HN, but for Scientists?
Are there platforms/communities such as HN but mostly with scientists instead of CS/engineering people?
I'd also love an HN-like community for scientists.
The closest I know of is SciRate [1], where arXiv papers are posted. Users can then upvote and discuss them.
I don't feel it has reached critical mass, so it's still of limited appeal to me. Though I know some quantum computing researchers that use it, so maybe it's dependent on the field.
[1] https://scirate.com/
I’m a scientist on HN. It’s mostly fine here, but sometimes the articles on science can get a little cringey (armchair scientists proposing theories of quantum gravity in the comments, etc).
However, having seen the science community on Twitter, I don’t think a “HN for science” would be enjoyable.
I've written an AGPLv3 no-js link aggregator with tags in Django/sqlite3 which I self host at https://sic.pm but without an active user base. You can self host it for your own community however: https://github.com/epilys/sic
There are orders of magnitude more CS/engineering people than practicing scientists. And as an experimental physicist who does a lot of technical things, I probably have more in common with the people on HN than with biologists, for example.
Part of the reason HN works is, in my opinion, the fact that its demographic is already terminaly online. (Or at least terminaly at the terminal, lol.) It's also a larger demographic than scientists. But as others have said there are scientists on HN. I imagine a "science HN" would for the most part just be links to journals with comments? That could be interesting.
My personal recommendation is finding subreddits that are science centric, there’s r/physics r/chemistry r/science etc and I’ll bet my left but that any science subject you can think of has a corresponding subreddit you could subscribe to or browse.
There are a fair number of scientists on HN actually, obviously with a bias for more computationally-heavy fields.
If you had a specific (sub-)field of science that you were looking for, you might have better luck with your search.
I have considered launching something similar
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25853298
The problem is that bootstrapping takes significant effort without full time funding from a VC or institution. Most of the applied sciences are done right now on private/semi-private Slack groups.
HN is essentially for CS people. The number of non-CS engineering, even electrical/hardware engineering, discussions done here is abysmal.
There is Hackaday but that is more like a blog...
Would be awesome especially if people’s expertise or qualifications could be vetted by the community somehow…
Have you tried r/science and r/askscience? It's still reddit, but more scienc-y than most of the web, at least. Also if there are specific subfields of science you're interested in, the smaller subs tend to be higher quality too.
As a scientist on HN, I usually start scrolling from the bottom of threads to find those overlooked comments by domain experts. Then upvote them even if I’m not certain that they speak the truth. Maybe that is unethical but I want to encourage scientists to participate even if the general atmosphere is kind of oppressive. I wish there were a way for scientists to tag themselves, maybe by getting shadow banned?
Depending on the science, but i often see amas or replies from scientists or paper authors on reddit (space, biology, history, etc).
Eh—it wouldn't really work.
Do you want to hear about a 1mm thick polymer when overlaid on a w-section of a certain size and brought up to a certain temperature has certain properties that make it better for loading patterns of structural members of a floating ship?
Me neither.
HN works partially because almost all of us code and almost all of that code, code at least some of the time with concern for the network. This unites the focus to certain types of companies and subjects.
Scientists go down their own, squirrely rabbit holes.