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Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

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Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#34

Post by dotancohen »

Nice work, the video looks terrific.

Just so you know, the vast majority (I'd say everything but molecules) of this is already possible with Org Mode, and can be done just as quickly with Evil (VIM keybindings). That said, I'm sure that people will love this.

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#36

Post by jopizio »

ralph_r wrote: post #22
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…

I'm mostly interested in general use annotations. Basically, I want the ability to quickly circle a feature in a plot and point to it with an arrow associated with a text box with some explanation. I think the mini, floating blocks as you described could work well as long as they can be grouped and "locked" in place so they don't accidently get pushed away. OneNote has the ability to add such general annotations very easily, but there's no ability to lock the positions, and so as a result notebooks can easily become a jumbled mess.

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#38

Post by hoosieree »

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.

Notebooks aren't very git-friendly, so in practice you rarely know which version produced the paper.

The fact you can run notebook cells out-of-order exacerbates this problem. Not only do you not know what version the entire file was, you also don't know in what order or how many times each cell within the file executed in order to produce the plots you see in the paper.

This isn't to discount the improvement in UX that you get from notebooks compared to my preferred alternative (emacs with org-mode). Maybe I'm just bitter that the ipynb format exists at all. If notebooks were just a UX layered on top of emacs+org-mode, that would fix most of the core issues.

Re: Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing

#39

Post by Hugsun »

dotancohen wrote: post #34

Nice work, the video looks terrific. Just so you know, the vast majority (I'd say everything but molecules) of this is already possible with Org Mode, and can be done just as quickly with Evil (VIM keybindings). That said, I'm sure that people will love this.

I love and use org mode a lot. I wouldn't know how to do half of these things within it though.

Can you point me to good resources on how to do them?

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