Top all-time · #1014
Michael Eisen
Personal blog · michaeleisen.org/blogsciencepolitics
Michael Eisen's personal blog at michaeleisen.org covers science and politics. Since 2011, 65 different Hacker News readers have linked it 77 times, most often “Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 4 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Michael Eisen's blog mainly for his post on algorithmic pricing bots that drove an out-of-print book to a $23M Amazon listing, cited in threads on Amazon pricing and open access.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- One commenter calls a post a favourite; others say 'I like this example' and call a series of posts 'really great'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies29 people · 30 mentions · first linked 2011-04-23
- The Villain of CRISPR5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-01-25
- Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-11-02
- Congresswoman Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-01-06
- On pastrami and the business of PLOS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-03-27
- Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking open access2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-04-01
- My father, Aaron Swartz, and Assigning Blame for Suicide2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-08
- The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-04-09
What Hacker News says?
There are already places for open-access articles, mainly PLOS and arXiv. PLOS stands for Public Library Of Science and was create around 10 years ago. It has got quite popular among scientist, and it's peer reviewed. However, it charges the authors with a small fee, usually around $1000 per article. For some scientists this is a problem. Personally I think this is a much better and a more economic systemic model th…
Comment linking /blog/?p=890
on “Aaron Swartz commits suicide”Submitted Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies as a story · 711 points
HN discussionhttp://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost... "The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available." Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312
Comment linking /blog/?p=1312
on “Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available”Submitted NASA paywalls first papers arising from Curiosity rover – I am setting them free as a story · 569 points
HN discussionCould be pricing algorithms gone wild, too. For a really extreme example of this, see: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “Google Cardboard”Submitted The Villain of CRISPR as a story · 227 points
HN discussionProbably Amazon bot bidding wars: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “The Future of Programming”Submitted Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) as a story · 206 points
HN discussionMy favorite story of algorithmic pricing gone mad was discovered by a postdoc in my grad school lab, leading to an out of print book being listed on Amazon for over $23 million: https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff”Submitted Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) as a story · 204 points
HN discussionMadness.. Its not like such a feedback loop hasn't been encountered before in systems. I like this example: https://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “Zillow to stop flipping homes, loses more than $550M, lays off 25% of staff”Submitted The Arsenic DNA paper exposes flaws in peer review as a story · 193 points
HN discussionOP is referring to a case of a buggy algorithm in a bot which was setting a ridiculous price on a used textbook on Amazon: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 HFT has already caused at least one "flash crash": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading#May_6.2C...
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early”Submitted Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) as a story · 186 points
HN discussionThis isn't exactly related, but it's one of my favorite blog posts. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have (2019)”Submitted Amazon’s $23M book about flies (2011) as a story · 168 points
HN discussion> but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free Agreed. 6 hours @ $200/hour for my consulting rates gives $1,200. I give that away for free. What remains is the non-bulk. That's still expensive. Who will do the typesetting and proof reading? In physics and math, this is often pushed into the TeX stylesheet. Not so for most other field. One of the journals I've reviewed fo…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1883
on “Sci-Hub, spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz, angering publishers all over again”Submitted On pastrami and the business of PLOS as a story · 55 points
HN discussionFamously, the million dollar book feedback loop: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “Amazon sellers marking products as collectible to get around price gouging rules”Submitted Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking open access as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThere is something mesmerizing about an evil genius at the height of their craft, and Eric Lander is an evil genius at the height of his craft. Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to stand in awe even as I picture him cackling loudly in his Kendall Square lair, giant laser weapon behind him poised to destroy Ber…
Comment linking /blog/?p=1825
on “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020”Submitted My father, Aaron Swartz, and Assigning Blame for Suicide as a story · 9 points
HN discussionFor instance, see http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
Comment linking /blog/?p=1825
on “The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020”Submitted How academia betrayed Aaron Swartz as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI think the problem is that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to hazy, individual, non-standard assessments of impact, of which the calculated "Impact Factor" of journals that people publish in is one factor. My boss (and Public Library of Science founder) has a blog post related to this, http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=911 . Essentially, hiring/tenure committees don't explicitly sit down and plug in the impact fa…
Comment linking /blog/?p=911
on “Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing”Submitted Congresswoman Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI'd encourage all active researchers who support the move to open access to sign the following petition: http://michaeleisen.org/petition/ It basically tells funders that you support them to negotiate better open access deals, even if that risks limiting the number of venues you can publish in.
Comment linking /petition/
on “Max Planck Society Discontinues Agreement with Elsevier”Submitted PubMed Commons: Post publication peer review goes mainstream as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis seems apropos: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358
Comment linking /blog/?p=358
on “The anatomy of a ripoff”Submitted The Imprinter of All Maladies as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
