Einstein award going to Paul Ginsparg for creating arXiv.org

[reikonomusha]

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 [email protected] 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."

[quickthrower2]

He not only fixed, but was careful in his conversation to give you the best possible anecdote.

[EricLeer]

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?).

[EvgeniyZh]

Now this thread is first Google result for your name

[nikcub]

This is why I love HN

[Rebelgecko]

How does he (or people in general) pronounce arxiv?

[5faulker]

This is a great story.

[antihero]

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?!

[adrian_mrd]

Nice anecdote, thanks for sharing :)

[dekhn]

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]

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]

> 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.

[judge2020]

> 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.

[evanb]

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]

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.

[dekhn]

I would love if there was a "Nobel Prize in Math, Computer Science, and Information Processing".

[bborud]

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?

[the_cat_kittles]

just in case it hasnt clicked yet, the X is the greek letter chi, so the url is "archive" phonetically

[asdf_snar]

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.

[mschuetz]

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.

[cozzyd]

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

[galcerte]

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.

[ahurmazda]

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]

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...

[roastedpeacock]

IN a world of leeches like Elsevier, his work is much appreciated

[codetrotter]

Neat, next award should go to Alexandra Elbakyan for creating Sci-Hub :)

[boibombeiro]

The least controversial post of the year.

Well deserved.

[Cort3z]

Why does so many online articles refrain from adding a simple link to the product in question?

https://arxiv.org/

[p2p_astroturf]

What is the point of arxiv other than a file host but where people forcibly constrain themselves to the bureacratic process of creating a UN*X braindamaged tex / PDF with whatever academic publishing conventions? Someone in here even has posted makefile. For analogy to the problem I am alluding to, imagine needing a makefile to write an ASCII text document. Skimming through these comments, it seems like arxiv supports some kind of search or other metadata traversal. All this stuff could be done without a centralized server. No I am not advocating for your half working p2p network, cryptocoin, or startup.

[nipponese]

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]

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]

That’s good. Sometimes I think stuff like this (supporting plumbing) moves science forward more than an individual discovery could.

[brainwipe]

Been out of research for a while, didn't know about this. Will get my papers up there.

[anothernewdude]

A worthy choice.

[azalemeth]

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.

[Vetch]

> 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.

[sam_lowry_]

Yep. the next Einstein award should go to Alexandra Elbakyan.

[quickthrower2]

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.

[photochemsyn]

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.