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Comment by codekilla | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The most useful replies can be upvoted to deal with noise, and using mathematical formulas to help explain responses is absolutely crucial. I can't tell you how helpful it has been to be looking at an obscure proof, post a question to Math Overflow, and have the answer explained in an intuitive way with reference to the symbols and notation used.

These articles on distill I believe could greatly benefit from this. Let the community help distill.

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I see where you're coming from. But maintaining another service and the added expenses, community managers, spam control etc. might be a bit much for something that intended to be a publishing platform.

And if there is a question that requires more control, like math formatting, etc. I would actually suggest posting to cross validated[1] and then linking it here.

[1]: http://stats.stackexchange.com/

Understood. It's true that this type of thing could incur additional expenses and effort, I think though that it is truly worth the effort. It's going to take a push from the top to create a community around the idea, a community that can distill the idea to those that do not understand it. I really strongly believe that everything needs to be in the same place, the tooling needs to be good(perfect formatting of both code and symbols), etc. I admire projects like distill, but I can't help but think that an article like this suffers from what I will term 'the symbol grounding problem'(yes a theft from classical AI). When you write an article like this, for some people it is incomprehensible because the symbols used are not grounded in concrete numerical examples. It's been my experience(and just look at some of the comments on this thread), that when you don't provide many analogies and examples of concrete computations to illustrate the inner workings of what the mathematical symbols encode, a very significant portion of those reading do not actually take away any understanding. I truly do not want this to be the case, and I must strongly advocate that building infrastructure around helping the community be able to pitch in is absolutely critical. It should not be only on the author to take on the burden, with a community it can be done much better. It's worth it to build something where you can publish an article and by default it is expected that questions will be asked, and answers will be provided. I work in academia at a technical institute you have definitely heard of and I just want to stress this point as much as possible, I see this problem every day, all day. If someone at distill reads this, please consider it carefully.

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