Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140922

Points: 659

# Comments: 230

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111451

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

(We obviously live in a more nuanced world than most social media interactions might make you think :P)

> On a lighter note, decades ago, in middle school, we had an exercise to summarize a book we read.

My first experience with plagiarism was in first grade, when we were told to write a book report about a subject during our library time. I diligently took my book on the musk ox and copied three pages word-for-word into my notebook as my report. I can't remember when or how we learned this wasn't "right", but I still think back on that and laugh.

I started getting that "I'm reading another AI-written blog post" feeling around 1/3 of the way through, but I don't consider myself super calibrated on this.

Pangram seems pretty confident it's AI (https://www.pangram.com/history/e9f6eb77-86f9-46d0-a6c1-e57c...). But I know these tools aren't perfect. I'd love to hear from the author what their process was in writing this piece!

Related question (I'm trying to work this out for myself):

If you believe using AI to write an email or blog post for you isn't okay, but using AI to write code for you is... what's the difference?

Right now my instinct is something like:

- Code can be verifiably correct (especially w/ good tests) so it's less of a purely-creative act than writing.

- But always, always double-check the tests!

- I still wouldn't submit a PR where I can't vouch for every line of code.

- AI-written documentation and specs are mostly still bad and should be looked down upon. But mostly because the quality, at least today, is poor. (Lots of duplication, lack of a clear understanding of the reader's intent and needs, no thoughtful curation, etc.)

- Be psychologically ready to update these priors as models change.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's thought more about this.

Instead of forwarding model-generated links to https://www.google.com/url?q=[URL], which serves the purpose of malware check and user-facing warning about linking to an external site, Gemini forwards links to https://www.google.com/search?q=[URL], which does... a Google search for the URL, which isn't helpful at all.

Example: https://gemini.google.com/share/3c45f1acdc17

NotebookLM by comparison, does the right thing: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/7078d629-4b35-4894-bb...

It's kind of impressive how long this obviously-broken link experience has been sitting in the Gemini app used by millions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8068255

Points: 104

# Comments: 38

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7495930

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

So any data shared by this policy WILL absolutely be tied to the traditional methods of scientific credit, via the linked journal article. To me, requiring that reasonable data is published and archived alongside scientific literature doesn't seem absurd at all.

> Journals try to enforce data sharing because they want to maintain their position as arbiters of academic affairs.

Is there any evidence behind this claim? PLOS seems to behave in exactly the opposite way. It's true that SOME journals use extreme selectivity or control over copyright to maintain their position as arbiters of science. But PLOS, whose largest journal PLOS One is both open access and makes no judgment on the impact of the science it publishes, seems to be actively reducing the amount of control it exerts over academic activities.

My experience (in genomics / evolutionary genetics) was overwhelmingly positive, with huge amounts of collaboration all around. Scientists did try to publish at the highest-impact journal because they care about their career prospects, and there were often competitive labs racing to the finish line with a breakthrough publication.

But I never saw researchers withhold important details in order to accelerate their own publication or to hamper the efforts of others. By and large, I saw huge teams collaborating on large projects with a deep sense of purpose to move the field forward and improve understanding.

In fact research funding in genomics became so collaborative — with increasing portions of the research budget being put towards huge consortium-based projects — that smaller labs began criticizing funding agencies because their smaller projects weren't being funded. These projects are typically more competitive and higher risk, yielding potentially high-impact articles with a far smaller number of authors.

What's the answer in the end? As with many things, it's balance. Cooperation is great, but to a fault. Sometimes having small labs working in relative isolation, even competing against other small labs, can yield great innovation and progress. Other times you need a huge collaborative effort to do something big, expensive and important for the future of the field.

Let's say you release your project to GitHub & figshare and now have a DOI in hand. What are you supposed to do with it? Do you ask your users to cite this DOI if they use your software? If so, what text should accompany the citation? How do you track citations to your code? Will they show up in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science?

And what if the journal one of your users is submitting to doesn't accept figshare / github citations? It's unfortunate but true that many publishers disallow citations to unpublished / non-academic works. This is why many scientific software projects have resorted to publishing papers on their software — it's a hack to make a software project fit into the traditional social system of scientific credit.

DOIs are a technical glue that binds together the thousands of academic publishing outlets, but they do not solve the scientific or cultural issue of what is the minimum viable citable scientific product, and how those citations are generated, propagated, or valued.

Securing a DOI only solves a small slice of the problem of scientific credit — a point most colorfully expressed by this blog post from CrossRef, the largest DOI registrar for academic work: http://crosstech.crossref.org/2013/09/dois-unambiguously-and...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7339613

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH funding, the author mentions that he left academia to co-found a startup making software for life scientists.

Wait a minute — don't small software startups have equally poor success rates? (e.g. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...)

If uncertainty of success was his major concern, hasn't the author chosen a pretty poor next step in life?

On a related note, recently at http://paperpile.com/ we've been thinking about ways to help our users connect their reference manager with web-based writing environments like ShareLaTeX. We've had some ideas about how to do this simply and cleanly, but I suppose now we could show you guys (via pull request) rather than tell now. :-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7240904

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

You could make the argument that the variety of use cases is limited: all of the above are fairly simple "click a button to save somewhere" apps, and they don't do too much fancy integration beyond laying an iframe with their save dialog onto the page.

Our own academic-focused extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/paperpile-extensio...) is a bit more niche, but does some cool stuff: we use the background page to parse metadata from PDFs, content scripts to insert buttons into academic search results (Buffer does something similar for Twitter), and it plugs into Google Docs to provide an extra layer of UI.

But alas, the most useful thing our extension does is similar to Evernote/Pocket/Buffer: save a piece of content (in this case journal articles) for later.

I think the problem with doing cool extension stuff is that it's often really hard to get just right: you need to tread carefully when working on a system that could interfere with your user's most basic browsing experience!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7136778

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

However, even if intra-company sharing is discouraged / disallowed, it is still common for job-seekers to know what salary they could expect based on their skill level, other offers of employment, sites like glassdoor, etc.

Perhaps more accurately, you might say journal subscription NDAs are like the only employer in the world threatening to fire you if you ever posted your salary to glassdoor or shared it with a friend who's just starting his career what he might expect to make.

It's no wonder why Elsevier draws such ire from the librarian community... an analogy would be if a company legally disallowed its employees from discussing their salaries with anyone, in order to reduce the information available when any other employee negotiates a salary or raise.

And even though David Tempest argues that the main reason for these clauses is to maintain price differentiation between countries, I'd guess that this policy is equally designed to convince small but well-funded US research institutes to keep their non-discount subscriptions, while giving relatively steep discounts to large accounts like the UC system that have negotiating power due to their size.

Fundamentally, the ecosystem of subscription journals is full of non-market dynamics and requires extensive legal management (think NDAs, copyright transfer agreements, DMCA takedowns and copyright infringement enforcement). On the other hand, the rise of Open Access journals has produced a healthy competitive market, where authors can choose where to publish based on a variety of factors including cost, quality of peer review, user-friendly submission tools, and prestige of the journal brand. Plus, copyright is largely a non-issue for open access: authors keep their copyright and there's no cost to the publisher for enforcing against infringement.

I think the more market-driven nature of OA, plus the obvious desire to have publicly-funded research be publicly available, will compound its growth and cause it to eventually overtake the subscription journal model.

What's more interesting to me is that ResearchGate, a site which is virtually identical to Academia.edu in its "mission" and design, has been redistributing a shockingly large number of Elsevier PDFs for a long time. Unless these google searches are misleading, there seem to be many thousands of them:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filety...

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:researchgate.net+filety...

I'm really stumped as to how ResearchGate gets away with this, but Academia.edu is getting hit with DMCA takedowns. Maybe Elsevier and other publishers haven't yet learned to reliably "find" ResearchGate's shared papers, or perhaps they've come up with some arrangement that allows them to publicly share thousands of paywalled PDFs with impunity?

It's tuned more specifically towards academic work than Evernote, but the Drive sync is quite simple and robust.

(Disclaimer: I co-develop Paperpile, a web-based reference manager)