Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

alphaxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 190 posts

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#101

Post by ethanol-brain »

impendia wrote: post #90
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> Use HTML rather then PDF. The PDF is the original paper, as it appears on arXiv, so using PDF is natural. In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. But also, we tend to prefer that the formatting be semi-canonical, so that "the bottom of page 7" or "three lines after Theorem 1.2" are meaningful things to say and ask questions about. That sa…

> That said, the arXiv is rolling out an experimental LaTeX-to-HTML

Some history: https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#102

Post by cgshep »

Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#103

Post by elashri »

cgshep wrote: post #100

> Use HTML rather then PDF. Tenured prof here. Academics don't use HTML, despite its obvious advantages. The incentive system is deeply broken. No big-name journal or conference will accept a well-formatted HTML over their proprietary Latex/Word format. Latex to PDF converters generally suck.

Arxiv already provide a HTML version of the articles [1]. The authors does not have to provide HTML version, it is converted by arxiv. i.e [2]

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/about/accessible_HTML.html

[2] https://arxiv.org/html/2409.00838v1

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#104

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

epanchin wrote: post #46
MereInterest wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s an example. I have a firstname.lastname@gmail.com address, which was intended to be permanent. Google turned on two-factor authentication, despite not having a second form of authentication available. Instead, they required the recovery address for 2FA. The recovery address was another Gmail address, which I haven’t used since 2010, and which also had 2FA turned on using its recovery address. That was an SBCGl…

“I place the blame on Google because I didn’t update my recovery address to one that worked”

Did you notice that the issue was that O0P had failed to update the recovery address of their recovery address, and google removed access to both the main email and the recovery email at the same time?

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#105

Post by throw10920 »

impendia wrote: post #90
amadeuspagel wrote: post #47

Great idea. - The frontpage should directly show the list of papers, like with HN. You shouldn't have to click on "trending" first. (When you are logged in, you see a list of featured papers on the homepage, which isn't as engaging as the "trending" page. Again, compare HN: Same homepage whether you're logged in or not.) - Ranking shouldn't be based on comment activity, which ranks controversial papers, rather papers…

> Use HTML rather then PDF. The PDF is the original paper, as it appears on arXiv, so using PDF is natural. In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. But also, we tend to prefer that the formatting be semi-canonical, so that "the bottom of page 7" or "three lines after Theorem 1.2" are meaningful things to say and ask questions about. That sa…

> In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest.

The tooling producing PDF by default absolutely makes the preference for PDF justifiable. However, tooling is driven by usage - if more papers come with rendered HTML (e.g. through Pandoc if necessary), and people start preferring to consume HTML, then tooling support for HTML will improve.

> But also, we tend to prefer that the formatting be semi-canonical, so that "the bottom of page 7" or "three lines after Theorem 1.2" are meaningful things to say and ask questions about.

Couldn't you replace references like "the bottom of page 7" with others like "two sentences after theorem 1.2" that are layout-independent? This would also make it easier to rewrite parts of the paper without having to go back and fix all of your layout-dependent references when the layout shifts.

HTML has strong advantages for both paper and electronic reading, so I think it's worth making an effort to adopt.

When I print out a paper to take notes, the margins are usually too narrow for my note-taking, and I additionally have a preference for a narrow margin on one side and a wide margin on the other (on the same side, not alternating with page parity like a book), which virtually no paper has in its PDF representation. When I read a paper electronically, I want to eliminate pagination and read the entire thing as a single long page. Both of these things are significantly easier to do with HTML than LaTeX (and, in the case of the "eliminate pagination" case, I've never found a way to do it with LaTeX at all).

(also, in general, HTML is just far more flexible and accessible than PDF for most people to modify to suit their preferences - I think most on HN would agree with that)

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#106

Post by bee_rider »

anamexis wrote: post #98
Retr0id wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rather papers should be voted on like comments. I don't think this is an inherently better approach, but maybe there should be an option for different ranking mechanisms. You could also rank by things like cite-frequency, cite-recency, "cite pagerank", etc.

It doesn't seem like citations would be good for discovery, because there must be a significant latency between when a paper is released and when citations start coming in.

Probably it would be best to just get a site on the web and expose a bunch of different metrics so people can sort by whatever.

Citations are probably not the best metric for discovery, but also this really just makes me wonder if papers are not the best thing for discovery. An academic produces ideas, not papers, those are just a side-effect. The path is something like:

* make a idea

* write short conference papers about it

* present it in conferences

* write journal papers about it

* maybe somebody writes a thesis about it

(Talking to people about it throughout).

If we want to discover ideas as they are being worked on, I guess we’d want some proxy that captures whether all that stuff is progressing, and if anybody has noticed…

Finding that proxy seems incredibly difficult, maybe impossible.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#107

Post by gr__or »

I am very non-eager to help any further platform grow that has not been built on-top of sth like atproto (the BlueSky protocol), to prevent silos and the monopolist landlords that come with those.

Great idea though, would love to use sth like this, if it existed on a federalized protocol.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#108

Post by michaelmior »

cgshep wrote: post #102

Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.

> usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers

Unfortunately for those of us pre-tenure, it's difficult to balance these as I'm sure you aware. We're evaluated by people who may have the best intentions, but don't work directly in our field. They then determine whether we keep our jobs. It's difficult not to consider prestige as a factor when you know those evaluating you will.

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#109

Post by Ar-Curunir »

cgshep wrote: post #102

Tenured prof here. Every paper of mine goes on Arxiv with no exceptions, published under CC BY-NC-ND licenses. Some of us are working hard to overcome the system (e.g. look at the IACR's efforts). Unfortunately, academics are still hindered by institutional inertia; in fact, many prefer the status quo, usually those who rely on prestige over actual quality to advance their careers.

What do you mean by the IACR’s efforts here? In the crypto community it’s very much the norm to put everything on eprint, and it is very rare to find a crypto paper not on there

Re: alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv

#110

Post by michaelmior »

throw10920 wrote: post #105
impendia wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use HTML rather then PDF. The PDF is the original paper, as it appears on arXiv, so using PDF is natural. In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. But also, we tend to prefer that the formatting be semi-canonical, so that "the bottom of page 7" or "three lines after Theorem 1.2" are meaningful things to say and ask questions about. That sa…

> In general academics prefer PDF to HTML. In part, this is just because our tooling produces PDFs, so this is easiest. The tooling producing PDF by default absolutely makes the preference for PDF justifiable. However, tooling is driven by usage - if more papers come with rendered HTML (e.g. through Pandoc if necessary), and people start preferring to consume HTML, then tooling support for HTML will improve. > But al…

> Couldn't you replace references like "the bottom of page 7" with others like "two sentences after theorem 1.2" that are layout-independent?

Yes, but I think such references are inherently harder to locate. Personally I try to just avoid making references to specific locations in the document and instead name anything that needs to be referenced (e.g. Figure 5, Theorem 3.2).

Post reply on HN