
Show HN: Paperkast - dogancan
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paperkast.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paperkast.com</a><p>Hello everybody,<p>I just wanted to share a link aggregator website: paperkast.com. It&#x27;s a article sharing and discussion hub.<p>It&#x27;s opened recently. I think it was a need for the academia. I don&#x27;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&#x27;s all over the place. Seperately, we know that the link aggregation style has a good reputation. It&#x27;s a good stimulation for discussion.<p>What do you think of it?
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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...](https://pragprog.com/book/swdddf/domain-modeling-made-functional)
you get redirected to: [https://forums.pragprog.com/fosta-
sesta](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.

~~~
r3bl
Eh, no. GoodReads is more about connecting to your _existing_ friends and
sharing books between each other, not really designed for you to meet new
people based off of your shared interest in books.

But as for the comment above yours, that is Goodreads. It doesn't sell the
books, but is a central place to discuss books. Unlike Amazon.com comments,
you don't need to verify anything to be able to comment on a book.

And lastly, it's kind of difficult to say that it's an independent source of
reviews, considering that Amazon purchased GoodReads back in 2013, GoodReads
offers Amazon-only discounts, and Amazon is always the preferred seller (while
the rest of the sellers are hidden behind a dropdown).

~~~
lukka5
I think you have groups on Goodreads that are intended for discussing a
specific topic, book, or author's books. But I agree in that it's not really
designed for meeting new people.

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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...](https://paperkast.com/s/mbiq74/maximum_entropy_model_for_predicting)

~~~
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.

~~~
bocklund
Specific tags are good to carve out communities as they really are in
academia.

I work in materials science, which there is a tag for, but I work in a super
narrow slice of materials (it’s a broad field) and I imagine many others are
the same. Even on a list of about 10 journals I keep RSS feeds for, I have a
hit rate (of a paper I will read) if no better than 10%. And these are
journals that I have already selected as “my flavor” of materials.

Specific tags are bad in that they could harm discoverability. It would be
neat if the tags could be hierarchical. E.g. a tag for quantum mechanics shows
up in materials science and physics so that the discoverability is there from
the general tags, but the narrow slices are available as a filter.

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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?

~~~
nsedlet
That's what I was thinking - maybe something under the link. Could be optional
as well.

I'd been remembering how Marginal Revolution, which despite having a fairly
educated/technical audience, still often writes its own link text when linking
to papers: e.g. item #1 here
[https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/sa...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/saturday-
assorted-links-172.html)

But obviously that would have a big impact on UX for submitters and readers
which I haven't thought through in detail!

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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?

~~~
fredsir
Maybe the abstract should automatically be fetched when posting and shown with
whatever the poster wants to add?

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mattmilten
There is also [https://paperhive.org/](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](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.

~~~
bgdkbtv
True, but you never know what your users think could be improved until you ask
;)

~~~
dogancan
Exactly

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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.

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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.

~~~
moredhel
I am still having similar issues:
[https://paperkast.com/feed](https://paperkast.com/feed)

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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.

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

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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.

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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
Ah gotcha. Ok I'll do that then. Thanks

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stilley2
Any particular reason for the 100 character title limit?

~~~
dogancan
Fixed to 150 characters. Thank you man!

~~~
stilley2
Thank you! I really hope this takes off.

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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.

~~~
seltzered_
Funny, years ago a friend and I were trying to make something exactly along
lines of lobste.rs but for scientific papers.
[https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk](https://github.com/seltzered/journaltalk)
was as far as I got.

Didn't get very far due lack of motivation and other parallel projects, but
it's been neat to see things like this (and fermat's library, and peerpub,
etc.) spring up over the years.

~~~
ivthreadp110
I know how you feel- It's always rewarding when you worked on something but
never finished it- you knew it was a good idea when doing it-- then years
later someone else does something very similar. No anger from it, not like
they stole your idea- it just validates that your original idea was so good
that it was just a matter of time until someone else did it. Makes me feel all
warm and fuzzy.

~~~
ada1981
I have this happen all the time, but often I have the opposite experience and
feel like I failed, lacked focus, missed an opportunity.

Basically like getting punched in the gut.

Not sure if that is good because it keeps me motivated to ship, or if your
perspective / wiring is better.

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ada1981
Throwing an error!

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Phithagoras
Try resubmitting this as Show HN: Paperkast

It might get more attention

~~~
dang
We've added that bit above. Thanks!

~~~
dogancan
Thanks guys!

