venice_benice's comments

interesting project; I’m not really sure how useful it is for field-specific stuff—I'm searching for “image reduction astronomy”, and it shows all sorts of related but not image-reduction work (including noise reduction which is not the same thing). I’m not really familiar with vector search enough to evaluate it well enough.

However I can give you the heads-up that the abstracts don't render well because (La)TeX is interpreted as markdown so that

    Paper~1 shows something and Paper~2 shows something else

will strikethrough the text between the tildes (whereas they are meant to be non-breaking spaces). Similarly for the backtick which makes text monospaced in the rendered output but is simply supposed to be the opening quote.

Do you recall the name of the software? I am aware only of PhoSim (https://www.phosim.org/)

I disagree. The spacing of the stylized TeX/LaTeX logo is very sensitive to the font used (especially the LA pair); most LaTeX users already don't adjust it when they use a font other than Computer Modern. Even when they can see the A halfway on top of the L, they don't change the spacing.

But with PDF you at least have the knowledge that the font will be the same no matter who sees it. Webpages have no such guarantees (and indeed some people disable web fonts completely for whatever reasons) and it will only end up looking ugly as hell.

On the web, the typographer's instructions are more of a suggestion, and we should lean into a more declarative style of layout, instead of trying to hack up something resembling precise position that will end up looking completely out of place anyways. I say this remembering in horror the many websites where people wanted the staggered look, and ended up producing a monstrocity.

This is not the workflow being discussed. Yes, you can use Pandoc Markdown (in which you can embed LaTeX) and then Pandoc can parse the markdown and produce a LaTeX file. But the actual typesetting is still done by LaTeX; here Pandoc is basically just a preprocssing step.

what was being discussed is using Pandoc to convert from Typst to LaTeX, which it can't really do because its internal document representations are not as expressive as either Typst or LaTeX.

pandoc is seriously under-powered for the kinds of things that LaTeX and Typst can do. Much of the information in Typst/LaTeX source code would simply be ignored during the conversion. It is fine for simple documents, but cannot handle a lot of stuff.

pandoc is much less powerful here since it can only parse a subset of LaTeX, as opposed to LaTeXML or lwarp which actually processes the LaTeX/TeX code expanding the macros etc, and then generates the output HTML/XML.

pandoc is nice for simple documents, but it is completely inadequate for many use-cases, which is why ArXiv is using LaTeXML and tikz.dev is using lwarp, rather than the more ubiquitous pandoc.

I am unable to reply to any comments, so I’ll add my reply to blagie as a top-level comment instead: Gilles himself documents his process of using Inkscape here: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/

As a summary, he uses a custom keyboard shortcut manager¹ which allows him to compos multiple keystrokes (and also saves commonly used styles):

> For example, when I press `s` and `f` simultaneously, my shortcut manager will apply a solid stroke and a grey fill to the current selection. When I want the stroke to be thick, I press `s+f+g` together, where `g` stands for thick (as the `t` key is hard to reach).

[1]: he makes it available on GitHub: https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-shortcut-manager

well yes, but it likely will be a “telephone number” and not even a simple one like say `2MASS J19593766+2246141` which is 2MASS (the survey name) and the coordinates of the star in the J2000 epoch: 19:59:37.66 +22:46:14.1 .

The Gaia ones (which is the billion star catalogue) look like `Gaia DR3 1827256624493300096`; the number basically contains the rough coordinates of the star as a HEALPix index (along with some other data) so it's not really human readable, but is perhaps more suited for a survey with billions of sources.

Ironically, the Gaia catalogue is incomplete at the brighter end (very bright stars like Betelgeuse for example are not in the catalogue at all) so still needs to be supplemented by other catalogues (and can't be used as a single source of truth to which all other catalogues are cross-matched for example)

HEALPix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEALPix

there are still people using it---a few examples of being used in Malayalam: https://typedrawers.com/discussion/4912/metafont-in-2023-nup... (the paper linked there has more information); the comments have work by another group which was presented at the TeX Users Group conference a few months ago.

Euclid's website has some nice explainers­ – for example, https://www.euclid-ec.org/public/core-science – which mentions using two methods:

- “weak gravitational lensing” with the visible light instrument (which has higher resolution than the IR one) to measure very precisely the shapes of galaxies, to enable a statistical study of distortions in their shapes, caused by weak lensing due to dark matter (and regular matter which they can observe “directly”)

- “galaxy clustering” with the near IR instrument to calculate distances to the galaxies (via their redshift) which they can use to map out 3D distribution of galaxies and compare to simulations for example (there is a nice figure on this page: https://www.euclid-ec.org/euclid-core-science showing a few surveys and simulations)

There is more information on their blog here as well: https://www.euclid-ec.org/blog

The images here are simply first light images (i doubt the horsehead nebula or globular clusters are part of the core science of Euclid); more images and spectra will be taken in the coming years to do the actual core science (which will require a lot more data)

yes, and yes. they call this “Odd Spreads” and “Even Spreads”

it is available in their Tools menu (the >> icon)

Most of the article is copied wholesale from the official press release: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-finds-...

I'm not even sure how they managed to screw it up when the original makes sense

> Such collisions produce a kilonova – an explosion 1,000 times more powerful than a standard nova. However, one very speculative theory is that if one of the neutron stars is highly magnetized – a magnetar – it could greatly amplify the power of the explosion even further to 100 times the brightness of a normal supernova.

They changed the nova in the first sentence to supernova making the whole thing meaningless. I'm not sure about the correctness of the supernova thing, but at least it is not inconsistent with the previous sentence.

> I cut-&-pasted Buttrick's quote from his website without alteration directly into HN's edit box and the uppercase text was immediately converted to lowercase. I'd not planned this but I could hardly have had a better illustration of the problem than this excellent example.

This has nothing to do with typewriters; the text is actually lower case, it's just being used with the small-caps variant of the typeface (I haven't directly verified it, but I am familiar with Butterick's site, and he uses them frequently). It's not really a Unicode problem either; small caps are not encoded in Unicode (well there's something similar for use in phonetic representation but it doesn't have the X for example).

I agree with the other points; keyboards (with the possible exception of handmade ones) have all standardized to a quite limited range of input keys, all traceable back to typewriters, leading to most people I know irl replacing curly quotes with straight quotes, all the dashes with just hyphens, and so on.

In his book, Bringhurst brings up this limitation of modern keyboards, and muses over the possibility of a fully programmable keyboard (in hardware and key displays, not just layers or software hacks like OS/environment-dependent modifier keys). It would be nice to press a button or two and have any keyboard layout I want, multiple scripts, and so on.

Already, this has rebuttals: https://twitter.com/lacalaca85/status/1666501987435700225 (link to a thread by author) and the paper itself: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acdb7a. (Note: RNAAS is not peer-reviewed, but there is a strict editorial standard; the arXiv thing is because of some long standing drama between arXiv and RNAAS).

The objections are primarily that the original paper assumes that a 2000 day period is the fundamental period of Betelguese's pulsation modes, which gives a radius that is much larger than what is observed in multiple wavelength bands.

It's unfortunate that Dr. Becky did not mention this in her video (perhaps it was published after she finished the script; even though it was out a while before the video was). I feel like this is not the first time that reputable science youtubers have jumped the gun on discussing research (Anton Petrov did something similar recently)

> doesn't have anything to do with the abnormal dimming in ~~2020~~ 2019 The Great Dimming is explained by this paper as being constructive interference of the pulsation modes (you can see this in their Figure 4. I don't know why Dr. Becky said this, but it doesn't seem to be correct.

In the case of phys.org, they just repost (or maybe re-host is a better word?) University press releases, among other things, verbatim, so this probably is just the press release from the University of Sunshine Coast or the authors or something, which is probably why the university is credited in the article.