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a3_nm

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a3_nm
·há 4 meses·discuss
I'm not sure whether I'm taking too seriously something intended as a joke, but this in fact can conceivably be useful! When studying mathematical problems, sometimes you have a number that has some special meaning in your problem (e.g., the first value for which some phenomenon does not occur), you may be able to compute this number by brute-force or by ad-hoc reasoning, and if the number is high enough then someone else finding this number may mean that they are looking at the same problem as you. Since there's a canonical way to write numbers, but not a canonical way to define problems, then this can be helpful for these people to find each other.

An example of a similar phenomenon here https://a3nm.net/work/research/questions/#words-without-shuf... where someone interested in the sequence "abcacbacabc" is plausibly looking at the longest and lexicographically smallest ternary word without a shuffle square substring. Just searching for "abcacbacabc" on Google yields papers who look at this -- and two people independently coming up with the concept could find each other in this way if they write examples the same way even if they don't use the same words to define the concept.

(A related resource in maths is the OEIS https://oeis.org/ to see whether the integer sequence you came up with has already been studied or has another non-obvious reformulation.)
a3_nm
·há 7 meses·discuss
I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000.

Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.
a3_nm
·há 3 anos·discuss
As much as I think that Wikipedia notability guidelines are way too strict, I'm wondering -- is it necessarily a bad thing for editor communities to split off and create separate specialized wikis? As long as the other wikis are also under a free license (here, CC BY-SA 4.0), you can always import back the articles into Wikipedia. So maybe it can be a useful way for communities to "incubate" articles?
a3_nm
·há 8 anos·discuss
> Good luck with that.

Well, depending on the books, it may be easy to download the books online without buying them...