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Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

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Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#21

Post by ted_dunning »

ralph_r wrote: post #14
rrnechmech wrote: post #9

We don't need faster scientific writing We need slower scientific writing. Edit: While I understand policy involved, apologies, I'd contend 'shallow'. Not lengthy? Sure. But the point was made enough @kbk et al. got it

I totally get where you're coming from, maybe I could have worded the title differently. In contexts such as publishing scientific papers and journals, patience and attention to detail are really important. There are however many other contexts where I would argue speed and a simple UX makes a big difference. * Notes that need to be taken on the fly: class notes, lab notes, field observations, general notes * Prototy…

Another way to put this while avoiding the slow/fast argument is that the tools for note-taking should not hobble you.

That is, stempad is a blow against artificially slow writing, not against all slow writing.

It ideally doesn't keep you from thinking deeply and may help if it lets you avoid thinking about the tool instead of the content.

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#22

Post by ralph_r »

jopizio wrote: post #20

Very nice work. I'll definitely play around with it. For the use case of a digital lab notebook, it would be nice to be able to annotate (superimpose drawings, highlight, etc.) images and pdfs directly in the editor. This would be even more powerful if such annotations could be grouped or locked, so that their position relative to the annotated image remains fixed. This is something that all other note taking apps ei…

Glad to hear you're interesting in trying it. For your use case, I'm curious, are you referring to general use annotations (ex. highlighting, text boxes, commenting, drawing), or are you specifically interested in scientific annotations (ex. Adding an annotation with math or code in it)?

Regardless, it's definitely a realistic feature to have. I'm thinking of it as a block right now, perhaps a file block, that can be resized and annotated freely. Maybe annotations can be mini, floating, moveable and resizable editors. Would that make a big difference for you?

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#24

Post by DiggyJohnson »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #23

[flagged]

I've always been confused by these takes because it seems to me that the effort spent reviewing and organizing the original less-organized version of lecture notes is precisely when I learn the most.

But to your question about OCR, I'd like to extend it with another question? Is there a fundamental difference between the OCR that we might use to solve a caption or read a street sign versus the technology to OCR a paragraph of prose?

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#25

Post by bee_rider »

kbk wrote: post #11
rrnechmech wrote: post #9

We don't need faster scientific writing We need slower scientific writing. Edit: While I understand policy involved, apologies, I'd contend 'shallow'. Not lengthy? Sure. But the point was made enough @kbk et al. got it

For reference http://slow-science.org/ > We are scientists. We don’t blog. We don’t twitter. We take our time.

It is good that the actual scientists aren’t going to do this task.

It is a shame that we’ve more or less given up on the idea of having science communicators to do that job.

IMO when journalism ended the worst side-effect was that people who would be otherwise employed actually doing things have had to start blogging about the fact that they were doing them, instead of actually doing them.

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#26

Post by jbl0ndie »

hoosieree wrote: post #19
tomtranter wrote: post #5

My biggest frustration as an academic was reproducibility of papers I was reading. The pdf is such a useless medium for information transfer and the academic publishing industry is a complete racket where all the value is generated by the authors and reviewers who work for free and have to pay (in most cases) to have their work accessible freely to the public. I would love to see this turn into a default way to publi…

If you're lucky, someone releases code+data associated with their published paper. If you're really lucky, that code and data is in the same state as it was in the published paper. If you're really really lucky, someone besides the author can get it to run. If you can consistently locate and run academic publication code without direct help from the authors, you are The Chosen One. [edit] In seriousness, reproducibil…

Isn't that the idea (or perhaps the promise) of languages like R or notebook tools like Jupyter or Collab, which provide a means to ingest, clean, analyse and present your data, then share the code you've used to do that.

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#28

Post by jononor »

jbl0ndie wrote: post #26
hoosieree wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're lucky, someone releases code+data associated with their published paper. If you're really lucky, that code and data is in the same state as it was in the published paper. If you're really really lucky, someone besides the author can get it to run. If you can consistently locate and run academic publication code without direct help from the authors, you are The Chosen One. [edit] In seriousness, reproducibil…

Isn't that the idea (or perhaps the promise) of languages like R or notebook tools like Jupyter or Collab, which provide a means to ingest, clean, analyse and present your data, then share the code you've used to do that.

I like notebooks, they are a useful tool. But they are just a slight adjustment to the programming model and an alternative type IDE. It does not do much in terms of helping reproducibility. Data, software and dependency versioning is much more important. And verification that the code indeed runs on another machine, and produces the correct results. Setting up CI for the project, and basic end2end tests is the minimum level I set for my research (in applied machine learning).

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#30

Post by [deleted] »

tomtranter wrote: post #5

My biggest frustration as an academic was reproducibility of papers I was reading. The pdf is such a useless medium for information transfer and the academic publishing industry is a complete racket where all the value is generated by the authors and reviewers who work for free and have to pay (in most cases) to have their work accessible freely to the public. I would love to see this turn into a default way to publi…

[deleted]
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