JohnHammersley

Sparrho[1] is a new startup tackling this problem, built by early career scientists to help solve the issue of scaling / distributing the knowledge that builds up in experienced academics about where & how to find papers.

They index a whole bunch of sites and repos to provide a recommendation engine tailored to you and your field.

[1] https://www.sparrho.com

Thanks for the mention - glad you like it! (I'm one of the founders).

Given that you've been helping to spread the word, would you like to join our advisors programme? Details at https://wwww.overleaf.com/advisors

Thanks for the feedback (I'm one of the Overleaf founders). Just to address a few of your points:

1) You can choose a pdf preview, which is much sharper -- it's currently in beta which is why it's not the default, but you can choose it via the settings menu (click the gear icon in the top right in the editor)

2) You can jump both ways in Overleaf too -- right click on some text in the editor and choose "position in preview"

3) You can choose from a number of different LaTeX engines and keybindings on Overleaf too -- again, via the settings menu in the editor.

Hope this helps, and thanks again for the feedback.

Yes, I too spent most of my time playing games - the James Pond series was a particular favorite, along with a side-scrolling shooter with awesome music...anyone remember the name of it?

Edit: It was Nevyron: https://youtu.be/jOwhIlMoZZs

The intro music still sets the spine tingling :)

This brings back lots of memories - my first computers were the Acorn Electron and the A3000 (never realised they were the 'posh' end of the market until now), and I still remember my Dad letting me install the RAM upgrade in the A3000 despite what was undoubtedly an internal worry that he'd just opened up what was an expensive piece of kit at the time to his clumsy, all too eager son :)

I also remember programming my first games (space invader clones) in BASIC on the A3000 (and the A3020s we had at school) - fun times.

I'm glad I read the whole article, as it's great to see a lot of familiar faces highlighted in the logo slide towards the end - I'm immensely proud of what we've achieved at Overleaf[1] (although with still a long way to go), and it's great to see Sparrho[2] and Impact Story[3] also included in this piece.

There's a huge amount of innovation happening in science tech right now, and it's amazing how far it's come in just a few years.

For anyone in London interested in new developments in science and publishing tech, were hosting an event on May 10th you're welcome to attend - would love to see new faces there: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/futurepub-7-new-developments-in...

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

[2] https://www.sparrho.com

[3] https://impactstory.org

To give some context - John Lees-Miller (the author of the post) is my cofounder at Overleaf[1], which now serves over 350,000 users after growing from a side project of ours that started just over three years ago.

This post is written from the experience of building and scaling the service to cope with continually rising demand, and ever-changing requirements. Hopefully it provides some tips on how to avoid common pitfalls!

Thoughts appreciated.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

This is a great article - it's a set of really clear explanations of several complicated topics, and kudos to the author for bringing it all together so well. It reminds me of the research we conducted at Ultra PRT when building the Heathrow Pod (a driverless taxi system) [1] and evaluating much larger networks on campuses and in cities.

One aspect I didn't see in the analysis is the effect of a passenger's willingness to rideshare on the effectiveness of the algorithms - we found it can have a pretty dramatic effect on system efficiency[2], especially when operating near capacity (as you'd expect). Does anyone who's used this system have any experience of this? What happens if passengers refuse to share or request a different ride?

[1] http://www.ultraglobalprt.com

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/31589946_Ride_Shari...

The problem some friends (who did this) found with this route is that by the time you've finished your PhD after working in industry, you have other commitments (usually family), which makes the relocation & relatively low pay of post-doc positions difficult to cope with. It's not impossible to continue in academia this way, but it is harder than when going straight to PhD from masters, and my friends who went this route ended up back in industry after their PhDs.

You can now view (& compile) a large selection of latex examples, templates and articles directly in the browser on platforms such as Overleaf[1].

I'm one of the founders, and we're also making it possible to directly submit projects from Overleaf to repositories such as the arXiv and bioRxiv, and to traditional journals, to help speed up the submission and publication process.[2]

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/tutorial

Thanks, glad you like it!

What was so cool recently was that a group of 7th/8th graders[1] used us to write their 300-page engineering notebook!! Just amazing :)

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/289-the-nano-ninjas-building-r...

Just wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks again for CodeMirror, and it's great to see the progress you've been making with ProseMirror.

We use CM at Overleaf[1], and it's been fantastic. To make it easier for non-LaTeX users to collaborate on LaTeX documents, we built our own rich text editor on top of it[2], which is still in beta. Still got a long way to go!

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

[2] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81

The HN title is the one the BBC had used in linking to the article from their homepage; it made sense to me and so I went with it for the HN post (I didn't actually notice until afterwards that the title in the article itself was different). Hope that helps clear up the reasoning behind it.

I think Twitter just won the internet

:badger badger badger badger:

Aha, thanks for that explanation, that was really useful and concise. I've learnt something new today, which is always good :)

Thanks for sharing this -- it's remarkably addictive. It's not the first thing one would think of when coming up with a game design concept, but they've somehow made it work!

I wonder if they're storing all the results to do an analysis on peoples' eye for kerning.

If you want to produce a nicely typeset document, LaTeX (or XeLaTeX) is the way to go -- it does almost everything you could want (kerning-wise) automatically, and has an active community supporting new packages and new fonts. There are also many templates[1] to help you get started.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates

(and if you give Overleaf a try let me know what you think - I'm one of the founders, and always like to hear feedback from new users)

Thanks, somehow I missed that

Yes, you can use the git sync for this :) https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195

You can already use these with Overleaf if you need to :)

We try to detect which compile engine to use, and you can always specify it manually in the editor settings. Just click the gear icon in the top right.

We have a git-bridge for offline working - it's in beta at the moment but has been pretty popular: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195

It's not the same as having a full offline mode, but it certainly helps.

You might also want to check out Overleaf[1] -- it offers a rich text (WYSIWYG) layer on top of a full LaTeX distribution, with an automatic preview of the compiled document alongside the source in the browser.

It's geared primarily towards research papers and associated material, but can be used for anything! One of the first projects (not by the founders) was a set of wedding invitations!

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

PS: In case you can't guess, I'm one of the founders, and any feedback is always appreciated, thanks.

Congratulations on your new arrival! Ours is ten weeks old today and it certainly adds a different kind of stress / happiness to just about everything! :)

I've just posted a longer reply to one of the other comments on here, and so to keep this one brief, hats off to you for writing this and posting it, it's so important (and hard) to get these types of internal comms right. Our angel investors were great for helping remind us of the benefits of being more open internally.

Good luck for 2016!

This is such an important point, and it's very easy to overlook the internal comms (whilst all the while being open and personable to the outside).

One thing that really, really helped us was our angel investors asking for a monthly update. They were very hands off, but just wanted to be kept in the loop about what was going on.

Aside from it taking a while to get out of the habit of 'putting off sending the email until the next big piece of company news was out' (which is never a good idea), it was amazing to see the different reactions to sending them a very personal, informal email with updates not only about the company but about the team as well, rather than just a fact / numbers based 'company update'.

I'm sure this is obvious to anyone on the outside, but it's so easy to miss the internal stuff when you're growing (both traction and team). I highly recommend that anyone starting a business finds someone they trust (investor or not) with whom they can send such a monthly update. Not only will it help put things in perspective, it's good practice for when it's necessary to write ones to the team like this one from Keen.

What a great announcement for the end of the year :)

+1 to msie's recommendation to read Chaos & Fractals (http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/b97624)

This is related to a problem we have to deal with all the time in LaTeX - the delay between typing the source and seeing the typeset output, especially when running as a SaaS at https://www.overleaf.com

I think the quality of the output you're aiming for matters - we as authors (and I speak based on my experiences both running Overleaf and in writing research papers) seem to put up with more latency / compile delays if we feel it's 'worth it' (however badly defined) for what we're looking to produce.

I personally find I do my most creative writing late at night, but my most polished / error free during the day. Whilst I wish I could say I split my work up accordingly, I've never found a way to do this effectively. Anyone else have this / found a solution?

My whole PDF library is exactly this.

As a sidenote, isn't this pretty much why the PDF remains so popular as a format, at least in science - you get a typeset copy with no worry you'll ever lose access or not be able to read it... you just need that spare hour or two... :)

We've been taking a similar approach at overleaf[1], where our rich text mode let's non-LaTeX users write papers without needing to code.

We've also had success in working with publishers to simplify the submission process for research articles, with direct one-click submission links where we pass the files plus meta data.

See e.g. https://www.overleaf.com/blog/269 for a recent example.

[1] https://www.overleaf.com

I used to work with Steve, he's a great guy and it's good to see he's still working on this stuff.

There's a nice archive of papers plus some simulation models we put together at http://www.ultraglobalprt.com/about-us/library/

I realise this is an oldie, but I recently shared it with a friend who recognizes 6 out of the 18 situations... So I thought I'd repost for anyone who missed it the first time.