skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They do! Or at least they are starting to. At least in physics/math in my experience most people have a personal homepage that they post their papers to, and also upload them on ArXiv. There is some complication with regards to copyright, because to publish in a journal you usually need to assign the exclusive rights to them. Nowadays most journals have realized the need for authors to post their papers on personal homepages and e-print services like the ArXiv, so that this is no big deal in practice.

There are still problems:
1.) Usually old papers are not available via this route. If you email the author and ask nicely he will usually send it to, but at least in pure mathematics one quite common wants to look up really old articles, say from the 1950s, and those are the ones that are terribly hard to come by, because they are often only available behind a paywall like JSTOR.

2.) Currently "prestige" and peer review is handled through the journal system: Authors send their papers to a journal for publication, other scientists review them (for free), and then the paper gets published (or not). Afterwards publishing houses, who add little value to the process, force libraries to pay horrendous amounts of money to get access to these journals (usually through selling bundles).

At the moment there are efforts underway to pleasure publishers into a saner pricing structure, and there are now some open access journals where usually the author pays once (if at all) and then it is free to read for everyone.

Many people also consider more radical approaches, for example, making journals simply be ArXiv overlays that point to a set of papers on the ArXiv. I have even heard suggestion of replacing peer review, at least partially, by an open review system like you suggest, and some journals have experimented with it, but it does not seem to have a lot of consensus behind it at the moment. But this is in a way orthogonal to the problem of making research available to as many people as possible.

The problem with the very radical change that you suggest, i.e., using blogs instead of research papers, is that peer reviewed papers have proven their worth over a long period of time. It is doubtful whether simple blog posts would guarantee a similar quality over a long period of time. My personal feeling is that there would be a lot of noise and incorrect stuff drowning out the important stuff.

With regards to your edit: If you submit a paper that seems to be serious research to a journal, it will be reviewed, and if it holds up, eventually published. If the paper is decent, you'll be able get it published without being associated to an academic institution (at least in mathematics, can't speak for other fields).
I was in Beijing for Chinese New Year for a couple weeks in 2009, and when I flew in, I couldn't see the enormous city at all from the sky. It was completely hidden in a cloud of smog. There was some of the worst air quality of the year at that time from all the fireworks plus being the coldest time of year (so everyone is burning coal fires), and a ton of debris in the air from a 44 floor skyscraper that burned to the ground down the street (video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hSPFL2Zlpg)

I never really knew what coal burning smelled like before. Even in the city it isn't allowed, but once we left and went to a smaller town outside Beijing that's when I really got it. It is the heat source for 99% of the population, plus it powers most of the factories. There were days where we were told we shouldn't be outside unless absolutely necessary (which was, since my husband had to commute to his job at Microsoft). At night if you blew your nose your tissue would be grey. If you took a shower, the water would run grey from dust wherever your skin had been exposed. Your clothes would be dusted in a thin layer of gray that never really went away. We tried to combat this by changing out of our clothes just inside the front door and putting them straight into the wash, but it never really went away.
Again somebody seems to misunderstand what OS means. Only because Android OS and Chrome OS are called operating systems does not mean they play in the same category as Windows. Windows is a platform, because it has vendor-provided high-quality drivers for basically any hardware device, wheres Android, Chrome, and OS X are always a customization for a particular device or device series. Drivers and a good driver model for the OS are hard.

If there was no Windows (or better anything like the x86-Windows PC platform), there would likely be no hardware platform to run Linux on, and CPUs for OS X would be way less powerful due to lack of the progress of a highly competitive market over two decades.

For this reason, the potential demise of Windows is a nightmare that should keep any IT professional awake. But I am optimistic: web apps have yet to prove to be on par with desktop apps, and there seems always to be the next desktop app when you think people are basically only using a web browser. I am confident that in 10 years there still will be Windows PCs or Laptops in private households, together with many other devices.

Or am I missing something?
The blue screen of death jokes for Windows phones have suddenly turned into reality.
> There are actually underground websites for searching
> paywalled journals through proxies.

Can you hook a brother up?
I think it looks cool, but also seems like it has potential for conversations to quickly degrade to nothing useful.

- What are the plans to maintain relevant, and insightful conversations?

- I may be missing something, but how is this different than something like Quora?

I do like the striped colors at the top representing what items have been voted for. Overall this looks cool. Good work!
I am sure cars contribute, but I believe the majority comes from factories outside of the city and from homes, which primarily burn coal to keep warm. Beijing is downwind from a lot of that.
I see a download link, bright green, upper left. E.g:

http://www.academia.edu/1741963/Formal_Specification_and_Doc...

You do have to be registered to download, but it's better than paying $20.
I lived there in '08 and '09. You cannot believe it until you have seen it. The difference during the Olympics was stark. For example, my apartment in Shijingshan had a view of a mountain (~5 mi) and a comm tower (~1 mi). I lived in that apartment for a month before I ever saw either of them. The 'Jing rarely gets full sunlight, rather there is this kind of yellowish lambertian light source in the white-ish gray sky. People who espouse environmental deregulation should go check it out.
Because, I made it :D Will change it before launch!
How are those electric vehicles powered, by coal? Coal is the only cheap and viable short & medium term energy resource solution for China, and a substantial problem (though only not the only source) for causing the pollution currently around Beijing.
Yes, I agree with this, having been the subject of unreasonable scrutiny in the past myself and having had friends who have similarly been abused by the "justice" system.

This kind of thing is far too common. The prosecution may be allowed to presume guilt, fine. But the law should prevent an overzealous prosecutor from rendering moot the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th amendments (not that I'm a constitutional scholar, just applying the "common sense" rule here).

Seizing assets is wrong in 99% of cases, and eliminates the right to mount an effective defense. It is morally bankrupt.

"Making an example" of someone is complete garbage. That is not justice, it is cruel and unusual punishment. It seems to more often be used by DA's with political aspirations than for legitimately egregious crimes.

This is why I vote against anyone who lists "tough on crime" as a credential. It's not. "Fair on crime" is a virtue, "tough on crime" is bullying and an abrogation of justice. Citizens should have an expectation that punishments for doing something wrong will suit the offense. Anything otherwise is a violation of the 8th amendment.

If there is doubt over whether or not an action is even a crime, a DA should be using their discretion to NOT prosecute. When the "victims" of a "crime" don't even want to press charges, you have to question the motives of a DA that pursues the case anyway.
Lessons We Can Draw From Cherry
Wow, academia.edu only shows images of pages of pdfs, instead of giving you the actual pdf? I didn't know that. That's absolutely unacceptable .. if true- and a later comment shows that this is only half-true. So it's not as completely ridiculous as I thought, but this wasn't an over-reaction anyway. Companies tend to do terrible things to pdfs.
Doesn't the footer suggest that the writer was STEPHEN P. HEYMANN acting on behalf of Ortiz?
This has two parts, one part is the externalization of pollution by the rich countries to developing countries, the second is the speed with which China is increasing its energy consumption due to an increase in local consumption.

Their fuel of choice (coal) doesn't help and in many ways what is happening there is comparable to what the industrial revolution did to England not all that long ago.

In 1952 (long after the start of the industrial revolution but before the end of major emissions in the UK) this culminated in the 'great smog':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog

Which in turn led to the clean air act.
The central point I agree with Marco on is the problem with the rhetoric of "X open source project will work soon or eventually". It's always a pipedream and not a project you can hold in your hand - sometimes because the person demonstrating it won't allow a hands-on experience. :)
IEEE has a similar copyright assignment requirement. If you want your paper in an IEEE venue (which includes many of the top engineering, robotics, signal processing, etc. conferences and journals) you are not allowed to publish it anywhere else, including on your own web site. Institutions pay big bucks to subscribe to IEEE Xplore for online access.

Many people work around this by self-hosting a very similar paper, rendered from the same LaTeX sources, but without the IEEE chrome. IEEE usually turns a blind eye.
> Quick fix would be subsidised electric vehicles.

No, that would be an 8-lane highway straight into unintended consequences territory.
I've heard the games argument over and over, as if it's true for everyone. I'm a 35 year old male, and I could care less about games. I want a decent game, I'll pull out my phone and download something for a buck or free. If I want a better experience, I suppose I'd buy a console and then have the ability to rent from GameFly. (back when I had a Wii, I thought it was pretty cool to download old games from the 80's, I'll admit) There's a subset of the market: those who want a better gaming experience due to better hardware than a console provides and are willing to drop $60 a pop for the privilege. That may be you, but don't extrapolate to the population. There's a ton of people who don't have time or interest for something more than Angry Birds. I've heard too many discussions about Windows that indicate that games is the only real compelling advantage, and if that's true, that means a large portion of the market is ambivalent.
I heard that the change during the Olympics was remarkable. How come the actions they took to clean up didn't stick? You would think that when everyone saw the difference, there'd be a lot of support for fixing the underlying problems.
What was your crime?
> People who espouse environmental deregulation should go check it out.

This is a very interesting comment. Right now in Canada, we have a Conservative majority government that is absolutely hell-bent on environmental deregulation. Their supporters almost exclusively bring up China as the primary reason why environmental deregulation is so important to them ("if we kept our existing regulations, our economy would tank since China would make so much more money").

I very much doubt seeing the skies in Beijing would change anything, but I wonder. Perhaps a campaign in Canada to show images of what China is like would make a difference; on the other hand, the supporters of the environmental deregulation are not the type of people to care about air quality. They value a "strong economy" and money above absolutely everything else, and think that Canada needs to pollute more and more, as much as it can in fact, in order to be a reasonable country in the future.
There's nothing wrong with networking of course, but there is something wrong with claiming relationships that don't exist, claiming to own things you don't own, lying about your accomplishments, and damaging other peoples' reputations in the process. The line is a bit fuzzy, but there are definitely a lot of things that are at best unprofessional and slimy.

People who just do this and nothing else usually don't cause much overt harm, but they do waste peoples' time and time is quite valuable. It's in the slimy ass-clowning category.
I've seen that article and I submit the Nexus 7 as a counter-example. (If anyone didn't read the link: that quote's making an analogy between desktop Linux and Android devices.) The Nexus 7 was widely agreed to be great on day one, even by certain die-hard Apple fans. (I forget if Marco was one of those.)

With that, Google now has a track record of achieving "great on day one". Who's to say they can't repeat that on the desktop? In fact, they may be well on their way with the new Samsung Chromebook, which seems to have received mostly praise: the biggest remaining criticisms are with the concept, not the execution.
It's not just Beijing. According to the polution ratings I follow, right now (it varies a lot during the day, it's 2AM here now) Beijing is ranked 16th among the ~50 cities that the government rates. The rating right now is also the same as the one posted by the US embassy here.

From what I understand, much of the pollution comes also from other industrial cities and accumulates in this general area of the country (someone that knows more about it please correct me if this is wrong).

The government seems to be taking some actions, but it is hard to know how hard they're tackling the problem.
Ahh, that irritating message. Right up there with: want to install our app?
Superman: Warner Bros secures commercial control of hero
I don't get the link, so yes, apparently one has to register. Personally I find that quite horrible. There are serious efforts underway to open up research, and putting stuff into yet another walled-garden (or rather, dozens of different walled-gardens) is a step backward.

Consider that the people that put their stuff their would ordinarily perhaps have put it on their personal homepage or some e-print service, so comparing it to the $20 fee of publishers is not the right comparison.
I don't think the industrial revolution comparison is correct. Pretty much all coal pollutants can be easily dealt with using air pollution control technology (except CO2, but that won't make anyone sick in the short term). The problem is that Chinese energy producers aren't interested in using that technology. Chinese officials know exactly how much of a difference electrostatic precipitators or fabric filters could make for their air quality and they know exactly how much it would cost; they just don't want to spend the money.

My father designs those systems and travelled to China in the late 80s to early 90s; China bought a little but had no interest in outfitting all of its coal-fired plants.
That was my impression, too, but I just wanted to cover a - comparably - dead-simple solution, since we sometimes forget the old-school approaches to an agonizing problem.

With .htaccess, there isn't really anything external - a new point of failure - to screw up the redirects.
No, no, no. The point of an AG is to act as a first line to determine which cases are worth pursuing and which are not. They absolutely are granted and should exercise frequently the right to not prosecute!

I have had several friends prosecuted for trumped up nonsense that should have been slap-on-the-wrist misdemeanors at the most.

I would prefer to see an AG exercise their privilege to not prosecute in cases where, even assuming the facts in the complaint are true, it is unclear that a crime has been committed. Particularly where there is no individual who has been harmed.

"Tough on Crime" is a messed up way to operate a justice system. "Fair on Crime" should be the standard we hold our officials to.
d) It facilitates dollar-cost averaging, and lengthy time horizons

Yes, you have to invest wisely, but most plans have an S&P 500 index fund for growth and a Bond fund for income (your allocation mix should be more growth when younger, more income when older).
They even shutdown many factories temporarily before the games. Guess many are back on.

Also, the city (an many others) grew a lot since 2008. Lots more traffic, heating, etc.

Not defending the government, but the problem has also grown bigger.
The guy was flashing his phone and ran into issues. Kinda cool to see it using that much of the Windows code base (kernel and bootmanager atleast)
Show HN: The 'One Bucket List' for your Life.
Market returns have been volatile. S&P 500 for the past few years [1]:

2012	16.00%
2011	2.05%
2010	15.06%
2009	26.46%
2008	−37.00%
2007	5.49%
2006	15.79%

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500#Total_annual_returns_...
"ChilledLime" takes site-name-doesn't-match-site-purpose to a new level. Sorry, cherry.com.
Thanks for the detailed response. Just one clarification: I am not suggesting using just pure blog posts, but rather publishing properly formatted papers using a self-hosted publishing system a la Wordpress. Blog posts may or may not be added in order to promote the content.

It seems like the real issue here is prestige, which then translates to funding. "Publish or die" is how most researchers seem to live. Thus I think if we are able to show that self-publishing/distributed publishing brings the money to the researcher and the academic institution then this idea would get traction.

Re: edit. I see. That's great to know.
Just a random and juicey name that I love ;)
It depends. Did Gonzalez's actions result in anyone committing suicide, or any divorces or families breaking up?

If it did, then it definitely deserves as long a sentence as murder. Indeed, an (attempted) financial crime of this magnitude is frequently worse than murder since it (potentially) has similarly devasting effects on a much wider set of victims.
Yes

From here, this looks like an ordinary court filing that happened to have been made on the day of Swartz's death.
Curb the Corporate Agenda of Activist CEOs
I disagree. Most people don't care about the platform, they care about the content.
Europe's sentencing laws are not comparable to U.S. sentencing laws.

In the U.S., that same crime would have resulted in a minimum of life in prison, and possibly would have resulted in the death penalty.
Thanks for the kind words and the suggestions!

Well, yes.. today after somebody posted this to HN, the unregistered unknown internet surfers some spam opinions too. But I think, when we launch the registeration recquired site, the ratio of spam and unuseful opinions and comments will drop.

Quora is knowledge based, ChilledLime is opinion based. Delivering the same, or better knowledge in a more democratic way.
I think it's kind of ridiculous that everyone is pointing fingers at "everyone else" other than the man responsible for the suicide, Aaron Swartz himself.

Sure, he was in a tough situation, and I'll admit I don't know the entire backstory of what led up to this man's suicide(although there is no shortage of information on the HN front page as of late), but there is nobody that can be held responsible for his suicide other than himself.

It is self-evident that this man was well-respected in the online community.

He killed himself. Nobody else is responsible for that extraordinary action. We can only speculate on his exact reasoning for doing it, but I would suspect a man in that state of mind may not be acting completely rationally and just wanted to escape but sadly could not find a way out other than ending his own life.

Let's celebrate his life and accomplishments and stop trying to find people to blame.
Hopefully this drives more people to https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat..., which is almost a quarter of the way to the point where the administration has to respond.
So You Think You Can Polymorph?
There have been a lot of middle-class-is-dead, be-your-own-boss type pieces recently, with only the macro trends mentioned changing.

Perhaps this appeals to the libertarian tendencies of many of us. I personally learned nothing new from this piece, and the factual inaccuracies in it make for a weaker case.
6 Pages of linux feeds all in one place
> Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is
> blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc.

I like this plan. But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Maybe we need moles in the publishing companies themselves.
Generally, the best prosecutors (in the sense of securing convictions) view their targets as trophies to be collected.

This is part of what makes them so "good"--by objectifying the target, they are better able to think purely strategically about how to secure a conviction.
Thanks for starting the blog! As a fellow chumby enthusiast, I've been meaning to shoot you an email asking for more detail on your cross-compiled-go-for-chumby setup.

I had plans to drop some I2C eeprom chips on a pcengines ALIX x86 SBC (to gain a small amount of non-volatile storage without need to mount CF partitions read-write), but just haven't found the motivation to work through the software side. Problem solved!
Aaron Swartz Alleged Victim Regretted Being Drawn Into Hacking Case
Sliders Suck
It's Alex Jones. He'll say no because then we'll be able to confirm he's a loon. Long before Piers Morgan and the Illuminati, Alex Jones was reporting on religion being a form of mind control, Christians as the NWO and ritual child sacrifices. I actually remember reading something on his site circa 2001, where he made claim that the 2nd amendment was created for advancement of a new world order...today? Opposite story.

None of the loons that follow him like to hear about how divergent he is from what they hold true today.

Godlike Productions is about as close to fact as Alex Jones. Just a bunch of nuts beaking off fear-based nonsense. None of these references are based on reporting. :(
It is somewhat common everywhere to see people buying a Mac and installing Windows. Not because they don't like OSX but because they need certain Windows only apps.

Unlike of course you have some evidence of China being an outlier. Which of course you don't.
"Like the Ubuntu phone OS, the source code for Ubuntu for Android is not yet available. "We don't want users to install it on hardware that we're not sure it can support," Collins said"

Don't worry though, this is definitely going to be different than how android development has proceeded.
Totally ridiculous, victim-blaming comment.

“If you add up everyone's responsibility for something, it doesn't equal 100% — it equals a billion percent if it has to, because any number of entities can be fully responsible for the same thing.”
— Ran Prieur, The Mathematics of Responsibility (http://ranprieur.com/essays/mathres.html)
It required them to shut down a lot of industrial production. A temporary pause in production was a reasonable sacrifice for the Olympics. After the games were over, they worked overtime to catch up. Beijingers have lived with it their whole lives, it is normal for them.
One can view Swartz as completely responsible for his own suicide, while still observing that the overzealous prosecution was a factor that shouldn't have happened regardless of Swartz committing suicide.

In other words, the suicide serves to highlight what was already an absurd injustice, and that injustice alone is sufficient to act on. Doing so doesn't make Ortiz or Heymann responsible for the death; only for their own manifestly unjust prosecution.