

SciCombinator - scientific news aggregator and discussion - anu_gupta
http://bitwise.r12.railsrumble.com/

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petercooper
It's great to see something like this that doesn't just rip off HN, (old) Digg
or Reddit's design. A very fresh design. Given the scope of "science" though,
I suspect some way of filtering it would become a priority.

Loving the "about" page too. Great to see all of the different tech being
used. I hope other entries take a page out of this book (disclaimer: I'm a RR
judge.)

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gizmo686
I actually wish more people would rip off designs, instead of trying to look
different for its own sake. It would lead to much more uniformity, and when
people do make a new design for the sake of a new design (as apposed to
differentiating their site), it will stand out more.

Having said that, I also like the design of the page, however, the solid white
background comes across as a little bit to strong. After a few minute hacking
around with the background, #ECF2F5 seems to make the site a lot easier on the
eyes.

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w1ntermute
Looks great, just one comment: please don't use Disqus (or any other 3rd party
service) for comments, they suck.

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anusinha
Awesome project/website. The one thing I'm not terribly thrilled about is the
infinite scroll--it's nice to have coherent page 1, page 2, etc so that you
don't have to worry about scrolling down, clicking through a link, and then
coming back to just the top page.

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kgarten
unfortunately it's just pubmed ... so it's a life sciences and biomed
aggregator :( Not a science aggregator.

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rkda
I was excited until I tried to submit an article and it asked me for the
Pubmed ID. Science is bigger than Pubmed damnit. Titles mistleading :( Nice
site though. Can't argue with that.

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corporalagumbo
Nice name, great idea. I hope this takes off.

I notice that the ranking mechanism is automatic according to the altmetric
score. Are you planning on integrating HN style upvoting, and potentially
alternate filtered lists for most upvoted (similar to HN's front page)? I
suppose the problem with that is that scientific publishing moves at a much
slower pace than the sort of content HN deals in.

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dazoakley
Thanks for the comments. :)

Yep, the ranking mechanism is based mostly off of altmetrics, but we also
modify the score based on the number of clicks through to the article, or the
discuss* page and the age of the article (similar to the HN decay algorithm),
plus a few other things.

* so this sort of does the upvote thing, but in a more subtle way - having the filtered list sounds like a great idea though!

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kmfrk
I'd love to be able to filter articles behind a paywall. It'd probably be a
good way to make people sign up for the sign, too.

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mvts
The font isn't rendered well in FF 16. Other than that, it's a pretty
interesting project.

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clowder
Thanks for the heads up; I'm sure that there will be plenty of little things
pop up now we have finalized the entry. We'll take a look at it once the
judging is over.

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mkl
The site looks neat, but it's a bit hard to read here since the text is wider
than the window for most window widths (Chrome 22.0.1229.79, Kubuntu 12.04,
125% zoom - it fits at 100% but that's too small for my eyes).

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bendmorris
Given the name, I thought this was going to be some kind of new private
science funding source. Got my hopes up for a second. Cool idea, though, and I
love the design. This thing definitely needs "subreddits" for different
fields.

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tehwalrus
subreddits or filtering are a must, and I don't know what a pubmed score is -
is it more technically challenging to handle arbitrary doi.dx URLs? How about
support for ArXiv?

If the difficulty is gaining ranking for things, then I guess you just need
more users and a way to handle upvotes - let me know if you want me to
advertise it to all my grad student friends with institution subscriptions
inside all these paywalls. You'll have to support physics articles before
they'll care, of course...

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akcreek
I've been seeing a lot of sites lately that I like more on mobile than desktop
- this is one of them. I consider that to be a good thing BTW.

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bchar
Bonus points for a nice, mobile optimized, interface. Great site, thanks for
sharing.

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clowder
Cheers. Using boostrap's grid for layout meant that we got it (mostly) for
free.

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prezjordan
How on earth do the submissions have that score?

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mrstew
It's the Altmetric score I think.

[https://altmetric.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/83337...](https://altmetric.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/83337-how-
is-the-altmetric-score-calculated-)

Based on number of tweets, blog posts, news stories etc.

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clowder
That’s right. We also apply a HN style decay to the scores, along with a boost
for open content.

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simon_ivansek
Great idea! I love it!

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clowder
Cheers mate.

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Evbn
Is this your site? Please trim the blurbs to complete sentences. It is so
frustrating to have so many sentences cut off in

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dazoakley
You can expand the abstract by clicking on the ... at the end of the text.

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rcthompson
Yes, but it makes sense to put the ellipsis at a sentence end whenever
possible.

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clowder
The issue was that we wanted to limit the abstract to two lines on the
homepage. Limiting to one sentence meant that long sentences were taking up
more than that. So, we truncated based on word count.

We could have done something more complicated with checking sentence length
and then truncating etc. But, the Rumble is time limited & it wasn’t a
priority.

