{"id":3782,"date":"2010-06-07T13:41:40","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T20:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=3782"},"modified":"2010-06-07T13:41:40","modified_gmt":"2010-06-07T20:41:40","slug":"what-to-do-with-scirate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2010\/06\/07\/what-to-do-with-scirate\/","title":{"rendered":"What To Do With Scirate?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One interesting thing about quantum computing is that because it is a very new field, a large amount of the research in the field is on the arXiv<\/a> (interestingly the worst users have historically been computer scientists.) Back in 2006 whenever I would sit around BSing about the arXiv with other quantum computing people, the idea of improvements that would bring the arXiv more up to date would come up. After hearing repeatedly about such ideas, in January 2007, I got fed up of hearing about these ideas and so I sat down and wrote scirate.com, a Digg-like front end for the arXiv. Okay well mostly I did it to learn PHP and Python. Oh, and because coding is fun and I can actually succeed at it as opposed to opened ended research which if hard. Also I did it because I hated spending time filtering through the arXiv each day and wanted to use the power of group knowledge to help save me time. I figure if I add up the time Scirate has saved me versus the time spent reading it I’m pretty close to having gained time. What you didn’t know the point of this blog is to slow down all you competing quantum researchers and thus effectively increase my own effective research speed? \ud83d\ude42
\nAfter some initial development, however, I mostly stopped working on Scirate. Why? Well first of all because I didn’t think I’d succeeded in a very elegant way. Second there was never much traction: there is a group of quantum computing theorists who use scirate fairly often, but outside of that it is not widely used (though there are around a thousand users signed up.) Probably this is also because the development of scirate was essentially closed, consisting of me, hacking away in his spare time. Third, well this thing called a “real job” called (but I keep getting this “hold” music, heh.) I am, however, very proud that until last week, I basically haven’t had to touch the website in any way (last week my host moved Scirates server and didn’t copy over my crontab jobs, thus there is a day missing where I didn’t catch this) besides fixing a few double votes (that occur via a mechanism I’ve never been able to track down.)
\nSo now the question is: what should I do with Scirate?
\nSome things I’ve been thinking about.<\/p>\n