Prediction: Arxiv has no need of this money, as it has no need of upgrades. This money will exclusively attract salesman, all of whom will offer to make arxiv worse, for money. One of them might succeed
ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
71–80 of 164 posts
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#72> arXiv was founded in 1991 by then-Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. ’81, prior to his return to Cornell in 2001. I had no idea arXiv was that old. I honestly only heard of it and started using it less than 10 years ago.
Different disciplines began regularly posting their papers to the arXiv at different times. The order was (very) roughly High-energy theory ~1992 Other physics theory ~1994 Physics experiment ~1996 Math ~2000 CS ~2008 Some disciplines flipped nearly overnight, while others took several years of slow growth before posting to the arXiv become the default.
CS was surely earlier, it was quite widely used by 2006 in my recollection
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Loads fast, except for the PDFs which load quite slowly
Have to download the file, then load it on the client. Not sure you can make it much faster.
They probably could make it faster by rendering server-side a preview of sorts. I don't think that most papers are large enough for this to have a major impact unless you have a very slow connection.
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#74Internet movie pirates have been using bittorrent for 20 years. I think there is fraud here.
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#75Why do you need $10M to host some PDFs?
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#76I am really glad arXiv is getting more funding. It is an essential resource. For me personally, it’ll be really interesting to see if the frontend changes. No doubt there are some important improvements that can be made (a website can always be made more accessible, moderation tools, support for name changes as mentioned, etc.) However, to first approximation, arXiV’s website already seems almost like a platonic idea…
Loads fast, except for the PDFs which load quite slowly
Browsers are painfully slow at rendering PDF. Open them with your local reader.
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#77Oh that’s great to hear! I really like arXiv and am glad it’s getting more funding! I hope this will enable arXiv to fix some of the long-time issues it has, including the way identity and attribution are handled. For example: the current system assumes people’s names do not change [1], which in particular negatively affects trans authors. This seems like it could be fixed if they had the bandwidth to, and I hope the…
There is no good way to deal with name changes. You can change them in the metadata, but the old ones will still be around in the paper itself. You can let authors change them in the paper, but the old ones will still be around in others' bibliographies. You can't do much about the bibliographies, since (1) you'd need an automated way to find them all and disambiguate them (have fun with Chinese names) and (2) a lot of authors will reject the idea that someone else changes their papers.
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#78Make the papers web-native!
They seem to be trying:
> In addition, arXiv will provide substantially better access to the visually impaired by producing HTML as well as PDF versions of its content.
But it's a different question whether they will succeed. A compile-to-HTML pipeline needs to work with every single LaTeX package that people use, or at least work with most ones and fail gracefully for the rest. That was hard enough for compile-to-PDF, requiring the arXiv to keep every year's version of TeX Live permanently maintained.
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I agree that that's middle class levels of expense. If you're living a "normal" life, and for the sake of the example you start with $500k per year, my estimates are $300k after taxes, $290k after medical/insurance, $240k after rent/mortgage, $220k after food, $200k after transportation. IMO $50k for rent/mortgage is the only vaguely plausible number you have.
Considering: - health insurance rarely pays for what they do, balance bill you several thousands of dollars every time you have a regular check up for an incurable health issue, and it often requires legal notices and lots of lost work hours on the phone with debt collectors, insurance, hospitals - rent figures don't include my $200 electric bill, $200 water bill, $70 internet bill that comcast decided to charge me $…
Arxiv is run by Cornell, which is in Ithaca NY. Upstate NY a $500k a year salary would literally buy you a mansion. Ithaca right by the college is pretty expensive by upstate standards because of houses being converted to multi-family units to rent. But Ithaca for $500k is buying you a big house walking distance to downtown, if you go out of the city $500k is buying you a big house with a large amount of land.
Re: ArXiv receives $10M for upgrades
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems a reasonable use of NSF money to me, to promote sciences by creating a common infrastructure for organizing the world's library of preprints. It's infrastructure of a sorts, and civil government is the ideal party to fund civil infrastructure. (Isn't it?) Not random FAANG's, and I don't see why they'd want to anyway—what they'd get out of it. FAANG's aren't charities; anything they do that looks philanthropic i…
I’m not saying it isn’t a bad use of NSF funds, I’m saying that especially in the AI space that industry use of arXiv is large enough that taxpayers deserve to have industry foot the bill.
I favor the "company pays tax, tax funds science infrastructure", cycle, not the "company funds science infrastructure" cycle. It reduces the risk of industry asserting influence over the infrastructure.
Whether companies pay enough tax is a separate discussion, but they paid some taxes, and those taxes are now funding ArXiv. This seems like a good setup.