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  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by upupupandaway
  • Published there in August, from a company rather than a university. Without arXiv we'd have had a blog post and nothing citable.
    by perdy
  • Are they doing to do something about authors using Arxiv to publish propaganda/opinion pieces but presented as research?

    ArXiv gives the appearance of scientific credibility that a blog post wouldn't have so I'm seeing the platform get abused.

    Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49580164

    by aurareturn
  • Sorely, sorely needed.

    How is science to evolve if good research requires $49 a pop to view?

    And what amazes me is that these authors have undeniably stood on the shoulders of giants in order to create their research.

    by networkOne
  • >"they’re having trouble keeping up with the onslaught of AI-generated papers."

    What an interesting problem to have!

    So, let's see, we have a hosting site, much like GitHub is for code, or DropBox is for files, or Pastebin is for text, or YouTube is for Videos, except that this website is tailored to hosting academic papers as opposed to other specific file types...

    Now in 2026 we have a problem, and that is that AI (or people using AI) are apparently writing crappy AI-written academic papers, and uploading them to ArXiv (and other academic paper hosting sites) in large amounts...

    What to do, what to do?

    Hmmm, this sounds very similar to the problem of many crappy AI-generated videos being uploaded to YouTube...

    Or, the "AI-generated-file-of-specific-type-was-uploaded-where-the-file-contents-of-uploaded-files-of-that-type-are-NOT-supposed-to-be-AI-generated-on-this-specific-file-type-hosting-website" problem...

    What to do, what to do?

    Well, heck, I don't know!

    What shall we all do?!?!?!?!?!?

    Observation (if I might!): The "people using AI to upload crap to the Internet" problem is a subset of the (older, larger!) "people just plain uploading crap to the Internet" pre-AI problem... :-)

    >"Lots of suggestions in the comments but no magic bullets."

    This is Hacker News after all; what were you expecting? Silence? :-)

    by peter_d_sherman
  • Did we completely write off the "web of trust" as a workable system? Where you exchange keys with people and co-sign each others keys and then trust keys signed by them. This would be an alt to "algorithms" and also a way to "subscribe" to things that got vetted by trusted people or orgs. I kind of do this with uBlock Origin, where they curate a (very complex) list of ads (but without the key signing). Orgs could vet and publish lists of arXiv papers and I'd be subscribed to that. This could also be the source of my social media feed (friends of friends, etc).

    I remember in the early days of PGP this was put forward as a vision. I remember the various key-holding systems (that were hard to use). I did a key-party with my brother and his friend in the '90s.

    Why did this fail?

    by jamienk
  • Tom Dietterich (Editor in Chief at arXiv) posted on LinkedIn the other day that they’re having trouble keeping up with the onslaught of AI-generated papers. Lots of suggestions in the comments but no magic bullets.

    It’s ironic that the LLMs which benefit so much from reading arXiv papers of yore are now being used to pollute it. Personally if I see a single author post 2023, I assume it’s junk, especially if they’re not from an actual research institution. Not all solo independent researchers are phonies but … many phonies are solo independent researchers.

    OpenReview is okay but even some of the reviewers are apparently using LLMs or just hardly reading.

    by edot

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