Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime • Hacker News Board

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#11

Post by mcguire » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 4:18 PM UTC

Forget the dissertation. Nobody really reads those (really, not even my committee).

What we want to watch in real-time is the defense. Especially the spanking tunnel at the end.

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#12

Post by doctorKrieger » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 4:31 PM UTC

toppy wrote: post #6

That's an excellent solution for big problem in my country (not at PhD level though) namely plagiarism. Make students to use such system, turn autocommit on and you can see their progress and all deviations (big chunks of text appearing from nowhere etc.).

once they learn about it nothing will change.

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#13

Post by muhfuhkuh » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's live coding sessions for Ludum Dare.

Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're used to, or purity of notation?

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#14

Post by Fomite » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 4:51 PM UTC

burritofanatic wrote: post #5

Excellent! People writing important papers really should be using Git. When documents are extremely complex, previously removed portions can have pertinence later.

This doesn't work particularly well for fields not using LaTeX as their document creation tool.

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#15

Post by dovel » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #14

burritofanatic wrote: post #5

Excellent! People writing important papers really should be using Git. When documents are extremely complex, previously removed portions can have pertinence later.

This doesn't work particularly well for fields not using LaTeX as their document creation tool.

Why is that?

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#16

Post by SuitAndThai » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #13

This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's live coding sessions for Ludum Dare. Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're used to, or purity of notation?

It's probably because the author needs to describe complex mathematics and DocBook is unable to describe mathematics[1]. I can't speak much about Publican however.

1. http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Math.html

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#17

Post by hds » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 5:37 PM UTC

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #13

This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's live coding sessions for Ludum Dare. Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're used to, or purity of notation?

Partly it's what I'm used to, but I've yet to find anything "easier" for the large amount of mathematics I typeset. There is a lot of notation and very little graphics or difficult formatting.

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#18

Post by sanderjd » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 5:38 PM UTC

hds wrote: post #4

sanderjd wrote: post #3

That's really neat! I'm not sure if this is intentional because your work is private, but I would love it if I could click on the images or SHAs to go actually see the thing.

At the moment I'm a little hesitant to make it public. Partly because there's a large chunk of unpublished research in there, but also because some of the early drafts are a little embarrassing. Perhaps when the thesis is deposited (and hence public) I could add that in for "historical" interest.

Yeah, totally understandable.

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#19

Post by jaredsohn » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 6:02 PM UTC

dovel wrote: post #15

Fomite wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't work particularly well for fields not using LaTeX as their document creation tool.

Why is that?

I would think the GP means that git works much better if you are creating a document in a non-binary format (of which LaTeX is one example.)

Re: Watch a Ph.D. thesis dissertation being written in (somewhat) realtime

#20

Post by irremediable » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 6:24 PM UTC

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #13

This is really cool stuff. Reminds me of a stripped down version of notch's live coding sessions for Ludum Dare. Any reason you chose LaTeX as your content dev language and publishing over something a little "easier" like DocBook XML and Publican (which uses LaTeX as an intermediate build language to create PDFs)? Is it required, what you're used to, or purity of notation?

I think LaTeX remains the go-to language for this kind of stuff. Certainly, every STEM academic I've worked with has used it.