Thread

1. upupupandaway · 1790210032 · focus · HN ↗

   Asking earnestly: is ArXiv a valuable resource? I used it few years back when finishing my (late) Master's, but also saw a lot of crap published there (primarily for promotion/visa purposes) so it kind of took the shine out of the service for me.

   1. edot · 1790210376 · focus · HN ↗

      It’s good for getting free access to preprints which are often close enough to the paywalled real papers in journals. If I find a paper I want (or more realistically, if ChatGPT finds a paper it wants for me), but it’s behind a paywall, odds are the authors put a preprint on arXiv.
   2. ufo · 1790210648 · focus · HN ↗

      Some researchers and journals publish peer-reviewed work on arxiv; it serves as a stable archive that won't be plagued by link rot or paywalls.
   3. tristanj · 1790211454 · focus · HN ↗

      The preprint papers on arXiv are like 99% the same as the published versions, except they're free instead of locked behind a multi-thousand dollar/year paywall.

      1. upbeat_general · 1790215316 · focus · HN ↗

         And if there are differences, that is often a good thing! It can mean the author wanted to format something in a particular way that the journal didn't allow.

         1. senderista · 1790223487 · focus · HN ↗

            Often they are extended versions of the journal articles and contain valuable material that had to be cut for space limits.
      2. locknitpicker · 1790267608 · focus · HN ↗

         > The preprint papers on arXiv are like 99% the same as the published versions, except they're free instead of locked behind a multi-thousand dollar/year paywall.

         I don't think you fully understand the problem. It doesn't matter if you can find in arxiv a preprint of an article published on a reputable journal. What matters is that right besides that paper you will find a dozen other papers that can be utter nonsense generated by a poorly calibrated slop factory. You don't find those in papers published in respectable journals which enforce double blind peer review and were filtered for relevance and quality.

         It's that peer review process that creates value and relevance. Otherwise all you have is a glorified file server.

   4. embedding-shape · 1790211734 · focus · HN ↗

      Either you setup feeds for the specific topics/subjects you care about, scan what you come across once a week, or you use it to get access to papers that are usually behind some paywall. I don't think the intention nor the value comes from just haphazardously reading through everything in some section.

      It's not peer-reviewed and supposed to free and accessible from both sides so the results kind of makes sense.

   5. txhwind · 1790222159 · focus · HN ↗

      A free-to-read PDF host site is valuable enough. Most academic publishers have a pay wall.
   6. lemontheme · 1790234481 · focus · HN ↗

      My take: if not for arxiv and huggingface, the field of ML would be nowhere near where it is today.

      More to your question, I recommend something like semanticscholar to find actual relevant papers. Try to identify researchers that seem trustworthy, then explore the citation network around them.

      For more hot off the press stuff, follow what gets boosted on social media.

      Still doesn’t cover the truly niche stuff but it’s a start

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