munfred

Indeed, a fantastically written article!

1) What are the differences between Scispot and Benchling?

2) What are the things you offer that nobody else does?

3) How long have you been developing the product?

4) If it is only three people, why would a lab choose you over established players?

Strongly agree on the archival concerns. The reason scientific publishing is nowadays built upon 2D PDFs is that those are the digital analogue of paper.

Distill used a new medium and media, with all the good and bad that comes with it. In my view the biggest challenge is archiving to ensure readability and accessibility in 20, 200, 2000 years. We can read things written in parchment 2000 years ago, we should aspire to properly view digital media 2000 years from now. Yet 2 years from now much of digital media on the internet is already broken. The internet archive is humankind's savior in this regard, but we need to do more, better and faster (because so much digital content is being created and lost before we can save it...).

Regarding Distill specifically, short of a GitHub repo for each article archived in other mirrors, I don't see much else that is straightforward and flexible enough. Even the Distill arXiv idea mentioned would likely have to run on a combination of GitHub + mirrors...

> Another significant risk factor is having unachievable goals. We set extremely high standards for ourselves: with early articles, volunteer editors would often spend 50 or more hours improving articles that were submitted to Distill and bringing them up to the level of quality we aspired to. This invisible effort was comparable to the work of writing a short article of one’s own. It wasn’t sustainable, and this left us with a constant sense that we were falling short. A related issue is that we had trouble setting well-defined boundaries of what we felt we owed to authors who submitted to us.

As someone finishing a PhD, I think that doing LESS and doing it SLOWER is actually a very desirable thing for most of science. We are limited by how fast humans can wrap their heads around articles, and if we have fewer articles that are better written, that's a huge compound gain!

To the Distill team, if anyone is reading this: I don't think you should feel bad for being slow, or for doing "few" things at all. We humans to place big emphasis on superficial large numbers in the heat of the moment, but only good things withstand the test of time. I've only read a few Distill articles, but they were all really good and I can see myself coming back to most them 5-10 years from now. I don't think any other academic journal comes close in the ratio of (total goodness)/(total content). Good job Distill team for making a great thing, and summarizing the lessons learned so well in this goodbye article!

My only wish would be that you could find a way to continue to do auch good work that does not entirely rely on unpaid volunteering. In the end of the day volunteering only means some other institution bears the cost of supporting the volunteers.

For example: Could you get a Distill editor endowment to pay editors using donations throughout a non-profit fiscal sponsorship partner? Could you partner with a university, or even publisher, to support long term writing?

GOOD work takes TIME and is SLOW and we are bad at appreciating that. I hope the distill team keeps taking their time to put out good work, whatever it is they go do next!

Cheers to Distill!

You can use the public matrix server that offers an interface to it with the Element web client and is maintained by Element the company (used to be called New Vector): https://app.element.io/

If you do want to set up your own server I wrote a guide when I learned how to do it with Google cloud instances: https://munfred.com/matrix

I have a suggestion to make on this regard, not related to body language.

In scientific conferences, typically at the end of the day (e.g. after dinner, with drinks) you have "poster presentations". These presentations look pretty much like these images from Google [0]. Everyone goes to a big room, and the presenters stand in front of their posters which are ~90x120cm. People walk around looking at the poster titles figures, and when one of them catches their interest they stop to listen to the presenter (if they are already taking to a group) or ask him about it.

The fact that you have these big posters at all ends up being just a cue so people can identify who is working on which kinds of subjects/projects, and go talk to them about it. My advisor had this really funny idea of having "microposters" at a conference, where he just taped an A4 paper with one figure and the project title and his name to his back, and that is all it took to start conferences. It worked super great, it was exactly what it took to "break the ice".

In these conferences people will typically have read your papers, but they don't know your face, or even that you were in a paper (at most they will remember first author or last author, which is the professor). So just having a small cue "I'm Bob and I work on X" is already sufficient to break the ice.

My suggestion would be two things: 1) For mimicking the poster presentation aspect of scientific, to allow people to upload an image which gets displayed on an area of the map. Then the presenter can stand there, and interested folks just gather around him to listen.

2) Allow some kind of mouseover view that shows additional information about the person, eg a bio, a description of the projects, or a picture/link to a description of the projects.

I haven't yet seen a good virtual scientific conference, and it is exactly this aspect of the social interactions that is missing. In the end of the day, the primary reason why scientists move halfway around the globe to gather in a hotel for a few days is not to so much to listen to the speakers as it is to gather in small groups at breakfast/lunch/dinner/happy hour/breaks, and exchange ideas and get to know each other. Academic conferences allow people to put a face to the names they see in papers, and it really helps make science feel more humane and prompts you to exchange more.

Thanks!

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific%20poster%20presen...

The author of this post raises valid points about some avenues for publishing scientific results. Journals have high barriers, rigid formats, paywall, and sometimes exclusionary reviewers. Twitter and blogs are fringe because they are not formal, but increasingly where the conversation is happening. He advocates for a model like Substack for scientific publishing. Which I don't see how it is different from blogs.

However to me the real problem is that he completely ignores the existence of preprint servers. This started with the arXiv in the 1990s for physics, math and computer science, but finally the model has begun to catch up with other fields. In biology the bioRxiv is well established and I'd say more than half of the papers I see do have a preprint deposited there. For medicine, which has a notoriously protective culture, the medRxiv was launched last year and got a gigantic boost due to the pandemic.

Other fields also have their own preferred preprint repositories. To me preprints solve the gatekeeping and cost barriers very well. I only wish they were a little more tied to comments from the readers (in depth comments of the kind you get during peer review, not the knee jerk ones we're used to seeing on the internet).

I say this because there is almost and "adversarial" relationship between the readers, who just want the bottom line in two sentences, and the authors would like their work to be perceived as a big important and novel contribution. Because of this often papers are written with more flourish language than actually necessary to make a point, and so it is really a hard to parse articles and tell good from bad. Often the "summaries" that peer reviewers wrote before making the comments are better than the official abstract of an article, but readers don't get to see and benefit from them. Each person that reads an article has to redo all that work of judging it for themselves, and with the deluge of articles we have it is simply impossible to keep up.

Initiatives such as openreviews.net are already a big step in the right direction. I think in the next 10-20 years this is where the bulk of scientific publishing is headed. A mix of preprint server coupled with curated community reviews that makes papers much easier to gauge and also incentivizes authors to write better and not bullshit, or risk getting wrecked publicly with the public reviews.

If you open the text and look at section 2 of bill S.2658, you will see the definition of "Large Communications Platform Providers": (7) LARGE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.—The term “large communications platform” means a product or service provided by a communications provider that—

    (A) generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and
    
    (B) has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States.

There is actually another bill that aims to legislate over assessing the value of user data: S.1951 - DASHBOARD act, introduced 2019-06-25.

Full text: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/195...

Official summary: To require the Securities and Exchange Commission to promulgate regulations relating to the disclosure of certain commercial data, and for other purposes.

It applies to “commercial data operators”, defined as entities offering consumer online services or a data broker with over 100M monthly users in the United States for most months over the last year. It says that they must routinely provide each user with an estimate of how much they think that users data is worth for the operator, and clearly describe the data collected and how it is used, as well as allow users to delete their data.

It also says that operators must disclose every quarter to the SEC the “material value” of the user data they hold, contracts they have for collection and use of data, and the value of anything else the SEC determines is necessary. It puts the SEC in charge of figuring out a valuation methodology for the data. It also says the SEC should amend the rules for disclosures from public companies that classify as data operators to include information on how data held by them: how it is protected, liabilities, sources, revenue generated, large contracts or acquisitions of data.

For public companies I believe this would significantly change how they must do their accounting, since they must treat data as an asset. It could have significant impacts on their market cap, which could be real (since more information will be available) or just a result of the new reporting rules affecting their listed assets.

Having professional standards bodies for interfaces has actually been proposed - in another bill! S.1084 - DETOUR Act, introduced 2019-04-09.

Full text (only 1800 words!): https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/108...

It was written to get rid of dark patterns and deceptive interfaces. The official summary says: "To prohibit the usage of exploitative and deceptive practices by large online operators and to promote consumer welfare in the use of behavioral research by such providers."

In my reading, the DETOUR act says that large online operators (defined as services with more than 100M monthly active users anywhere, not just in the US) may not use misleading interfaces or unclear wording to mislead the user. It also says that they can only conduct behavioral experiments (e.g. A/B testing) if they have an independent review board registered with the FTC and have informed consent from the users as well as routine disclosure to the public of experiments being done. Finally it says that online large operators may form professional standards bodies, and that those bodies should develop on a continuing basis guidances and bright line rules for developing their technology products in a way that does not impair user autonomy or induce compulsive behavior in children.

I find this idea really interesting! Do you have any reference on studies that have looked into the idea or places that have implemented it?

If you look at section 2 of bill S.2658[0], you will see that the bill only applies to "Large Communications Platform Providers". You bank is not that. Spotify and Netflix are not that. The bill doesn't apply to them. And note that the current threshold is 100M monthly active users in the United States*. A third of the population using the communications platform monthly. Relevant passage of section 2:

    (7) LARGE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.—The term “large communications platform” means a product or service provided by a communications provider that—
    
    (A) generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and
    
    (B) has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States.

---

Original bill text: [0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/265...

As pointed out, in section 4 of S.2658 this is explicitly prohibited:

C) PROHIBITED CHANGES TO INTERFACES.—A change to an interoperability interface or terms of use made with the purpose, or substantial effect, of unreasonably denying access or undermining interoperability for competing communications services shall be considered a violation of the duty under subparagraph (A) to facilitate and maintain interoperability based on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.

As the bill S.2658 text currently stands [0], if iMessage has more than 100M monthly active users, then yes. It is hard to find such statistics on a quick search, but the surest way to make sure it applies to iMessage is to call your representative and tell them the threshold should be lowered from 100M to 10M MAU :)

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/265...

No it doesn't, you need to impersonate an user and login with your password in order to relay messages outside of FB messenger. That said, it has been done: https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-facebook

This has actually also be proposed by Mark Warner in 2018 on a whitepaper titled “Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms”: https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f...

It discusses 20 topics for potential legislation, listed below. Look at items 13 and 16 in the whitepaper, they go very much along the lines of what you said.

    1) Duty to clearly and conspicuously label bots 
    2) Duty to determine the origin of posts and/or accounts
    3) Duty to identify inauthentic accounts 
    4) Make platforms liable for state-law torts (defamation, false light, public disclosure of private facts) for failure to take down deep fake or other manipulated audio/video content 
    5) Public Interest Data Access Bill
    6) Require Interagency Task Force for Countering Asymmetric Threats to Democratic Institutions
    7)Disclosure Requirements for Online Political Advertisements
    8) Public Initiative for Media Literacy
    9) Increasing Deterrence Against Foreign Manipulation
    10) Information fiduciary 
    11) Privacy rulemaking authority at FTC
    12) Comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation
    13) 1st Party Consent for Data Collection
    14) Statutory determination that so-called ‘dark patterns’ are unfair and deceptive trade practices
    15) Algorithmic auditability/fairness
    16) Data Transparency Bill
    17) Data Portability Bill
    18) Interoperability
    19) Opening federal datasets to university researchers and qualified small businesses/startups
    20) Essential Facilities Determinations

Those are good questions. My take is that it would be similar in spirit to the way government can act to prevent price gouging with drug patents. Notice that platforms are allowed to charge and regulate access to the API, but it has to be "reasonable". Here is what is stated on section 4 on interoperability:

------------

SEC. 4. INTEROPERABILITY.

(a) General Duty Of Large Communications Platform Providers.—A large communications platform provider shall, for each large communications platform it operates, maintain a set of transparent, third-party-accessible interfaces (including application programming interfaces) to facilitate and maintain technically compatible, interoperable communications with a user of a competing communications provider.

(b) General Duty Of Competing Communications Providers.—A competing communications provider that accesses an interoperability interface of a large communications platform provider shall reasonably secure any user data it acquires, processes, or transmits.

(c) Interoperability Obligations For Large Communications Platform Providers.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—In order to achieve interoperability under subsection (a), a large communications platform provider shall fulfill the duties under paragraphs (2) through (6) of this subsection.

(2) NON-DISCRIMINATION.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—A large communications platform provider shall facilitate and maintain interoperability with competing communications services for each of its large communications platforms through an interoperability interface, based on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.

(B) REASONABLE THRESHOLDS, ACCESS STANDARDS, AND FEES.—

(i) IN GENERAL.—A large communications platform provider may establish reasonable thresholds related to the frequency, nature, and volume of requests by a competing communications provider to access resources maintained by the large communications platform provider, beyond which the large communications platform provider may assess a reasonable fee for such access.

(ii) USAGE EXPECTATIONS.—A large communications platform provider may establish fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory usage expectations to govern access by competing communications providers, including fees or penalties for providers that exceed those usage expectations.

(iii) LIMITATION ON FEES AND USAGE EXPECTATIONS.—Any fees, penalties, or usage expectations assessed under clauses (i) and (ii) shall be reasonably proportional to the cost, complexity, and risk to the large communications platform provider of providing such access.

(iv) NOTICE.—A large communications platform provider shall provide public notice of any fees, penalties, or usage expectations that may be established under clauses (i) and (ii), including reasonable advance notice of any changes.

(v) SECURITY AND PRIVACY STANDARDS.—A large communications platform provider shall, consistent with industry best practices, set privacy and security standards for access by competing communications services to the extent reasonably necessary to address a threat to the large communications platform or user data, and shall report any suspected violations of those standards to the Commission.

(C) PROHIBITED CHANGES TO INTERFACES.—A change to an interoperability interface or terms of use made with the purpose, or substantial effect, of unreasonably denying access or undermining interoperability for competing communications services shall be considered a violation of the duty under subparagraph (A) to facilitate and maintain interoperability based on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms.

(3) FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENCE.—A large communications platform provider that maintains interoperability between its own large communications platform and other products, services, or affiliated offerings of such provider shall offer a functionally equivalent version of that interface to competing communications services.

(4) INTERFACE INFORMATION.—

(A) IN GENERAL.—Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, a large communications platform provider shall disclose to competing communications providers complete and accurate documentation describing access to the interoperability interface required under this section.

(B) CONTENTS.—The documentation required under subparagraph (A)—

(i) is limited to interface documentation necessary to achieve development and operation of interoperable products and services; and

(ii) does not require the disclosure of the source code of a large communications platform.

(5) NOTICE OF CHANGES.—A large communications platform provider shall provide reasonable advance notice to a competing communications provider, which may be provided through public notice, of any change to an interoperability interface maintained by the large communications platform provider that will affect the interoperability of a competing communications service.

(6) NON-COMMERCIALIZATION BY A LARGE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM PROVIDER.—A large communications platform provider may not collect, use, or share user data obtained from a competing communications service through the interoperability interface except for the purposes of safeguarding the privacy and security of such information or maintaining interoperability of services.

(d) Non-Commercialization By A Competing Communications Provider.—A competing communications provider that accesses an interoperability interface may not collect, use, or share user data obtained from a large communications platform provider through the interoperability interface except for the purposes of safeguarding the privacy and security of such information or maintaining interoperability of services.

(e) Exemption For Certain Services.—The obligations under this section shall not apply to a product or service by which a large communications platform provider does not generate any income or other compensation, directly or indirectly, from collecting, using, or sharing user data.

I'm every bit as surprised as you. I don't think it's a significant fraction of congress though, I think it's specifically senator Mark Warner. He did work with tech before, and my take is that he knows what he is talking about and was waiting for a good political moment to present such unpalatable proposals (unpalatable to the tech companies, that is).

See his Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Warner#Early_life,_educat...

Last year he (meaning, most likely his staff under his supervision) put out a "whitepaper" outlining 20 possible proposals to regulate social media and tech companies. Notably, 4 of the things discussed were introduced as bills in one form or another.

I posted about them last year, see the discussion and links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21389809

Here is the full text of the ACCESS Act of 2019 bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/265...

I highly recommend that everyone reads it - it is extremely short, well written, and probably the single most important piece of legislation to HN folks in the past decade.

As the bill is right now, it require communications platforms with 100M monthly active users in the US to make their services interoperable with other platforms. The bill presumes that platforms using open protocols already (like email) are fine. Facebook and it’s messenger platform is likely to be the only one meeting the threshold.

I'm not American, but if you are and you care, I would suggest you to call your representative and explain why you support (or not) this bill. Remember that as it goes through congress, it can, and most likely will, be heavily edited or gutted to fit the many competing interests whispering in their ears. If you think the bill is good as is, tell them that! Personally, I think the bill is perfect, except for the 100M user threshold to start demand compatibility, which I think should be lowered to 10M.

I have installed trillium twice before, when trying to find a better alternative to a bunch of google docs, but didn't end up using it. The reason is that you cannot readily share an editable copy of a document with a link, which ends up happening with half the documents I write in Google docs. If that was an option, I think it'd be preferable to Google docs in every way (for me).

I have installed trillium twice before, when trying to find a better alternative to a bunch of google docs, but didn't end up using it. The reason is that you cannot readily share an editable copy of a document with a link, which ends up happening with half the documents I write in Google docs. If that was an option, I think it'd be preferable to Google docs in every way (for me).

Nice to see this here, I spent the last weekend reading about quadratic voting/funding. The core idea is that in order to decide how much "endorsement" each project amongst many receives, you take the square root of how much each person gave to that project, sum that, then square it to decide how much of a matching contribution to be given.

It has a couple interesting properties that make it appealing for the funding of "public goods" (such as software) via grant matching mechanisms. The main ones:

- Projects with distinct supporter bases will receive more funding if they join forces as a single project with more supporters

- Projects with few supporters that give a lot of money/endorsement will receive very little boost from this

- You can also implement the possibility of "negative votes/funding" that allow people to "short" the projects that they consider a net negative

Over the past year a grant matching mechanism using quadratic funding has been trialed in a platform called Gitcoin, which supports crowdfunding Ethereum development projects: https://gitcoin.co/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gi...

A post by Vitalik Buterin describing quadratic funding is here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/12/07/quadratic.html

Vitalik also wrote about the last 3 rounds of this funding on Gitcoin, they’ve been making tweaks and the results are extremely promising:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/04/30/round5.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/01/28/round4.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html

The idea of quadratic funding came from quadratic voting, which was discussed in the 2018 book Radical Markets: https://vitalik.ca/general/2018/04/20/radical_markets.html

In september 2018 Vitalik together with one of the book authors and another person put out a preprint describing their ideas for quadratic funding, which is very interestingly written: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.06421.pdf

The broader field under which this fits is called "mechanism design", which means inverse game theory: instead of specifying the rules and seeing what the outcome is, you decide which outcome you want and try to design a game that leads to it...a very enticing idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

Well actually that's more like Unicode Art ;)

Agreed (I'm a matrix user myself). When I saw the thread I was confused about what exactly (if anything) he wanted to achieve that couldn't be done with matrix. I'd be surprised if he wasn't familiar with it already.

Perhaps it's largely about branding/development control? I imagine it looks better to investors to say "we're making this new thing" rather than "we're gonna use this other thing that we don't own".

Please note that this article makes a crucial omission: this bill only applies to communication platforms With more than 100M users in the United States.

To my knowledge, only Facebook and Facebook messenger meet that threshold (please list others for which there is data supporting that they'd also be affected). So as it is, this bill would make Facebook offer APIs to it's services, but other services with less users in the United States won't have to.

Here's the relevant section of the bill:

(7) LARGE COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM.—The term ‘‘large communications platform’’ means a product or service provided by a communications provider that — (A) generates income, directly or indirectly, from the collection, processing, sale, or sharing of user data; and (B) has more than 100,000,000 monthly active users in the United States.

Link to bill on congress website: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/265...

Link to the full proposed text as uploaded by Mark Warren: https://www.scribd.com/document/431507473/GOE19968

Same. I have this fantasy where I wonder: what if all software became public domain, and you reward creators based on the GitHub stars a repo has, weighted by something like page rank?

Then I realized this could be extended to anything where there is a platform for rating the content creation, from books (Goodreads) to arts (deviant art) to deeds (Facebook and Twitter). Then my friend told me I had reinvented Whuffie, as presented in the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom...

The main problem with this idea is that the money for paying creators would probably have to come from the government, since who else would pitch in to support this? But hey, people talk about universal basic income, this is like a weighted version...

3D printing in university libraries is my favorite example. Every makerspace in libraries I talked too says they contemplated charging and discarded the idea because filament is so cheap ($10/kg in bulk) that it's not worth the hassle and would dampen the goal of giving students access to the technology

This is an interesting insight. Do you live in Singapore or did you conclude this from elsewhere?

In the case of Facebook unless it becomes a subscription it does not indeed. In the case of Netflix, Spotify and G Suite it's baked into the subscription already, what the regulation would do is alleviate vendor lock-in.

UGH. I was so excited when I read the thread title, only to be sorely disappointed to realized they're talking about regulating the _wrong_ thing.

We need regulation to keep the web at least moderately open and interoperable. We need regulation to enforce standards and make it possible to jump over the wall of walled gardens.

We're in a sorry state right now in that only email and SMS are open standards for talking to people, and under constant siege. Attempts for new revolutionary decentralization are yet to do a better job than most protocols from the 80s. What if we had regulations to force service providers to provide APIs and interoperability in their services? What if messaging someone on Facebook from Google hangouts was as easy as sending an email?

The balkanization of the web and walled gardens is to me the biggest issue that affects the most people for the worst, and while we constantly talk about the new technologies that could solve the issue if only there was a way to develop them, we ignore (I think often out of unconditioned reflex) that the issue could be fixed in a timely and reasonable manner by bringing the government in with a reasonable framework.

People complain all the time about how Google and Facebook and Netflix and Spotify own all my data and make it impossible to use it outside their platform, yet I never hear people discussing the most obvious solution: just regulate them to make the data interoperable and empower you like you wish all the decentralized technology would enable you to do, if only they had adoption!