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ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

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Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#211

Post by light_hue_1 »

contubernio wrote: post #106
light_hue_1 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right. Consider the impression you get when seeing a reference to an arXiv preprint vs. a link to an author's institutional website. This just isn't true. arXiv is not a venue. There's no place that gives you cred…

A Fields medal was awarded based mainly on this paper never published elsewhere: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0211159

It was not awarded because that paper is on arxiv. That paper could have been printed and sent out by mail. Or posted on 4chan. etc. It just so happens to be it was on arxiv which made no difference to anything.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#212

Post by abdullahkhalids »

frankling_ wrote: post #40

The 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…

> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, particularly in ML, with some decently cited papers never formally published and "preprints" being cited left and right.

This has been a common practice in physics, especially the more theoretical branches, since the inception of arXiv. Senior researchers write a paper draft, and then send copies to some of their peers, get and incorporate feedback, and just submit to arxiv.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#213

Post by PaulHoule »

0x3f wrote: post #186
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for confirming. We need to stop marketing for AWS by talking about the ability to use the internet in AWS branded product terms.

The S3 API/UX/cost model is so seductively simple for static hosting though. I kind of think they deserve their ubiquity. Not on 90% of their products though.

It's great for some applications, like to serve up the QR codes for this system

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840

I could even make those cards tradeable like NFTs, use DynamoDB as the ledger, and not worry about the cost at all.

On the other hand if you are talking about something bandwidth heavy forget about AWS. Video hosting with Cloudfront doesn't seem that difficult, even developing a YouTube clone where anybody could upload a video and it gets hosted seems like a moderate sized project. But with the bandwidth meter always running that kind of system could put you into the poorhouse pretty quickly if it caught on. Much of why YouTube doesn't have competition is exactly that: Google's costs are very low and they have an established system of monetization.

I am keeping my photo albums on Behance rather than self-hosting because I lost enough money on a big photo site in AWS that it drove my wife furious and it took me a few years to pay off the debt.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#214

Post by swiftcoder »

renewiltord wrote: post #170
magnio wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have their own: https://hal.science/ It is actually quite common to come across HAL in subfields of mathematics in my experience.

That’s great. People will use whichever one is better.

Turns out that "better" for many people means "better moderated", since static hosting is hard to differentiate. And at present Arxiv is winning that one (at the expense of considerably higher running costs due to said moderation)

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#215

Post by snovymgodym »

mort96 wrote: post #82
swiftcoder wrote: post #65

> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university

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.

It's frankly not that crazy of a salary for an important executive position.

The city manager of a small city in Texas gets paid around that much and that's taxpayer money.

Now what collegiate football coaches are paid, that's pretty crazy.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#216

Post by vulcan01 »

davnicwil wrote: post #19

Very unrelated to the article, but I think 'arXiv' as a brand is bad, and really detrimental to what the institution aims to accomplish. That is, it's not readily parseable, it really gives an insider term vibe - like this isn't for you if you don't already know what it means or how you should read or say it. It sort of reminds me of the overuse of latin and latinate terms generally in the old professions and, well,…

By your criterion, Google, Apple, and Amazon are terrible names as well.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#217

Post by DANmode »

bonoboTP wrote: post #183
bjourne wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really am not sure about that: https://biologue.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2020/05... The problem is that "optimizing for peer-review" is not the same thing as optimizing for quality. E.g., I like to add a few tongue-in-cheeks to entertain the reader. But then I have to worry endlessly about anal-retentive reviewers who refuse to see the big picture.

Currently a kind of rule of thumb is that a PhD student can graduate after approximately 3 papers published in a good peer reviewed venue. If peer review were to go away, this whole academic system would get into a crisis. It's dysfunctional and has many problems but it's kinda load bearing for the system to chug along.

No hard rule, no crisis.

Maybe we can go back to very opinionated “true” academia,

where there are institutional gatekeepers,

but they mostly get it right on who to award (and not),

vs the current game of

“whoever plays ball with funding sources the best = the best academic”,

which is obviously bullshit.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#218

Post by prepend »

swiftcoder wrote: post #65

> raised concerns about the proposed $300,000 salary for arXiv’s new CEO, saying it seemed high Is a mid-to-high engineering salary outlandish for a CEO of what is likely to be a fairly major non-profit? Even non-profits have to be somewhat competitive when it comes to salary, and the ideal candidate is likely someone who would be balancing this against a tenured position at a major university

Yes, considering the workload and responsibility of the position.

Non-profits run into the problem of creating cushy jobs that just burn doner money.

Arxiv is basically a giant folder in the cloud and shouldnt have such high paying jobs. At least not if they want rational people to keep donating.

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#219

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

bonoboTP wrote: post #182
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #171

Earlier 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.

> Is the problem the storage cost for hosting them, the HDDs?

No. Around half the cost is infrastructure. The other half of the cost is people. i.e. engineers to maintain infra and build mod tools for moderators to operate.

> Arxiv doesn't need moderation. Nobody is asking for Arxiv moderation.

This is just not true. Tons of people ask for arxiv to have moderation. Especially since covid, etc when antivaxxers and alternative medicine peddlers started trying to pump the medical categories of arxiv with quack science preprints and then go on to use the arxiv preprint and its DOI to take advantage of non academics who don't really understand what arxiv is other than it looks vaguely like a journal.

And doubly so now that people keep submitting AI generated slop papers to the service trying to flood the different categories so they can pad their resumes or CVs. And on top of that people who don't actually understand the fields they are trying to write papers in using AI to generate "innovative papers" that are completely nonsensical but vaguely parroting the terms of art.

The only reason you don't see more people calling for arxiv moderation is because they already spend so much time on it. If they were to stop moderating the site it would overflow into an absolute nightmare of garbage near overnight. And people wouldn't be upset with the users uploading this of course, they'd be upset with arxiv for failing to take action.

Moderation is inherently unappreciated because in the ideal form it should be effectively invisible (which arxiv's mostly is).

If you want to see the type of stuff that arxiv keeps out, go over to ViXrA [1] or you can watch k-theory's video [2] having fun digging through some of the quality posts that live over on that site.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViXra

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1at9BjQP8CI

Re: ArXiv declares independence from Cornell

#220

Post by prepend »

mort96 wrote: post #117
0x3f wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get by on a low salary by living with multiple people in the same apartment. Or you live far away and commute. Or both. Not really a tenable long-term situation for a senior employee with plans to start a family. Family homes of decent size and area are literally millions of dollars.

I guess I don't understand why programmers somehow deserve a better life than other people. Janitors deserve to start families too, don't they?

Its about how the market values those skillsets, not about what people “deserve.”

No one is sitting around and setting salaries based on the intrinsic human dignity of the people working jobs.

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