5 ms·
Look, I'm actually interested in the topic, and this piece actually seems to have some useful information in it, but please please please, stop publishing techn
by qchris 6y ago
Look, I'm actually interested in the topic, and this piece actually seems to have some useful information in it, but please please please, stop publishing technical/math-heavy articles on Medium. Putting pictures of equations mid-text combined with occasionally cut-off or accidental multi-line equations kills the readability. I mean, the author already spent the time putting most of the background into a Jupyter notebook, which is much more accessible and readable, even directly in the Github repository [1].
I would love to see Medium adjust their formatting to make it possible for something like Tables of Contents, or faithful rendering of notebooks that don't just rely on Github gists, but until then, I think it does a huge disservice to the actual information that technical/symbolic-math-including authors are trying to convey.
[1] https://github.com/WessZumino/Random-Matrix-theory-for-pedestrians https://github.com/WessZumino/Random-Matrix-theory-for-pedes...
- bline80 6y ago@qchris, thanks for your comment. I agree Medium is a bit of a pain for math. Equations cutout are not too bad in my opinion, they are mostly time consuming to make. Looking at the final result I do not see how readability is affected. I would say that inline math is the worst and may in this case affect readability. The information in the Jupiter notebook is different than the one in the article; actually I find math in Jupiter Notebooks also not nice and readable, apart from the occasional equations here and there... for a full calculation it is not the best, even though some extensions help.
- spekcular 6y agoI'll go even further: please stop posting articles on Medium, ever, because they have paywall which prevents many of us from reading them (and they profit off the author's labor). For any quantitatively-oriented person, the quickest solution might be to write the article in LaTeX and host it on github.io, but other solutions are of course possible (e.g. MathJax and some other free web hosting).
- bline80 6y agoSure, but this gives little visibility and it will be skewed versus a particular audience. ArXiv is a better alternative then, but again it restricts the audience. Btw, I thought the article was not behind a paywall ... I chose not to profit from it by not activating the option. I need to check again how it works.
- xkyscore 6y agoFor paywalled sites that let users read X free articles, the easiest solution for me was to block all cookies from the site, i.e. block all cookies from [*.]medium.com. Medium will always think that "You have 2 free member-only stories left this month". This has worked for nytimes and medium so far.
- andi999 6y agoAlways wondering: when will this fall under some law of 'computer assisted fraud' or so.
- ahelwer 6y agoI used to publish some math-heavy posts on medium (complete with equation images!) before moving it all over to gitlab pages with the hugo static site generator, and equations rendered with katex. If the author is reading this, the translation process didn't take very long (maybe a day) and I'm very happy with the results; compare: https://medium.com/@ahelwer/walking-the-faster-than-light-tightrope-35147a7c6e3d https://medium.com/@ahelwer/walking-the-faster-than-light-ti... https://ahelwer.ca/post/2018-12-07-chsh/ https://ahelwer.ca/post/2018-12-07-chsh/ I'm generally allergic to tweaking things & general command-line bullshit but the whole process was surprisingly smooth. Readers don't have to deal with popup & tracker bullshit (except for youtube, who have endeavored to make it impossible to embed videos with issuing tracking cookies), and it feels nice to have much more control over what makes it into the final product.
- bline80 6y agoThanks Andrew. Yes Medium is not that good for math, but it gives visibility to a broader audience w.r.t. a personal page. The plan was to add the PDF of the article on GitHub but I forgot. Nevertheless, beside the painful process of cutting and converting equations, the final result is not too bad in my opinion.