Jeff Huang

> This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide

The "Post" section of the page linked by lazyjeff says:

>Otherwise known as "Self-Archiving" or "Posting Rights", all ACM published authors of magazine articles, journal articles, and conference papers retain the right to post the pre-submitted (also known as "pre-prints"), submitted, accepted, and peer-reviewed versions of their work in any and all of the following sites:

> Author's Homepage

> ...

So posting a PDF of the "accepted version" to a personal website is not a "grey area" - it is explicitly permitted by the ACM.

This is the usual situation: authors retain the rights to put the "accepted" version on their homepage. This includes all the changes made in response to reviewer comments, but is formatted by the author rather than the publisher.

Unless they have selected an open-access option (which usually requires paying a fee), they typically do not have the rights to post the "publisher formatted" version. However, in fields like CS the submitted version is usually produced using a LaTeX template for the journal so looks very similar to the publisher-formatted version; the main differences are often things like the journal name and page numbers written in the headers and footers.

For lazyjeff's example, you can compare the version…

> But a postdoc at a university is an underpaid training position for the most part. That's not really true or fair. You're talking about a person who's done likely 4 years of undergraduate and between 4 and 8 (median 5?) years of graduate studies and gained a Ph.D. This person is without a doubt "an expert" in their field. Does that person still need training? Sure. But who doesn't?

You're also talking about someone who is probably in their early to mid 30's. Eventually people want to start having a life. And you're expecting them to make pennies? I'm not joking. Here's a list of CS Post Doc stipends[0]. Go to Berkeley or Stanford and make $66k-$80k? I've gotten more money as a PhD Intern! You're going to get more than double that in industry before we talk about RSUs.

I think this is something we need to take quite seriously here. There aren't really good reasons for people to choose this path, especially considering how disruptive it is to your life (have fun moving again in a few years :). Maybe we can hope that those who go are just really dedicated to research and following their passions. So dedicated that they are willing to put off normal human things like starting a family, maintaining relationships[1], or even just building one's net worth (or paying off student debt). Some people want to become a professor[2] so will do that.

But the big thing I see is that there's nothing to attract the best people. (We can extend this to even just professorships[3]). So…

I can see how that would be useful, but I fear it is outside of the context of the site and I'm not sure how it would fit. Comments on Science is supposed to be about comments, not about papers themselves, but I guess the jury's still out on that one.
The best I can do, that still fits in the context of the site as it is now, is to have a link where you can list papers tagged with e.g. "antimatter", and order them by score.
I'll think about your idea and get back to you on that. I would love to have some help as I am a solo-coder-designer-administrator on the site and it's already proved to be a handful.

Thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated.

Edit: I forgot to add a link for a similar site to that you described, but for computer science: http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html Admittedly, the voting is missing, and it's quite narrow in scope, but my guess is sites like that exist for most fields. Have you not found any for theoretical physics?

On the other hand, infrastructure can only be as useful as the applications they support. Technologists love solving hard technical problems [1], but ultimately, isn't the main goal to improve peoples' lives? Almost all the engineers I know would prefer to work on sophisticated interesting problems than "another web-app," but there isn't much point if it is just for our own edification.

I can understand your disdain for Instagram's frivolity, but people said the same about Twitter and it ended up playing a major role in the Arab Spring, whereas almost no one outside the techworld knows or really cares who runs their infrastructure. Of course without this infrastructure it all wouldn't work.

Like you say, comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges, you can't really argue one is fundamentally more important than the other.

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

While not exactly software per-se, I created a system of multiple text files to manage todos, long term goals, and various reminders (eg, IOUs, deadlines, etc). This was inspired initially by Jeff Huang’s blog post [1] but then grew to a complex collection of different files. A problem I ran into was building an interface for displaying and editing these text files (each file has a different width and for some files I want to have different heights when editing them). Ultimately I settled on multiple vim tabs in a terminal window. Been using this for close to five years now and I couldn’t be happier with it. However, at this point the system of files (and the terminal “user interface”) is completely customized to my life and would likely never fit someone else’s requirements.

[1] https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/

I commiserate, since I too started my PhD later in life, but luckily I don't have any kids and my wife can work remotely. I'm moving for a postdoc right after the Spring semester ends.

I understand why the bias against not moving exists, but interestingly, despite the supposed taboo, lots of programs self-hire for faculty (at least in CS) [1]:

> 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves.

It makes me wonder if this is a case where prior wisdom has not caught up with modern practices.

[1]: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty-composition-and-hiring-trends