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Comment by _ux1n | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see this at the top, agree 100%. I’m definitely going to copy some of OP’s setting and snippets, but not for real time use during a lecture.

A textbook is an infinitely better reference than any notes one could take in class. Read the damn book. Lecture time should be for asking questions when you have a freaking live expert professor literally presenting the material to you. Ask all the small, nuanced questions that you can think of in the moment, which you can’t find answers to easily online or in the book.

Not to downplay the efficient workflow here, but there is zero chance that this person’s notes are actually better than a real textbook.

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That's fine amd dandy from a US perspective, but many European universities are different. I don't know about this guy's exact class, but some (many?) undergrad classes are 500 people in a lecture hall with the professor orating, no textbook, and the content on the exam is pretty much whatever was covered during the lectures. So accurate note taking is very important because those notes essentially are your textbook. Hence the small business of students assembling high quality lecture notes and selling them to people who have't been to class (much).

At that point smuggling an audio recorder to the class might lead a better reproduction of the material.

audio recording != text book ;) It still would need significant time to transcript, and then OPs workflow comes back into picture ...

You'd still have to transcribe them, and you'd miss what's on the blackboard.

onenote can transcribe in real time and save the audio recording as well... you can even save notes at particular timestamps so you can mark something you didn't understand for later.

all of these things are solved problems

Note: Europe: the continent where most of the lectures are still not in English. And where are many languages. Not to mention the accents and the dialects in the same non-English language.

I also doubt you are aware how seriously distorted the result of the speech to text conversion would be for a non-professional recording of any non-trivial lecture given in English (e.g. domain specific terms).

yes it was totally my mistake to assume a comment on an english speaking american site would be in the context of american english. also one note picks up domain specific terms just fine in STEM fields...

also remember how i said it records audio and logs in real time? yeah, just listen back to it and correct the one or two words it garbles. works just fine. people want to complain not use the solutions that exist. i'm sure writing in latex is trivial and doesn't have you googling issues every 2 hours lol

The lectures will contain content from text books, even if they aren't referenced. Reading around the topic will give a better understanding and better results.

Undergrad maths classes with 500 people? That must be one hell of a course. Either way, all undergrad classes I attended in Germany were based on some kind of textbook (usually (co-)authored by the lecturer, and occasionally self-published, i.e. as photocopies of a set of more or less neatly typewritten pages, with equations scrawled in by hand).

It does not make too much sense to compare textbooks and class notes, specially when you get to higher level classes where the textbooks are reference textbooks, hardly readable by someone who is not already familiar with the material.

Your study notes will contain parts of the textbook, of course, but also explanations that are not in the book, maybe examples that you find useful and that might not be in the book, counterexamples, doubts, schematics... No textbook will have 100% of the contents you need to study.

>A textbook is an infinitely better reference than any notes one could take in class.

but...

>Ask all the small, nuanced questions that you can think of in the moment, which you can’t find answers to easily online or in the book.

and then what, forget them by the time you go back to the book? Why was the book so good again if it doesn't answer all the questions? It makes more sense to record the answer to those useful questions you ask, maybe in the form of some notes.

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