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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this.

The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work.

Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2 hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well.

Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

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People are different, the processes in their minds goes different ways. People develops different styles of learning and then they adopt to that styles and adopt styles for themselves. So it is pointless to agree or disagree.

I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture".

I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine.

And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.

On the point of writing greek letters and symbols I've taken to practicing a Greek letter possibly hundreds of times when I first encounter it. Just write it, write it, and write it again.

At first it's just to understand how my hand has to move to write it efficiently, then I move on to attempting to write precisely. Finally, I write it over and over pushing myself to get it to the speed at which it will not interrupt the rest of the notes when it happens. This approach has be wildly successful for me and while it does take some time it is always time well spent.

Recently, I ran into § and just had to figure it out. Honestly, I was out of my depth in the Wikipedia article and I don't even know what it represents. It was fun, though.

> I ran into §

This is the symbol for section, it means that a new section is starting, or it may be a reference to a section number.

I agree that Greek might not be the best for people with a different linguistic background. By the way, did you mean Galois Theory? If it's OK to ask, what other languages do you speak mainly besides English?

Yes, I meant Galois Theory. I speak russian, and 'Galua' just letter-per-letter transcription from russian spelling.

Ah, cool. Funny thing, in Chinese Einstein uses the character for "love" [ai] also because it's a phonetic approximation.

If you read that out loud as if it were Spanish, it would sound like the original French pronunciation for Galois. So, good job! :-)

Russian spelling is mostly phonetic. It tries to keep the idea of spelling that word is a program for sound making machine, which knows nothing about pronunciation of a particular word, just follow simple rules for interpreting letters.

As I understand, Spanish is much like this, it keeps spelling simple. If so, then there are nothing surprising that transliteration from cyrillic into latin make sense from Spanish point of view.

I wholeheartedly agree on the "People are different" part. I for one am never able to process information and write it down. It's always either thinking about the content or "copying down curvy lines that purposely mean something". The worst lectures for me were when the teacher / professor forced us to copy down the lectures, even though they had perfect lecture preparations they could have just uploaded online. Or teachers that gave us the homework of copying down these pages of vocabularies because "only then you will remember them".

If you remember only one thing about teaching: There are multitudes of learning styles and only a minority of students will have similar ones than you. Probably, the (as I imagine) magical experience of remembering after writing something down is so intense that it is hard to let that feeling go and let others have their different styles.

Edit: Xi was the worst for me, too. I think the standard letter form as portrayed in print does not lend itself to quick handwriting. Also, if I compare how much time is spend in elementary school teaching how to efficiently write the Latin alphabet to how there is no introduction in university regarding the Greek alphabet (except if you are lucky a complete table with their pronunciation), it is almost ludicrous. Yes, we are all adults at that point in time, but for some reason I still didn't get the idea to google for "how to write greek letters efficiently" back then [1][2].

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+write+greek+letters+efficie...

[2] https://www.foundalis.com/lan/hw/grkhandw.htm

Research shows handwritten notes to generally be far superior to typed notes for memory and retention

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

So while there are certainly some people who are better with digital notes it is absolutely not " pointless to agree or disagree."

Do they control for handwriting? It's hard to learn from handwritten notes if your handwriting is illegible, especially at speed.

it's the act of writing the notes physically which is helpful

>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally.

More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>.

I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.

> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

This is the problem.

Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast.

Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years.

Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a hundred students scribbling out a lecturer's slide with basic function laplace transforms in it. The lecturer moved on leaving 99 people with half a table of transforms. Me, I'm sitting there with <<laplace basic transform table>>. I took this home, reviewed notes and added a reference to my textbook which contained it, added a sticky note to the book page sticking out of the side. Then I spent some time playing with them and trying them out and building valuable real understanding.

Now I've completely forgotten what you even use a laplace transform for 20 years later but I can find out in 10 minutes with that textbook and my notes which I still have in a concise manor.

Ditto, EE too. I bought a copy of Abramowitz and Stegun just for the great table of Laplace Transforms.

If I were a professor, I’d ban all electronics from the room. All the decent professors handed out copies of the notes anyway, or wrote them in real-time on an overhead projector, for easy copying later.

Then you'd be a terrible professor, because that attitude is not pro-learning. Students take their own notes because writing is an aid to memory. Students take electronic notes because those notes are easier to organise, edit, and search through. Many "decent" professors will not hand out notes, and the writings they put on the projector might be scanned and put online, but those writings have none of the benefits of actually typeset notes. Moreover, since you would ban electronics, students couldn't access those scans in a later lecture anyways.

Yep, I’ll be just like this guy.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ksnt.com/amp/news/local-new...

You know people used to hand-write notes, right?

The act of writing them actually helps one to remember -- I never went back and organized, edited, or searched through notes I took, because I remembered most of the material, and what I didn't was in the book.

>You know people used to hand-write notes, right?

They also used to write cuneiform :p What's your point here?

>The act of writing them actually helps one to remember

Source for this, in comparison to typing?

It’s been widely reported for several years. Here’s the first link I found.

www.medicaldaily.com/why-using-pen-and-paper-not-laptops-boosts-memory-writing-notes-helps-recall-concepts-ability-268770%3famp=1

Well, I gave up entirely on taking notes in high-school because laptops weren't allowed, and I can barely read my handwriting if I'm quickly taking notes. Whereas in uni I actually used my notes, and have even referred to them years later since they're actually readable and useful. Granted, I would have them 1/2 typed while reading the material before lecture and did a final-draft cleanup after lecture, but typed notes were far more helpful than handwritten notes.

Assuming that everyone learns the same way you do is just false. Some people really like mind maps, I don't find them personally helpful but I don't tell people it's a useless technique or that they're wrong. If a student can't be trusted to have a laptop without spending the lecture browsing Facebook, then why should the lecturer care? That student is only hurting their own academic performance, it shouldn't stop others from being able to learn in a manner that benefits themselves.

Have you ever sat in the back row of a lecture hall and watched what the students are doing on their laptops?

What does that have to do with anything?

A lot.

Laptops are generally disruptive to the entire class, and (anecdotally, but I’ve done a lot of higher learning) almost all of their use is not for note taking or anything related to the class.

So why not ban them? Many professors do.

So when you get to the real world and everyone in the meeting is on their laptop? ...

Doesn't work that way in a lot of the real world.

>So why not ban them?

Because some students are using them to take notes, and banning electronics harms the learning of those students.

They are distracting other students using a computer. Why do you want to ban using a computer but keep permitting distracting other students?

Ridiculous. You're forcing your own preferences and quirks onto a class-full of students. They are adults, they can make their own decisions and do what suits them best. As we can see from this very article what works for some does not match what works for you.

> They are adults, they can make their own decisions and do what suits them best

They can, but do they ?

Given my experience as a student in the US long time ago, it rarely seemed so. I am all for treating them as adults as long as its not disturbing/distracting others in the class.

If I'd known to do that, I might have made my way through my EE degree instead of dropping out to the (easier) CS degree. 90% of the time I got about 40-50% of the way through transcribing the stuff on the board before the lecturer erased it because 'fuck you, you had 30 seconds'

> >Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

Why wouldn't modern day students do this? It's one of the best way to study that I ever used.

I can understand why people don't do it. We weren't taught how to learn at school or college and when we turned up at university we were expected to know how. It took me a semester of alcohol fuelled hedonism, followed by screwing up, panic, then introspection to work it all out.

I imagine a lot of that could be avoided with some assistance from the education sector along the way.

My eldest wants to be a doctor so I've tried to share as much of my experience with her on how to learn so she doesn't have to make my mistakes as they still don't teach them any of this today, at least in the UK.

This is exactly what I have observed among today's students also, and I am desperately trying to help! Smart students actually get hit harder because they cruise through high school and hit the wall in college. Then they may have a seminar or something on how to take notes and basic time-management (usually delivered through a first-year experience program or something similar), but if they want a real understanding of how to learn they have to get it on their own.

I'm not saying they shouldn't, I'm saying that they are not going to do it, the majority at least. Most people take the path of least resistance, if your path of least resistance is retyping your notes consistently every class more power to you, you are not an average student then. I never typed up my notes, I made flashcards based off them which worked for me, but OK. I'm just saying that if you think the average student diligently types up his notes after every class you're sorely mistaken.

> As if the average modern day student is going to do this.

If that is the case, then I fear little from the upcoming students chomping at my old ankles in the jobs market!

Transcribing my lecture scribbles to neater notes later in the day (or sometimes later in the week depending on scheduling) was important in solidifying the knowledge or, more importantly, realising that something hadn't twigged in my head as I thought it had (giving me chance to look up the matter and/or ask the lecturer for clarification next time, instead of being surprised by not understanding when new information was built on that part or it came up in an exam).

My handwriting is terrible,and worse when it comes writing down formulas, this could be a useful way of writing up notes a lot quicker. Also useful for cheat sheets or summarising notes

I have no objection to taking quick notes in lectures using electronic means instead of pen+paper (though the latter would still be my preference).

It was the implication that people don't have and won't make time to review, tidy, and, where relevant, expand upon or question those notes afterwards, that I was responding to.

My handwriting is also awful, but what the parent suggested isn't at all incompatible with taking typed notes: I would type a first draft while reading the material before lecture, add during the lecture, then finish the final draft afterwards. I regret I didn't learn this method of note-taking earlier, and it works for both hand-written and typed. It also doesn't take that much time, but the last step of reviewing and cleanup is critical for actually cementing my understanding of the material.

Another possible method would be taking written notes during lectures, then typesetting them afterwards. However, I found it was preferable to revise my notes soon after the lecture, at least 1-2 days following, while my memory was still fresh.

This method of writing notes still seems like a downgrade from using a pen - my optimal way of taking notes would be with a pen, but with some sort of handwriting recognition on a tablet so it could immediately translate it to prose + LaTeX mathematics. Something that does both nicely seems difficult to find though...

It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop.

https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...

Totally agree. Also handwriting is better for your handwriting! About ten years into my IT career my skills devolved into chicken scratch and I can't even read notes I wrote recently now. I need to do something about that.

I want to highlight that part:

"Participants using laptops are more likely to take lengthier transcription-like notes with greater verbatim overlap with the lecture"

In other words, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking notes on a laptop if you don't copy everything verbatim. If you force yourself to process the material you should have no problem.

But they noticed that most do not go back to their notes as much as they should so a general advice, while typing is easier hand-written helps you learn and retain better using less exposure.

Assuming a class isn't already being recorded (many/most at my university were), the best solution is probably to record audio on your phone and take hand written notes. Then go back and transcribe the hand written notes while referring to the audio in to the computer.

If you're going to do that, your best bet is probably to take handwritten notes on a tablet while recording using an app that syncs the two.

I sometimes do this; it's also nice that I can snap a photo of a slide with the tablet and insert it into the notes.

TBH, I mostly type notes, in part because my handwriting is really bad and, if I'm going to write something up about an event cutting and pasting is easier. OTOH, I sometimes prefer to have fairly cursory notes knowing that I can always go back to exactly what was said if I need/want to.

Well, I started taking LaTeX notes in-class specifically because I couldn't refer back to handwritten notes later; my handwriting is atrocious at the best of times and when taking quick notes it was just unreadable. However, I did have to keep a notebook for diagrams as well, and my typed notes always needed cleanup afterwards. My eventual process was to type up a first draft before class while reading the material, supplement them with lecture material, then finish them after class. This won't work for everyone, but after I started doing this I would actually use my notes, whereas before I wouldn't, since I could actually read the darn things. Plus, I can type ~2.5 times faster than I can write.

As another reply mentioned, it seems like hand-written notes are good because the limitations on writing speed force you to synthesize information as it is relayed to you.

Outside of mathematical lectures, I find writing notes in something like notepad++ more fruitful. I can attempt mirror the structure of the speakers' argument using tabs/indentations, and quickly reformat the document as the logical structure becomes clearer.

I've known people who liked using mindmaps for this purpose. Personally, I could never get into them but big fans exist.

That's... not true, and not supported by the study you linked.

In the study, there was no measured difference in memory between the two note taking styles; the groups' factual scores were not significantly different in any of the tests.

Where things vary is the non-memory questions: are the notes helping you understand and apply the material better, and how advantageous are they to your studying?

In both of those categories, handwritten notes win out.

Finally, there is no "because"; the authors can only speculate. I am not aware of any studies that can actually purport to say why handwritten notes are better.

I find handwritten notes far worse. For me, I'd prefer a full set of notes to a be provided if feasible (a lecture, etc.) but that doesn't work in everyday conversational meetings. I instead prefer typing notes because it requires little cognative load to accomplish and is quite efficient.

The point of notes for me is to refresh my memory after the fact because my human memory isn't reliable enough. They are especially useful for capturing finer quantified details.

During a typical lecture or discussion/meeting, I find it far more useful focus most my cognitative abilities on what's being described/presented to me and only commit critical information to memory. The majority of my energy spent is processing the language and concepts discussed, linking language and concepts togethe, connecting those concepts with previous experiences/knowledge, and generating new ideas/relationships... all in what seems a fairly random order as needed. This allows you to ask informed questions when I see things missing in the conceptual structure I have that I might otherwise miss later and have no means to extract that information because my notes may not have the relationship or fact I need.

Later on when reviewing the information, I utilize the critical conceptual structure/framework I created about the discussion to reason through it. If there are pieces of information missing, it's pretty obvious and I can refer to my notes. If I missed the concept I at least have a second shot at recovering the idea from highly detailed and clear to read notes I took.

I could not imagine trying to write LaTeX on the fly during a in depth mathematics discussion, I'd have far too much focus on syntax formulating correct notation structures than the concept at hand when it's far easier to translate using a camera phone or handwriting.

Agreed. Paper and pen is hard to beat when it comes to equations and improvising. Hats off to anyone with that level of Vim & LaTex skill though. Now that I'm in the workforce I use OneNote, Notepad, and Confluence for notes and documentation for the most part, but I still use a lot of pen and paper as well... especially when doing complex coding where I need to map out how all the data structures work before hand.

Run away from OneNote quickly. Microsoft are not shipping OneNote desktop any more, preferring the horrid UWP app.

Another vote for paper or neutral formats here. They persist longer than vendor whims!

Case in point I wrote a lot of my work up on TechWriter on an Acorn RiscPC. Where are we now with that. Hmm...

Thanks for the tip. OneNote is one of a handful of things Microsoft has done that I like. Is it really not on Windows10? I haven't upgraded from 7 yet.

It does ship with windows 10 but it's a UWP app and it's rubbish. It's missing on Office 2019. See: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/onenote-2016-is-mis...

This one totally caught me by surprise for ref when I upgraded, perhaps foolishly. I installed OneNote 2016 and am sticking my fingers in my ears until I have some time to deal with it.

That's awful. I probably have hundreds of pages of notes in this thing. Time to mass PDF export.

I have been using it for about 15 years so am in the same situation. I haven't found a suitable alternative yet.

Annoyingly they're going to EOL the cloud connectivity for it in 2023 and then the product in 2025. I've taken all my notebooks offline and will deal with it at some point, probably in 2025 :D

I've been waiting and looking for a replacement for a long time, but it doesn't seem like one will appear unless I make it myself.

Are you referring to EOL for desktop version or OneNote entirely?

EOL for old desktop version. There's a new terribly crippled UWP desktop version and the cloud based web app available going forwards. They are absolutely terrible bits of software compared to the old desktop version.

Do they not understand customers at all? Except for high performance simulations, I will never use the cloud. Maybe they realize that and want to force cloud adoption?

I think they understand that if you give customers no option they will be forced to comply with their wishes and act as a monthly revenue stream.

However they also misunderstand people's reluctance to put all your eggs in a large basket out of your control that disappears in a puff of smoke if you stop paying for it plus their ability to want to avoid paying a monthly fee.

At some point it'll backfire.

I think the moral of the story is, do not depend on proprietary software ;)

I totally agree. One reason I haven't moved yet is I haven't found something I would consider using that isn't proprietary.

I'm hopeful that the "new" OneNote will follow the same type of iterative dev/release scheme that VSCode has used so well, but for now it is pretty barebones and missing a lot of functionality from the Office app.

Fully agreed. We had two guys in university that would type to Latex the mathematics lecture notes and produced a neat script that everyone else used. They failed the course.

I object to this for completely different reasons. Do whatever you like to learn the material, but when you're sitting in a lecture, please don't have a laptop open -- it's terribly distracting for the other people in the room. You may stick resolutely to note-taking and have no messaging programs, games, or video playing. Even so, your constantly updating screen, your tapping keys, are a magnet for others' attention. And that's a best-case scenario by far. Few students are disciplined enough to stay off of Facebook during a lecture. Laptops have no place in a lecture hall.

Over the years I've audited a lot of math classes and tried various ways of taking notes.

I've found that live-TeXing lets me keep half my attention at best on the lecture. The people I've talked to about it agree. Also, when the professor requests for the class to be transcribed, the live-TeXing duty is rotated among the students as to not unduly impose on one of us.

I eventually gave up and moved to taking notes with an iPad and an Apple pencil, which has the quickness of handwritten notes, and the availability of digitized notes -- if I'm looking for something I can usually find it pretty quickly by navigating to the class and the (labeled) lectures.

Of course if live-TeXing works for someone, more power to them!

If this works for the guy how can you ‘disagree’?

Because it's very much an edge case and he hasn't passed yet. A lot of people get to the end of their course and realise they have thousands of pages of useless words and diagrams and have a nervous breakdown.

It takes a lot of discipline and time to write very high quality notes and to study. I spent more time thinking about things and experimenting with ideas and writing notes than I did in lectures or tutorials or labs.

I did take LaTeX notes for most courses on my math degree, and I passed all of them. In fact, the ones where I dedicated more time to the notes were the ones that I could study more easily as I put in more effort to understand and review what I wrote.

> Because it's very much an edge case and he hasn't passed yet.

I am fairly sure he passed more than one course with this approach. The blogpost says that he started using LaTeX to take notes during his second semester. The screenshots show introductory complex analysis, which is usually taught somewhat later.

Don't you think you could be an edge case too where you went back and studied extra and experimented? Very few college students I know actually did anything like this, and I know I didn't. Obviously it would have helped, but I did not do that then.

No because we formed study groups and did it collectively.

I use pen and paper notes for meetings & discussions. While I love the act of physically writing, not having notes accessible and searchable at the tips of my fingers means I am not able to get the most out of them.

This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?

I've never used standalone smartpens but I semi-regularly take handwritten notes in an iPad app using Apple's smart pencil. Some apps attempt to turn cursive into text but TBH my handwriting isn't good enough for the transcription to work reliably.

I did live TeXing for about a year, after only having ~a year of emacs and latex use. It's not as hard as it sounds but yes like you mention, it takes your head out of the lecture and into your editor. However, the idea of 'rewrite your notes at the end of the day', who has the time for that though?

While I agree with you on the notes aspect of this (and have always used pen-and-paper notes), I do think that the setup described here would be quite useful for authoring papers -- I've always found it is way too painful to write out math-mode equations in LaTeX.

I would never write short hand with mathematics, it’s too confusing… do you mean long hand?

Sorry I should have used a different word. Write the name of the equation down / bullet points. Don't write too much. Just enough to jog your memory later or cover anything you don't think you understand.

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