dcy.

We're currently creating a small tool that helps people create online
communities. We are currently pitching it as "create your own hacker news" and
we'd love for you to try it out if you have some time.

bit.ly/1r2KPVR

There are some rough edges (of course) and we're still doing our private beta
at the moment, but if you sign up we would love to see how we can help!

------
turnersr
Check out Ask HN: What are some alternatives to HN? -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254884)

All the subreddits listed below were aggregated into
[http://www.reddit.com/user/Widdershiny/m/hackernews](http://www.reddit.com/user/Widdershiny/m/hackernews)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/REMath/](http://www.reddit.com/r/REMath/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/](http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/lowlevel/](http://www.reddit.com/r/lowlevel/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/vrd/](http://www.reddit.com/r/vrd/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/systems/](http://www.reddit.com/r/systems/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/math/](http://www.reddit.com/r/math/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/types/](http://www.reddit.com/r/types/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/dependent_types/](http://www.reddit.com/r/dependent_types/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Coq/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Coq/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/](http://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/](http://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/](http://www.reddit.com/r/fsharp/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/scala/](http://www.reddit.com/r/scala/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/](http://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/](http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/](http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofMath/](http://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofMath/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/](http://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofScience/](http://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofScience/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/](http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IPython/](http://www.reddit.com/r/IPython/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/](http://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Design/](http://www.reddit.com/r/Design/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/museum/](http://www.reddit.com/r/museum/)

------
Mz
I know of at least one PHD student who seems fond of this site:
[http://linkstothedamnpaper.org/](http://linkstothedamnpaper.org/)

On the about page, it describes itself as _an open discussion community
showcasing the best in freely-available biology research_.

------
bfwi
It's possible to create your own Hacker News/Reddit clone using Telescope
([http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/)), which is built on Meteor. Of course
the challenge will be to build the community that makes such a site useful.

------
coulomb
Try researchfields.com -- HN-like site dedicated to researchers and grad
students for discussing that sort of thing.

------
return0
I would suggest you take a look at
[http://sciboards.org](http://sciboards.org)

------
untilHellbanned
Onarbor, [https://onarbor.com](https://onarbor.com), is exactly this.

~~~
meldanpete22
Onarbor does have "Sites" that are representative of all the major grad
schools departments, e.g., Biology,
[https://onarbor.com/sites/biology](https://onarbor.com/sites/biology)

