I am really glad arXiv is getting more funding. It is an essential resource.
For me personally, it’ll be really interesting to see if the frontend changes. No doubt there are some important improvements that can be made (a website can always be made more accessible, moderation tools, support for name changes as mentioned, etc.) However, to first approximation, arXiV’s website already seems almost like a platonic ideal. It reminds me of Craigslist. Simple HTML, loads fast, has the information and features you need but otherwise gets out of your way. I love it.
The arXiv team deserves a lot of credit for what they’ve done to get it this far. It’s difficult to overstate how useful and transformative preprint servers have been to science.
I had this same thought but was reluctatnt to state it as it feels like unnecessary pessimism. But honestly, this website works flawlessly. The last thing it needs is software developers trying to keep themselves entertained or impress people. If it ain't broke...
Cool idea! Is there a way to go to the arxiv page (https://arxiv.org/abs/...) of a paper instead of only going to the PDF (https://arxiv.org/pdf/...) without manually manipulating the URL?
Awesome, hadn’t seen that. I’m sure there will be a zillion edge cases where it won’t work properly for specific documents because of odd latex quirks.
If the pdfs were served by some of the megacaps who posts tons of papers (e.g. Google or Facebook) then it would be an order of magnitude faster. And said megacaps would end up spending peanuts relative to the value they get from arXiv.
An order of magnitude faster sounds unimportant. Is all the time spent by researchers sitting around waiting for 0.4s for a paper to download really an issue?
They probably could make it faster by rendering server-side a preview of sorts. I don't think that most papers are large enough for this to have a major impact unless you have a very slow connection.
SumatraPDF on Windows is lightning fast with the kind of PDFs you get from the arXiv (true PDFs without heavy graphics). I don't know what is fast on Linux, but probably some MuPDF-based viewers are (the MuPDF PoC viewer is fast even on WSL).
For me personally, it’ll be really interesting to see if the frontend changes. No doubt there are some important improvements that can be made (a website can always be made more accessible, moderation tools, support for name changes as mentioned, etc.) However, to first approximation, arXiV’s website already seems almost like a platonic ideal. It reminds me of Craigslist. Simple HTML, loads fast, has the information and features you need but otherwise gets out of your way. I love it.
The arXiv team deserves a lot of credit for what they’ve done to get it this far. It’s difficult to overstate how useful and transformative preprint servers have been to science.