Given that Cornell charges what, $50k a year as an Ivy League, $300k feels like almost nothing.
Heh, you might want to look up what they’re charging young people now.
ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
201–210 of 300 posts
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salaries in the US are so bonkers. Everywhere else outside of the US, $300,000 is an outlandish high salary. To call it "mid to high" is insane.
>Salaries in the US are so bonkers. Sure, but the cost of living there is significantly higher as well. Anyway, I can hardly even comprehend these kinds of sums, though I am a bit of an outlier, as I earn around $27,700 as an SWE in Europe, which is low even by the standards of companies in my own country.
> Sure, but the cost of living there is significantly higher as well.
The US is huge though, and the cost of living is astronomically lower outside of those big tech hub cities. I live in a tiny town in the midwest with a big house and a big yard that we bought for $89k USD in 2016[†]. I'm able to support myself and my wife comfortably on just my (self-employed) SWE salary.
[†] Real estate inflation index for our area says the house would have cost us around $130-$150k USD in 2026.
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a classic story of someone having to pick a name quickly, which then gets established long before anyone who cares about branding is aware of its existence. The original service didn't even have a name, only a description, and it was amusingly hosted at xxx.lanl.gov. But LANL wasn't really interested in it, and the founder eventually left for Cornell. At that point, the service needed a domain name, but archive.…
I thought the X was an allusion to LaTeX.
Usually, when you see "ch" in a Latin word, it represents a "χ" in the original Greek word. Both TeX and arXiv use "X" to represent it instead. TeX because Knuth chose to be fancy, and arXiv because "archive" was no longer available.
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have to keep in mind that an increasing portion of their time and labor is going towards moderation and filtering due to a mass influx of nonsensical AI generated papers, non-academic numerology-tier hackery, and other useless drivel. Spinning the service off forces other the labor out onto other universities rather than leaving them to solely Cornell
Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs? I'm sure they can be offloaded to cold storage because most of that slop won't be opened by anyone. Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation. It needs minimal checks to remove overtly illegal content.
> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation
Seems like a lot of people are asking for moderation. And moderation is a pretty big part of the existing offering[1].
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? To some extent, maybe, but often not. For example, London has similar cost of living to the Bay Area, and when I was at Meta experienced folks like Dan Abramov over in London were making about the same as fresh college hires in Menlo Park...
Yeah I was talking more about the definition of obscene. Like is it obscene to make 300k if housing is so expensive? I say no, and that London salaries are just bad. Although it would be preferable to fix the housing market. To be fair though, Dan specifically is kind of notorious for messing up his comp negotiation. Did you not see the Twitter pile on at the time?
> Dan specifically is kind of notorious for messing up his comp negotiation
Indeed, but having seen the infamous spreadsheet, he didn't have all that much headroom (unless he agreed to move to the US)
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A software engineer in Ohio doesn’t command that kind of salary, but in San Francisco or Seattle that’ll buy you a moderately-senior engineer. On the other hand, a CEO of a well-known nonprofit might command that kind of salary in Ohio. People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves.
I'm not entirely convinced that this is entirely some sort of widespread bad behavior. Many non-profit boards conduct research on salaries and essentially size their organization and pay something akin to a market rate for the given size and scope. However, even a small percentage of bad actors finding a way to inflate their salaries will, as a side effect, inflate salaries across the board because it influences the…
I suspect abuse is more prevalent at the low end, among nonprofits that don’t do much.
I stand by the point of my original post: People often underestimate how much the leaders of nonprofits pay themselves. These are figures you can look up and quiz your friends to test the hypothesis, if they’re into that sort of thing. For a good time include some nonprofit hospitals.
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#207The recent announcement to reject review articles and position papers already smelled like a shift towards a more "opinionated" stance, and this move smells worse. The vacuum that arXiv originally filled was one of a glorified PDF hosting service with just enough of a reputation to allow some preprints to be cited in a formally published paper, and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos. It ha…
I came here to say something similar. As someone who works in a field that applies machine learning but is not purely focused on it, I interact with people who think that arXiv is the only relevant platform and that they don't need to submit their work to any journal, as well as people who still think that preprints don't count at all and that data isn't published until it's printed in an academic journal. It can fee…
You may have delivered value in peer review, but on the whole, peer review delivers negative value. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
The arXiv vs journal debate seems a lot like 'should the work get done, or should the work get certified' that you see all over 'institutions', and if the certification does not actually catch frauds or errors, it's not making the foundations stronger, which is usually the only justification for the latter side.
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#208I'm not sure why we're so focused on filtering what gets into arxiv (which is an uphill battle and DOA at this point) vs fixing the indexing , i.e. the page rank of academia. Google "sorted out" a messy web with pagerank. Academic papers link to each others. What prevents us from building a ranking from there? I'm conscious I might be over-simplifying things, but curious to see what I am missing.
tangentially related: https://readabstracted.com/
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
>marshalling in the end of human involvement in science Good riddance! But not relevant in the least.
Impact size is not relevant to funding allocation?
Your attempts to smuggle your conclusions into the conversation are becoming tiresome. Profiling a private company's computer program is not impactful research. The best-fit parameters AI people call scaling exponents are not properties like the proton lifetime or electron electric dipole moment. Rest assured, there remain scientists at universities producing important work on machine learning.
Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Review papers are interesting. Bibliometrics reveal that they are highly cited. Internal data we had at arXiv 20 years ago show they are highly read. Reading review papers is a big part of the way you go from a civilian to an expert with a PhD. On the other hand, they fall through the cracks of the normal methods of academic evaluation. They create a lot of value for people but they are not likely to advance your car…
I exited academia for industry 15 years ago, and since then I haven't had nearly as much time to read review papers as I would like. For that reason, my view may be a bit outdated, but one thing I remember finding incredibly useful about review papers is that they provided a venue for speculation. In the typical "experimental report" sort of paper, the focus is typically narrowed to a knifes edge around the hypothesi…
My feelings about that outsider thing are pretty mixed.
On one hand I'm the person who implemented the endorsement system for arXiv. I also got a PhD in physics did a postdoc in physics then left the field. I can't say that I was mistreated, but I saw one of the stars of the field today crying every night when he was a postdoc because he was so dedicated to his work and the job market was so brutal -- so I can say it really hurts when I see something that I think belittles that.
On the other hand I am very much an interested outsider when it comes to biosignals, space ISRU, climate change, synthetic biology and all sorts of things. With my startup and hackathon experience it is routine for me to go look at a lot of literature in a new field and cook it down and realize things are a lot simpler than they look and build a demo that knocks the socks off the postdocs because... that's what I do.
But Riemann Hypothesis, Collatz, dropping names of anyone who wrote a popular book, I don't do that. What drives me nuts about crackpots is that they are all interested in the same things whereas real scientists are interested in something different. [1] It was a big part of our thinking about arXiv -- crackpot submissions were a tiny fraction of submission to arXiv but they would have been half the submissions to certain fields like quantum gravity.
I've sat around campfires where hippies were passing a spliff around and talking about that kind of stuff and was really amused recently when we found out that Epstein did the thing with professors who would have known better -- I mean, I will use my seduction toolbox to get people like that to say more than they should but not to have the same conversation I could have at a music festival.
[1] e.g. I think Tolstoy got it backwards!