Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | fredbo22's commentslogin

Yes. I agree.

The authors have had the solution in front of them from the beginning. They've been free to send out free copies from the time they finish.

But if they want the advantages that come from journals, well, someone is going to need to pay for them.


If you email any author I guarantee they will send you a PDF of the paper.


> If you email any author I guarantee they will send you a PDF of the paper.

So let us create a website that for a given paywalled URL automatically emails the authors for a PDF. ;-)


I'm pretty sure someone actually did that. Google around for it.


Not all authors will respond to email promptly. And many have retired or even died -- there are decades-old papers still behind paywalls.


It's a beautiful sentiment.

Who's going to pay for the layout and editing and filtering? The people at Elsevier do something for their money.

I'm happy with going to all author-circulated preprints, but I'm afraid that all of the archival work of the journals is a pretty good thing.


I have been publishing at Elsevier, and the editing process was a nightmare. The "layout and editing and filtering" is not performed by skilled editors, it is performed on an Amazon Mechanical Turk level. There was no improvement for the reader over what my co-authors and me had submitted, just a lot of back and forth to prevent numerous new errors to be slipped in.

I'd gladly pay a one-time fee for a good editor to bring a paper into a better shape, to cover these costs.


Ehm... The same people that currently do so at Open Access journals, or at institutional repositories?


In many cases, "layout" is a standard LaTeX/Word template done every few years. "Editing" on text-level is done by the authors, based on feedback from reviewers that aren't paid. Filtering is done based on the same reviewer feedback.

Coordination and archiving are valuable, but don't match the prices asked by some.


Why do we need to pay for expensive layout, in an era where nobody reads the print journal any more? A Word document exported to PDF would work just as well as far as actual science is concerned.


Care to share this wisdom? I'm wrassling with these kontainers now and I'm wondering why people think they're so wonderful.


Took me a while to see the value of Docker.

Ever deploy the same software to multiple servers, and it maddeningly behaves slightly differently on different servers, and you're not quite sure why?

This is the problem docker solves. Install exactly once, when you build the image. Then deploy the exact same code, down to the bit, as many times as you want, to as many servers as you want. Or quickly roll back to the Docker image for the previous version.

So this is how Docker helps you scale quickly and deploy as often as you want, with confidence.

Kubernetes, meh. Just some code for spinning up more or fewer Docker containers in an automated fashion. At least that's my impression, I haven't had to get my hands dirty with it yet.


So why not just make a virtual machine image and keep a pristine copy of it? I think this dates back to the mainframe era.


One reason to use containers over VMs is that building, updating and extending containers is far easier and more maintainable than full virtual machines.

Containers give you the ability to layer the pieces you need on top of each other, so you are only responsible for the parts that you maintain. No need to rebuild an entire VM image every time one piece of the stack is updated.

Distribution of containers is also far more efficient than full virtual machines (especially important in a highly distributed environment).


I don't find the Docker API particularly intuitive. For my use-cases so far I've found it much simpler to spin up a VM if I want to duplicate a particular environment.

I think where Docker tends to shine is when you are operating at scale. For larger players using VMs to recreate a computing environment is expensive and eats into your bottom line. In such situations there's value in having some kind of tooling or API that partitions and simulates specific environments for processes running in the same kernel space. For better or for worse, in 2019, Docker is the best solution to this problem.


It's similar, but far more resource efficient.


I personally think that in 10 years, people will look back on kubernetes and shake their heads.


Comments like these are so infuriating! You get to shit on a huge community with zero reasoning, and zero consequences for being wrong.

Your negativity is only rewarded if somehow you're right (which is more a result of broken clock syndrome than anything else), so you and people like you are incentivized to keep sniping from afar.


Is there not some part of you deep down that looks back at the last decade of technology and feels "well I'm glad we're not doing things that way anymore, it was totally wrong for our situation"?

It just seems that that is constantly the case. We might well be another 3 or 4 decades away from software development technology hitting real maturity in terms of really streamlined tooling, frameworks, languages that help us work at the right level of abstraction at the fastest speed.

I don't think it's an entirely unwarranted comment. I think it's wise to constantly be thinking about and looking for "what awfulness are we accepting as a trade-off to get the great benefits of this particular way of configuring our process?"

By all means get into the hype, dive in, be excited. But don't forget to shit on yourself because you know the shit is coming at some point. If not in 5 years then in 10. It'll help you see it coming.


I feel the same way about your comment as diminoten felt about your grand parent comment.

You didn't say anything particularly actionable or insightful. Just projecting vaguely pessimistic and defeatist attitude.


I'm glad we're on the same page.


What actually ends up happening is people like you get left behind. Jobs become harder to get as you struggle to keep up, your ambition hardens into a self defensive ego shield, and you're stuck telling yourself that you were right to stop moving forward because things only got downhill from the moment you chose to stop learning.

The rest of us reap the benefits of innovation, standing in the sun, while you rot in some forgotten basement where the last self-hosted server rack at a fortune 10 company is kept. You'll have cursed yourself to the menial task of caring and feeding the pets surrounding you, the last vestiges of what you've tricked yourself into believing was a simpler, saner time.

Pessimism loses against the unyielding light of positivity. It may feel good to take shots from the shadows, but you're developing a hunched back, hiding from view.


What actually ends up happening is people like you make outlandish truth claims about the dispositions, aspirations and futures of strangers on the internet who they have no context for. And get it it oh so wrong.

People often misconstrue my pragmatic hyper-realism for pessimistic defeatism. It's nothing of the sort.

Nice rhetoric though! I really pictured the rotting corpse at the computer in the basement of the fortune 10 and partying on the beach with models and bottles making the promo video for Fyre festival. You really took me there.


You really have no idea what you're saying, and obviously have no serious experience.


The big companies self-host for legal reasons. It is easier to put up a legal fight with self-hosting. With other hosting, your data can be silently grabbed. You won't even know your data has been compromised.

It's also just cheaper and more reliable at that scale.


No they don't, every major cloud provider can meet any legal requirement you've got.

This comment was true 15 years ago. It's now so outdated that you're flagging yourself as one of those basement dwellers I wrote about above...


I think you should question your own biases if you're this emotionally invested in a technology.


A technology? Sure. Technology in general? Not at all.


Hard to do in a comment, but the real value of containers, etc., is really microservices and micro-environments. If you dig in, there are dozens of similarities to both the Unix shell kit and the Unix kernel design. The translatable wisdom starts with principles — do one thing well, smaller is better, and hugely, let data be the interface that assembles individual tools into a process / flowchart / blockchain / supply chain / etc ad nauseum. Let those principles guide your design and how your containers envelope the problem. Like I said, hard to explain in a post, but the gist is that “everything old is new again, except I invented it!”



Just watched the video.

This is the Steve Jobs more young entrepreneurs need to know about and emulate. Not the "Jobs was an asshole and successful, therefor if I am an asshole I will also be successful" vision of Jobs. Or the "Jobs made pretty things and suckered people into paying too much for them" vision of Jobs.


Wow. I need to remember him taking that drink of water and giving himself time to respond. I respond way too quickly to things far too often. You can just see himself giving himself a second to collect himself. Brilliant.


Sent them an inquiry last month and never heard anything. I think they're taking this privacy blackhole thing too far. Don't waste too much time on this one.


Sorry! Something must have went wrong here, as our protocol is to respond to everyone. Please email me at yegg at duckduckgo and I can sort out what happened.


Ugh. I'm not going to bother applying writing. I hate blackholes.


If you apply through the website, it won't be a black hole, for sure. There are some third party application sites that we're getting a handle on now. Hopefully we hear from folks like you!


At my last gig, "water cooler" conversations were discouraged because SLack conversations were archived and searchable. No need to wonder what someone said last week, last month or last year. It's all there and ready to read.

It was kind of stupid to come into work when this rule is in effect.


Is that even legal?


Probably not illegal to discourage but maybe illegal to ban


Yup. JavaScript, Node.js, Node, npm, React, Angular, Vue, Express and a few more words mean pretty the same thing and are fishing for the same pool of developers (Yes, I know there's a difference between Angular and React.)


> Yes, I know there's a difference between Angular and React.

When can you start?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: