[HN Gopher] Einstein award going to Paul Ginsparg for creating a...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Einstein award going to Paul Ginsparg for creating arXiv.org
        
       Author : endymi0n
       Score  : 1073 points
       Date   : 2021-11-26 08:32 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (idw-online.de)
 (TXT) w3m dump (idw-online.de)
        
       | grouphugs wrote:
       | it has too much garbage to be getting awards
        
       | roastedpeacock wrote:
       | IN a world of leeches like Elsevier, his work is much appreciated
        
       | brainwipe wrote:
       | Been out of research for a while, didn't know about this. Will
       | get my papers up there.
        
         | DreamScatter wrote:
         | It's not a public website, I'm not even able to post my math
         | research on arxiv
         | 
         | https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl
        
       | evanb wrote:
       | The Nobel Prize in Physics often goes to "tooling" experimental
       | work. Think: blue LEDs, CCDs, fiber optics, optical tweezers,
       | things like that. Not that anybody asks me, but I would advocate
       | a similar tooling award split between Berners-Lee (www), Knuth
       | (TeX), and Ginsparg (arXiv). I can think of no people who had a
       | more profound change in how physics is actually practiced.
        
         | prionassembly wrote:
         | Maybe that's a sign that theory research in physics has become
         | iredeemably suspect?
         | 
         | The Swedish bank (not an OG Nobel prize, but effectively one of
         | them) prize for economics pretty much alternates (A) sharing
         | the prize between econometrics (ie. tooling) and empirical
         | research and (B) awarding deep theory.
        
           | evanb wrote:
           | I would push back on this. Irredeemably suspect? The Nobel
           | committee doesn't make theory awards until they are supported
           | by experiment. There was basically no new particle physics
           | data for 30 years. Then they found the Higgs and that's
           | nothing else. Theory beyond this is speculative, nobody knows
           | if it's important or not.
        
         | bborud wrote:
         | That's a very good point. Surely people on Hacker News
         | collectively know enough people to get a nomination done? :-)
         | 
         | PS: the above list good, are we missing anyone important who
         | ought to be on that list?
        
           | speedcoder wrote:
           | Maybe the HN community could set up an award?
        
             | ngc248 wrote:
             | I second this. lets do one.
        
               | speedcoder wrote:
               | How would we go about doing so?
        
         | dekhn wrote:
         | I would love if there was a "Nobel Prize in Math, Computer
         | Science, and Information Processing".
        
           | vecter wrote:
           | There's the Godel Prize for theoretical computer science, the
           | ACM Turing Award for more general contributions to computing,
           | and of course the Fields Medal (and nowadays the Abel Prize)
           | for math.
        
       | ahurmazda wrote:
       | Well deserved. I only recently learned about the origin of arxiv
       | and the story surrounding Joanne Cohn. Highly recommended read
       | 
       | https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.2021110...
        
       | trox wrote:
       | If you've ever wondered about the unusual arXiv.org website
       | favicon: The original logo was a skull with bones as reference to
       | the piratey nature of distributing preprints without the
       | publisher's consent. The smiley face was added later in order to
       | make it less offensive. Due to the conversion to a non-
       | transparent format, the backgrond was filled with the green
       | color.
       | 
       | https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-behind-the-arXiv-org-f...
        
       | Cort3z wrote:
       | Why does so many online articles refrain from adding a simple
       | link to the product in question?
       | 
       | https://arxiv.org/
        
       | azalemeth wrote:
       | Completely and utterly deserved. Arxiv, like Wikipedia and
       | arguably sci-hub, is an absolute boon to humanity. What I find
       | interesting is that its endorsement system does largely work at
       | making it very easy to submit papers whilst reducing the amount
       | of spam. Sure, there are some papers that are not completely
       | brilliant -- or indeed, actually any good at all -- but they have
       | the same "right" to be read as their huge CERN brethren. In some
       | fields of physics, paid journal publishing is really a niche in
       | comparison to stuff on the ArXiv. In others, and other areas of
       | science, not quite so much yet. I also very much like the fact
       | that it is open, mostly LaTeX based (machine-readable maths!) and
       | free.
        
         | quickthrower2 wrote:
         | Wikipedia is one of my refuges from the where the rest of the
         | web seems to be going. It's one of the few that don't cause me
         | to hit reader view (mobile safaris defacto ad blocker)
         | immediately.
        
           | janto wrote:
           | Unfortunately Wikipedia has also been heading in a
           | disappointing direction. I now expect everything on there to
           | be filtered through a specific political perspective.
           | Deleting information is much easier than adding, so pesky
           | facts are unlikely to persist.
        
             | danielheath wrote:
             | Somewhat true of the main pages; if you want to know
             | whether something controversial is being left out, check
             | the talk page.
        
             | prionassembly wrote:
             | The Wikipedia process is still pretty good last time I
             | checked?
             | 
             | There was a notability challenge in en.wikipedia on Olavo
             | de Carvalho, a Steve Bannon type who wrote some philosophy
             | books (like -- on Aristotle and Epicurus) as a younger man
             | (and keeps getting his "philosopher" self-nomination
             | challenged because he didn't go and get a college major in
             | philosophy). I was for keeping the page, but on balance I
             | think the process, arguments and result were fair -- even
             | if almost certainly carrying some underlying political
             | motivation.
             | 
             | We have to focus on the process. It's the only way to
             | general axiology.
        
               | janto wrote:
               | I don't have faith in the process anymore. Wiki-lawyering
               | to remove content, is too effective. To what end? Saving
               | disk space?
               | 
               | I'm no longer motivated to fight deletionism in my
               | domain. I don't want to spend time that is not
               | appreciated.
               | 
               | I suspect that as soon as a page is tagged for deletion
               | by someone, others that enjoy being the arbiters of what
               | is and is not WP, flock there. If they lack interest in
               | the topic, they will vote to remove with many technical
               | reasons. Statements that others do find it relevant or
               | interesting, are simply ignored.
        
             | Kye wrote:
             | It does seem that many pages get claimed by one editor or
             | another who sees it as their domain, but I haven't seen any
             | study on the politics of these wiki fiefdoms. Most I see
             | are conservative, sometimes extreme.
        
             | alithejumbo wrote:
             | I second this opinion about Wikipedia.
        
         | sam_lowry_ wrote:
         | Yep. the next Einstein award should go to Alexandra Elbakyan.
        
           | robot0x13 wrote:
           | and Aaron Swartz
        
         | Vetch wrote:
         | > and arguably sci-hub
         | 
         | Inarguably, not arguably. In my mind there is a clear
         | separation between pre and post sci-hub. The stark increase in
         | experienced friction when accessing scientific knowledge since
         | sci-hub's pausing has highlighted its profound value.
         | 
         | There's also libgen, the closest thing to a bastion of all
         | written human knowledge.
         | 
         | It'd be fun to read a short story about an AI trained on libgen
         | data that makes significant contributions to fusion, longevity
         | and cancer but whose creators are ineligible for any prizes and
         | are jailed for life for multiple counts of copyright violation.
        
           | nefitty wrote:
           | On one of huggingface's explanation blurb of a training set,
           | they half-jokingly speculate that GPT was trained on libgen.
           | Apparently Google won't reveal what book data it used...
        
             | harias wrote:
             | Google books probably contains as much information as
             | Libgen. It's simply doesn't allow public access.
        
         | photochemsyn wrote:
         | Wikipedia has some major issues for real research and there are
         | good reasons why universities don't allow students to include
         | wikipedia links as citations in their papers. The information
         | there simply isn't curated properly.
         | 
         | A main gripe is that more often than not, the supporting links
         | for claims made in wikipedia articles are broken or of poor
         | quality. Another is the tendency of ideologues to remove
         | anything they disagree with in their particular domain.
         | 
         | It's useful for finding trivial information (flag of Botswana,
         | say) but otherwise I usually block wikipedia from search
         | results.
        
           | duskwuff wrote:
           | > there are good reasons why universities don't allow
           | students to include wikipedia links as citations in their
           | papers
           | 
           | That reason is because Wikipedia is a tertiary source. It's
           | too far removed from a source of information to be
           | appropriate to cite. It has nothing to do with the
           | reliability of the site; it's basically never appropriate to
           | cite any kind of encyclopedia.
           | 
           | If there's a specific piece of information you found on
           | Wikipedia, you chase down Wikipedia's source for that
           | information and cite that. If you're using Wikipedia as a
           | general reference, you don't need to cite that at all.
        
       | anothernewdude wrote:
       | A worthy choice.
        
       | reikonomusha wrote:
       | Around 6 or 7 years ago, I went to a quantum computing conference
       | and presented about a then newly developed quantum programming
       | language that could run on a real quantum computer, showing a 1/2
       | decent simulation of dihydrogen energy in terms of bond length.
       | 
       | I authored a paper about this quantum programming language but
       | had no way to post it to the arXiv. I'm not a traditional
       | academic, but I had posted on the arXiv before, long ago, at a
       | previous job. Problem was that my arXiv credentials were
       | associated with that job's long lost email.
       | 
       | I gave the presentation in a giant ballroom, and afterward, sat
       | down at my assigned spot at one of these large circular tables.
       | Next to me, during a brief coffee break, an old man I didn't
       | recognize told me my talk was very interesting, and asked me if
       | my paper was published yet. "Not yet; we haven't chosen a
       | journal. And posting to the arXiv is delayed, because my account
       | is locked, so a colleague is planning to post on my behalf."
       | 
       | The man responds, "Oh, it should be possible to fix that." I said
       | that I figured as much and have just procrastinated contacting
       | the admins. "They're at Cornell right?"
       | 
       | He said, "No, I mean, _I_ can fix that. You said your name was
       | Reikon Musha right? "
       | 
       | He opens his clunky laptop and continues, "I'm not supposed to do
       | this. But I'm certain that if you gave an invited talk here,
       | you're definitely not spoofing your name. Maybe you can show me
       | your ID? No, no, just kidding."
       | 
       | He continues clicking around. "Was xyz@example.com your old
       | address? What's your new one?" I answered yes, and gave him my
       | new address. He typed it in and said, "straight into the database
       | it goes; just go and reset your password now."
       | 
       | I was absolutely puzzled. I said, "Thanks?? Who are you?"
       | 
       | He says, as a matter of fact, "I'm Paul, I invented the arXiv."
        
         | adrian_mrd wrote:
         | Nice anecdote, thanks for sharing :)
        
         | EvgeniyZh wrote:
         | Now this thread is first Google result for your name
        
         | EricLeer wrote:
         | What an interesting story! I was wondering if you where you
         | also working in the quantum computing field back then, or if
         | you just worked on this as a hobby. 6 years ago the entire
         | quantum computing field was not hyped as much yet (this was
         | just about when the ibm quantum experience started?).
        
           | reikonomusha wrote:
           | Yes, I was working in the field, not as a hobby. The
           | programming language and compiler research certainly preceded
           | IBM's foray into publicizing "cloud quantum", but I think
           | they had just come out with a primitive version of their
           | Quantum Experience by the time we gave that talk. This was
           | definitely before the public hype set full sail--but it was
           | clearly beginning to simmer. Everything was really research-
           | oriented then, but it's, as you observe, around the time
           | companies began to open up a bit more. (This is completely
           | ignoring DWave, a whole different story. This also ignores
           | physics-academia, which on the other hand had all sorts of
           | hype, all of which eventually bled into the public arena,
           | from Majorana qubits to chemical simulation.)
           | 
           | As a personal aside, I miss those days when things were just
           | _so much quieter_ , heads-down, and collegial. It's difficult
           | to describe how the research and commercial environment has
           | changed for its participants over the last decade.
        
           | ajkjk wrote:
           | It was definitely very hype within academia long before that,
           | even if you weren't hearing much about it in mainstream news
           | yet.
        
         | antihero wrote:
         | So what you're saying is you can pwn literally any arXiv
         | account by giving a convincing enough presentation on a highly
         | specialised scientific field at a conference that Paul is
         | attending?
         | 
         | Pah, what sort of security do you call that?!
        
           | path411 wrote:
           | Reminds me of the xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/
        
           | Shared404 wrote:
           | If you can both get invited under a fake name and show
           | interesting enough research that Paul seeks you out I
           | suppose.
           | 
           | I think the first part would be rather difficult, probably
           | more so than pwning a server.
        
             | hiddencost wrote:
             | Parent is joking
        
               | Shared404 wrote:
               | Well, _that 'll_ teach me not to HN right after waking
               | up.
               | 
               | Or won't. But it should :P
        
               | nefitty wrote:
               | I've always said that the neurobiology of sarcasm is
               | woefully understudied
        
               | toomuchtodo wrote:
               | HN pre-coffee: read only. HN post-coffee: writes enabled.
               | :)
        
               | rolandog wrote:
               | Also, you can comment as a caffeinated user by prefixing
               | with cudo.
        
               | tomcam wrote:
               | I'm glad you were the one to break the news
        
         | 5faulker wrote:
         | This is a great story.
        
         | quickthrower2 wrote:
         | He not only fixed, but was careful in his conversation to give
         | you the best possible anecdote.
        
           | reikonomusha wrote:
           | Haha, exactly. I know a lot of these kinds of anecdotes are
           | hammed up for entertainment, but the conversation was quite
           | literally as written (modulo the inaccuracies of my memory).
        
             | cormacrelf wrote:
             | You can now add, "And that man's award's name? Albert
             | Einstein"
        
           | mromanuk wrote:
           | I laughed at your comment. On point.
        
         | Rebelgecko wrote:
         | How does he (or people in general) pronounce arxiv?
        
           | reikonomusha wrote:
           | Like "archive". The X represents the Greek letter kh. Similar
           | to TeX or LaTeX, which are pronounced like "tech" and "lay-
           | tech".
        
             | Uehreka wrote:
             | With arXiv I mind less for some reason, but I pronounce TeX
             | and LaTeX as teks and lay-teks because:
             | 
             | - That's how I pronounced them when I first read them.
             | 
             | - That's how everyone else pronounces them when they first
             | read them until someone who has heard this factoid corrects
             | them.
             | 
             | - They look exactly like commonly-used English words.
             | 
             | - It feels like a dumb prank to take the name of a writing
             | system, whose sole purpose is written word and which will
             | be most discussed in written media, and give it a
             | deliberately odd pronunciation that people don't usually
             | discover until they talk to someone about it.
             | 
             | I'm grateful to the legendary folks who built these things,
             | but I still wish they would've honored the Least Surprise
             | Principle and picked better names.
        
               | Jiro wrote:
               | Not to say I disagree with you at all, but everything you
               | say here applies to GNU.... (Well, maybe it's not so
               | common a word, but it's still a written word for
               | something that you're supposed to pronounce it unlike the
               | English word it resembles.)
        
               | Uehreka wrote:
               | I pronounce it gah-noo or G.N.U. arbitrarily, but I
               | assumed it was just like "sequel" and S.Q.L. where
               | everyone just pronounces it both ways.
        
               | anticensor wrote:
               | SEQUEL is actually the precursor of SQL :)
        
         | nikcub wrote:
         | This is why I love HN
        
           | Yajirobe wrote:
           | and everybody clapped
        
       | codetrotter wrote:
       | Neat, next award should go to Alexandra Elbakyan for creating
       | Sci-Hub :)
        
       | grouphugs wrote:
       | i remember them addressing all the garbage on there actually. he
       | does deserve an award. i am in a mood due to severe lack of
       | sleep, depression, and got hit with more sonic last night. phew
       | doggy, let's go, gotta kill 'em all
        
       | DreamScatter wrote:
       | I still have never been able to post my paper about my
       | Grassmann.jl geometric algebra foundations research on arxiv.
       | 
       | https://github.com/chakravala/Grassmann.jl
       | 
       | Seems like a useless overrated website.
       | 
       | I was able to post my article on my own website instead.
       | 
       | Arxiv is really a useless website.
        
       | boibombeiro wrote:
       | The least controversial post of the year.
       | 
       | Well deserved.
        
       | mschuetz wrote:
       | ArXiv is great. I encourage anyone to submit their work there in
       | addition to submitting to a peer-reviewed venue. Thankfully,
       | they're compatible with overleaf nowadays. There was a time when
       | arxiv didn't accept stuff from overleaf but it also didn't accept
       | pdfs made from latex, so I had to pdf-print my pdf to submit it
       | to arxiv.
        
         | galcerte wrote:
         | Do you think it would be worthwhile to upload something like a
         | master's thesis that ultimately did not get published through a
         | traditional journal? That happens to be my case. I am alright
         | with my supervisors' decision to not pursue publication,
         | however I still wish to have it out there in some form, as it
         | took a sizeable amount of effort, and it might be useful as a
         | way to advertise myself.
         | 
         | On a tangent, is publishing the LaTeX source of a paper or
         | thesis on GitHub something that people do...? I was also toying
         | with the idea of writing my thesis with org-mode while
         | including the code snippets I used for numerical calculations
         | and graphs.
        
           | cozzyd wrote:
           | There are some theses on the arXiv but it's relatively rare.
           | See e.g. https://arxiv.org/search/?query=dissertation&searcht
           | ype=all&...
           | 
           | Typically these are uploaded in some other archive that may
           | be less open (e.g. often outsourced to proquest or
           | something), but many universities have their own open
           | archives. My PhD thesis is available on MIT dspace.
           | Hilariously, it's a scanned copy of my printed thesis, since
           | I had to print it out for submission, even in 2015.
           | 
           | As for theses on GitHub, those happen but often people keep
           | it private since they don't necessarily want the revision
           | history exposed :).
        
           | 8bitsrule wrote:
           | >worthwhile to upload something like a master's thesis
           | 
           | That'd be great. Seems dumb to let talented, hard-working
           | student papers moulder on some basement shelf. (Or do they
           | file 13 'em?) I've run across several onlined, very readable
           | and informative masters' works over the years. Tend to be
           | less hidebound about fresh theories/tooling as well.
        
           | jacobmischka wrote:
           | I can't attest to ArXiv publication, I didn't consider it
           | actually (I may now, though to be honest mine is not
           | groundbreaking research by any stretch of imagination), but
           | publishing the LaTeX source on GitHub is definitely
           | relatively common. I and a few acquaintances I knew from my
           | Master's program did that.
        
             | galcerte wrote:
             | I imagine it depends on the field. Having perused your
             | GitHub page and taken a look at what your program was
             | about, I see why you might publish your thesis' source
             | there. People working in theoretical physics aren't too
             | inclined towards free software, so maybe that's why I
             | haven't seen many related papers.
        
               | jacobmischka wrote:
               | Ah yes, I assumed computer science, apologies.
        
           | eigenket wrote:
           | The tex for my thesis is on github but I don't expect anyone
           | to ever look at it there (anyone who might read it will find
           | it on arxiv), I just used github for backup & versioning (I'm
           | not quite dumb enough to have a document representing 4 years
           | work in one place).
        
           | Bayart wrote:
           | >On a tangent, is publishing the LaTeX source of a paper or
           | thesis on GitHub something that people do...?
           | 
           | I've definitely seen it done, although I suspect the prime
           | concern is versioning and backup.
        
           | Boywithhalo wrote:
           | "arXiv moderators expect submissions to be of scholarly
           | archival interest to the communities they represent. A
           | submission may be declined if the moderators determine it
           | lacks originality, novelty, or significance.
           | 
           | Submissions that do not contain original or substantive
           | research, including undergraduate research, course projects,
           | and research proposals, news, or information about political
           | causes (even those with potential special interest to the
           | academic community) may be declined." as explained in
           | https://arxiv.org/help/moderation
           | 
           | If your supervisors decided not to pursue publication then it
           | seems likely that it does not match these criteria either.
           | Note, this isn't a qualitative judgement about your thesis -
           | as it says as much about academia as it does your thesis.
           | 
           | Additionally, you might run into the endorsement system if
           | you're new to arXiv. https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement
        
             | galcerte wrote:
             | > Submissions that do not contain original or substantive
             | research
             | 
             | Most, if not all master's thesis contain original research,
             | and that is definitely my case as well.
             | 
             | > undergraduate research, course projects, and research
             | proposals, news, or information about political causes
             | 
             | My thesis can't be classified under any of these
             | categories, either.
             | 
             | It does sound like I would be able to publish it there, but
             | I'm going to have to reach out to my supervisors for an
             | endorsement in arXiv, thanks for the tip.
             | 
             | I believe they weren't inclined towards publishing it
             | because I did not quite manage to fulfill their
             | expectations with respect to the scope of the thesis. I
             | came across quite a few bumps along the way which hindered
             | my progress. It was still graded well enough, it has a good
             | amount of original content, and I am relatively satisfied
             | with its quality, though, so it's not like it was a
             | complete disaster.
        
               | amcoastal wrote:
               | You should do it, but contact your advisor first. I know
               | I'd like to upload my old masters thesis online, but the
               | university retains a copyright on it. Its possible yours
               | does to. I'm sure the information on that would be
               | available on your schools website in the thesis
               | format/guidelines sections.
        
               | Boywithhalo wrote:
               | Didn't mean to imply it was a disaster; but without being
               | familiar with your work the main signal in your comment
               | was that your supervisors didn't push for publishing it,
               | which might be a hint it's not a good fit for arXiv
               | either. But if your supervisors will endorse you then by
               | all means go for it!
               | 
               | Another option might be to put it on Zenodo.
        
         | cozzyd wrote:
         | Yes, arXiv generally doesn't accept PDF's, preferring instead
         | the tex source (which is amusing when people don't realize
         | their comments show up. It uses something called autotex which
         | has a few quirks (e.g. all images have to be in the same dir,
         | etc.).
         | 
         | Here is the makefile I use that also generates a .tar.gz for
         | the arxiv (obviously won't help with Overleaf without cloning
         | first, but)                   FIGURES=$(wildcard figs/*)
         | TEXFILES=main.tex included.tex included2.tex ...
         | main.pdf: $(TEXFILES) $(FIGURES) main.bib               latexmk
         | -pdf -g $<               .PHONY: clean show              clean:
         | latexmk -C              rm -rf forarxiv*
         | forarxiv.tar.gz: forarxiv/main.tex forarxiv.pdf              rm
         | -f forarxiv.tar.gz              cd forarxiv &&  tar
         | --exclude=*.bib -cvzf ../forarxiv.tar.gz *
         | forarxiv:             mkdir -p $@
         | forarxiv/main.tex: main.tex main.bib | forarxiv
         | latexpand --empty-comments $< | sed -e 's#figs/##g' > $@
         | forarxiv/main.bib: main.bib            cp $< $@
         | forarxiv.pdf: forarxiv/main.tex $(FIGURES) forarxiv/main.bib
         | ln -f $(FIGURES) forarxiv/            ln -f foo.sty forarxiv/
         | ln -f foo.bst forarxiv/            latexmk -cd -pdf
         | forarxiv/main.tex             latexmk -cd -c forarxiv/main.tex
         | mv forarxiv/main.pdf $@                        show: main.pdf
         | xdg-open main.pdf
        
       | the_cat_kittles wrote:
       | just in case it hasnt clicked yet, the X is the greek letter chi,
       | so the url is "archive" phonetically
        
         | asdf_snar wrote:
         | I've been using the Arxiv for 10+ years. I always thought it
         | was just a "cool" way of spelling it, like "ArXiV" or
         | "eXtReme". Mind blown, thanks.
        
           | cmehdy wrote:
           | Now the game "arxiv vs snarxiv"[0] will also make more sense
           | to you!
           | 
           | [0] http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/
        
             | Yajirobe wrote:
             | What about vixra[0]?
             | 
             | [0]https://vixra.org/
        
       | dekhn wrote:
       | Many years ago (think: 1994) scientists (mainly CS folks)
       | published papers on the web as postscript files. Actually, they
       | were usually on FTP sites, not the web, as almost nobody used the
       | web at the time. I developed a huge aversion to postscript (it
       | was clunky and the renderers weren't great) but the idea that
       | every bit of published science would be freely available on the
       | web seemed completely and totally obvious to me.
       | 
       | When I later became an academic, I learned that when you write a
       | paper and submit it, conditions for publication typically include
       | signing away the copyright to the journal, possibly with a
       | license to distribute a few preprints offline.
       | 
       | My advisor at the time pointed out that he actually modified the
       | contract (changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and
       | sent it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are
       | available as PDFs online).
       | 
       | arxiv is the closest thing to what I dreamt of some decades ago
       | and I'm thrilled that Paul is receiving recognition. Personally,
       | I think arxiv is a better path forward than scihub, entirely due
       | to its "legitimacy". In the future, I will always work to
       | "publish" on arxiv and not put my work in journals (fortunately,
       | I am not in a publish or perish situation).
       | 
       | My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and wish
       | there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the
       | browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data
       | tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be
       | programatically extracted.
        
         | cozzyd wrote:
         | I've said this here before, but based on having dinner with him
         | probably ten years ago now, the arXiv replaced the system that
         | existed in the early 90's where people at top research
         | universities would mail preprints to each other, as publishing
         | was slow and waiting for preprints to be published would put
         | you behind the curve by quite a long time. Obviously this was
         | inefficient and somewhat exclusive (if you weren't at a
         | university in the preprint exchange club, you'd be hopelessly
         | behind in your field).
        
         | dealpete wrote:
         | > My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and
         | wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and
         | the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying
         | data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be
         | programatically extracted.
         | 
         | Back when I was doing Math research it was common to submit
         | LateX files to ArXiv. A quick look at some of the Physics
         | papers, though, suggests it may not the case for other fields.
        
           | cozzyd wrote:
           | It depends. arXiv won't normally accept a LaTeX-generated
           | PDF, but it will accept a PDF written in Word.
           | 
           | Particle physicists, cosmologists and astrophysicists almost
           | exclusively use LaTeX (anybody using Word would get laughed
           | at). In other fields of physics, Word is more common and also
           | not everyone submits everything to the arXiv. It's an
           | interesting cultural divide...
        
             | cycomanic wrote:
             | > It depends. arXiv won't normally accept a LaTeX-generated
             | PDF, but it will accept a PDF written in Word.
             | 
             | What do you mean? I predict the majority of PDFs on arxiv
             | are generated from latex just based on the fields who
             | mainly use it. In fact many papers contain the tex source
             | files.
        
               | cozzyd wrote:
               | What I mean is, if you try to upload the PDF from LaTeX,
               | it will complain and tell you to upload the sources
               | (which it then compiles to a PDF).
        
             | dekhn wrote:
             | I wrote my thesis in latex and convert to html in 1995.
             | It's still online, 27 years later, and totally readable!
             | Only a few external image links are broken.
             | 
             | I don't particularly like latex though.
        
           | algorias wrote:
           | I'm in CS research, I submit all my papers as latex sources.
           | Submitting pdfs that were obviously created in latex is
           | supposedly against the rules.
        
           | capitainenemo wrote:
           | MHTML is not going anywhere, but presumably you could do a
           | single HTML file with all media as embedded data URIs?
        
         | judge2020 wrote:
         | > changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and sent
         | it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are
         | available as PDFs online).
         | 
         | Assuming the journals signed it first, this is most likely
         | illegal since they didn't know they were signing under the
         | different terms. If they sign it after the professor signs it,
         | they technically have the duty to confirm the language is the
         | same, but it still might be seen as a deceptive practice on the
         | professor's part.
        
           | dekhn wrote:
           | I had this discussion with the professor in question. He had
           | already consulted with his IP lawyers. As you say, they
           | technically have the duty to confirm the language is the
           | same, but we know they didn't because the paper was published
           | with their copyright attached. I think he was trying to push
           | the issue, gently, and hoped some published would make a
           | stink.
        
             | tomcam wrote:
             | Contracts are amended all the time in exactly this method.
             | That's how contracts work (IANAL so maybe I've missed
             | something, but I was taught this by lawyer left)
        
               | sebzim4500 wrote:
               | Surely you are supposed to tell the other person if you
               | are changing the contract though? Not a lawyer, but it's
               | hard for me to believe that tricking someone into signing
               | the wrong thing is an effective legal strategy.
        
               | hackmiester wrote:
               | If you just signed it, that would be indicating you
               | accept it with no changes.
               | 
               | There is no reason to send it back aside from redlining
               | something. So sending a new contract is itself the
               | indication that it has been redlined.
        
       | nipponese wrote:
       | Is arXiv openly accessible in China? I tried a quick search on
       | the topic and saw that there are quite a few mirror sites but no
       | definitive answer.
        
         | _hzw wrote:
         | You can check whether a site is blocked by GFW with the
         | following websites:
         | 
         | 1. http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/
         | 
         | 2. https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-
         | tools/blockedin...
        
       | Havoc wrote:
       | That's good. Sometimes I think stuff like this (supporting
       | plumbing) moves science forward more than an individual discovery
       | could.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-11-27 23:02 UTC)