Show HN: Stempad – Fast Online Scientific Writing (stempad.io)
As an engineering student, I hated that handwriting was the only viable way to do fast or impromptu scientific writing. It would be the only way to take quick notes in class or in a lab, write an assignment, or create a presentation. Here's a few things I witnessed in academia:
* Unsuitable editors: Students attempt to resort to text editors unoptimized for science, such as Notion or Word, to take notes and write assignments.
* Slow or expensive software: Students, teachers, and researchers using high-friction and high-cost tools for writing
* Messy class notes: Professors upload pictures of hastily handwritten class notes as supplementary material
The list could go on. I believe that the ability to quickly document scientific ideas with a keyboard would be a huge QOL improvement for anyone learning or doing science.
I recently launched the ability to export Stempad documents to LaTex. I tested it by rewriting part of a paper I found online (Metabolic scaling in small life forms by Marc E. Ritchie & Christopher P. Kempes) and exporting it. You can try the editor and export yourself using the post url. The export button is on the top right of the page. In case you want to see the result directly, this was it: https://www.overleaf.com/read/zjccqbjdyhtc#6e146c
Feedback is really appreciated! If anyone thinks they might find Stempad useful, let me know and I'd love to get in touch.
51 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadRegarding the editor, seems math and text cannot be written together. Copying math and pasting to text field results in pasting LaTeX code.
Now if just said made this because wanted to wouldn't have mentioned it, but as you provide a reasoning, LyX (LaTeX frontend) and TeXmacs (not frontend but can export to LaTeX) provide a way to get LaTeX documents without writing LaTeX.
Overall the site can function as cool math-enabled notepad but (for now at least) seems hard to use it as platform to author papers.
I would describe it as more than a math-enabled notepad with support for 6 other scientific block types and the ability to run code. However, I agree that it's definitely not built to write full blown scientific papers at this stage :)
If you can consistently locate and run academic publication code without direct help from the authors, you are The Chosen One.
[edit]
In seriousness, reproducibility is also my biggest concern. Scientific/academic publishing could do a lot better than rendering pretty static documents - we can provide the data, code, version control, and build processes which produced the paper so anyone can reproduce what they see in the paper. AND we could host them together so they're bidirectionally linked, to facilitate other scientists building on top of our work.
That could be our future, with the right incentive structures in place.
The fact you can run notebook cells out-of-order exacerbates this problem. Not only do you not know what version the entire file was, you also don't know in what order or how many times each cell within the file executed in order to produce the plots you see in the paper.
This isn't to discount the improvement in UX that you get from notebooks compared to my preferred alternative (emacs with org-mode). Maybe I'm just bitter that the ipynb format exists at all. If notebooks were just a UX layered on top of emacs+org-mode, that would fix most of the core issues.
We need slower scientific writing.
Edit: While I understand policy involved, apologies, I'd contend 'shallow'. Not lengthy? Sure. But the point was made enough @kbk et al. got it
> We are scientists. We don’t blog. We don’t twitter. We take our time.
It is a shame that we’ve more or less given up on the idea of having science communicators to do that job.
IMO when journalism ended the worst side-effect was that people who would be otherwise employed actually doing things have had to start blogging about the fact that they were doing them, instead of actually doing them.
Were is Sagan, Clark, Asimov. Burke when one needs them? Maybe AI might help here
The original idea of this notebook is a new system which can reduces bad time usage e.g. writing A x A x A x A x A. becomes A^5 The tool allows representation of ideas quicker. This means there's more time for important work, more time for slow work mentioned in the last paragraph of that manifesto.
Points in regards to the flaws of this manifesto:
To use the same framework of the initial statement to show flaws in thinking:
>We are scientists. We don't blog. We don't twitter. We take our time.
We are experts. We don't reflect online. We don't communicate online. We take our time.
If the quote said: We are scientists. We protect our time to focus on important work. We choose to not engage in shallow discourse. And value depth over speed even at the cost of time. We believe speed for speed's sake comes at a cost.
Then there is a leg to stand upon to protect "slow work".
>Slow science was pretty much the only science conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give scientists the time they need, but more importantly, scientists must _take_ their time.
Slow science is not defined in any way, and so prevents discussion and debate. Something being the only conceivable option does not mean it was the best option. Nor does the time span it existed give the process extra value. For millennia humans used 2 legs for our primary mode of transport. There is no movement to protect the usage of slow transport -
"Walking was pretty much the only transported conceivable for hundreds of years; today, we argue, it deserves revival and needs protection. Society should give humans time to walk to destinations, but more importantly, humans must take their time"
I agree science does need time to think, explore and discuss, but it does not need time to express ideas using AxAxAxAxA when tools such as Stempad exist to write A^5.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
There are however many other contexts where I would argue speed and a simple UX makes a big difference.
* Notes that need to be taken on the fly: class notes, lab notes, field observations, general notes
* Prototyping, brainstorming, ideation sessions, especially collaborative ones
* Drafting outlines
* Creating presentations on work you've already completed
* Doing schoolwork, such as assignments or lab reports
* Creating teaching material on content material you're a subject matter expert in
That's a few examples but there are plenty more. The goal isn't to rush the scientific process. The goal is to have a tool that doesn't get in your way and enables speed-of-thought writing for science. This can be helpful in many ways, especially for students, but also for scientists.
During my Master's or PhD I would have agreed with the "slow science" sentiments here. These days I want to get things done and work with collaborators.
That is, stempad is a blow against artificially slow writing, not against all slow writing.
It ideally doesn't keep you from thinking deeply and may help if it lets you avoid thinking about the tool instead of the content.
This is really well put
Impediments not deliberate choice
Speed is definitely a good thing sometimes.
Note: Maybe you could play it "both ways" and have a "flow", or focus or no distraction mode?
Regardless, it's definitely a realistic feature to have. I'm thinking of it as a block right now, perhaps a file block, that can be resized and annotated freely. Maybe annotations can be mini, floating, moveable and resizable editors. Would that make a big difference for you?
But to your question about OCR, I'd like to extend it with another question? Is there a fundamental difference between the OCR that we might use to solve a caption or read a street sign versus the technology to OCR a paragraph of prose?
Just so you know, the vast majority (I'd say everything but molecules) of this is already possible with Org Mode, and can be done just as quickly with Evil (VIM keybindings). That said, I'm sure that people will love this.
Can you point me to good resources on how to do them?
I use a tiled text editor/quarto preview browser pane with a lot of success for scientific notes.
A LaTeX using collegue I forwarded this to objected that you need to approve latex keywords (\alpha) and can't just keep on typing.
Not much of a LaTeX user myself, so just forwarding the feedback as is.
If I'm going to be using something for writing or notes, I needs to be snappy. You need to do some profiling and debug the lag. Other than that, great work!
Perhaps it's just a personal preference, but I'm just reticent to fall into the habit of using something which requires an internet connection, you know?