Show HN: HackerNews but for research papers

I have a feeling that the tree structure of comments in which most of the discussion usually takes place under the first few most upvoted comments might not be the best to have scientific discourse, but also don't know what would be better.

On the other hand, papers/journals themselves could be seen as a ultra-high latency social network in which replies happen in the form of papers that reference the work they're replying to.

The high latency could be seen as a feature. The ability to post a reply instantly and without much thought definitely degrades quality.

I think the ideal future for science publication would be something like:

- some database like arXiv for most all the results, obviously mirrored a few places

- multiple frontends like this!

- no more journals: replace journal review with an endorsement from a similar organization, on the arXiv (or similar) page

Thanks for taking one of the required steps to making this possible!

I love the idea and simplicity, thank you for sharing!

Small bit of feedback: would it be possible to make the UI a bit more mobile friendly? Or, alternatively, is there an API that others could use to build different interfaces?

Again, this is a Thing That Should Exist, so thank you for bringing it into the world.

Biochemistry subject seems to be missing

Edit: law, taxes, accounting, physics, astronomy, communications, zoology, weather just to name a few more topics

I'm a career scientist and here's why I suspect this won't take off:

(1) A lot of research is trash and not reproducible. Over the last 5 years I've found it's usually not even worth my time to read half the papers I read unless its in Nature or a top journal. Even then the ROI is minimal.

(2) It takes quite a bit of knowledge to appreciate and read a paper. In grad school, it took 4-6 hours of work to go through a paper. Do I really want to have a discussion on the 10,000 ft view of a paper? Probably not. Do I want to spend 4-6 hours really appreciating the nuances of a valid paper? Probably not.

(3) As alluded to by (1) and (2), most researchers (at least in my anecdotal experience) are spread so incredibly thin, as someone who would want to provide insight on some incredibly niche topic, I am already overbooked for my time between work and outside responsibilities.

I think you're going to find that the garden you're trying to grow doesn't have the adequate catalyst/buy-in. You might be better off creating a version where the paper is summarized by a GPT model and that 10,000 ft summary is discussed by the general public.

I suggest to implement LaTeX math in comments if you want to support math-heavy fields. Plain text comments make certain ideas almost impossible to express.

If you had watched me use this over my shoulder for a minute, this is what you would see:

I went to the page, scanned the list to find something that has comments, but everything is listed as "0 Comments". I clicked on "Comments" for the AGI paper, but nothing happens -- it's not a link. There's no "Discuss" link. On HN clicking on the paper title opens the upstream link, not comments, but on your site I discovered that it opens the discussion page. Once there at https://www.papertalk.xyz/papers/2404.10731v1, I noticed that there are in fact 3 comments, but the comments counter at the top still says "0". The comments are also just random gibberish.

I hope you iterate on this project and that it gets massive traction!

Hi, I created an account but could not login, for some reason. I'm on Brave and have some security settings on - maybe something related to that? Never had issues on other websites.

On another note, the mobile browser version could be better - the rows exceed the width of the screen.

But other than that, you've got something cool over here, I'll bookmark it :)

Huh. You know, I think HackerNews folks must approach literature searches and reading academic papers differently from the scholarly world at large. I can't think of any of my colleagues who would be looking for an algorithmically driven feed of papers to peruse. Usually we have specific questions we are trying to answer in research.

Just so you know, some campus networks block the .xyz domain. I can’t access this from my university WiFi.

.xyz ltds are blocked on some corporations for security proposes. I suggest a .com domain.

Is this not https://www.emergentmind.com/

?

Did you consider just running a Lemmy instance with perhaps different time decay parameters?

I like the concept. My feedback is to increase the color contrast. It's very difficult to read with the light gray text on light background. I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu.

You need people talking about the papers. Because they're so dense, I'd focus on just one specific niche topic, and get people versed in that subfield talking about it on there. And start with just 5 papers for people to talk about. Then once you get that going, slowly expand.

Well, this project still has massive shortcomings.. why not polish it a little bit more before posting ?

Cool! Have you considered tagging/sub-categorizing? That would be helpful to organize topics.

I’ve often seen papers have a list of keywords somewhere on the first page that could be helpful for indexing

Three thoughts.

1. If you could add a button that makes a search on Google Scholar for the paper so I could find its main publication and reference counter, that would be awesome.

2. I don't like being linked directly to the PDF; I would rather go to the Arkvix page and download from there.

3. What would the policy of publications be? Only open-access papers allowed? Are pre-prints okay, or just peer review? Could one post a paper published in IEEE, with an extra field for where the paper is publicly accessible?

mobile is non-functional: https://ibb.co/FByhmNb

rather than open pdf directly, it would be better to take me to the arXiv page, since i can do more there (like use semantic scholar to find related papers quickly)

i like the potential

Trying to create an account, says "Email rate limit exceeded".

Looks amazing. Thank you. I'd like to hear your opinions on moderation, if you have the opportunity.

Great idea!

Please let the text wrap. My phone is narrow and I want to read it. How it looks may not match your intent:

https://ibb.co/R0PCj16

How about Bio and Chem as well?

Sign in isn't working for me after confirming my email on both Chrome and Safari.

can people submit papers/links or is it curated by you/scraped by you?

I am glad to see more projects in the vein of helping people find research papers. I am delighted by the discourse of papers on HN. Indeed, the comments on research papers here can help me better understand something that's outside my field of expertise. But HN is not specifically for research. Thus, it feels like there is room for another space for people to come.

I like the idea of subcategories. Some notes on the experience:

  - When I load the page, it takes 1-2 seconds for papers to load. This doesn't feel great.
  - The grey colours in the list make the page hard to skim. I recommend a darker colour for the text.
  - The colour of the navigation links is too light. It is hard to see the links.
  - The information density is spot on. Amazing work!

I would make your website a daily destination if it had

-- ability for user to add/delete/modify the topic tabs. Let me define the topics of interest.

-- Algolia or similar search box at bottom like HN has

Oh hell yeah!

It can be hard to sift through the all the random papers on Arxiv or something, but I do try my best to keep up with current research. Obviously I don't have the time or ability to read every single paper (much as I wish I could!), but I do try and at least read the abstract, introduction, and conclusion to CS papers that are relevant to me, though the "relevant to me" part can be hard to figure out a lot of the time.

Having an "HN-like" experience for research papers could really help with that, I love the idea!

Out of curiosity, what did you build this in? Since I do think this has potential to get to HN-levels of success in the academic world, have you thought about scaling?

Would be nice to have the journal the paper is published in on the post.

This is a really cool idea! Is this open source?

I love love love this idea! The papers all look like they're from April? Any chance to get more recent stuff?

Would love to see non-stem on there, especially history where there is so much exciting stuff going on as many historians are stepping one foot into Archaeology. We are discovering so many amazing things right now.

Been looking for something like this for ages — great job!

Would be nice to see a category for electrical engineering. Things like digital/statistical signal processing, electronics, RF, etc. that don’t always fit into math/ CS.

Mobile comment view is messed up on Safari.

The top level view seems to leave a bit too much margins on mobile.

Love it. Theme is pretty but really hard to read! Please use more contrast.

Looks amazing!

UI Request: Make the font darker. That light font on a light background is extremely hard to read.

Why does the UI make it difficult to read the text?

I like this idea, but I think it would be even better if under every paper title there was a 100-word AI-generated abstract that states the bottom line.

When I saw Research Papers I expected a Health category, any chance?

I think you really want the papers posted to be driven by the users. But I understand why you might want an automated approach to bootstrap the site so that there is something there. If you're part of a small research community, it might be worth asking people to post articles they find interesting, and start by constraining it to that community (relevant clip of a paul graham interview: https://youtu.be/rCkCA1EaoVo?si=R6l9UNDjU0yR-fcL , which I think still applies even if this isn't meant to be a "startup")

I wonder if this is a good format though for discussing papers? - There are often lots of little sections of a paper to discuss in detail, and I think it's hard to do that with a linear format of comments controlled by up and down votes

I love the idea! But there is one little thing. I would love to see an easy and clean interface like HackerNews but using a Blue color instead. I think that would be awesome!

Is there an RSS feed I can subscribe to?

I like the idea! A few things I noted: 1) despite the paged UI, the API call /rest/v1/arxiv_papers?select=*&order=published.desc is downloading all 708 articles. You will find the UI more snappy if you do server-side paging. b) most of the javascript is cached, but not all of it, e.g., page-script.js

Tags would be great

Looks neat, is this a self-made thing or a project one could use to deploy a similar forum? I've been noodling on the idea of a HN style board for a non-tech audience that is older. I think the more primitive UI will resonate with the target demographic.

Yours looks too nice for my use case honestly :) Weird complement but I really do like how it looks, you did a good job.

This is really cool, I'd love to see this pull data from [1] HuggingFace, [2] Replicate Hype, and [3] GitHub.

[1] https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending

[2] https://hype.replicate.dev/

[3] https://github.com/trending

Needs a search for sure

Mobile view is broken

Looks interesting.

FYI. I tried signing up. Got: "Email rate limit exceeded"

I would like to search, either by keyword, paper title, venue, DOI, or author. (I was trying to see if any of my papers are on here.)

I usually look for research papers in well-known conferences. I think you can google the conferences for other fields, but some of them for Programming Languages are SPLASH, ECOOP, PLDI, ICFP. So if you want important new papers, those are the places to look.

Universities often have “seminar” classes and “reading groups” to discuss influential papers, which sometimes includes older ones as well. The discussions are a bit like what this site is trying to accomplish, albeit in-person. Unfortunately the seminars and reading groups themselves aren’t usually public, but some of their websites are (and some past websites are still up) and they post the list of papers.

For PL specifically you can find a lot of notable papers in the history of the r/ProgrammingLanguage subreddit, and there are lists you can google such as https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatW... and https://github.com/imteekay/programming-language-research?ta.... I also found https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love for more genera computer science papers.

Feedback: The UI on mobile could be improved. I find the website distracting as a whole. I seems like it was built for children. I think the colors are bad.

Great idea, thanks for doing this.

But - why is the most important information, the title, in such a light, hard to read, font? The title should stand out, not the comments count etc. See... Hackernews! :-)

Nice idea. I recommend defaulting to Top Rated. For better or worse, it makes the product look more mature.

Also, there's an issue with click propagation on the sort drop down. I had to click between Top Rated and back a few times because the click kept causing the underlying post to open. FWIW, this was on mobile.

Sign in doesn't show an error or log me in on mobile.

Sometimes HN feels like AI...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40440870

My most appreciated feature of HackerNews is that I can use it with JavaScript disabled. I know that I'm in the minority, but I also know several other colleagues and members on this site also browse without JS enabled (so while a minority, it's not just me).

Something to consider, especially when your site is just serving text / aggregating links.

This is great! I think your platform can become a new go-to place for keeping up with current research. I keep fingers crossed for you!

Recently I've built something similar [0], but I struggled at getting people on board after initial HN launch

[0] https://www.tldr-ai.org/

I wonder why there are no titles with LaTeX in them. There should be a lot of them in Physics.

Also, would love to be able to search for articles from the same site e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=papertalk.xyz

pubpeer.com integration?

Integration for pubpeer.com?

Chech and compare layouts on a phone (y vs yours), and fix it so linebreaking matches

Nice but "Error in sending confirmation mail" at registration

I wonder if we can ever recreate the success of hacker news.

Thanks so much everyone for the feedback, did not expect this to get so much support. I know there are a lot of bugs and usability issues, I'll try to fix all this stuff in the next week and post again.

I’m sorry but this website doesn’t work without JS.

I’m able to use almost every feature on HN without JS.

I had this idea for a while. Thanks for creating this. We need to have bio and chem categories asap.

Cool concept

OT: I used to see other HN-inspired forums for other topics. I remember once a data mining topic that showed up here. Can anyone here reading this share those forums as well.

Once this is functional and of there is even a small community, I’d visit!

+1 for tags / categories.

Pubpeer: https://pubpeer.com/

firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pubpeer/

Very interesting.

Login doesn't work. Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 400 ()

Check also the autocomplete field. Chrome populates the email field in the sign in page as the username.

It's very broad. Tough to build a community around something so broad.

I made something similar a few years ago (https://github.com/danielecook/upvote.pub) and it even hit the front of HN...but couldn't get enough traction. I hope yours sees more success.

I keep getting a "Email rate limit exceeded" when attempting to create an account so I can upvote and comment.

I like this idea

Maybe add separate AI section?

Great idea! Tried signing up and got `Email rate limit exceeded`.

Guessing this HN launch went well for you :)

I was thinking of creating something like this but centered around posting one’s intuitions on research, instead of the papers themselves (which are hard to read, even the list of titles are hard to parse). But researchers are afraid to say anything stupid and would prefer saying nothing at all.

It’s a hard problem but could be a good platform for research discussions considering none exists today. Best of luck.

This could easily be a new favorite thing; very cool!

The font is too light and difficult to read.

Could use something like the Lists page here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

Especially the Active, and Best Comments pages.

Also, would love biological fields in there. We bio/med people really don't have much as to message boards

Any friendly OSS Android app?