The Unstoppable Rise of Sci-Hub (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/02/19/the-unstoppable-rise-of-sci-hub-how-does-a-new-generation-of-researchers-perceive-sci-hub/ <comment><USER2> I am part of a well-funded university, so I have access to all the papers without using Sci-Hub.

Nevertheless, I prefer this platform because I disagree with the publishing model of most publishers. Let's not get into the details here, but there is all kinds of shoddy editorship happening all over the place---I have seen at least one blatant case of plagiarism in an Elsevier journal: no one cares. I have experienced very strange 'reformatting' queries; my highlight being a journal that forces you to convert your lovingly-crafted vector graphs into JPG just 'because'.

On top of all that, add the fact that the interface of many publishers is egregiously bad to use. It takes a lot of clicks to download a single PDF, often opening multiple windows for that purpose or redirecting you a few times. Sci-Hub streamlined this process: you put in a DOI, and you get a PDF. Not an ePDF that is super laggy (looking at you, Wiley!), but a normal PDF that I can download, annotate, print, decorate my wall with.

Thus, I disagree with the article: the single minimalist interface is definitely something that contributes to Sci-Hub's popularity.

<comment><USER3> When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than understanding the paper itself...).

<comment><USER4> That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans.

I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws.

Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works.

It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels.

Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks.

Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.

<comment><USER5> I am brazillian.

Here people BUY pirated stuff, sometimes more expensive than the original.

The reason is convenience and good service.

When you buy pirated software and games from the street dealer, you get:

often, better support than the publisher (specially for popular software, you ask him what is bothering you, he probably memorized the solution and tells you, while publisher support often is completely null, Google-style)

easier to install (custom installers are popular in pirated stuff).

sometimes have better patches, for example games with custom patches to run in older versions of Windows, or that fix popular issues (like Dark Souls at launch had tons of problems on PC, pirated versions fixed it, or Final Fantasy XV, the pirated version runs faster than the legitimate one, some people speculate that is because Denuvo, or because the lack of Denuvo allowed better optimization settings during compile time).

Translated to portuguese.

Has manual! Yes, sometimes the original software is lacking manual, while because during ancient times pirated software had no printed manual, people would add short manuals as a read-me file, some pirates still do that, even for software that has no manual at all.

Regarding games, Valve realized all that and Steam helped a lot, but before Steam it was common here to people buy even stuff that was free (many piracy dealers sold linux distros and other FOSS stuff) because of the convenience.

EDIT: forgot a big one... pirated stuff you can pay for it.

Yes... as weird it sounds, sometimes people wanted to buy a something, but it wasn't available here, often due to a stupid combination of region restrictions + exclusive publishing deals, since we are in South America, sometimes stuff would get into a legal limbo, whoever had "America" rights would focus in publishing in the US, and would block whoever had Europe or JP rights from publishing here.

This sadly is still common, specially with books, Barnes & Noble is a company that greatly aggravated me on that, I bought, legally, a lot of books that were only available in my country on the store "Fictionwise", BN bought them and demand me to be physically in USA to download the books I bought...

Or Electronic Arts, that only allowed officially USA players on Ultima Online, leading to a vibrant pirated server community in Brazil, since you couldn't play legally here.

<comment><USER6> Ok you might want to watch this short documentary. Your fun 'pirated' games and software with 'better support' might cost you dearly when your daughter or your girlfriend/wife gets filmed by a hacker, using your own webcam.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFS3p0emftw) \- "Security awareness: Filmmaker explores RAT malware, buys access to random PCs for just 15 cents a piece - made short film about his experience"

Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.

<comment><USER7> The Adwind Remote Access Trojan typically spreads by phishing e-mails.

Which is why you shouldn't believe everything you read.

By the way, this last sentence:

>Movies and other media files that don't run any scripts are ok if you're careful and know what you're doing, but installing pirated software is an invitation to get blackmailed and extored by darknet hackers.

Is entirely wrong. If you're worried about malware, you already know that it can come via video files as well as binary programs.

The rest of what you wrote is just spreading fear for notoriety's sake. Pirated software isn't an "invitation" to anything provided you have good anti-malware defenses and good security practices.

<comment><USER8> Dangerous for Windows maybe? Most cracked OS X apps make you disable Gatekeeper or System Integry Protection. Game over. So yes, to me that is an invititation.

<comment><USER9> Any examples of something that requires disabling SIP in cracked version and not original? Never heard of it, sounds implausible but then I'm hardly up to speed.

Like I get swapping dylibs, but not why that'd be best done by poking around in /System rather than the binary.

<comment><USER8> Both 'appked' and 'macbed' websites have guides for disabling both Gatekeepr and SIP (now they are derivative websites because the domains keep getting banned/confiscated):

macappdownload dot com slash fix-damaged-app-message

macappdownload dot com slash how-to-disable-system-integrity-protection-in- macos

These guides are all over their websites, especially at the download stage, where there is a short list of 'download instructions' with a link to these guides.

A while back I read someone saying that these websites are owned by a Russian hacker network. Touch at your own risk.

<comment><USER9> My question was "Any examples of something that requires disabling SIP in cracked version and not original?", this (while certainly possibly relevant) is not an answer to that.

<comment><USER8> To me this is an answer. I think somehow you're not understanding what I am implying.

These guides I linked to are there because when the software is being installed, it asks for these guides to be applied, to make the apps work. The modifications added to the cracked applications by the crackers take them off Apple's trusted developers list. So the only way to get some of them to work is to disable SIP and GateKeeper. This move then makes the user's computer vulnerable to all malware, because most forget to turn them back on. They also often don't know about the importance of these security features in the first place.

I am not concerned for your safety - I trust you will be safe. I am scared for the user I described above.

I hope this make it clearer.

I won't bother replying to more of your messages until you can show that you've actually tried this all out on a VM, because otherwise we just won't be talking about the same thing.

<comment><USER9> Off course gatekeeper needs to be off once something doesn't have a valid signature. But SIP protects /System, NVRAM, kext loading and some additional stuff. Not user app signatures. Hence my question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publishers are the least deserving key holders.

<comment><USER11> > My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed > my paper nothing.

Why are these intermediaries still around? Peer review is the real value provided by a scientitic journal and the people who do that have no reason to be loyal to these companies since they don't get paid.

<comment><USER12> > Why are these intermediaries still around?

Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.

<comment><USER13> > _Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, > maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc._

Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself, with no actual surplus value being produced. It's a resource leak, a circular reference in the economy.

<comment><USER14> My understanding is that the real job of a publisher in academia is brand recognition.

<comment><USER12> That's part of it, sure.

It's not meaningless, either. If you have a hundred venues for publication - what should you choose to follow? What should a library subscribe to? What do you recommend to students? etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal.

To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowledge distribution made possible by lack of copyright laws) and the biblical "miracle of the five loaves and two fishes" where Jesus replicated five loaves and two fishes to feed a lot of people (today copyright advocates would say replicating bread this way meant "stealing" from the baker). And the fact I then buy a legal paper copy whenever I read a pirated ebook if I liked it while the lack of a pirated copy availability would never cause me to buy a legal copy (countrary to the concept of lost profit copyright advocates use).

At the same time I was initially surprised about the fact the scientific society is openly speaking pro-SciHub and pro-LibGen: most of the same people would generally say piracy is bad both because it's "stealing" from the copyright holders and because it means breaking a law. They would condemn using cracked apps, sharing movies and ignoring licenses, I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. I find this phenomenon curious.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention.

There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all.

Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people that are doing honest work.

On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve (everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing (restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to be true) of most other IP markets.

<comment><USER4> > On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant > would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who > actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being > paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The > quality of science wouldn't suffer at all.

Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.

<comment> Al-Khwarizmi Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc.

For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only thematic fit for a given paper.

Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.

<comment><USER15> Out of curiosity, how does that research assessment treat papers with multiple authors? Does it only give credit to the first author, or does it divide credit by the number of authors?

<comment><USER16> Turkish higher education committee ignores multi-author papers completely and only counts single-author or advisor-student papers, in the first appointment of professors; and severely discourages multi-author papers in reassessments.

<comment><USER12> ... which is another silly approach. So a pair of researchers who always work together on projects supposedly never publish :-(

<comment><USER16> They do anyway, because there is no negative consequences for publishing multi-author papers, just not rewarded at first appointment (this is mainly because they failed to figure out which fields have their authors ordered and which have it unordered).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the big problems with disrupting journal publishing has been that there is no way to get access to the massive archive of papers that have already been published. Sci-Hub took care of that before the publishers even really understood what was happening. It is now much easier to just bid adieu to Elsevier and the rest.

I predict that the preprint servers will take over, killing most of the journals which are barely read anyway, and a few top tier journals will survive because academics need to signal status. I personally find [https://www.biorxiv.org/](https://www.biorxiv.org/) the most useful place to browse for papers at the moment, and stopped browsing actual journals some time ago. If something important gets published in an actual journal, I'll hear about it on twitter.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sci-hub has been critical to me as I developed the idea for my current startup. If it didn't exist, I could have gotten most of the papers from friends in academia, but it would have been dramatically harder and slower. I use it, I support the concept.

I'll make a slight counterpoint however. It costs between $1-$5k (very rough numbers) to publish in open access journals usually. That's not nothing, but it defrays the management costs that come with a run-of-the-mill journal operation. For more flashy/fancy journals those costs are claimed to be higher (Nature asserts $40k).

Maybe that's inflated, Nature certainly has some incentive to fudge the numbers. Still, I don't think it's that far off considering the volume of submissions (hence # editors), the general press coverage work they do and just putting out a magazine every week with usually about a dozen publications and two dozen original articles.

If we take it at 1/2 that cost, clearly the average lab can't afford $20K to publish. How do we solve that particular issue? Seems we're back to the "how do you finance good journalism/short-turnaround publications?" question. Don't have answers, but want to get opinions.

EDIT: To clarify, I think most publications would be fine under a fairly small contribution, I'm more curious about the very select, super expensive marquee journals.

<comment><USER19> Academics write the paper for free, academics review the paper for free. I've published quite a bit and never had worthwhile input from a non-academic editor. A journal's only real cost would be in hosting costs, which I'm sure would be minimal for static content.

While the big-ticket journals have a value from being so picky, often this is at the expense of some things. For instance, it is hard to get replication studies published, as journals like Nature want every article to be "front- page news" if they can. I'd like to see some weighted reputation system used instead, where academics can give their "vote" to papers they like, giving it a total weight, however such systems have been proposed in the past and haven't got much traction.

I don't think there is an answer in the above, but I'm not sure that the substantial costs are justified.

<comment><USER20> > I'd like to see some weighted reputation system used instead, where > academics can give their "vote" to papers they like, giving it a total > weight, however such systems have been proposed in the past and haven't got > much traction.

A reddit-clone with strong verification/validation of user accounts seems like it would fit the bill. I can imagine a system with a small monthly fee to participate, subreddits with paid moderators (read: reviewers), voting system that would float good papers to the top, and of course comments. The pay-to- participate barrier would hopefully keep the quality high but at a minimum cover the hosting costs. And run by a non-profit foundation.

<comment><USER21> I feel like quora could have gone this route

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's easy to say piracy is wrong when artists put in a lot of effort, and you're not paying them for that work, as is the case with books, movies, TV, etc.

It's much harder to say piracy is wrong when content creators receive next to nothing of the publication profits, and publishers are withholding information that pushes humanity forward on many fronts, including ones that save lives. The role of academic publishers is as gatekeepers and rent-seekers, and it's hard to argue that they deserve income simply because they hold this position.

<comment><USER23> not only that, most of those studies are paid using public funding just to see private companies profit from them.

That's totally unacceptable and unethical

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A few people are active trying to modernize the database code for Sci-Hub's sister project. PHP and SQL experts needed, it seems.

[https://gitlab.com/libgen1](https://gitlab.com/libgen1)

</comment><comment><USER25> Sci-Hub and Library Genesis are indispensable.

What Alexandra has basically done is start a revolution. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

I would like to donate towards their efforts, too sad they accept only bitcoins.

<comment><USER26> I don't understand. There are plenty of trivially easy and user-friendly ways to purchase Bitcoin (Coinbase for example). What is the issue with only accepting Bitcoin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Alexandra Elbakyan is very brave especially considering all the US based lawsuits that are thrown at her. Aaron Swartz was trying to do something similar at around the same time, and he got the book thrown at him and he didn't even launch anything.

<comment><USER28> Brave, or smart. She lives in Kazakhstan, which doesn't have an extradition agreement with the US. All she has to do is stay there, which is harder that it sounds. We've nabbed a number of people from former USSR countries when they've gone on vacation someplace warm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Sci-Hub ... an out and out copyright pirate

Arrr! Shiver me timbers.

> papers harvested (illegally)

illegaly? Maybe, in some world states; but not in others.

Also, the illegality is temporary. Think of Marijuana in the US (and many other places). A significant fraction of the population uses it. It took them a good number of decades, but they're gradually legalizing it. With scientific publications - Sci-Hub and Lib-gen are are making copyright law unenforceable for scientific material; and I'm pretty certain this will erode that part of copyright law to decriminalization and legalization eventually.

> in China Sci-Hub is banned

(Jaw drops.) This is really surprising! I wonder why it's banned there.

<comment><USER29> > I wonder why it's banned there.

Any superficial explanation you may get, it's really because central governments are stupid. Absolutely powerful central governments are absolutely stupid.

But, well, it's their loss.

<comment><USER12> That's a valid point, but it might be the case that it's not actually banned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is only one reason for me to use it: as a historical reenactor, I strive to make my equipment as accurately as possible, and I read various articles regarding roman military food, how widespread were certain metal alloys, how they used to do soldered joints, and so on. I wouldn't make an account to JSTOR just for a hobby - I use their search to find DOI's, and get them via Sci-Hub. I do buy books and stuff as part of my documentation, but there are really specific articles, usually a few pages long, that I can't find in both a convenient and legal way.

</comment><comment><USER31> For all the tech wizards out there who want to meaningfully science from the comfort of your own laptop - help Sci-Hub scale. Your experience with helping build massively extensible web systems is completely and wonderfully needed in the existential fight for researchers to get information.

From where I live Sci-Hub is often slow, breaking down, etc. Help them!

</comment><comment><USER32> Why does everyone talk about sci-hub and no one about library genesis? The latter is a way more comprehensive repository.

<comment><USER33> Do you have a tor link? Also for scihub for that matter?

<comment><USER34> My go-to source for links to piracy websites that sometimes change URLs is Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why not a low cost subscription app like Spotify that rewards the publishers (and I hope, by conseguence Authors and Reviewers)? This would be appetible to more general academy world (even low grade schools) and even small business that do research and development. And could create a more virtuose author/reviewers gratification.

<comment><USER34> University of California terminated a $10 million / year subscription to Elsevier [1] but $10 million per year divided between 21k academics and 280k students [2] is only $2.76 per person per month.

Of course, how you square that with the journals that charge $30+ for a single paper and $600+ a year for an individual subscription is, perhaps, your point...

[1] [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2019/3/1/18245235/uni...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2019/3/1/18245235/university-of-california-elsevier-subscription-open- access) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California)

<comment><USER36> Is there a single commercial source with the same or more coverage as sci-hub for $600/yr or less?

I've got a half dozen subs in a kind of Venn diagram and still am missing things. I'm in a position to pay for convenience, but while paying, am constantly annoyed it's worse for the user. Same story in film/tv.

<comment><USER37> Deep Dyve?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> One way publishers could get me, a Millennial, back into their good graces is to actually put some _effort_ into their publishing. As in, if you're not even going to publish a paper copy of this article, but still going to charge >$1000 for "open access" rights, then at least go the extra mile and start making eReader versions of them.

I would LOVE to use my kindle to read journal papers. Many books have well formatted text with figures interspersed. It would benefit the scientific community so much to be able to use them regularly.

(Note that PMC does this, and while I wish the figures were placed correctly rather than at the end, it's a great start!)

</comment><comment><USER39> We will probably never be able to quantify the effects of scihub on global science and implicitly on the well-being of everyone. Still I wonder how substantial it is, how many budding researchers and truthseekers were helped by it.

</comment><comment><USER40> The scientific paper industry is now in a similar state to where the music, tv and film industry were 10-15 years ago. People pirate what they offer not because of being cheap, but because their prices are highly exaggerated and their service is highly inferior to the one piracy offers.

Normally, those services would have had to adopt, and we would have ended with Spotify for papers. However, since the clients of those services are mostly public institutes, adoption is stalled and may never happen.

Personally I think that in the age of the internet academics and self-organize their own peer-to-peer reviewed journals with hardly any costs. Those self- organized journals should be free, as they're paid by the public tax. Old style journals are not really needed anymore in theory in the age of internet.

<comment><USER41> Hardly. It's, in fact, booming right now. You know who are the biggest benefactors? Top journals like Nature and all of IEEE. They are paywalled like nobody's business. In fact, they are much worse than Elsevier. But community only hypes about the later while lusting over publishing in Nature and much of the IEEE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Another use case for Sci-Hub is bulk downloads. This is especially important for machine learning. Building a dataset of academic papers across domains would be a insurmountable task, even with APIs like PubMed and using "interal" university networks with good journal access.

Rather than paste all the details here, take a look at the opendata stackexchange site were we share details about bulk downloads from sci-hub, including torrents: [https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk- downl...](https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-download-sci- hub-papers)

Note that some other publishing platforms have bulk access, such as arxiv.org: [https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data](https://arxiv.org/help/bulk_data)

And platforms like [https://unpaywall.org](https://unpaywall.org) try to link open access papers.

-

And if you are a researcher sitting on your PDFs, consider self-hosting, and making an archive.org backup. These will get indexed by Google Scholar. I did so for my papers, and they were indexed in a couple weeks: [https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access- research/](https://smalldata.dev/posts/open-access-research/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Since the valuable service provided by publishers is, more or less, predicting future citations of a research work for funding purposes, what do people think of using a PageRank-like system for that instead? That way, instead of trying to publish in a high-impact journal, people will just put their papers online and try to get them approved by high-impact researchers. I think that could be just as reliable signal of quality as the current system, while costing less money, because high-impact researchers would find it in their interest to approve only the best work sent to them.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've never understood why a wikipedia or github style publishing platform doesn't exist for research papers yet. Why do we ascribe reputation to the journals themselves? Is it the journals or is it the academics who participate in the journal who matter? Also why does reputation even matter really? Wouldn't an open source model make more sense where anyone can offer feedback and comments would be public? Wouldn't it make more sense to have all academics and even non-academics from around the world offer review? Generally speaking there's a right answer, whether it's a hard science where equations are likely involved and can be validated, or a soft science where you can mostly focus on validating the process and analysis. Even in the arts where it might be a bit more subjective. If anything given the reproducibility crisis in modern science, I would say the current model as failed and deserves no reputation at all. This reminds me of this:

[https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for- ac...](https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/we-need-a-github-for-academic- research.html)

If anything such a platform would be incredibly valuable in that academics can also create profiles on them and have an additional CV of their activity in contributing back to their field. This can be used as a real additional metric towards providing someone tenure or getting lab positions.

</comment><comment><USER45> "He raises the question, will Sci-Hub prove the ultimate disruptor and bring down the existing status quo in scholarly communications?"

I don't think so as, judging by the way things are going, OpenAccess will see to that.

Disclaimer: I work for a large "not-for-profit publisher" (make of that what you will) in the UK, and they're scrambling to protect their revenue stream - but not fast enough...

</comment><comment><USER46> I use sci-hub regularly to look up medical papers in my work as a hospitalist. My community (US) hospital can't afford to pay for subscriptions. Often, I need a case report or small journal article to better diagnose or treat a patient. Sci-hub has directly benefitted those people and I love it for its simple interface and ability to get you directly to the pdf with one click.

</comment><comment><USER47> Perhaps my perspective is ignorant, but in my sub-field of computer science, most people put their papers/pre-prints openly accessible on arXiv, ResearchGate, or personal web pages (if the publisher is not open access). I've never used Sci-Hub because I never had to, and when at home or traveling, I rarely have to use my university's VPN, because I cannot read a paper "for free". This is probably a good cultural indicator of my domain.

<comment><USER48> Sometimes you want to read some seminal paper from the 70s (somehow, most of the seminal papers are from the seventies), and half of the time it's re- hosted by someone or some university and is freely available, but another half of the time, all you have is an acm.org or citeseer page without the "Download PDF" link. Now what? This stuff is 40 years old, by all rights it should be public domain by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> One thing that is often overlooked is method that Scihub uses to obtain articles, and the impact that method has on the very researchers who use it.

Phishing scams are used to obtain the credentials of university accounts which are then used via a proxy on Scihub to obtain the requested article (it's quite clever..they seem to often silently proxy institution's Ezproxy with the phished credentials) . The same credentials given to Scihub are often not just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other third parties, causing harm to the phishing victim.

Having said that, library software providers and journal platforms should be looking at Scihub and learning from it. Users want an easy to use platform with minimal fuss or hoops to jump through.

Of course, this is just a tiny piece of the much larger problem of the rotten unsustainable commercial journal publishing ecosystem..

<comment><USER50> Do you have any evidence for this ? Because otherwise it's just a piece of FUD to poison public perception of scihub.

Especially the gratuitously cruel "credentials given to Scihub are often not just used by Scihub, and are then used for further phishing or hacking by other third parties".

<comment><USER49> Sorry I didn't respond earlier, think account was rate limited due to being new.

Not sure what sort of proof you want? "Gratuitously cruel" is quite an emotive description! The simplest example is the same phished accounts used by Scihub were also used to send more phishing emails to university and non-university email addresses.

Hopefully you'll see below from my other responses, I'm not here to turn people against SH (I admire it and what they did technically with creating their own proxy on too of other University proxies is really clever stuff!), but the access to articles need to come from somewhere, and I'm just pointing out my experience from working at a university (who I'm sure is sick of paying millions PA for resource access!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Libgen is another noble attempt to bypass the unreasonable prices and restrictions that publishers put on Textbooks.

</comment><comment><USER52> i consider scihub to be the greatest democratization of information since the www. it will open up hitherto closed paths for people with nontraditional educational circumstances, and should generally accelerate the rate of progress.

</comment><comment><USER53> Curiously, even if the quality is lower the open platform would presumably still win. There are a huge number of people in the category "desperately need to know, but don't realise that their need justifies paying to know". The sort of person who is comfortable reading an academic paper and will cheerfully implement something from arxiv, but their employer considers them a boring coder and isn't about to pay for access to a paywalled journal. Such people turn up in every discipline.

And academics have an incentive to get their ideas out there so have a tension present when they want to be published in a journal. It is easy to imagine unpaywalled research dominating paywalled. Who cares what people write if it can't be easily read? There are a lot of smart people out there...

</comment><comment><USER54> Taxpayers pay for lots of research, and lots of other research is legally free in other websites, so why get ripped off by profiteering 3rd parties?

</comment><comment><USER55> At least in my case, Sci-Hub was the difference between getting access to research and not -- and I'm based in the UK.

I've requested papers through public library inter-library loan services on a number of occasions, and on nearly every occasion was told "that paper/journal doesn't exist". Every single time, the article was sat online behind a paywall.

I don't have access to my alma mater's library and even if I did, I couldn't request research papers through them as a graduate (which is why I didn't pay the yearly alumni society membership and access fee).

So when the option is to pay £20 per page for a short summary article or get nothing -- you can bet I'll be hitting up Scihub.

</comment><comment><USER56> >Sci-Hub does not have the opportunity to sell its platform, there is no advertising, or 'social networking' to obtain vital user data that it can monetise; it is a pure and unashamed 'pirate'.

Black is white and white is black. They are not pirates and they have no connection with the 'pirates' political movement AFAIK. Feel free to contradict me, I'll learn something new.

</comment><comment><USER57> When any platform really makes difference, their rise is only factor of time. Piracy of books/document/magazines is much easier than multimedia, also tons of cheap readers/tablets available(thanks, Amazon).

Also, there's a moral dilemma: piracy or pay (sometime) big money for education resources which can change the world - not a movie or cheap TV Show.

<comment><USER58> I don't see a moral dilemma. The journals don't pay anything for the research that they publish. In fact, they paywall research that is often funded by the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I understand why people like Sci-Hub, but basically it will not exist without work of journals that they scrape. If it will consist of unvalidated papers that everyone can submit it will be far less usable, it will be bloated with false research and non-science papers. I don't think that this format of work is vitable in a long term. As far as I see it should be converted to format like Apple Music, when new big player will come with some nominal subscription fee, like 10$/month and will open everything it has, or to Wikipedia format, when there is some comunity that can moderate open source articles and publish them.

<comment><USER60> I would love to see Apple Music for papers. I refuse to use Sci-Hub for its blatant piracy, but the basic idea really is what academia needs! We just need to figure out how to make it legal - like the music and movie industries did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> If I were a foreign government looking to get insight into classified research, Sci-Hub plus a targeted PDF exploit on a small set of domain- specific papers would definitely be high on my list of targets. Cycling through so many different domain names and TLDs makes it easy to spin up a clone that _largely_ forwards to the real one but gives you the ability to return some compromised papers.

I love sci-hub and have often used it, but the above idea has always been rattling around in my head and gives me pause.

</comment><comment><USER62> Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

[https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt)

</comment><comment><USER63> Note that the article bends over backwards to underline the fact that Sci-Hub operates illegally. Although copyright infringement does occur, this is not true for all cases, i.e. Sci-Hub is not comparable to the Napster of old or lib-gen.

This is because some of the research (actually I would wager that at least >half, but don't have any figures to back this claim), is supported by public funds and hence should, by definition, not be copyrightable

</comment><comment><USER64> Does it has C++ ISO standard pdf's.

</comment><comment><USER65> Anyone who unironically thinks that the obviously positive effects of free and open science are even comparable to piracy is a lunatic.

<comment><USER66> Piracy also has obviously positive effects, and you'd be a fool to argue otherwise.

But it's worth being reminded that it's "piracy" that led to the modern forms of consuming art.

Before Napster the music industry would never move to the Spotify/Youtube model.

Before movie torrents the movie industry would never move to the Netflix model.

Ditto for books, games, what have you.

The exposure to other paradigms, other cultures, other forms of art have vastly improved the quality of life and even educated the masses (especially on less rich places of the world) on such a grand scale.

I think it would be a fools errand to try and prove that the benefits of one outweigh the other.

But it's fine, because, thankfully, we can have both.

<comment><USER67> Filmmakers fled the east coast to Los Angeles, where it was easier to evade motion-pictures patents held by Edison. This is how Hollywood was born. Piracy definitely helped create the biggest movie industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> if most experiments can't be replicated how important are these papers on sci hub?

<comment><USER69> The knowledge or ability to test which ones are or are not seems pretty good...? Instead of them being locked away?</comment></comment>


Debian project has plenty of money but not enough developers - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_address/ <comment><USER2> Bit of a weird headline as the article says Debian org has $900k in the bank but that is not spent on the devs; they are volunteers. If they would offer, let's say, 2k/mo (the article says they need good people who like though problems; 2k is nothing for those types however, many people would like do it because of love for Debian; they do not do it now as they need at least a little food on the table) per full time contributor, there would be plenty of devs joining. But for their goals to be met, they would be also immediately broke. So in fact they do not have plenty of money to achieve what they want, unless people work for free.

<comment><USER3> I am currently unemployed/independently-wealthy/thrifter/bumming around the bay area. I love debian, and I sometimes joke that if there was such a thing as a minimum wage dev job, I would gladly take it to get out of having to pass another technical interview :/

It would be neat if they could split the difference between free and real job, but I wonder if part of the reason they don't is that they want people who care unreservedly about values and code quality rather than people who need $500 a week?

<comment><USER4> It is of course one of the problems a Federal Job Guarantee would solve.

Clearly working full time on Debian is of value to society, a good use of time and clearly verifiable by committed contributions.

Definitely worth the living wage.

<comment><USER5> Agreed that Debian provides (a lot of) value to society. The big question is why don't they have money to fund development? Disregarding the 900k mentioned, because it's not enough to pay everyone and it would be spent soon. In my opinion public infrastructure would ideally be maintained by states, not individuals or private companies.

<comment><USER6> I may be jumping to conclusions here, but my first impression was you were suggesting that Debian is a public infrastructure, and that therefore in your opinion it would ideally be maintained by the state.

I have a rather strong emotional reaction to this because to me a major reason for FOSS is to break the problem of perverse incentives that arise in corporate -and- government work. Governments want to control their populace. The NSA, for example, has made algorithm suggestions that would give them an easier time listening in on the world. And the US has prominent figures arguing for encryption backdoors that supposedly only the "good guys" would have the keys to. Which is to say nothing of governments that outright ban encryption. So I would be very skeptical of FOSS officially maintained by a government (though I suppose its open source nature would still be a point in its favor for the transparency).

<comment><USER5> I understand the strong negative reaction; it's common. Thanks for taking the time to formulate a response.

I thinks it's two different problems: maintenance and cleptocracy. For example, should the government maintain roads and bridges? It falls within the common good (public infrastructure) so using taxes for that makes sense.

But, if the government has authority over the bridges, how to stop them from performing obligatory cavity searches (or some other bad thing) on people who use them? That's not a question of what the responsibilities or objectives of a government should be. The question is how to reform a hostile, cleptocratic government.

I won't presume what context you're coming from, but I've noticed that in some cultures it's normal to think of the government as "them". For me it's "us". While someone from the former group might say "government does that", I'm inclined to say "we do that". My outlook seems to be more common in Europe than in US, I think.

For me, using the government is the most direct and efficient way of maintaining FOSS, or doing anything that should be done by "us", as opposed to by "somebody". I see that as the purpose of governments.

These FOSS projects spanning many borders makes things slightly harder, but that's just because we're not used to that kind of cooperation. In principle there's no reason multinational programmes for financing these things can't exist.

Alternatively, make it difficult for states to use non-FOSS software. That way you'd redirect all that money being wasted on closed source.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is $900k in the bank a lot of money for as large and important an organization as Debian? That is how much the Mozilla Corporation earns every 18 hours. Even if the staff are volunteers, having rainy day spending seems prudent.

<comment><USER8> Debian doesn't spend millions of dollars on executives

<comment><USER9> Or on any salaries.

Debian's expenses are hosting, conferences and travel reimbursement -- and not a lot of that.

It's still not really a lot of money, though. As a thought experiment, if Google decided to donate $1 per installed Debian or derivative OS, I think that might double Debian's bank account.

That's a plausible funding slogan -- "A Dollar for Debian".

<comment><USER10> Debian doesn't pay for hosting for most services, all the ones run by the Debian sysadmin team use donated hosting environments at universities and companies. For a while we also had a partnership with HPE that gave us gratis x86 hardware, but these days we do have to spend money on x86 hardware unfortunately. The non-x86 ports usually run on donated hardware but we only run build servers on those machines so far. Google already donates quite a bit to Debian through conference sponsorship and also a one-time 300K donation last year or the year before.

<comment><USER11> I see Debian is one of the projects that benefit from Google's Summer of Code student sponsorships, although that is a much smaller contribution compared to those you mentioned.

Do you know if any of the students who particpate in Debian's summer of code end up being regular contributors after the sponsorship period ends?

<comment><USER10> Definitely both Outreachy and GSoC students participate after their internships, although a lot of them of course don't participate for various reasons.

In particular I know that for years now former GSoC interns are mentoring current GSoC interns on the project to package parts of the Android SDK for Debian. This year it is last year's intern and also two others from prior years.

[https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2020/ApprovedProjects/An...](https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2020/ApprovedProjects/Android%20SDK%20Tools%20in%20Debian)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This 2019 blog post from a Debian developer describes some of the problems they are facing from a developer perspective: "Winding down my Debian involvement" [https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian- windin...](https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding- down/)

<comment><USER13> Not liking the bug tracker and mailing lists as well as several other points come across as typical things-need-to-be-done-differently now, which has destroyed the culture and meaningful participation in other projects, like Python.

I'm sure there are many valid criticisms of Debian, the main one for me is overpatching upstream packages.

<comment><USER14> The bug tracker is objectively awful. It takes 15+ minutes to subscribe to a bug, which is ridiculous! Absolutely no one would write a bug tracker today where everything is processed by email[1].

[1] Which is not to say that _messaging_ is bad - a web interface with a proper message queue behind it would be fine. In fact that's how Fedora's systems work. It's that email is not a reasonable messaging system for this purpose.

<comment><USER15> Tell me about it. Doing bulk updates to dozens of bugs as a routine daily activity was an exercise in masochism. As for making comments on existing bugs, you had to manually download the mbox archive just to make sure the right recipients were copied in.

It was pretty neat in 1998. Today, it's long eclipsed by pretty much everything else.

If I were Debian, I'd migrate the whole lot over to GitLab issues seeing as they have the infrastructure for it set up (salsa). The problem is there is a very vocal minority who still think it's not only good, but the best choice for Debian. I doubt the silent majority who suffer it agree. Like anything, it's an entrenched part of Debian culture that's hard to change. But it was time to retire it over a decade back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like Debian and have entertained the thought of becoming a Debian developer multiple times. The learning curve for a new developer is steep. Just packaging a small piece of software requires a large amount of documents to consider last time i looked.

<comment><USER17> It is a tiresome process. I attempted to submit a particular package (and others before and after me). It was either met with a lot of red tape (IIRC document licenses for each file individually) and months of no visible progress when comments were addressed.

This was in stark contrast to e.g. contributing to nixpkgs. Do a PR on GitHub. The package gets built automatically by CI. Get feedback. Make changes to address the feedback. And it gets merged. Of course, PRs sometimes go stale (most projects are dealing with a lack of manpower), but the process is generally fast.

But the outcomes are radically different: I never attempted to contribute to Debian again, but I have become an active contributor to nixpkgs.

I think to attract developers the process needs to be modernized. Put all the package definitions in a Gitlab monorepo. Build each PR in a sandbox on CI. Describe the submission process on a single page.

<comment><USER18> Debian cares a lot more about licensing than Nix. Debian also has far more developers than Nix, I imagine, and processes that have probably existed for longer than GitHub itself.

<comment><USER19> > processes that have probably existed for longer than GitHub itself.

There is a saying in German that goes

> Wer nicht mit der Zeit geht, geht mit der Zeit.

Now Debian has lot inertia and Ubuntu is a huge factor too, so there are enough incentives for people to put up with that process.

Also, maybe this is by design. By keeping the bar for every high, maintainers are not bothered by low effort PRs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I guess the call to action is: [https://www.debian.org/intro/help](https://www.debian.org/intro/help) or [https://www.debian.org/devel/join/](https://www.debian.org/devel/join/)

Maybe also [https://wiki.debian.org/how-can-i- help](https://wiki.debian.org/how-can-i-help)

</comment><comment><USER21> No wonder, they have the largest red tape on maintainer application process.

Until very recently they were expecting GPG keys signed by 2 Debian developers, and that could be only done by being developers face to face, or by attending a key signing party on DebConf. Tough luck if you're in a remote location. Not sure how it's being done after pandemic.

<comment><USER22> I think it's awesome that they have a fully autonomous cryptographic web of trust. Far too few organizations do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wish Mozilla mimics Debian or Linux development organization. It earns hundreds of millions and can't keep pace with chrome.

<comment><USER24> Actually firefox is faster at javascrupt that chrome.

<comment><USER22> That's like saying that emacs's LISP interpreter is faster than vim's vimscript interpreter.... Yeah, so what?

The performance-critical parts of vim are written in C. You can't say that about emacs. Or firefox.

<comment><USER25> The performance critical parts of emacs actually are written in C, such as the low-level primitive functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> We have developed a tool for projects like Debian to distribute donations over larger projects. By distributing the donations in the dependencies, Debian could even attract new developers in its own dependencies: [https://github.com/protontypes/libreselery](https://github.com/protontypes/libreselery)

</comment><comment><USER27> NetBSD (with a lot less money in the bank and similarly bad bug trackers) has hired people using a few models in the past -- hourly, CoD, fixed-rate, etc but it's really the hiring itself that is so much trouble, just like in the real world! Not to mention doing "management" is also a total pain in the butt that someone now has to do _for free_.

The irony is that the people being hired are mostly already there doing work for free.

There is no way debian (or NetBSD) could pay market rate to compete for the time of anyone working on the project for very long so it's usually a motivational push or justification for sabbatical or "I have three months between contracts".

It's much much easier to buy hardware and things for developers who ask for it.

I suppose these projects are seeking developers with passion, personal wealth, and free time.

<comment><USER28> Hiring people who would do it for free allowed them to work faster. It becomes there day job. I know of a few projects in FreeBSD where the author said I'm between contracts in a few weeks, you can pay me to do this work and it is done in a month, or I can find a new contract and the feature "that everyone wants" will be worked on in my spare time and done in 2 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Unless Debian has systematic discrimination for race or gender or whatever, I don't think there is a need to focus on "diversity" for its developers, NBA is a good example there and nobody complained. Improving certain area is fine, put it a priority for problems non-exist will do more harm than good. You do it because you like it or need it, not because of where you are from or who you are.

And yes $900K should be used to improve the situation, there might be some great developers actually need the money, or the money can get more young developer to start in debian.

</comment><comment><USER30> With the amount of government and corporate reliance on Debian derivates, the budget should literally be 100 times larger. Like $90 million instead of $900,000. Or maybe just $9 million. Then you have no trouble finding developers. You use money to get them. It works very well.

Part of the issue though I suspect may be the way packages work. I am just guessing but it may be the case that these volunteers are creating packages for lots of third party software and constantly fighting with incompatibility to upgrade them. Which seems like the third parties should be more involved with updating the packages.

But personally I think that even though snaps are so hated, the relative impossibility of keeping all packages up to date and similar issues is making things like Snaps or Flatpak make more and more sense as a general direction.

I don't know if Flatpak has a way to do compression or reuse layers like Docker but I wonder if it might eventually make sense to go in that direction.

Or another crazy idea: maybe it's possible to train an AI to resolve dependency or build issues and create packages. Maybe pretty far-fetched but when there are so many tens of thousands of packages I feel like you should start going for radical ideas.

<comment><USER31> At the 1000ft view RedHat and Debian perform much the same function.

Debian has $900k in the bank. IBM purchased RedHat for $34B. The number's aren't directly comparable, but methinks a factor of 100 understates it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Plenty of money is always a relative term. If you think you have "plenty of money" but you don't have X, in reality you don't have plenty of money. There are exceptions like X=love, admiration, etc, but for most X, if you have plenty of money and a shortage of X, you just exchange some of your loads of money for X and you are good.

</comment><comment><USER33> Debian from the exterior sounds like the anti-corporate organization: flat hierarchy, top-notch democracy, self-directed work with almost no top-down guidance/"orders". And not so surprisingly, that also cause problems. Let's not forget the high barrier to entry for contributors.

It is complicated.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://nm.debian.org/faq/](https://nm.debian.org/faq/)

"The site gives me 403 Forbidden errors if I disable referers"

yah cool faq, many questions answered.

</comment><comment><USER35> if only there was some way to exchange money for labour.

</comment><comment><USER36> I had to create a deb for a web app, it had to setup and populate a DB (from web sources), and manage updates for this db when you upgraded the deb. It had a build process of static files that couldn't be vendored. It has a lot of configuration to be entered prior those would happen, using debconf. It had to vendor a virtualenv. I had dependancies on 2 other web apps that had the same story, and they shared some config files.

I didn't chose this architecture. But I was tasked to package it so that people could just "apt get install stuff" and start using it.

It was HARD.

The tech is very old school, it doesn't give a lot of feedback, it's hard to debug, documentation is sparse and examples in the wild are not up to date, not to mention the state of tooling. And you do all that with shell scripting, the worst language for the job. Sure you can use anything else, if you like zero doc and example.

Then we had to distribute it.

Well, turns out creating an APT repo is not so easy, either.

Now, we did all that by cutting a lot of corners, zero red tape, and only us to please. Also, the consequences of not using best practices, or worst, breaking something, were few.

On a team of 6, only 2 were really understanding what was going on. The rest were lost, awaiting instructions from us because they just couldn't picture were their work would fit in this blob of bash workflow. Now that I'm gone, I have no idea how the team is going to maintain the thing.

I can't imagine doing the same thing with the level of road block working for something as sensitive as the official debian repo would bring.

If debian wants more contributors, they have to make this stuff way, way more accessible. And be friendlier with people telling them it's hard.

Every time I raised the topic, somebody came along to say I shouldn't be doing x or y. Or just that I shouldn't be packaging something and just publish it on the debian repo, letting the debian maintainers do the packaging. It's not going to bring me to work with the community if the first taste of it is the demonstration they completely ignore their shortcomings.

And I say that while I've been typing apt commands for a decade now. I'm also french. Debian is, with VLC, Libre Office and Firefox, one of the 4 pillars of FOSS for me.

<comment><USER37> Making deb _is_ painful, the politics of how packages are folded, bent, welded, drilled and smashed is not a simple landscape to navigate.

A lot of Docker is a response to how difficult it is to build packages and how invasive package installation is to the base system (Nix gets this right).

If in the future you need to build packages again, I'd take a look at fpm.

The goal of fpm is to make it easy and quick to build packages such as rpms, debs, OSX packages, etc.

[https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

[https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm](https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If LMDE picks up steam I'm sure that could change. Is the Ubuntu distro so different from Debian that those devs can't simply work more on the upstream distro (or are Canonical devs not really doing much Linux work but userland/app work instead)?

</comment><comment><USER39> $900k is not much. It's only enough for 4 developers for 1 year. If you don't spend the money the sponsors give you, the sponsors won't give you anymore.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why don't they hire Poettering to further make Linux unusable for hobbyists?

<comment><USER22> Because getting him do do that does not require paying him!

Badump-ching! I'm here all week, folks. Don't forget to tip your waitresses...

<comment><USER41> He works at RedHat, and i strongly believe they paying him.</comment></comment></comment>


Here's a tour of WeChat, the greatest mobile app in the world - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/heres-a-tour-of-wechat-the-greatest-mobile-app-in-the-world-5be62536ff4d#.4gu0edsl6 <comment><USER2> Can someone explain why the West doesn't have such a thing?</comment>


PMD meets Git to prioritize technical debt - <AUTHOR> https://blog.walkmod.com/pmd-meets-git-part-i-a3e60004a421#.bc2yadkng <comment><USER2> This looks interesting. When we introduced PMD we did it with a major, swathing tech debt phase that took about 1 week to cover a code base of ~10^6 LOC. It was painful, and a step taken so that we could turn on PMD as of part of our CI flow. Going back, I wish we'd taken a more incremental approach as we lost a lot of time doing it (1000 dev hours or so?).

This is an approach I would gladly explore if we did another project that was introducing PMD midstream - I like it much better. One of the biggest difficulties was having people address PMD problems who didn't have a great deal of insight into the code they were fixing, and so it did cause another round of "repair" to code that was inadvertently broken on a functional level. This looks to help avoid that by associating PMD issues with a dev closer to the code.

<comment><USER3> Incremental approach only works if the code was not that bad to begin with (properly modular, mostly SOLID, no need for major rework) and when you have unit tests.

Plus it is folly to attempt rework while writing features based on the old, broken code.

<comment><USER2> I agree. We were lucky (not smart, I'd say, just lucky) in the sense that we turned on PMD as a CI portion prior to a lot of major code being written. To share one experience of my own, I wrote an entire application - not a major one, probably < 2000 LOC altogether - right when we were midstream.

I began by ignoring PMD's presence (it wasn't blocking my work at the time) and merrily went about writing the code. Right when I was nearly finished the application, PMD went live and I ended up realizing - with PMDs help, code review, input from more experienced devs in the domain - that my code was shit - poorly structured, not very testable, not following great design principles - and as a result I re-wrote the entire thing. It wasn't time-costly but it was an eye-opening lesson - getting some things right off the bat is important and saves a lot of headache later.

If we'd had more code like mine in place at the time PMD went live we'd have spent an order of magnitude more time re-writing so many things, in many cases nearly from the ground up.

Even the initial effort caused a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but in truth it did help us learn and improve more quickly than if we'd kept left to our own devices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great to see that you are using diff2html ([https://diff2html.xyz](https://diff2html.xyz)). I built it for Codacy trying to create a better diff experience when reviewing code. Also you can get PMD, Checkstyle as part of code reviews and pull requests @ Codacy.com and it is free for open source for ever.

</comment><comment><USER5> He recommends _git blame_ to identify which files should be prioritized when improving the codebase, but _git log_ and a bit of shell-fu can make remove the need for manual browsing.

For example, obtaining the list of the 10 most modified files is as easy as:

        git log --name-only --pretty=format: | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 10

This is only a simple example but something non much different could be used to get a better indication of actual activity, limit the search to specific timeframes or users, etc...

</comment><comment><USER6> I recommend using SonarQube instead of just PMD to prioritize technical debt. SonarQube includes PMD rules as well as multiple other sets of static analysis rules. And it has reports to help identify and prioritize problem areas.

</comment><comment><USER7> This seems interesting but I cannot run it on my machine.

It seems that the app cannot contact mongo.

After I restart the app I am able to login, but never able to add projects.

Can you help?

</comment><comment><USER8> hello friends</comment>


Why We Brag - <AUTHOR> http://topics.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304451104577390392329291890.html

<comment><USER2> Interestingly enough, there was an AskReddit thread yesterday that consisted of people bragging. Many people in the thread described it as extremely therapeutic.

The link is here : [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/taiqo/can_we_all_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/taiqo/can_we_all_just_brag_for_a_moment/)

</comment><comment><USER3> We're all here on this planet for a limited amount of time. One of the principles of life is to "leave a mark" on the planet.

We reproduce and feel awesome about our kids, because that is part of our "mark" on the planet. They'll carry on.

I believe the answer to the question "why do we brag"? Is because it's part of our instincts to let other human beings know of the "marks we've made" to the planet. What have we changed on this Earth? What did we accomplish?

If according to the article bragging is on the same brain energetic level as ingesting food, then obviously bragging is part of our survival instinct. To reach that level, then it's been there for millions of years.

Which can only mean one thing: it's also part of our most basic instincts which are to survive and to reproduce.

Maybe bragging has been a way of reproducing in the past?

Food and money(current day weapon) mean survival, why is bragging on par with those two? It's part of our DNA's assembly language instructions to reproduce and leave a dent on the planet and telling others about it seems to be a way to reinforce that instinct. My 2 cents.

Disclaimer: I have absolutely zero knowledge of whatever it is I'm talking about here.

</comment><comment><USER4> This research doesn't answers why we brag. It just tells us what we already know.. that it feels good to talk about ourselves, but why?

<comment><USER5> Perhaps it's for the same reason as why we like to help others in an area we're knowledgeable about. We are experts of ourselves, we love to talk authoritatively on subjects we know lots about. It'd be interesting to see if we get the same "pleasure sensation" from teaching/helping.

<comment><USER6> That's probably the case. Teachers certainly seem to find it pleasurable to teach, and I've found it immensely rewarding to tutor CS and SE students while in college. It's useful practice as a writer to have someone constantly challenging you to explain yourself succinctly and clearly.

On the other hand, it's also great to talk with someone who's knowledgeable about your interests. That seems to have less to do with pleasing oneself by speaking as an authority, and more to do with sharing and collaboration. My major is not in computing, so it was a breath of fresh air to discover CS professors and graduate students with whom I could speak freely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How did they not touch on a lack of confidence being a reason for bragging? I've noticed when people tend to brag, sometimes it's because they're compensating for other issues. I'm not a psychologist nor have I done any lab studies on this, but I'm sure many of you can agree.

Edit - Isn't bragging generally self-praise, not just talking about yourself? Saying "I'm the worlds greatest programmer and these are some programs I've written" and "I like pizza with pepperoni" are two entirely different things. None the less, both do trigger a rewarding response in your brain. Just questioning the semantics of the article.

</comment><comment><USER8> I like to use this to my advantage... by making bloggers feel special and talk about themselves. Then asking them for an interview/link later on. Helps with the Google juice.

</comment><comment><USER9> What a stupid study.

If asked whether I wanted to talk about someone else for 4 cents (the maximum they offered) or myself for free I would choose to talk about myself not because I enjoy talking about myself but because I don't want 4 pennies in my pocket.

Pennies are shitty and I would guess a lot of people would see pennies as a penalty.</comment>


Show HN: Pure CSS Connect 4 - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/finnhvman/pen/xXpzVN <comment><USER2> CSS is so weird.

On one hand people can do absurdly amazing things like this, and on the other I am sitting here trying to line up baselines of two text elements that are in different parts of the layout and I want to just throw my computer out the window.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if this code has been generated in part- it seems like one hell of a hassle to figure out and write by hand... But holy cow, it's awesome!</comment>


Shellconf.py – Simple remote configuration with shell for UNIX/Linux systems - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adionditsak/shellconf.py Hi all,
I have created my second Python script, and would appreciate comments, contributions or just someone to discuss it with, as i am sure it can be optimized in many ways, as it is a part of my learning. The script is for configuring UNIX/Linux machines with shell scripts with Python - So pretty much a Python way of Fucking shell scripts.
I added it to Github so you can view it there: https://github.com/adionditsak/shellconf.py :-)
Sincerely, Anders <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

I have created my second Python script, and would appreciate comments, contributions or just someone to discuss it with, as i am sure it can be optimized in many ways, as it is a part of my learning. The script is for configuring UNIX/Linux machines with shell scripts with Python - So pretty much a Python way of Fucking shell scripts.

I added it to Github so you can view it there: [https://github.com/adionditsak/shellconf.py](https://github.com/adionditsak/shellconf.py) :-)

Sincerely, Anders

<comment><USER2> Good stuff. Take a look at Fabric for another (and very commonly-used) example of Python wrapping SSH: [http://docs.fabfile.org](http://docs.fabfile.org). Also you might look to Paramiko for a native SSH implementation: [https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko](https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Nburger,

Thanks.

Yeah, Fabric is awesome. Really like it. Have not looked that much at Paramiko tho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> While Python is likely more widely installed than Ruby, I still don't understand, why use Python to run a bunch of shell scripts? Why not use the shell to run the scripts?

        for f in scripts/*;do
          #logrotate here
          scripts/"$f" &> "logs/$f.log"
        done

or something like that?

EDIT: not trying to be rude, I just don't understand.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense. Was thinking the same... Just doing this for learning actually. I think it makes sense tho to do it in Python, Ruby or something else, if you want to steamline it in some way with structure/architecture. I would like to see the bash version tho :-)</comment></comment>


Autonomous Shipping Containers – Self-Driving Cars – Medium - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/self-driving-cars/autonomous-shipping-containers-a35943fe53a3#.ld4vwngwb <comment><USER2> Already happening at the more advanced ports.[1] Flat AGVs move containers around. No drivers. No crane operators. No people at all in the container area. Trucks of the future may be more like those AGVs than today's trucks - flat wheeled platforms with no cab.

Fully computer-controlled traffic looks quite different from human-driven traffic. The coordination is much better.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo)

<comment><USER3> Once everything coordinates like that it seems like they could just forget trying to organize the lanes and make the computer route everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe autonomous containers could also be capable of transferring cargo to smaller autonomous delivery cars, then we'd have a full routing delivery network, that could deliver any package from a point of source to a point of destination for a low fee.

Next, we'd make automated factories that load materials and unload products by robot into the autonomous delivery containers. By organizing the factories as APIs, we could compile a complex product from a series of processes executed by various factories. It all works out because of the standard containerization and routing.

To make an analogy to the computer - the transport network is the bus, the storage warehouses are the memory, and industrial robotics are the CPU. We've been manually compiling in assembler our products so far, but we could use higher order languages to define physical products and to share code between products.

This would make it possible to attempt bootstrapping - a self reproducing (distributed) automated factory. If it works on renewable energy and common materials that are found in abundance in nature, it could mean a reduction in costs of production to zero.

<comment><USER5> > Maybe autonomous containers could also be capable of transferring cargo to > smaller autonomous delivery cars, then we'd have a full routing delivery > network, that could deliver any package from a point of source to a point of > destination for a low fee.

If it's fully automated them it'll need security baked-in by design. And I mean _security_. Because someone will start thinking in terms of bombs in boxes with detonators controlled by something like an RPi with a GPS receiver.

An inadequately secured automatic cargo delivery network is an amazing terrorist enabler (just as long as your hypothetical terrorists include a couple of tame hackers in their number).

Right now, Amazon will let me send anyone (you included, if I have your address) a box of live worms, or crickets or even cockroaches. Some gag, if they're labelled as a gift and you open the box unwarily.) But it has to be something they've already accepted as stock in their fulfilment centers. A fulfilment system with no restrictions ... brr!

(I'm not making it up about the roaches: [https://www.amazon.com/Dubia- Roaches-Feeding-Reptiles-Medium...](https://www.amazon.com/Dubia-Roaches- Feeding-Reptiles-Medium/dp/B00I15GKT6/) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The op doesn't understand how containers are really used. There is a reason they are called "shipping" containers most containers spend more time on ships then on the road so making autonomous containers would waste a lot of resources for little gain.

</comment><comment><USER5> What the OP missed: highways with traffic jams caused by breakdowns somewhere in miles-long platoons of self-driving shipping containers that block entry/exit lanes (because there's no such thing as a perfect drive train, and cost competition will ensure that the cheapest prevail over the best, and _of course_ they'll use drafting and drive nose-to-tail to reduce energy costs, because the failure mode is "only" a breakdown, and the inconvenience and cost is someone else's problem).</comment>


GDPR: European Commission Suing Greece and Spain Not Transposing EU Law - <AUTHOR> http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-19-4261_en.htm <comment><USER2> To put into perspective the EC issues multiple such statements per month. So many there's even a search engine. Active infringement cases against Germany currently 140, closed 2000 so far.

[https://ec.europa.eu/atwork/applying-eu-law/infringements- pr...](https://ec.europa.eu/atwork/applying-eu-law/infringements- proceedings/infringement_decisions/index.cfm?lang_code=EN&typeOfSearch=false&active_only=0&noncom=0&r_dossier=&decision_date_from=&decision_date_to=&EM=DE&title=&submit=Search)

</comment><comment><USER3> Financial sanctions being requested on Spain and Greece for failure to transpose EU rules for personal data protection into law!

Good thing, in my books.</comment>


3D online library of ancient Egyptian collection - <AUTHOR> http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140501-ucl-petrie-museum-puts-3d-scans-of-ancient-egyptian-collection-online.html <comment><USER2> Some great work by my colleagues at UCL. We also scanned Sir Isaac Newton's death mask

[http://uclgeomatics.com/2014/02/07/sir-isaac-newton- in-3d/](http://uclgeomatics.com/2014/02/07/sir-isaac-newton-in-3d/)

<comment><USER3> Really cool work. Would be nice to have a scale bar or something to get a sense of scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Someone print them :-)

<comment><USER5> I laughed at your comment and then, a light came on. What if I could create an Indiana Jones office.

There goes my summer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> would have been nice if they added a radiocarbon dating of the artefacts too

<comment><USER7> Is radiocarbon appropriate for things less than hundreds of thousands of years old?

<comment><USER8> Just looked it up again to verify my memory. Most sources I can find indicate that it's really only useful for up to 40-50k years back. Beyond that, the amount of carbon-14 is too low to get a good measurement. You'd need to use other (non-carbon) isotope ratios to get ages further back in time.

[http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/capabilities/gronemtrac/geochron/...](http://geology.cr.usgs.gov/capabilities/gronemtrac/geochron/carbon/tech.html)

via

[http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology...](http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/carbon-14.htm)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: If you didn't know it, how would you learn Front-end today? - <AUTHOR> As a developer with a bit over 5 years experience, I am sometimes asked by my friends about starting their own Front-end career. Where do you begin? What is an outdated knowledge, and what important? How do you write code that is at least close to being "production-ready" these days?
That questions asked about Java are a little simpler for me - "Take this book, this one and this. Here are the patterns, just remember these from this book. You'll learn the rest on the way." - few months later this person can be seen sitting as a Junior/Med in some software company. These languages do change, quite a lot, but Front-end is a bit more ... in a hurry - and learning from books does not work for it at all.
Even though Angular and React got most shares of the up-to-date production stack, Front-end environment is still not really settled. When I google "javascript tutorial", it takes only about 12 pages until I first hear about anything related to ES6.
"Modules?" - "Not this time, mate. But we've got this cool quiz that you can finish and get a JavaScript certificate!" "When was your guide last updated?" - "1996, but javascript didn't change even a bit, trust us on that! Also, would you like to obtain a FREE JavaScript certificate?" "React, Angu..." - "Shhh, there, a certificate for your eager spirit!"
When I was learning JavaScript a bit of time ago, there was only jQuery. And RequireJS. And that was pretty much all you needed. Today, new frameworks appear daily. It is not an easy path for a newcomer, when they have to learn at least 2-3 of these frameworks to even get started. And there seems to be no single, intuitive and reliable source to learn the basics from.
tl;dr;
Do you know any quality online tutorial that provide actual introductory knowledge of the current Front-end stack, in a beginners'-friendly form? (Vanilla, React or Angular, common tools like Webpack, ESlint, transpilers, maybe a bit about handling asynchronous code) <comment><USER2> I started to address this very issue, but I couldn't get anyone interested in the idea, so it got so far and no further. You might be interested in skimming what I did:

[http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi- bin/ModWebProg.py?FullStackDevel...](http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi- bin/ModWebProg.py?FullStackDeveloper)

[http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi- bin/ModWebProg.py?FrontendWebFra...](http://www.penzba.co.uk/cgi- bin/ModWebProg.py?FrontendWebFramework)

It's a wiki, so people could actually record there the things they learn, and this could turn into a valuable resource, but at the moment there's not really that much there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Elm is a language you may want to check out. [http://elm-lang.org](http://elm- lang.org)</comment>


Bezos divorce shows how people conflate community property with 50/50 division - <AUTHOR> https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/01/10/bezos-divorce-shows-how-people-conflate-community-property-with-50-50-division/ <comment><USER2> 'Under the previous statute, the higher-earning spouse could deduct alimony payments on his or her tax filings. The recipient included the payments as part of his or her taxable gross income. For divorces finalized in 2019 and after, alimony payments will no longer be a deductible expense for the payer, which is expected to have financial ramifications.

Typically, in a divorce where children are involved – Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos have four children between the ages of 13 and 18 – the payer would also split support payments between alimony and child support, putting more into the former to claim the tax credit. Now, there is more incentive to allocate more money toward child support and less toward alimony.'

Source: [https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/amazon-ceo- jeff...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos- divorce-subject-to-these-tax-changes)</comment>