[nhaehnle]

For arXiv submissions, please submit the abstract link; in this case: http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401

The advantage is immediate: One gets a plain website with the abstract, which allows the visitor to decide whether the PDF download is worth it. The PDF itself is only one more click away.

I personally would also leave out the v1, as that link automatically goes to the latest version in all cases.

[teraflop]

Serious question: are there any browsers in common use that don't display PDFs inline? Chrome and Firefox both do, and their built-in PDF viewers seem very simple and streamlined and efficient.

It just seems a bit odd to question whether a 760KB PDF is "worth it" when the current top post on HN is a blog post that downloads 780KB of Javascript, and has attracted no such comments.

Anyway, the paper is very interesting. The sorting example is particularly impressive -- I almost wouldn't have believed it was possible to learn automatically.

[nhaehnle]

I'm running Firefox on a fairly beefy laptop, and the integrated PDF viewer annoyed me so much that I disabled it some time last year. I suppose it's fine for simple stuff, and it's definitely better than an Adobe Reader plugin, but it just manages to be much too sluggish on too many real-world examples out there when standalone viewers work just fine and smooth - but unfortunately don't integrate well in the overall browsing experience.

[SkyMarshal]

I'm a serial computer and browser abuser, and on OS X, I can easily crash my browser, and sometimes even the whole OS, if I'm not careful what I load up in a new browser tab. So I'd rather have the simpler abstract page too.

[SandB0x]

The browser on my phone and tablet

[bane]

I strongly prefer the direct link to the paper. Downloading and viewing a PDF is not so burdensome that this is a problem. I get the abstract at the top of the paper and if I'm no interested I can just close the tab that's showing the PDF same as closing a web page.

[wagle]

I strongly prefer the cite-able link to the pdf. The link points to the PDF, but the PDF does not point to the link. The link points to all versions of the paper.

[bane]

As it turns out, the URL of the pdf is cite-able.

[wagle]

But it doesn't link to the versions of the paper.

You want to save one click of the mouse. I want to save having to reverse-engineer the parent URL.