This is a listing of best paper awards across 32 computer science conferences, for papers chosen in that year to be the "best" by committees in those conferences meant to be the broadest conferences in each subfield.
I use a single never-ending text file for this, because I'm tired of dealing with remembering formats or apps. I've written about it here: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
So I was thinking about how the web is not as permanent as it used to be. Between walled gardens, and dynamic content, it's hard to find things you saw. So I wanted a way to have a screenshot-based "archive.org" but for yourself, so that it works with non-public content too like a Facebook post or if it disappears like all the stuff on Google+.
Philosophically, I think almost everything we see and think about is in a web browser these days. Even private conversations with my friends, I often look up a few things about them. So I've been using irchiver myself to dogfood it, for almost 2 years now. And found it to be super useful already. For example, I've recovered important technical posts that someone deleted, paragraphs on text I lost when submitting a form that didn't save, or found a comic strip that I had at the tip of my tongue but got lost in google search.
And I think it's now possible because of strong+efficient screenshot compression and good OCR. There's an undocumented Win32 hack that lets you capture window content in a fast way (moreso that a typical BitBlt) so I used that to grab the images. And made a standard inverted index search engine for the content. Anyways, the webpage I put up for the project explains it as best as I can to a general audience [https://irchiver.com/].
In many ways, it's like the Rewind startup here. Except it just happens I did it for Windows, and they did it for MacOS and iPhone. And I care a lot about local storage of the original screenshots and text. Would love to hear others' thoughts.
I've been working on a similar system for a while called irchiver [https://irchiver.com/] but what I wanted from the start is for everything to be local and plain formatted, i.e. stored as .txt and .webp to be most accessible.
Coincidentally, I've only been building for Windows, so different from the platforms supported by Rewind. If anyone wants to collaborate, I'd be very open to it.
There's an open source project I was briefly involved in called SSVG [1] that renders the SVG as Canvas to speed it up drastically, especially on Chrome. It works as a simple one-line js drop in for many common visualization examples [2].
I've had my ups and downs with peer review. I'm trying to collect stories of papers from ideation to publication, while also describing the struggle for my own papers.
Looking at my past experiences for all my papers, I can only conclude that the process is more nuanced than can be described in a tagline like "peer review is broken" or "publishing is random", so I'm interested in hearing everyone else's experiences too.
Some of what looks challenging here is handling fonts. SVG would be so much better if there was a way to do font embedding. Even a minimal set of fonts would be amazing. Or if operating systems or libraries for SVG support could all commit to supporting a common set of fonts, like browsers did for web safe fonts. Think of how clunky the web would have been without those.
Are you sure you recall correctly? The linked page recommends upgrading GIF to PNG, "the only reasonable alternative to paying the Unisys tax on the web is to upgrade graphics from GIF to PNG format", which makes sense because it's a lossless conversion. PNG was a new format back that, without much adoption. JPEG doesn't make sense as a substitute format for GIF, and would greatly increase the size and decrease the quality of files.
Spacemonger is probably the oldest piece of non-updated software I still use. I've been using it continuously for over 20 years, about the same length as I've been using Winamp 2, and just recently used it to clear out some large files to create a full-disk backup.
It still works blazing fast on hard drives that are 1000 times the size than the drives that existed when it was programmed, and nearly as well as 20+ years ago (there are some occasional crashes when removing some system protected files, but easy to just open it up and scan again). I never made the jump to Spacemonger 2 because in the early years that I started using it, I was in high school without a credit card.
I emailed the author in December 2020 to see if there was a way to enable HiDPI on it, since that's the only real flaw of it right now. He responded 3 months later with a very personal message that I really appreciated.
I've started doing this more. The videos of my work has always outlasted the work itself. Even though technically I can dig up old compilers or try and update my dependencies, I rarely do. So whatever was captured in the video becomes the only artifact of my older programming projects.
I used to think that video formats would no longer be supported over time, but even the oldest weird video formats still play in VLC and MPC, and probably would work fine if uploaded on YouTube.
If you want automatic archiving, check out https://irchiver.com/ for Windows. It runs on client-side so gets an archive from your point of view, i.e. including Facebook content and partially-filled out forms, etc.
Fair point, it's something I'm aware of and it's a bit intentional to counterbalance the "normalization bias" already done in other rankings, if that's what you meant by "account for differences".
To put another way, to count in a way such that a CVPR best paper is worth 28-fold a CHI best paper is also quite suspect. There's a rabbit hole you can go down to find the best conference to submit to where the submission-to-best-papers is low, to optimize for this.
PS: note that there's an upper bound to best paper awards, which is "< 1% of submitted papers".
I've been looking at the bias in rankings for a little while. I think one way to identify and raise awareness of the biases, is just put rankings together side-by-side. I did this for computer science programs, and there's some interesting differences that I noticed:
My own reading is that the math professor's analysis is quite credible, and that Columbia did indeed cheat the rankings by reporting "creative statistics".
Nice idea, I could imagine using this. Just a thought, it might be nice to see more variation in the Lorem Ipsum, like with text that include numbers and links and capitalized word, maybe even multiple paragraphs.
irchiver captures text on the page, and separately OCRs the screenshots (specifically, the screenshot from your viewport). So you can search just what was shown on the page, or what was in the page. Both techniques have pros and cons.
While archive.org is fantastic, it can only capture pages that are both 1) publicly accessible (i.e. no social media content) that it happens to crawl, and 2) static content (you're out of luck if the content you want is loaded dynamically, or changes depending on user input).
I've been working on this problem for a while. Website upkeep is hard to quantify, but basically every disk fails and every operating system eventually needs a serious upgrade. The timeframe that a system can run continuously is not that long compared to the timeframe that information is relevant. So the most lightweight way to keep something up and running is to make it trivial to port to many hosting configurations by simplifying the toolchain needed to rehost it. (Note that humans are part of that workflow, if it's a company)
I've written a manifesto about making a commitment to keep websites online and maintained for 10-30 years, for people who are maintaining web content: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
And on the flipside (from a user's point of view), I've also been working on a background process that automatically captures full-resolution screenshots of every website you visit, creating your own searchable personal web archive: https://irchiver.com/
I've personally been trying to make a commitment to keep my web projects and writing online for 30 years. My original internal goal when I started thinking about this, was to outlast all the content on Twitter, Google+, and facebook.com. One of those has already been met, kind of sadly.
> Because politicians exempted themselved from anti-spam laws, as they do with most laws.
This was the most puzzling thing to me. The politicians that I saw on TV as adamantly pro-privacy, anti-tracking, who made a lot of sense in everything they were saying -- you contribute a single dollar (because they want to show grassroots support for their pro-individuals campaign) and they IMMEDIATELY give your email and survey responses to everyone in their party, including to state-level campaigns in places across the country.
There was no indication on the donation form that any of my personal details would be used for anything except to show that they had a lot of grassroots supporters.
Not only that, but their emails are so clickbait-ey like "lazyjeff, you are the reason that [hated politician] is destroying democracy."