Hi everyone. My name is Adi, and I'm a co-instructor for Stanford's CS43, Functional Programming Paradigms. We are designing our curriculum for the Winter 2020 quarter, so I would be very interested in feedback if people have any.
Glad to see this important piece here (disclosure: I am one of the editors of The Gradient).
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5089308, from RCIS 2009 (Beel and Gipp) noted that "Google Scholar seems to be more suitable for searching standard literature than for gems or articles by authors advancing a view different from the mainstream."
Unrelated, but interesting: scraping Google Scholar is remarkably annoying if you want to actually use the data. The easiest way (in my experience) seems to be regex hacking on the BibTeX files, but this seems truly broken.
Blocking scraping is the norm for Google, for instance the Public Youtube API allows you to view a grand total of 3 or so videos per key per day before it starts blocking you.
Google has basically got as bad as twitter in terms of giving a big middle finger to third party devs, but they have been smart enough to maintain a completely useless public/free tier for most things.
Scholar locks you out of the bibtexes after you download ~20 or so in my experience, but you can get around this if you instead save the paper to your favorites and then access the bibtex from the paper link in your favorites page.
One way to think about this is the "barbell strategy" due to Nassim Taleb. Make emails incisive and direct; decks should be contextual and comprehensive.
Thanks for sharing! Despite the fact that Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is so accessible, I find that most in our field (stats/ML) don't often think through information-theoretic tools in a "first principles way."
Yes, KL divergences show up everywhere, but they are not derived from scratch often enough. Maybe I'm stifled by my campus bubble though :)
Most researchers / students I know who are "power-users" of TeX have fairly idiosyncratic editing habits, so it would be nice to support `\newcommands` or eventually editor bindings. (I write a lot of "live-TeX" during lectures for school: https://github.com/acganesh/stanford-compendium, and I have one-character `vim` macros for each symbol). I ended up opening a `vim` pane and copying my TeX over to Chrome.
I know Evan Chen (MIT grad student) is a really prolific live-TeXer, so you might try contacting him for feedback. I'm a huge fan of this project of his: https://github.com/vEnhance/napkin.
I really like the visual equation recognition, sort of like a beefed up DeTeXify. It's very helpful to ensure that all "equivalent" TeX commands are matched appropriately.
Supporting custom macros seems hard, but we should be able to fix spacing problems if we revamp the comparison logic entirely. Thanks for filing the Github issues -- we definitely welcome any contributions, so let us know if you have any ideas!
Also, we're friends with Evan and have already gotten his feedback. :)
-AG