
Fermat’s Library – Annotating Academic Papers Every Week - lainon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/fermats-library-annotating-academic-papers-every-week/
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wodenokoto
I kinda want to like Fermat's library - the concept is good - but mostly I
hate reading articles on their websites. I would much, much rather just read
the raw PDF, and it annoys me they do not link it.

Rendering is slow, buggy, and results in choppy scrolling. The annotations
feels out of place UI-wise, but often also content-wise.

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throwawayjava
_> Rendering is... buggy_

Unfortunately, [http://fermatslibrary.com/](http://fermatslibrary.com/) is
down at the moment so I can't comment with an informed opinion.

But there are two killer features that most annotation software fail to
supply:

1\. print-ability. Physical copies are important.

2\. Accurate rendering (related to 1). There's a pretty high barrier to
overcome before someone else's inline notes are more valuable than knowing
that I'm looking at exactly what the authors intended for me to look at.

That said, the scientific PDF annotation space is ripe for disruption. IDK how
meaningful that market is (directly or indirectly), but someone could
definitely step in and own it with something that's even an iota better than
current options.

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wodenokoto
> But there are two killer features that most annotation software fail to
> supply:

I don't know what kind of annotation software you usually use, but I have yet
to annotate a PDF and lose the ability of 1 and/or 2.

As for crowd-annotation services, I can only think of genius and medium.
Genius does not preserve original format, but that is obviously unreasonable
to expect (they're songs!). Medium is its own format, so rendering is accurate
by definition.

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henrikeh
What programs do you use? Can they make annotations with math typesetting,
markup, links and images?

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wodenokoto
Technically, yes. In practice no.

I've mostly dabbled with preview, Adobe reader, Zotero and Mendeley. You can
in all do whatever advance shit you'd like in 3rd party software and copy-
paste.

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davidzweig
In 2014 I had an idea, didn't go anywhere though:

"I've been working on a project to implement a feature similar to PDF native
'custom annotations,' but using an external JSON file. The idea is to allow a
more hacker-friendly way to add javascript-powered interactivity to a PDF
file, and allow a js-based-document-viewer to interact with other elements in
a web page. Somewhat like using an external subtitles-file for a video instead
of hard-coded subs, allowing you to use things like HTML5 tracks for
generating events etc. (manipulating PDFs internal workings is hard work for
those who create documents/content, and the JS support is old-fashioned, if I
remember rightly).."

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.pdf-
js/2...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.pdf-
js/24DK2E7I5nc)

I think mostly I liked PDF's precise, fixed control over layout, and wanted to
be able to program some js onClick callbacks on top of it in an easy way.
Maybe sometime I will revisit the ideas, see if there was something there.

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a_d
This approach could save journalism from the scourge of fake news. The
specific issues are:

1) opinions masquerading as news. 2) misinterpretation of facts/data. 3)
misrepresenting the facts. 4) cherry picking (not showing full picture, such
that the meaning changes). 5) insufficient context / history about the topic.

All these issues with reporting could be mitigated with expert + crowd
annotation — esp where the author and the subject (say people mentioned in the
news) can come and add more context.

When objective function is speed and clicks, sometimes depth on a topic
suffers. This is true whether news is human or machine generated. In that
case, continual engagement with the original article, amendments and updates
become a very important tool.

If journalism is defined as a search for truth, then news annotation could be
the thing that saves it.

HN, thoughts?

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pvg
_journalism from the scourge of fake news._

Journalism isn't suffering from a scourge of fake news.

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JoshCole
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146)

You don't need to have an increase in fake news to have an increase in the
perception of fake news. Another way to get an increase in the perception of
fake news is to change the structural graph through which news propagates. The
two most outspoken people I know of on the topic of the problem of fake news
both happen to be twitter users (Elon Musk, Donald Trump).

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pvg
I don't really understand how this is a response to what I said.

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JoshCole
The Science paper I linked was meant to show that the twitter graph has
properties which spread fake news through its part of the news propagation
graph. The people I referenced were meant to show that people on the graph
with such a property are talking about the fake news problem as if it is real.
Taken together, my response to you was trying to get at the idea that fake
news, even if not a thing from the perspective of one node on overall news
propagation graph, can seem very real from another position on the graph.

So basically, I disagree with the claim that fake news doesn't exist, in a
subtle way.

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pvg
_I disagree with the claim that fake news doesn 't exist_

I got that bit, it's just not a thing I argued.

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cf
This reminds me a lot of [https://via.hypothes.is/](https://via.hypothes.is/)
. Could someone familiar with both explain why to prefer one service over
another?

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pvg
The thing you linked seems to be 'annotations generally' whereas Fermat's
library is 'curated sequence of academic papers with an annotations feature'

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cf
Thanks!

