Hacker News Reader

Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

I participated in a discussion on /r/math about this a few months ago, and there was surprising resistance to ideas like this. Most of it fell into two categories. The first was people with a paper fetish who refuse to believe that there are now computer display technologies that provide adequate readability and resolution to be a full-time substitute for books. The second was people who can't imagine a usable way to typeset proofs that embed metadata about which lines are the key steps and which could be folded. This is probably influenced by the fact that LaTeX doesn't support this kind of semantic markup and it would be awkward to add.

View on HN

Except... it's not a fetish. Paper books have many advantages. It is easily annotable. (none of the current ebook types are easy). It provides tactile feedback, which can be used for organization - folded corners give you two types of indices (top/bottom outer corner). The entire structure of the book as a stack of pages gives you immediate visual feedback where you are, and it's effectively random-addressable. ("Yeah, it's roughly a third in, check there"). Heck, you can color page edges to make it even easier, and that gives you three spatial indices on top of the two tactile ones. It's not as unwieldy as screens. It is flexible, which makes it nicer to handle. It doesn't need to be charged. It doesn't break when you drop it. (Not to mention you can kill a fly with a paper book, ebooks don't work)

Yes, e-books have other advantages - but calling it a paper fetish basically means you're making an uninformed call, because you're not even aware of the advantages.

The second, you could have easily addressed by proposing a markup if it were easy to do so. The fact that you haven't, and aren't even aware why people think it's hard, means you're again coming from an uninformed position.

And you thought the resistance was surprising?

The reddit thread in question was surprisingly lacking in discussion of the usability aspects you're focusing on. I think most of those issues make for a much more productive conversation, because there's real room for improvement in those areas—paper and current computer/tablet technology each have their own usability pros and cons. I'm not at all uninformed about those usability challenges. I was just surprised and disappointed at how many people assumed that paper had an unbeatable advantage on the purely visual aspects of presenting information, as if computers were still limited to 100dpi with really poor black levels.

> The second, you could have easily addressed by proposing a markup if it were easy to do so. The fact that you haven't, and aren't even aware why people think it's hard, means you're again coming from an uninformed position.

I didn't propose any specific markup because the specific syntax isn't the problem. The problem is that the predominant markup language for mathematical documents is LaTeX, which is a bit too presentation-oriented rather than semantic/structure-oriented for it to be really easy to use it to produce documents that can be interactively folded (especially when the output file format is almost always PDF). Something that used eg. MathML and an HTML/XML based overall document structure can trivially encode all the information necessary for rich interactive reading, and proposing specific tag or class names to indicate what lines of a proof should be collapsed by default only invites bikeshedding.

I think you're quite unjustified in accusing me of being so thoroughly uninformed.

>I was just surprised and disappointed at how many people assumed that paper had an unbeatable advantage on the purely visual aspects of presenting information, as if computers were still limited to 100dpi with really poor black levels.

I'm not surprised. Virtually all "designers" think low contrast text is better, despite high contrast being preferred on paper. They deliberately reduce contrast by setting the text color to gray. Even Firefox's Reader View, which otherwise fixes most mistakes of designers, sets the text to gray unless you override it in userContent.css. Desktop GUIs often have low contrast text too, which is also difficult to fix. Unless somebody somebody knows how to do this their expensive monitor will be wasted.

Actually latex would be quite sufficient, basically what you are proposing is an appendix where you list additional details

The real reason people don't do this is simple, it would require an inhumane amount of work and details which will likely be wrong themselves and will for sure be to boring to be checked. Most science is wrong in some aspects, sometime it is better to have a meaningful intuition that can be understood by other expert (and maybe rejected)

Paper math books also do not serve up distracting ads.

Math ebooks shouldn't either lol

people with a paper fetish who refuse to believe

Maybe there was surprising resistance because you spoke like that?

Nah. I'm only using language that harsh now because of how disappointingly irrational and weak the objections on reddit were. It's odd to see mathematicians resistant to quantifying what they believe to be inferior about computer displays, and improperly generalizing what seemed to be their experience with $500 laptops to also argue against high-quality eInk, OLED and IPS LCDs.

Two points:

1) Mathematicians write all over the papers and books they read. Electronic versions of this exist (e.g., Xournal, written by a well known mathematician), but they tend not to be as convenient as simply scribbling on paper.

2) Mathematicians digest papers nonlinearly. Digital presentations don't usually lend themselves to flipping back and forth between pages. At times, I suspect mathematicians use papers and books as memory mansions, organizing concepts by relating them to their location in the physical copy.

> Mathematicians digest papers nonlinearly.

That's a fairly weak argument: you can browse an electronic document in a non-linear fashion way easier than a book.

And also: books don't have CTRL-F

> That's a fairly weak argument: you can browse an electronic document in a non-linear fashion way easier than a book.

How do I make handwritten side notes? How can I create a bookmark for a specific page? How can I view multiple non-contiguous pages next to each other? How can I reference a specific part in an electronic text (in non-electronic text "3rd paragraph on page 11") and send it to a collaborator?

I was specifically addressing the "non-linear" part, and none of the things you list have anything to do with that.

However, to nevertheless address your points:

>How do I make handwritten side notes

There is a number of applications to do this (e.g. xournal), and when combined with a touchscreen on a decent hirez modern device, we're getting close to what paper can do. I'll grant you: this is still the weak point of computers as compared to pen and paper (especially for scribbling diagrams), but it won't be for long.

>How can I create a bookmark for a specific page

I'm not sure if you're trolling here, all e-book readers I've used have this feature.

>How can I view multiple non-contiguous pages next to each other?

Multiple windows ? CTRL+N ?

>How can I reference a specific part in an electronic text (in non-electronic text "3rd paragraph on page 11") and send it to a collaborator?

Cut and paste?

Or ... sending him an email with ""3rd paragraph on page 11"" in the body?

I think if you reframe the problem it can be much easier (if not trivial) to find solutions.

If you present a 100 page book as a folder of 100 image files instead, most of these become image manipulation problems:

>How do I make handwritten side notes?

The same way you'd edit an image.

> How can I create a bookmark for a specific page?

Create a subdirectory with the page or a link to the page.

> How can I reference a specific part in an electronic text (in non-electronic text "3rd paragraph on page 11")

Cut and paste the excerpt into a new image file.

> and send it to a collaborator?

File sharing is a solved problem. Hell, you can even share it on Instagram if you so choose.

It's odd to see mathematicians resistant to quantifying what they believe to be inferior about computer displays

They're mathematicians, not display interface experts. This is like demanding that someone explain to you why they don't like a particular kind of food -- people are allowed to dislike things without having a complete internal axiomatic system justifying it.

Dislike, sure. Personal preferences are acceptable. But claiming that it's impossible for a computer/tablet display to be as readable as paper and that all electronic displays cause more eyestrain is unreasonable. Especially when the person making that claim has already demonstrated that they are familiar with terms like resolution, contrast ratio and form factor, but they fail to even propose a hypothesis for what might still be inferior about the best computer display technologies.

Mathematicians are happy to use computers for typesetting papers, but not for the initial creative phase:

1) computer displays require you to scroll, which interrupts your mental flow

2) paper and pencil or pen is free-form

3) in advanced mathematics, results are rarely calculated in numerical form, so the computer isn't helpful

4) notebooks are permanent. No backups needed.

I imagine the same is true for most cartoon artists.

> improperly generalizing what seemed to be their experience with $500 laptops to also argue against high-quality eInk, OLED and IPS LCDs.

And what Grad student can afford those at [Insert State University]. I was a PhD student in math not long ago, and vastly preferred paper books, and even printed out articles. It is way way easier on your eyes than something actively blasting light. Maybe in 20 years high quality e-ink will be cheap enough, but that has been promised since forever.

> It is way way easier on your eyes than something actively blasting light.

See, this is the kind of bad argument that really irks me. There are good arguments about how computers aren't ready to replace pen and paper for actively doing math, and even a few shortcomings for computers replacing paper textbooks. But "actively blasting light" doesn't mean anything. Photons are photons. If you think a backlit display is somehow harder on your eyes than an indirectly-lit piece of paper, then you should be trying to figure out whether you simply have the backlight set too bright for your surroundings, or if your screen's contrast ratio at reasonable brightness levels is inadequate. Your LCD's default settings are probably optimized for movie-watching more than reading, but that's easily fixed and definitely not an inherent limitation of all backlit displays everywhere.

>not an inherent limitation of all backlit displays everywhere.

This may be true, but in my experience(not very wealthy, typically sub $400 devices) the presets are set such that 0% backlight in the OS is glaringly bright. I cannot turn it down without rooting the device.

Maybe for tech device things we should have two separate tracks, one for wealthy snd people who can modify devices and one for poor and people who cannot. Even my Thnkpad laptop under Ubuntu has a setting for 10% brightness which is far too high for a truly dark room. The next lowest setting is 0% which is absolute dark. How do you use your laptop under such conditions?

You could use xbacklight to have a finer control of the display brightness. You can also rebind the brightness keys to shell scripts that use "xbacklight -inc <percent>" or -dec, with a finer resolution.

I don't see how backlight settings for a truly dark room are relevant here. I've been annoyed by several of my devices being unable to dim far enough, but never in a situation where I would expect to be able to easily read words printed on paper. An office or classroom setting that has adequate light for pen and paper work could be too dim for an LCD at 100% brightness to be comfortable, but almost any device can be dimmed enough for that environment.

Color temperature can also be a problem, but there's a lot of awareness of that issue nowadays. Most operating systems now support automatic adjustment of color temperature based on time of day, plus manual adjustment. Devices that adjust their color temperature to account for ambient lighting are starting to catch on, and I expect they'll be pretty common in a few years.

a lot of mathematicians prefer chalkboards over whiteboards too, because 85% of all known whiteboard markers are nearly empty.

love of math and love of technology aren't as closely linked as you believe.

Trying to do learn math with a computer is frustration. The computer eats up your desk space, you have to constantly move it around as you work on different things, a mouse and keyboard eat up even more space. You have to have power, and you have to drop your pen every other time you need something.

Maybe you don't see the problem because you aren't doing any math?

I’ve been studying undergrad maths for the last year or two, and I had a bit of a breakthrough when I realized how much more effective it was for me to do all my work (notes, exercises) in LaTeX rather than with pen and paper. I can refactor at will, improving proofs, and the consistent tidy typesetting makes me think more systematically about the problem I’m working on.

I've started doing everything in LaTeX - diary, everything I'm learning about, books I'm writing, maths, documenting my programming etc - the last few months too; it's going great. It took a few months to learn about LaTeX packages, basic TeX etc. (And every time I use TikZ I've forgotten it all again..) It's especially useful mathematically in avoiding errors when doing page-long calculations with pen and paper - copying lines instead of writing them out, and the whole thing looking so lovely and neat - eliminates 95% of the errors I made before, and it's faster. I still do ideas, sketches etc on paper, but anything that's likely to be want to be kept goes straight into LaTeX.

But also..all my favourite books have markings on each page, margin comments, turned-over corners etc. Any pdf book I read more than once or twice, I'll get a paper copy, I think.

What tool(s) do you use for working with LaTeX?

A Makefile to encapsulate all the details of how to generate the PDFs.

Text editor customizations to trigger `make <current-doc>.pdf` on save. (Emacs in my case)

A PDF viewer that reloads the PDF when it changes on disk (Skim in my case, which does auto-reload, but I also have some Applescript in the Makefile to poke Skim so that it notices the file change faster).

A good text editor LaTeX editing mode (Emacs in my case).

Random test editor customizations for working on LaTeX.

My main tips are

1. don't be shy of perfecting your work environment

2. use git to track both your work environment customizations and your LaTeX work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com