I'm not blaming Simons, I am blaming the people I worked for when I worked at arXiv who, again, took a decade to start looking for sustainable funding.
While this thread is by no means as formal of an event. Picture yourself at someones memorial service, before/during/after the service you bring up a topic that is orthogonal to the person's life and frames it about yourself instead of the person being memorialized. Its just a bit weird.
Memorial service? What are you on about? In all likelihood, nobody here had met the guy, and HN would hardly even be on his radar. Picture yourself at a coffee place discussing some celebrity's life event and maybe it won't be so weird anymore.
I think you are underestimating the reach of HN. While I personally didn't know Jim, I know several people who did. And I know many people, me included, who benefited from his generosity and support of science.
I’ve noticed this cycle for the past 30 years on the internet where a useful thing starts out really simply (host a BBS, or host a billion pdfs forever). It’s not trivial, but it seems like it should be pretty low resource.
Then people get hired and are into it and want to get paid (as people do). And costs go up. And slowly more people get added. And instead of looking for cheap ways to operate, they want to fund those people and give them 5% raises every year.
So they look for funders to cover “the bare minimum.”
So rather than figuring out how to operate efficiently, they look for benefactors.
I love arxiv and use it all the time. But why do they have employees? And what are their costs? And why not get it to the point of operating with volunteers.
I suppose someone can do that and set it up. Until then, I’ll just donate or applaud benefactors. And use scihub too I suppose. How much does that cost to run?
When I worked there our estimates were that running costs came to about $5 per published paper compared to $5000-$20,000 at commercial journal publishers. It is still a lean operation but I think it’s a bad sign they moved most operations out of the Ithaca campus and right into high-cost NYC.
I have a spreadsheet. I take action at the end of the year depending on whether I'm itemizing or not (which I'll know at the end). I'm not going to do too much research. I'll add to it if I have a positive experience. If something annoying barely approaches the space of a thing I blacklist. I have some retention of some things on it but others I might fail to blacklist. In this case, I remembered.
I have a good base-case: GiveWell. So I'm content to dump everyone else on the slightest suspicion. I don't really care that much.
I find this kind of comment quite distasteful on someones death. Was he actively trying to destroy arXiv?