Also a graduate student in cs theory and was a BSMer(huh, I realized I attended your midwest theory day talk)
There is a facebook group, computer science real talk. https://www.facebook.com/groups/500102603385910/ Things in there are interesting to grad students. It seems to start as a place for cornell cs graduate students. There are people talking about STOC papers in there, neat.
Thanks for sharing! I founded the group since I was fed up with the Computer Science Facebook group for Cornell -- while there was occasionally interesting CS content, it was flooded by a lot of stuff that's either no longer interesting to me (a lot of it is Cornell undergraduate centric, while I'm now a graduate student at MIT), or just meme/jokish in nature. My goal was to make a group with interesting, thought-provoking content and better quality discussion. If this appeals to you, feel free to join and contribute.
Sounds like an awesome resource! I was also a BSMer :)
Re:A Hacker News for grad students?
by JacobEdelman on Sunday June 29, 2014 @06:36PM
(#7962755)
I'd also like to thank you for your blog. It is a resource that I have repeatedly found myself going back to as I explore CS and math.
I'm not happy with datatau because I feel it's too focused on basic software tutorials. I'm not happy with any of the subreddits I've looked at; I think a large part of it is just that by being part of reddit the quality of discussion is pulled down.
In more generality, I feel that people who want to engage in scientific discourse at the graduate student level (I'm thinking of mathematics, physics, and computer science) don't have enough tools to do this. There are conferences, which are typically stuck in one field; and blogs by researchers, which are great but often do too much conference/workshop/program advertising for my taste. Most web spaces like reddit are too elementary (how many posts do I read there about picture proofs of sums of squares!). I think the subcommunity of HN users interested in mathematics, and the kinds of posts that end up on HN, shows that there is real interest. I even know of mathematics/CS researchers who keep an eye on HN because of the promptness of dissemination and quality of discussion.
All this being said, I would be very willing to help run such a community, getting it off the ground with interesting submissions and such. Right now the closest thing I have is a Google Plus community I've formed around my blog [1]. But again, very few people beside me post things that I consider up to my standards.
[1]: plus.google.com/communities/101551468332631556735