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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

What does arXiv provide that your conference proceedings / association doesn't?

For example, I usually log in to the ACM site and go to my SIGs and see what's new there. I've never thought about visiting arXiv.

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It provides basically a subset (maybe around a third) of the same interesting papers that I see in conference proceedings, but it provides them earlier (typically 1 month to 1 year earlier). This can be important as my field (NLP) is quite fast-paced.

Just to give a concrete example, this paper (which was a relevant read for me) was published in TACL in July this year but was available in arXiv since February: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.01595

In physics, arXiv is where it's at --- conference proceedings are usually not very relevant, and people usually put also them on arxiv.

I'd be willing to be the GP is in CS; in CS, conferences are where it's at.

Conferences certainly dominate journals, but most people publish their work on arxiv first, anyway.

I'm in CS (at the intersection of PL/compilers/HPC), and I've never heard of anyone in my field doing that. In fact, the only papers I've read on arxiv have been ones linked on HN.

I'm in a similar intersection (hi!), and same goes for me. I want to change that, though. I have started publishing tech reports (I work in an industry research lab) whenever I submit a paper for review. I'm tired of work being stuck in endless review cycles, not public and not referenceable. Were I still in academia, I would submit to arxiv, and I have even recommended this to grad students.

Virtually every ML paper is posted on arxiv before conferences.

At least for theoretical CS and cryptography, Crypto ePrint and arXiv often have more detailed full versions of the paper. These are often invaluable for understanding proofs and other important details.

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