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| ▲ | IanCal a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Adding an external service so you don’t have to store a few hundred bytes is wild, particularly within a pdf. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz a day ago | parent [-] | | It's not the bytes. It's the fact that it's likely gonna be printed in a paper journal, where you can't click the link. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I find it amusing that you are complaining about not having a computer to click a link while glossing over the fact that you need a computer to use a link at all. This use case of "I have a paper journal and no PDF but a computer with a web browser" seems extraordinarily contrived. I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. If we cared, we'd use a QR code. This kind of luddite behavior sometimes makes using this site exhausting. | | |
| ▲ | jtuple a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though. Reading paper was more comfortable then reading on the screen, and it was easy to annotate, highlight, scribble notes in the margin, doodle diagrams, etc. Do grad students today just use tablets with a stylus instead (iPad + pencil, Remarkable Pro, etc)? Granted, post grad school I don't print much anymore, but that's mostly due to a change in use case. At work I generally read at most 1-5 papers a day tops, which is small enough to just do on a computer screen (and have less need to annotate, etc). Quite different then the 50-100 papers/week + deep analysis expected in academia. | | |
| ▲ | Incipient 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Perhaps times have changed, but when I was in grad school circa 2010 smartphones and tablets weren't yet ubiquitous but laptops were. It was super common to sit in a cafe/library with a laptop and a stack of printed papers to comb though. I just had a really warm feeling of nostalgia reading that! I was a pretty average student, and the material was sometimes dull, but the coffee was nice, life had little stress (in comparison) and everything felt good. I forgot about those times haha. Thanks! |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. This is by no means a universal experience. People still get printed journals. Libraries still stock them. Some folks print out reference materials from a PDF to take to class or a meeting or whatnot. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z a day ago | parent [-] | | And how many of those people then proceed to type those links into their web browsers, shortened or not? Sure, contributing to link rot is bad, but in the same way that throwing out spoiled food is bad. Sometimes you've just gotta break a bunch of links. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz a day ago | parent [-] | | > And how many of those people then proceed to type those links into their web browsers, shortened or not? That probably depends on the link's purpose. "The full dataset and source code to reproduce this research can be downloaded at <url>" might be deeply interesting to someone in a few years. | | |
| ▲ | epolanski a day ago | parent [-] | | So he has a computer and can click. In any case a paper should not rely on an ephemeral resource like internet links. Have you ever tried to navigate to the errata corrige of computer science books? It's one single book, with one single link, and it's dead anyway. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m unconvinced the researchers acted irresponsibly. If anything, a Google-shortened link looks—at first glance—more reliable than a PDF hosted god knows where. There are always dependencies in citations. Unless a paper comes with its citations embedded, splitting hairs between why one untrustworthy provider is more untrustworthy than another is silly. | | |
| ▲ | ycombinatrix a day ago | parent [-] | | The Google shortened link just redirects you to the PDF hosted god knows where... |
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| ▲ | andrepd a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I feel like all that is beyond the point. People used goo.gl because they largely are not tech specialists and aren't really aware of link rot or of a Google decision rendering those links unaccessible. | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z a day ago | parent [-] | | > People used goo.gl because they largely are not tech specialists and aren't really aware of link rot or of a Google decision rendering those links unaccessible. Anyone who is savvy enough to put a link in a document is well-aware of the fact that links don't work forever, because anyone who has ever clicked a link from a document has encountered a dead link. It's not 2005 anymore, the internet has accumulated plenty of dead links. | | |
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| ▲ | reaperducer a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | This kind of luddite behavior sometimes makes using this site exhausting. We have many paper documents from over 1,000 years ago. The vast majority of what was on the internet 25 years ago is gone forever. | | |
| ▲ | eviks 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What a weird comparison. Do we have the vast majority of paper documents from 1,000 years ago? | | |
| ▲ | SR2Z 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | We certainly have more paper documents from 1000 years ago than PDFs from 1000 years ago! Clearly that's the fault of the PDFs. |
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| ▲ | epolanski a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 25? Try going back by 6/7 years on this very website, half the links are dead. |
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| ▲ | IanCal 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’s an even worse reason to use a temporary redirection service. If you really need to, put in both. | |
| ▲ | leumon a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | which makes url shorteners even more attractive for printed media, because you don't have to type many characters manually |
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| ▲ | epolanski a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fix that at the presentation layer (PDFs and Word files etc support links) not the data one. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz a day ago | parent [-] | | Let me know when you figure out how to make a printed scientific journal clickable. | | |
| ▲ | epolanski a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Scientific journals should not rely on ephemeral data on the internet. It doesn't even matter how long the url is. Just buy any scientific book and try to navigate to it's own errata they link in the book. It's always dead. | |
| ▲ | diatone a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Take a photo on your phone, OS recognises the link in the image, makes it clickable, done. Or, use a QR code instead | | |
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