Ask HN: How do you stay on top of new research?

9 pointsjust_human6mo ago9 comments

I used to use Karpathy's gret arxiv-sanity.com but it now redirects to a paid product (undermind.ai). It's been a while since I've tried to read new research papers on a daily/weekly basis. How do others stay on top of new research papers?

9 comments

bjourne6mo ago

You can't. 10k articles are published daily. It's doubtful you'll have time to even download them all.

brudgers6mo ago

Agreed and Fomo is an aspect of youth. Getting older is in part coming to terms with the reality that we missed out on approximately everything…the realization that we were mistaken when we thought we were keeping up.

Blackstrat6mo ago

And it only gets worse once you retire. In some cases, I go back to interests abandoned in the past, so I could pursue the almighty dollar. In reality, I use HN as a curator of things that might be interesting to read or study. Of late, the AI fad seems to have blotted out a lot of the subject diversity, though I only skim the first 120-150 “new” entries, though occasionally I use the search feature for specific subjects. I have uses several of the others like Stack Exchange, Quora, Reddit, et al, though I prefer HN unless I’m looking for a lot of opinions on specific topics, e.g. best textbook on subject X.

yorwba6mo ago

You can use undermind.ai on the free plan. I made two searches when they launched and still occasionally get updates with new relevant papers. Unfortunately, those papers are typically only new and relevant, but not novel. (Not a knock against the search quality. In an area where data acquisition is expensive, everyone working with the same handful of small datasets is probably unavoidable.) But the initial searches surfaces some old papers I had missed, so I'd say it's worth a try.

softwaredoug6mo ago

The only way I know how is to see what research gets mentioned by 2 or more people I respect. Then I might check it out.

But there's a lot of bad ML research out there, my default is to ignore it.

barrenko6mo ago

Similar to a rule from zombie movies - Fight only when you absolutely must, run when you can. 'Fight' meaning reading a paper.

bilsbie6mo ago

I try to keep a curated list of researchers on x.com.

dv_dt6mo ago

google scholar and alerts for references to a curated author list

toomuchtodo6mo ago

I created a custom feed of research links ingested from HN, Bluesky, and Reddit subreddits firehoses that meet url regex criteria (DOIs or paper repo TLDs) that funnel into karakeep.app for reading at my convenience. Firehose->folder.

(i would also ingest twitter/x firehose, but the access story is meh, alas)

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