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Comment by activatedgeek | Hacker News Reader

I think these notes are great, and Vitaly certainly seems like a great person from Twitter (been following for a while now). I just want to spell out the obvious - the biggest (and probably the only) beneficiary of such structured notes is the note-maker.

The beginners who come in feeling excited that this will be a great learning resource are probably missing the point. Learning happens when you force yourself to create notes by finding structure in the raw text. Notes are extremely personal, and reading someone else's does not have the same emotional connect.

Am I suggesting you stop reading notes made by others? Absolutely not! I am suggesting you rather double down on that, except _always_ make your own notes if the objective is learning. Use the excellent public notes to build your own mental models of what makes for good notes.

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> the biggest (and probably the only) beneficiary of such structured notes is the note-maker.

I would probably agree with the "biggest", but disagree with the "only": * The readers might use a note as an extended abstract when selecting a paper to read. This is like a short conference talk which is for advertising the paper and inviting people to the poster session. * The authors get feedback about their research, and some of them engage in a discussion as well.

Having said that, I agree that taking your own notes is better for you.

>beneficiary of such structured notes is the note-maker.

the same is true of most textbooks as well; most people write textbooks for themselves (and then publish them in order to not nothing to show for a year of work). i saw that somewhere and it's changed the way i approach reading textbooks (no longer do i take it for granted that one presentation is /the/ presentation).

I don't quite agree with this reduction. A good reference textbook is specifically designed to convey a clean linear story of the otherwise ugly conceptual development of research ideas. Notes are personal. Textbooks are a deliberate transform of those notes meant to convey structure in ideas to the average person in the target audience.

I find it funny that someone would go through the pain of undertaking an endeavor as large as writing a textbook, just for themselves. For that, they already have their notes. If you are hinting that writing textbooks (good or bad) has professional consequences, sure. Are they wrong in doing so? I don't see why they shouldn't bear the fruit of good exposition.

Stretching the argument further, you might as well explain almost every action as "people do X for themselves". Kevin Simpler explores this theme in detail [1].

[1]: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life (https://www.librarything.com/work/19982533/book/195649617)

>A good reference textbook is specifically designed to convey a clean linear story of the otherwise ugly conceptual development of research ideas.

Keyword: good. I said most and I stand by that: most textbooks suck and serve only to order the concepts in a way that makes sense to the author.

It is a gradient. You can have notes where the author took that effort to great length and textbooks where it didn't.

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