4 ms·

My experience points the other way. Surveys and textbooks are good in principle, but I rarely find myself using them in research. When you're looking to underst

My experience points the other way. Surveys and textbooks are good in principle, but I rarely find myself using them in research. When you're looking to understand a very specific thing (e.g. what is ADMM? How fast does the conjugate gradient algorithm converge?), there's just far too much notational buy-in needed to get started in a survey, or god forbid to hunt down a textbook with a chapter on the subject. These are necessary evils if the topic is esoteric enough. But far more useful are lecture notes, powerpoint slides, technical articles, stackoverflow answers. These materials are scattered about the internet, and are useful even in their unpolished, typo-ridden state, is it any surprise they are the top hits on google? I am certain the community would benefit from polish and incentive to put these things down in paper.

cing 10y ago
Achieving a research-level understanding of a topic is quite different than working in the trenches on new research. I figured the goal of distill.pub was the former. I think you're partially describing a search problem. Google fails to return relevant passages from full-text papers/books for whatever copyright reasons (ignoring the notational buy-in). The remaining issue is that reviews/surveys/textbooks do not provide the complete picture necessary to perform successful research. I'm sure they fall short on specific things that are scattered around the web; practicalities, implementation details, quick definitions, etc. But are you suggesting that distilled publications should include all this information in one place?