> and with just enough moderation to not devolve into spam and chaos

arXiv has become a target for grifters in other domains like health and supplements. I’ve seen several small scale health influencers who ChatGPT some “papers” and then upload them to arXiv, then cite arXiv as proof of their “published research”. It’s not fooling anyone who knows how research work but it’s very convincing to an average person who thinks that that they’re doing the right thing when they follow sources that have done academic research.

I’ve been surprised as how bad and obviously grifty some of the documents I’ve seen on arXiv have become lately. Is there any moderation, or is it a free for all as long as you can get an invite?

Should be the main link. The original article is based on the CEO job posting.

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 feel like a clash of worlds.

I think both sides could learn from the other. In the case of ML, I understand the desire to move fast and that average time to publication of 250-300 days in some of the top-tier journals can feel like an unnecessary burden. But having been on both sides of peer review, there is value to the system and it has made for better work.

Not doing any of it follows the same spirit as not benchmarking your approach against more than maybe one alternative and that already as an after-thought. Or benchmaxxing but not exploring the actual real-world consequences, time and cost trade offs, etc.

Now, is academic publishing perfect? Of course not, very very far from it. It desperately needs to be reformed to keep it economically accessible, time efficient for both authors, editors and peer reviewers and to prevent the "hot topic of the day" from dominating journals and making sure that peer review aligns with the needs of the community and actually improves the quality of the work, rather than having "malicious peer review" to get some citations or pet peeves in.

Given the power that the ML field holds and the interesting experiments with open review, I would wish for the field to engage more with the scientific system at large and perhaps try to drive reforms and improve it, rather than completely abandoning it and treating a PDF hosting service as a journal (ofc, preprints would still be desirable and are important, but they can not carry the entire field alone).

> Unfortunately, over the years, arXiv has become something like a "venue" in its own right, ...

In my experience as a publishing scientist, this is partly because publishing with "reputable" journals is an increasingly onerous process, with exorbitant fees, enshittified UIs, and useless reviews. The alternative is to upload to arXiv and move on with your life.

> 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 credit for arXiv papers. No one cares if you cite an arXiv paper or some random website. The vast vast majority of papers that have any kind of attention or citations are published in another venue.

> arXiv fulfills its function better the less power it has as an institution

It is an interesting instance of the rule of least power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power.

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.

My observation is that research, especially in AI has left universities, which are now focusing their research to a lesser degree on STEM. It appears research is now done by companies like Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Tencent, Alibaba, among many others.

arXiv's CEO doesn't need to be a tenured professor equivalent it is a preprint repository ffs.

For anybody outside the SV, and especially outside the US, this seems high, yes.

arXiv does not need to and should not optimize for “shareholder value”, which is at least nominally the justification for outlandish CEO pay packages.

Everyone outside the US doesn't deal with USD. Your comment is bonkers. Read up on purchasing power. All locations are not equal.

Note that you are seeing an explicit tradeoff of different economic systems.

>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.

That's a specific field at a very specific time. In general there is a difference between research and development, you're going to expect the early work to be done in academia but the work to turn that into a product is done by commercial organizations.

You get ahead as an academic computer scientist, for instance, by writing papers not by writing software. Now there really are brilliant software developers in academic CS but most researchers wrote something that kinda works and give a conference talk about it -- and that's OK because the work to make something you can give a talk about is probably 20% of the work it would take to make something you can put in front of customers.

Because of that there are certain things academic researchers really can't do.

As I see it my experience in getting a PhD and my experience in startups is essentially the same: "how do you do make doing things nobody has ever done before routine?" Talk to people in either culture and you see the PhD students are thinking about either working in academia or a very short list of big prestigious companies and people at startups are sure the PhDs are too pedantic about everything.

It took me a long time of looking at other people's side projects that are usually "I want to learn programming language X", "I want to rewrite something from Software Tools in Rust" to realize just how foreign that kind of creative thinking is to people -- I've seen it for a long time that a side project is not worth doing unless: (1) I really need the product or (2) I can show people something they've never seen before or better yet both. These sound different, but if something doesn't satisfy (2) you can can usually satisfy (1) off the shelf. It just amazes me how many type (2) things stay novel even after 20 years of waiting.

As a US based academic, I have to say when I saw the salary I immediately gawked. I think it's not americans but silicon valley-ites and tech bros on here who have lived with inflated salary/net worth that think it's just a middle of the road salary. As I regularly interact with friends in engineering who make like $200k + benefits ($), and I wonder why I don't jump ship to that weird land.

Simply anticipating basic push backs from reviewers makes sure that you do a somewhat thorough job. Not 100% thorough and the reviews are sometimes frivolous and lazy and stupid. But just knowing that what you put out there has to pass the admittedly noisily gatekept gate of peer review overall improves papers in my estimation. There is also a negative side because people try to hide limitations and honest assessments and cherry pick and curate their tables more in anticipation of knee jerk reviewers but overall I think without any peer review, author culture would become much more lax and bombastic and generally trend toward engagement bait and social media attention optimized stuff.

The current balance where people wrote a paper with reviers in mind, upload it to Arxiv before the review concludes and keep it on Arxiv even if rejected is a nice balance. People get to form their own opinion on it but there is also enough self-imposed quality control on it just due to wanting it to pass peer review, that even if it doesn't pass peer review, it is still better than if people write it in a way that doesn't care or anticipate peer review. And this works because people are somewhat incentivized to get peer reviewed official publications too. But being rejected is not the end of the world either because people can already read it and build on it based on Arxiv.

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

That’s true. But that’s separate than the use in ML in Blockchain circles as a form of a marketing - using academic appearances.

The irony of the TBL quotes there being the entire problem with the semantic web is the ontological tarpit that results due to the excessive expressive power of a general triple store.

Even in the states, it’s more a distortion caused by the big tech centres. 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.

And while academic salaries are generally not great, tenured professors at big universities tend to make a fair bit (plus a lot more vacation time and perks than is normal in the US)

So is the living cost. Insurance, housing, etc. A better comparison is PPP.

Not everywhere. Switzerland exists. Also cost of living is a thing so if anything US/CH just ramp up to match that. The rest of Europe has high CoL but terrible salaries. Asia has bad salaries but low CoL (on average).

Yes the obvious play is to move human labor to cheaper countries like France (including CEO of course).

It's a bit more complex than an S3 bucket though because the value comes from the reputation network, which can't really be replicated easily.

Though, saying that, I suppose all the reputation data is kind of public. Apart from emails/accounts.

Universities (outside a few) just have much weaker PR machines so you never hear what they do. Also their work is not user facing products so regular people, even tech power users won't see them.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Does arXiv count as a publication? Yes, pretty much anything that gives you a DOI does, for example Zenodo. Does it function as a reputable anything? No.

The paper you link to counts as a publication, but its reputation stands on its own, it has nothing to do with arXiv as a venue. Ideally, that's how it is for all papers, but it isn't, just by publishing in certain venues your paper automatically gets a certain amount of reputation depending on the venue.

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.

Well, I’d argue that many things in the semweb are not expressive enough and lead to the misunderstandings we have.

People think, for instance, that RDFS and OWL are meant to SHACL people into bad an over engineered ontologies. The problem is these standards add facts and don’t subtract facts. At risk of sounding like ChatGPT: it’s a data transformation system not a validation system.

That is, you’re supposed to use RDFS to say something like

  ?s :myTermForLength ?o -> ?s :yourTermForLength ?o .

The point of the namespace system is not to harass you, it is to be able to suck in data from unlimited sources and transform it. Trouble is it can’t do the simple math required to do that for real, like

  ?s :lengthInFeet ?o -> ?s :lengthInInches 12*?o .

Because if you were trying OWL-style reasoning over arithmetic you would run into Kurt Gödel kinds of problems. Meanwhile you can’t subtract facts that fail validation, you can’t subtract facts that you just don’t need in the next round of processing. It would have made sense to promote SHACL first instead of OWL because garbage-in-garbage out, you are not going to reason successfully unless you have clean data… but what the hell do I know, I’m just an applications programmer who models business processes enough to automate them.

Similarly the problem of ordered collections has never been dealt with properly in that world. PostgreSQL, N1QL and other post-relational and document DB languages can write queries involving ordered collections easily. I can write rather unobvious queries by hand to handle a lot of cases (wrote a paper about it) but I can’t cover all the cases and I know back in the day I could write SPAQL queries much better than the average RDF postdoc or professor.

As for underengineering, Dublin Core came out when I worked at a research library and it just doesn’t come close in capability to MARC from 1970. Larry Masinter over at Adobe had to hack the standard to handle ordered collections because… the authors of a paper sure as hell care what order you write their names in. And it is all like that: RDF standards neglect basic requirements that they need to be useful and then all the complex/complicated stuff really stands out. If you could get the basics done maybe people would use them but they don’t.

Living costs are similarly high in many places that have nowhere near the salaries of the US.

It's still the land of opportunities. It's easier to find ways to reduce your living costs than ways to increase your salary.

It's also caused by progressive tax rates. People take harder jobs based on net wage, not gross wage, so gross wage has to compensate.

I think the problem described in 6th paragraph needs to be solved.

$300k for a top executive position isn't especially high for anywhere in the US. That's around what the administrative director of a hospital would be making, which seems like a much smaller scope than leading ArXiv. For comparison, my roommate works for a non-profit that serves Philadelphia whose CEO's salary is $1.1 million. General average for US CEOs including for profits is around $800k and for large organizations tens of millions is not atypical.

Non-profits aren't maximizing stock value, but they do need to optimize for stakeholder value - you want to maximize the amount of money being donated in and you want to make the most of the donations you receive, both to advance the primary mission of the non-profit and to instill confidence in donors. This demands competent leadership. The idea that just because something is not being done for profit means the value of the person's contributions is worth less is absurd.

arXiv doesn't need much. All they do is host static pdfs uploaded by someone else with free CDN services from Fastly [0]. I'm sure they could get academics to volunteer moderation services as well.

In reality you could host the entire thing for well under $50k/year in hardware and storage if someone else is providing a free CDN. Their costs could be incredibly low.

But just like Wikipedia I see them very likely very quickly becoming a money hole that pretends to barely be kept afloat from donations. All when in reality whats actually happening is that its a ridiculous number of rent seekers managed to ride the coattails of being the defacto preprint server for AI papers to land themselves cushy Jobs at a place that spends 90+% of their money on flights and hotels and wages for their staff.

I'm already expecting their financial reports to look ridiculously headcount heavy with Personnel Expenses, Meetings and Travel blowing up. As well as the classic Wikipedia style we spend a ton of money in unclear costs [1].

Whats already sad is they stopped having a real broken down report that used to actually showed things. Like look at this beautiful screenshot of a excel sheet. Imagine if Wikipedia produced anything this clear. [2]

[0] https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/18/faster-arxiv-with-fastly/

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/FY26_Budget_Public.pdf

[2] https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/2020_arXiv_Budget.pdf

That sounds more like an issue of certain fields having crappy standards because the people in those fields benefit from crappy standards than an issue with the site they happen to host papers on.

The article lists the reasons quite clearly.

We don't do 'utility' in America. Everything has S.V. brain rot - it's mixed with wall street brain rot, and now if you aren't extracting wealth out of what you have access to - you are failing.

> It might already be too late, and we will be left with a browser monopoly.

Ladybird continues to have the appearance of making progress, fwiw:

https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-02-28/

And it is a risk for Arxiv too that once they start to drink the koolaid and start going to the same cocktail parties that these kinds of nonprofit board members and execs go to and will feel the need to prance around with some fancy stuff.

"oh no, you see we are not a preprint server host anymore, our mission is a values driven blablabla to make a meaningful change in the blablabla, we have spent X dollars to promote the blablabla, take me seriously please I'm also fancy like you! "

No need to ask - the whole point is open access. https://info.arxiv.org/help/bulk_data.html

Lobsters has this I think. But it also means I've never posted there.

not a bad first order filter.

can you think of a better one?

> they'll just turn into a shitty journal at this point

To this end, they added an endorsement requirement this year: https://blog.arxiv.org/2026/01/21/attention-authors-updated-...

there is. bioarxiv.

This is going to be in NYC where $300k does not go as far as it does in Ithaca.

I am of the same opinion, and ultimately ArXiv becoming a journal that can prevent one from publishing a paper — no matter how junk it is — would pretty much kill its purpose. But I suppose that now when flooding the interned with LLM-generated garbage is almost endorsed by some satanic people, it is pretty much a security issue to have some sort of filter on uploads.

Now, honestly, I have no idea why would one spend resources on uploading terabytes of LLM garbage to arXiv, but they sure can. Even if some crazy person is publishing like 2 nonsense papers daily, it is no harm and, if anything, valid data for psychology research. But if somebody actually floods it with non-human-generated content, well, I suppose it isn't even that expensive to make ArXiv totally unusable (and perhaps even unfeasible to host). So there has to be some filtering. But only to prevent the abuse.

Otherwise, I indeed think that proper ranking, linking and user-driven moderation (again, not to prevent anybody from posting anything, but to label papers as more interesting for the specific community) is the only right way to go.

Heh, you might want to look up what they’re charging young people now.

tangentially related: https://readabstracted.com/

Maybe they'll do something like what Anna’s Archive did

I don’t buy “some fields are just more honorable”. Everyone uses publishing for personal gain.

But yes it’s a people problem, not an arxiv problem.

The net salary in France might be low but the overall cost of hiring is quite high. Besides, why go to the middle when you can just find even cheaper places, if that's your prime metric?

> It's a bit more complex than an S3 bucket

It’s even less. I would bet if it’s not now, for the vast majority of its life it was a machine at someone’s desk at Cornell.

The French government put a bit of money on the table to help researchers fulfil their open science requirements for government and EU grants, and funded the HAL repository ( https://hal.science/ ). It’s much smaller than arXiv, but it exists. In other countries like the UK there are clusters of smaller repositories as well, but it’s not as well centralised.

Is this Gondor or Mordor?

It is just a preprint repository. It is pretty open (the stories where a preprint was rejected or delayed unreasonably are extremely rare). It offers the basic services for a math/compsci/physics themed preprint repository.

I don't see much of a monopoly, nor any "moat" apart from it being recognised. You can already post preprints on a personal website or on github, and there are "alternatives" such as researchgate that can also host preprints, or zenodo. There are also some lesser known alternatives even. I do not see anything special in hosting preprints online apart from the convenience of being able to have a centralised place to place them and search for them (which you call "monopoly"). If anything, the recognisability and centrality of arxiv helped a lot the old, darker days to establish open access to papers. There was a time when many journals would not let you publish a preprint, or have all kinds of weird rules when you can and when you can't. Probably still to some degree.

>They will spend it on anything but Firefox, which is the only thing anybody wants them to spend it on.

Mozilla certainly won’t spend it on Firefox, because the structure of the organization legally prohibits them from spending any of their donation money on Firefox. The ‘side projects’ are, at least officially, the real purpose of Mozilla.

OpenAI didn't get everything that they wanted, but I very much disagree with calling it a "failed attempt". The non-profit went from owning the entirety of OpenAI to having ~25% stake.

I am using Zenodo for a while now instead. It is more user friendly, as well.

I am not a software engineer, although I do write programs. What is it about digital infrastructure that requires maintenance? In the natural world, there is corrosion, thermal fluctuation, radiation, seismic activity, vandalism, whathaveyou. What are the issues facing the arxiv demanding the attention of multiple people 'round the clock?

Page rank was inspired by bibliometrics and evaluation of science publications. It's messed up now because of the rankings. Further fiddling with ranking will not fix the problem.

According to swissdevjobs.ch[1], the top 10% salary for a senior software developer in Switzerland is 135,000 swiss franc; that's roughly $170,000 per year.

So if this is correct, then even in Switzerland, it seems like $300,000 per year would be an obscenely high salary for a senior developer.

[1]: https://swissdevjobs.ch/salaries/all/all/Senior

The reason the French can’t build these things is the same reason they shouldn’t be allowed to be in charge. It’s a preprint PDF host. Just make your own if you can run this one.

Not sure about that. How would a university test scaling hypotheses in AI, for example? The level of funding required is just not there, as far as I know.

it just hosts pdfs, no?

Is your argument really that "OpenAI was an independent nonprofit corporation and it worked out great, Arxiv will remain just as non-profit as OpenAI"?

This the type of guy that will suggest paper.ly as a better name with a straight face and then we wonder why the internet is turning to shit

> like this isn't for you if you don't already know what it means

Isn't that actually kindof a good brand signal for a repo of very specialized papers? "Fun with learning" in comic sans wouldn't help credibility.

They built the brand on Firefox then did a bait and switch. How many people who donate to Mozilla know that it's not helping Firefox?

But yeah, this is just how it works. Things can't stay good for too long. One must always be on the lookout for the new small thing that's not yet corrupted. Stay with it for a while until it rots, then jump to the next replacement.

Ah, thanks for the correction.

I wonder what makes you feel that. I've been publishing preprints close to a decade on arxiv now and never had any particular feelings about it.

To me it's just a way to get out your work fast, so that there is already a trace of it on the Internets - nothing more and nothing less.

> That is, it's not readily parseable, it really gives an insider term vibe...

Isn't that normal with highly specialized research fields? I agree many papers could benefit from clearer wording, but working in a niche means you sometimes don't reach a broader audience

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.org was already taken.

And besides, the name has Ancient Greek influences. A similar Latinate term might be something like "archive".

For everyone else,

The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone. Corenell has helped with donation a long with other organizations that pay membership fees.

As a result, donors + leaders of arxiv think it's best to spin off to increase funding.

Sam Altman is a special kind of person; not many could pull off the schemes he does.

I doubt it was him who architected it. A team of lawful evil lawyers more likely

This issue of accessibility is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but it doesn’t mean that only large companies are doing good research.

Personally I think this resource mismatch can help drive creative choice of research problems that don’t require massive resources. To misquote Feynman, there’s plenty of room at the bottom

+1, PageRank was taken from academia. They even cited it in their original work. Funny how the origins of these things get forgotten.

They have to update the software stack, replace usage of deprecated APIs, support new latex packages etc. They could probably minimize these by limiting the scope but just keeping a small, tightly scoped software functional is always boring, people want to work on fun new features, they enjoy the brand recognition and feel like they should do more stuff.

I wonder when they will introduce the algorithmic feed and the social network features.

The non-profit still controls the board doesn't it?

I responded to the idea that $300,000/year is a "mid-to-high engineering salary". CEO salaries are absurdly high everywhere.

HAL is decidedly second-tier. Given the option, everyone would pick arXiv over HAL. Hence, HAL hosts lots of stuff that didn't (even) make it to arXiv => lots of subpar dredge.

Perhaps but the fastest race car is not possibly marshalling in the end of human involvement in science, so you might consider these of considerably different levels of meriting the funding.

Zenodo is more for IT Papers and also datasets isn't it?

I like it as well, it works great. But I wonder if it would scale if at some point there were a massive exodus from arXiv.

Interesting, thanks for the context! Makes it more understandable as a choice.

Now they're going to have a deficit of 600,000 in operating costs.

> The reason is because arxiv is growing significantly leading to 297,000 deficit in operating costs for 2025 alone.

Dollars? So 300 people's cable bill? That's basically nothing. They're spending too much, and it's still nothing, and the solution is going to be to privatize it and eventually loot it.

You can't hand out a collection plate and get $300K for Arxiv? Your local neighborhood church can. Civilization is obviously collapsing.

> HAL is decidedly second-tier. Given the option, everyone would pick arXiv over HAL.

Can you elaborate on that?

No, my argument is that OpenAI could make billions of dollars if they converted from a non-profit to a for-profit, and they only succeeded after years of effort and because they had already structured the company into separate for-profit and non-profit entities. And even after all this, the non-profit still controls the majority of the for-profit entity.

So if OpenAI with billions of dollars only partially succeeded at converting to a for-profit business, then that suggests that organizations with fewer resources (like arXiv) have much worse odds.

Technically yes, socially no.

Also the sources and has a very tame but useful pre-acceptance process.

Oh right, well it depends on CoL doesn't it? You can reframe European salaries as 'obscene' by world standards too. Both the US and Europe have totally broken and unaffordable housing markets, for example, but at least the Bay Area compensates with salary. I would say that relative to costs it's more that other salaries are obscenely low, if anything. People in Europe should be rioting, but unfortunately only the home owners are politically active.

I thought the X was an allusion to LaTeX.

It's an opinion, and you feeling no particular way about it is equally valid.

But I did justify and maybe to reword slightly, surely if one of the main drivers is opening up research, the brand name should be something that's less obscure and more accessible / understandable as to what it is on first sight?

Maybe arXiv evoking the word 'archive' with an ancient Greek twist does that for some, but it's clearly a bit cryptic for many, and if the point is to open up probably the brand should just be something much plainer.

What is unclear why they need stuff of 27 and 6.7 million to operate essentially static hosting website in 2026.

>marshalling in the end of human involvement in science

Good riddance! But not relevant in the least.

It does do a fair amount of filtering of submissions, and it's a long term archive (e.g. for the next 100+ years). I suspect both (but with the former dominating) are the issue.

Well, technically, it can also compile your tex file if you upload the tex file instead of the pdf directly, which helps a lot in standardizing the stylistic structure between preprints. Most other repositories are wild west and inconsistent. I really appreciate the similarity in style applied to most preprints there. Moreover, this means you can also download not just the pdf, but the source tex file to, which can be very useful.

As shown by Altman, not really.

Impact size is not relevant to funding allocation?

I think it already hosts much more data than arXiv, given that they also host large datasets.

Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters? Food delivery drivers? Or do those jobs command a six-figure salary too? If they can live comfortably in the city on a five-figure salary, maybe the argument that "cost of living is so high in SF that you can't live without a $300,000/year salary" is just a little bit overblown?

I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.

> Does cities like San Francisco not have janitors? Waiters?

When I used to visit the Meta campus in Menlo Park, the QA folk I worked with were commuting 2 hours each way just to be able to afford housing. I've no idea how far away the janitorial staff must have lived to do the same

It can host large datasets as well, yes. It is hosted by CERN, so it is not specifically IT in any way. It also allows you to restrict access to the files of your submission. It has no requirements to submit your LaTeX sources, any PDF will be fine. There are also no restrictions on who can publish. You'll get a DOI, of course.

Everything published on arXiv could also be published on Zenodo, but not the other way around.

> I can not imagine what one could possibly need $300,000 per year for unless an apartment costs like $200,000 per year.

Being able to afford unpredictable expenses and not have it bankrupt you. In the US, that would include healthcare. Everywhere in the world, that would be useful if you were laid off.

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.

To build an emergency fund, you just need an income that's a bit higher than your expenses. If you earn $60,000 after tax per year, and spend $50,000 per year, you have a decent $10,000 emergency fund after one year and a massive $100,000 emergency fund after a decade. You don't need $300,000 per year to save.

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?

It's not about deserving, programmers just have enough market power to be able to choose to go elsewhere. Janitors and other more fungible employees do not.

Besides, I did already say that everyone else was underpaid relative to costs. But that's not unique to the Bay Area. Cost of housing relative to income is terrible in almost all of the major European cities too.

Once cities become wealthy enough to develop a home owning class, they seem to cease being able to provision adequate housing supply in general.

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.

Usually this kind of argument leads to punishing the programmers, not lifting up the janitors.

I've never even connected the 'X' to the Greek letter chi. I just kinda accepted it as one of many groovy web 2.0 misspellings in search of a domain and trademark.

I don't see it as an especially exuberant structure or budget. I've seen larger teams with bigger budgets struggle to maintain smaller applications.

I've contracted into some consultancy teams which you could uncharitably describe as "15 people and $4mn/yr to create one PDF per month".

The similarity in style comes from conference and journal templates, not from Arxiv. You can style your paper with latex in any style, Arxiv doesn't care. On Arxiv you mostly see preprints that people submit to conferences and journals and they enforce the style.

No, it's to be a pre-print server. If someone doesn't know what that means, then they shouldn't be using arXiv.

The "essentially static hosting" isn't the cost centre (although with 5 million MAU, it's nothing to sneeze at). The real costs are on the input side - they have an ingestion pipeline that ensures standardised paper formatting and so on, plus at least some degree of human review.

That's kind of two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries, isn't it?

Just put out a torrent and people of the sort at r/DataHoarder will keep it alive for longer than bureaucrats.

> The cost of living is so high in part because so many have ridiculously high salaries

Bigger problem in the SF area is that a bunch of folks who owned property before the gold rush have ended up real-estate-rich, and formed a voting block that actively prevents the construction of new housing (on the basis that it might devalue their accidental real estate investment)

oh interesting I didnt know this

This is particularly funny because arXiv doesn't just predate Web 2.0, it nearly predates the public web entirely (only missing it by about two weeks)

Do you mean that the CPU compute cost of turning latex into pdf/HTML is the main cost?

The PDF formatting is all but standardised. They ingest LaTeX sources, which is formatted according to the authors' whims (most likely, according to whatever journal or conference they just submitted the manuscript to). I'll concede that the (relatively novel) HTML formatter gives paper a more uniform appearance. They also integrate a bunch of external services for e.g., citation metrics and cross-references. Still hard to justify such a high cost to operate, but eh.

Also, the "human review" is a simple moderation process [1]. It usually does not dig into the submission's scientific merits.

[1] https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

everyone has a first time they see a thing and don't yet know what it is.

Using a brand as a filter where you have to already know what it means to get it is exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to achieve.

Consider the most exclusive (successful) brands that exist. Even there, where exclusivity is a brand goal, none of them have this property of being obscure on first contact.

No, I mean that the pipeline requires software engineers to build/maintain, and salaries are (as in basically every tech organisation) the dominant cost

You usually get introduced to it by your academic supervisor or collaborators as a masters or PhD student. If you're a solo researcher who has made a significant contribution on the frontier of science, I'm sure you'll be able to understand how Arxiv works as well. Because I assume you have had some conversations with other experts in the field. If you're a full on autodidact with no contact to any other researchers in the field, well, maybe it's better if you chat with some other people in that field.

Its reasonable to have a tradeoff here to avoid cranks and now AI psychosis slop. You can still post on research gate and academia.edu or you own github page or webhosting.

Then drop it and make people upload a pdf and a zip of the latex sources.

Most people I talk to hate that pipeline and spend a lot of debug hours on it when Arxiv can't compile what overleaf and your local latex install can.

Arxiv can recompile latex to support accessibility and html. Going to pdf submissions would be a major step backward.

Make it an external service then, and leave the thing that's already working great to just be.

The reason authors like and use arxiv is that it gives 1) a timestamp, 2) a standardized citable ID, and 3) stable hosting of the pdf. And readers like the no-nonsense single click download of the pdf and a barebones consistent website look.

All else is a side show.

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].

[1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/moderation/index.html

> 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

An Arxiv paper by itself should not be valuable. People should understand what an unreviewed preprint means. People should understand peer review does not mean correct. People should understand that counting publications in a cv is a bad way to assess scientific merit.

I fundamentally dislike these busibodies for whom the already existing endorsement gatekeeping isn't enough. Science is not an institution and not a community but an attitude towards understanding reality.

I dislike quacks and cranks. But I don't mind if they can host their nonsense online alongside real papers on an explicitly unreviewed site. It's a bad precedent and will just ratchet more and more close to reviewing except not by blinded peers but by the Arxiv overlords based on vibes and political valence.