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" .
1.'Grad students' is a misnomer. I should've known better.
2.Ideally HN would've been the internet utopia that the intelligentsia turned to for respite and nourishment.
But if HN(algorithm+users) performs a filtering function on all the posts submitted, then it has evolved to consistently rank posts relating to web-based software development over anything else. Now this previous sentence is rather harsh. There are many wonderful articles on physics , social sciences , philosophy, history etc that are featured on a daily basis. But for each such article upvoted there are a multitude of github.io's .(Which,again is great. HN is after all for hackers and entrepreneurs). Every now and then though I come across a post linking to a blog that provides such delightful insight , a visualization of vectors , a new perspective on chemical analysis ,a novel line of questioning on the usefulness of reason and logic that I wonder if there is a multitude of such material 'out there' that I may be missing out on.
3.By grad student I meant anyone pursuing a rigorous(again dodgy semantics) scientific education(whether enrolled or on their own) while trying to fit the pieces(the various dependencies,if you will) together.
4.As for the whole possibility of creating such a site , I was merely checking(at least at the time of posting) if I was the only one that felt the necessity .
> fit the pieces(the various dependencies) together
Something that would work is a platform for writing review papers collaboratively. I'm imagining a review would be a mix of 30% original content (written in blog-post language) and 70% links to research articles. In the end, the results could be publishable as a review paper in a journal, or exported as an annotated bibliography (a .bib file, e.g. [1]).
Also crowd-sourced news seems to be the elusive puzzle that everyone seems to be trying to solve (what with facebook's new trending feature), but no one has quite figured out how .
It's a unique problem in that it is just as hard technically as it is socially.
I just started with the assumption that getting real-time quality news is the shining light at the end of the news tunnel.
Which seems like a reasonable assumption considering that every innovation/breakthrough in news/information industry has been heading in that general direction.
There are only 3 contexts by which news is relevant time(no one is interested in what happened years ago), location and category. Blogs have clearly favored category and applications like twitter have greatly reduced the time (although I believe twitter is not streamlined to get the most important news out quickest,different discussion). The only way to further reduce that time seems to be by truly democratizing news as in crowd-sourced news.
I'd say the Malaysian flight disappearing/crashing-into-the-ocean is 'important' news. Here it is of global relevance because of the catastrophic nature of the incident, but one could easily argue that a series of break-ins on your street is important as well ,albeit its relevance is local therefore its only important to the people of the locality.
I believe future news/social applications will have to harmoniously marry the global with the local. In all humble honesty I sorta envision these really cool applications that'll be aware of where we are and what we want and serve us relevant content.This idea is exciting to me because we don't have to wait for superior technology to build them.
Have you changed anything about your life in reaction to the MH370 news? Did hearing about a new theory, or possible new piece of floating debris, ever improve your day?
