I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

getpolarized.io

428 pointsburtonator157 comments

From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money.

Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.

This has been good feedback (even if a bit rough) and will definitely try to refine it a bit more.

One of the things I've found that I struggle with is trying to explain what I'm building as most things are obvious to me since I'm the one building it.

Our users have done a GREAT job helping me out with that and pointing out the flaws with Polar regarding usability that I can't see.

I wonder if this is related to inattentional blindness:

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

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

Focus on a real pain point that people are having, and organize everything in your messaging around that.

Why do people need a document manager in the first place?

What is this going to do for them that their existing solutions don’t do?

How is it going to be better than the existing document managers that they have?

(If you find yourself going down the ‘its Decentralized’ route, don’t, people simply do not care)

It doesn’t have to even be much better than what people have, as long as it knocks it out the park for that use case. Hell, GMail started as conversational email plus a load of storage.

It may make your messaging seem kind of sparse - that’s a good thing. People are time poor, and have time to dig into the features later.

But without it you’re going to end up building something that is kind of a lot of things, but not really good at anything.

I shelved a bunch of my "bright" ideas for time a time when I'm better at pitching when I realized "this will work if everyone just does it my way" wasn't a great plan :)

> One of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s easy to build for people like yourself, but that there are very few people exactly like you. In fact there might only be one.

macOS, GNOME, iOS all seem to -successfully- have the less is more paradigm.

i have been going down exactly that path. i found a platform for collaboration and document management that i thought was awesome. i didn't create it, but it was GPL licensed and i tried to get people to use it. no luck. i eventually added a REST API and use it myself as a development platform for building websites.

so now i solve peoples problems using the tool that solves my problem.

Tell a good story.

A strong narrative is much more engaging and memorable than a list of features.

Your front page at http://getpolarized.io mostly consists of a huge screenshot. When I look at the screenshot, all I see is a PDF viewer with some highlighting. Everybody already has a PDF viewer included with their OS that supports highlighting; there's nothing interesting about that screenshot that shows me what is useful about Polar.

Good point!!! I'm going to revamp the home page to improve upon this.. part of the issue I have is that some of the features aren't really obviously cool once you don't have the whole.

For example web page archival is kind of cool but it becomes a LOT more exciting when you add document management, highlighting, document sharing, etc.

So, write a short pitch story where Anna has been using web archival for a month or so, while on the bus remembers this discussion on a topic she had with Jamie and having seen a relevant web article some time back. She then uses the search feature in the app on her phone to find it, highlights the important quote, and shares it to Jamie.

BTW can Jamie receive this highlighted document if she doesn't use Polar? Say as a PDF? That would be cool, and really help spreading the word about Polar, simply by usage.

Exactly! :)

Narratives are a huge turn off for me. They always just feel like marketing gimmicks, and some my understanding and interest in a product. I'm perfectly capable of seeing a list of features, and imagining how well they apply to my situation. So, if you use a story, you will lose customers like me (n=1). That being said, I love the idea of Polar, and I'm going to be researching more about it.

> Narratives are a huge turn off for me.

Yes, I get very suspicious of them as well. But in this case, the site is heavier on the "what" than on the "why". A little more "why" would be welcome.

Get someone else who is familiar with the project to help you out with writing public facing material. Another perspective always help.

And even if I knew what I was supporting...I guess the plan is to raise $27/current user (which seems completely unrealistic) which will allow them to limp along until they definitely raise $150,000 from the "Internet as a whole", which will allow them to limp along until they definitely get approved for a whole bunch of grants?

Nothing about that inspires any confidence and left me pretty convinced that I would be flushing money down the drain on a project that'll be dead in 3 weeks.

I can definitely see they are passionate about it, but the messaging needs a ton of work.

To quote from the article,

> We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users

Which is based on the illusion that you get an unbiased sample when you ask users to respond to a poll. You don't - the people most likely to sacrifice a moment of their time are also those more likely to come forward with money, conversely those who didn't fill out the questionnaire probably have a majority of people who won't give any money.

How would you fix this kind of bias?

The only way I've seen this addressed is using the idea that late responders are more similar to non-responders than early responders - so in a study where you suspect that non-responders have a different bias to responders you'd use late responses to get an idea about what non-responding people would have answered.

Right?

Not to be a dick, but it sounds like this is roughly something not unlike a search engine. Google was built in a garage and available for free for its whole existence.

So as much as I believe in the abstract idea of making knowledge more accessible online, I'm not gonna pay before I see a working example of something better, and I might never pay.

I'd pay for a google that wasn't run by google.

Also the premium parts, are those open source? What is the premium stuff? He promises a breakdown and doesn't show anything on this page, and the donate page is broken.

Maybe a better submission would've been the homepage itself, which has the app's purpose in a single lead graf:

https://getpolarized.io/

> A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.

I suppose the author's assumption is that a normal user/visitor to the site would have seen the homepage before seeing the crowdfund pitch.

Had exactly the same feeling. Non-responsive, want to raise money, did RSS. Didn't get more info after a 10sec skim.

non-responsive is fixed.. bug with the CSS I didn't catch. mea culpa.

Agreed! This is exactly what I thought when watching it. He mentions "changing the internet" and that was it. Then started asking for money and outlining his plans to launch and indiegogo and I still had no clue what Polar even was.

I had the same issue. I have a rough idea (I think) of what Polar is trying to do -- but I'm not entirely sure. I'm also not sure how this would be "rebooting the internet", or what the overall benefit to the internet actually is. I may have missed it (that's likely), but I didn't see where that was explained.

It may be that the video explained it, but I'm not be in a situation where I can watch it right now.

EDIT: After reading the bulk of the other comments here, I am relieved that I'm not the only confused one. I thought I was just being stupid. I often am.

Thanks. I went back and forth on this and it was a tough call.. the plan was to get an initial crowdfunding video out and try to raise from people already passionate about Polar.

I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on.

If this was successful I was going to invest more time in a kickstarter/indiegogo style campaign.

This took a week of work already so was a bug chunk of time.

The positioning isn’t a fluff piece exercise - it’s how you define what you are building, who it is for, and who it is not for. As a product guy, it’s your North Star.

Without it you end up doing one or both of going down a tech rabbit hole of ‘it’s a decentralized, federated blah’ and losing people’s interest entirely.

Ideally you should have a quick this is what we do, why we do it, and why we’re different ready at all times - even if your current audience is only true believers.

EDIT: Clicked through to your features page. Confused. Polar allows me to "manage my reading"... oookay. What does that mean? What pain point is that solving for me? Does my reading need managing?

What are the benefits to me as a user? You need to tell this story before you get to the fact that it's based on Electron (perhaps very much not a selling point) and uses PDF.JS. How is this better than Evernote for me, which, based on sheer longevity is probably going to be my first port of call?

Who's your audience? Answer: not 'everyone' - you mention Pre Med students, but then your screenshot has a load of growth hackery stuff. If I'm a med student is there latex support?

Getting out a notepad and making yourself clarify what this is, who you are building it for, and what benefit you see it giving them is going to be a big help for you.

This goes double for you, as you're effectively creating a double sided marketplace of consumers for your product, and sites willing to integrate with your metadata.

I found that the process of making a pitch deck really helped me to flesh out my last product attempt, it was very educational for me. Next time I try to make something, I will make such a deck at the ideation phase.

You're too wrapped up in the grand vision to invite us for the ride. Don't do that. Give us a quick and concise summary without jargon or marketing flair. If you can't express it in a few sentences, it's not ready.

As someone who has never heard about your product before I agree with the op. I read your text about how you wanted to raise money and “reboot the internet” but it’s meaningless to me because I don’t know what Polar is.

I know there’s a video but I’m not gonna watch it just to learn what the product is.

I've never heard of Polar before. Tell me, in as few words as necessary, why I should care about it and what it is? (In that order.)

I don't think you did discuss what you were working on though, it's a noble vision for sure - I'm wondering if this is meant to be a page for people who already know what polar is or is it meant to reach a larger audience? Maybe if I already knew what the company was I'd have understood what was going on but I without already being a user already I was totally lost and had no idea what I was being asked to support.

'I also didn't want to go into the grand vision without also discussing what we're working on.'

The comment reminded me of something: in startup school, they cautioned us against pursuing a grand vision and encouraged us to talk to our users to find out what problems they needed to solve. In this case I think there is a lot of overlap but just wanted to say it since I remember the video so vividly.

I'd like to add that you lack confidence in what you have to offer (can smell my own). My guess is you don't believe people will value what you're offering.

Also this is a open source https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf . By the way its really awesome project. I am very glad i found it.

So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load. While polar focusses on saving webpages adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages often don’t save and/ or render properly.

Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with other programs. Feels like a lock-in.

This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar simply isn’t worth my time.

In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being knowledgeable enough to do this.

> So I’ve followed the development of polar for a while know. Recently I stopped > and uninstalled the program. I might return to it later but at the moment the > thing which is most important for something dealing with content gets the least > attention: simply dealing with content. For instance, a pdf which loads > instantly in Skim or preview on my Mac takes 20 seconds to load in polar

This is probably resolved. There was an issue pre 1.17.5 that caused a few issues with PDFs taking longer to load.

We're also about to upgrade to Elecron 5.x which fixes some problems with latency on some Windows machines.

> a simple webpage took 4 seconds to load.

This is actively being worked on ... Unfortunately, I have to decompress in the UI thread and this slows things down a bit. I'm trying to work on a new streams approach which should allow me to decompress content in a background thread and also stream load it in the foreground.

Should work on the web too which I'm excited about.

> While polar focusses on saving webpages > adblock isn’t implemented yet and pages

I'm working on porting the web capture directly to the browser which should help solve this issue. Since the capture is done in a chrome extension ad block and other features will work as well as any type of extension.

Electron doesn't work on chrome extensions.

> often don’t save and/ or render > properly.

Report them and they will be fixed.

> Even though polar is supposed to be open a non standard format .PHZ > was implemented in polar and polar’s database is far from open or useable with > other programs. Feels like a lock-in.

We're lucky PHZ works at all. It's very very complicated to implement properly. Portability is NOT an issue until I completely nail it working reliably.

It's literally NOT possible to implement this now with any web standards. NONE support the features we need to implement caching of web pages.

Additionally, I've gone out of my way to mention that Polar is Open Source and that this is important to the vision and respecting people's rights on data portability is insanely important to me.

Not calling you out here but if I was trying to lock you up I'm going about it the wrong way.

Benefit of the doubt please ;)

> This along with a slew of other bugs, polar being webtechnology and the focus on > getting more users and developing the web version instead of focusing on > developing an app which is robust and feature full (or at least expandable) > makes me think my values and the values of the polar dev don’t align and polar > simply isn’t worth my time.

How's that?

The reason we're working on web + mobile is that users have demanded this functionality.

One of the other challenges we have is that there just aren't enough users of the Desktop app to support active development of JUST that platform. If anything the Desktop will be a losing leader for the web edition as I'm expecting more users on that platform.

That said, most of the web + desktop unification/integration is done now so desktop + web won't be an issue of competition.

Also, I found out the hard way that we MUST support web tech first in Electron as they do not properly support their internal APIs. Electron was broken for about 8 months preventing us from upgrading because of their internal broken APIs.

Chrome and web standards are much more reliable.

> In any case, I hope I’m wrong and polar will be better or someone else takes the > core ideas of polar and makes something more stable etc out of it. I hope I > might be able to do that, but at the moment I’m unfortunately far from being > knowledgeable enough to do this.

You can always donate if you want to keep supporting the project!

Here's a better pitch based on your feedback and maybe more tailored to the Hacker News crowd.

The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter. These platforms are not open in the sense that the metadata is locked up inside them. Additionally, they're not very respective of the rights and privacy of their user base.

Polar tries to reboot this by building out a generic datastore model where users can share content with anyone of their backend datastores.

The information/metadata model is free and portable and content and metadata can flow across networks.

Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader where you can add documents directly (vs RSS subscribing to a feed) and manage them and keep track of your reading.

The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web and you can exchange the metadata with other users (still being implemented, initial sharing should ship next week).

This means that you can add content from anywhere on the web and also share it with anyone else.

We also archive the content and the actual content archives can be exchanged too. This means if anything is ever deleted you still have a copy.

Polar also adds support for features like spaced repetition (never forget anything) and incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where you left off) to encourage you to use Polar to manage all your reading material.

The idea is that if people have a very valuable app to keep track of their content that they're more naturally likely to use it which means that the sharing and open content vision is directly powered by users.

Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We're planning on adding other backend providers like Filecoin but we have to take baby steps now because we're still an early project.

Polar's design (though not yet implemented) can support end to end encryption and key sharing for group encryption. This means we can support fully end to end encrypted datastores.

You can use a system to store your data (that you don't trust) and only you have the key.

Additionally, if you want private group sharing we support one to many encryption where you can fan out content to anyone in a fully private group.

It's important that this remains Open Source so that we can rely that Polar isn't just going to vanish.

You're a for profit company, running on a propriety firebase backend, focused on solving one single (but important) use case for which solutions having varying degrees of success and utility already exist.

You're not going to "reboot the internet" - that headline is a very grandiose claim likely to turn off most people on this forum.

Well I suck if my goal is anything other trying to make the world a better place.

I've been working on Polar for free for the last six months ten hours a day 6-7 days a week because I want the world to be a better place.

But hey.. I guess I should be doing this for free because I'm grandiose and trying to make the world a better place.

You have to put the effort in to something that you expect people to actually pay for. I’m not gonna lie, I’m sure I’m not the only one who gave a giggle at $27. I would use this if it were free and so would many others. Tons of people dedicate months or years to FOSS projects and tons of people dedicate months or years to achieve something great, and, as you say, helpful, without ever getting so much as a thank you.

It doesn’t stop them. That’s what makes them truly great people.

I don’t see that you’re looking at your customer or purpose with this statement. It seems you’re far more concerned with your bottom line at the moment...a clickbaity headline like you chose kinda puffs your ego regarding the project out of proportion, and the fact that the follow up video to that link contains such little actual information about the product is strange at best.

We developers are not usually ourselves the best designers or marketers - getting on HN can be a really big deal for your success - but I see a lot of confused people here. Perhaps look at someone involved in marketing. Just saying.

Mad respect for all you’ve contributed to the technology sphere.

> I’m sure I’m not the only one who gave a giggle at $27

To be fair, it's not hard to imagine software that allows the easy sharing of content that would be worth $27. It all depends on what, exactly, it really does and how much benefit I'd get from using it.

> Well I suck if my goal is anything other trying to make the world a better place.

Yeah, you do, and so do I if I try to do anything. While people here have a valid question ('wat is this thing?') which you need to address, and perhaps you oversold your case, I feel for you.

Stick your neck out for other people and a common breed of web-dog will stick its teeth in, howling "it'll never work so there's no point trying!". And thereby will ensure it won't.

Disheartening isn't it, but there are plenty of good people though. I can't help you at the moment (tough times here I'm afraid) but I wish you luck!

Respect :).. thanks.. No good deed goes unpunished :)

No one's saying you suck. Only that "reboot the internet" doesn't seem like a very good description of what you're actually doing or trying to do.

Opera Unite had the potential to reboot the Internet by including a simple-to-use web server and content manager alongside the browser. It had basic blogging, streaming and even a chat server. It could be used by 'normal' users to self-host their own content and to share files without them having to download an app or sign up to a subscription.

Whereas Polar seems to be aiming for a stratum above those end-users. But such techy people can already self-host if they want to. Most just don't want to. It's not a technology problem so much as a time-opportunity issue.

I don't think that tone will help you.

I've been thinking on something similar for a long time, and first of all congrats for actually building something. I never got that far.

As for feedback, I'd strongly suggest focusing on UX above all else. I tried Polarized a while ago, and gave up on using it because it didn't 'feel' very usable. I know that's vague feedback, and I wish I could be more specific, but broadly speaking it just felt more like a great idea rather than a great tool.

The internet wasn't successful because of the idea(l)s behind it. It was successful because it was simple, practically and conceptually speaking, and anyone with a text editor could do something amazing with it ("look ma, the whole world can read what I wrote!").

Or another example: I get all warm and fuzzy when I think about Emacs and its extensibility and whatnot, but I use VSCode for most of my day to day coding because it gives me a nice default set of features that are well-integrated and presented in a unified UI. I also don't particularly like Apple and what it stands for, but here I am paying a premium for a MacBook (2015 model, but still) and OSX because if I'm gonna spend my day using a tool, it better feel right!

> The Internet is broken as content primary pools behind walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter.

Wait, this confuses me even more. My understanding is that Polar is basically a content management system. Is that not correct? If I understand correctly, then it is an entirely different beast than the likes of Facebook or Twitter.

If the comparison to Facebook and Twitter is apt, then I have no idea of what Polar actually is.

I think there’s a headline in there with the double meaning of “Save the web.” Something like... “Save the web. Polar helps you archive, search, and take notes on what you read online. Whether it’s the web-based documentation you need to keep that one piece of infrastructure running, that PDF for your dissertation research, or anything else online you’d like to keep your own copy of, Polar can help. Plus we think by helping people save their copy of the web, we can fix the web too. Learn more.” But with better examples from how your customers are already using Polar. I’ve been looking for an open source solution to this problem (basically, how can I have my own search engine built from things I’ve read) for a while now. I’m not ready to add a new tool quite yet, but am keeping an eye on this. Good luck!

I edited your pitch briefly to shorten it, to change from abstract to concrete, and emphasize slightly different things. This version is still not concrete enough imo, and the benefit not crystal-clear enough, but this was just a quick edit

The Internet is the greatest content-sharing system ever devised, but it is broken. The content that people create is being pooled within walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter where comments, likes, and ability to share with friend is locked down. While this content is locked down, users have no control over their rights or their privacy. Their ability to use this content and its metadata is also severely limited.

Polar is attempting to reboot the internet by correcting these issues.

Polar protects the rights of users by providing a free and portable personal datastore where users can link content, reactions, comments, and discussions with anyone on their own terms.

Polar is implemented as a 'read it later' style app similar to an RSS reader where you add entire documents to your datastore. The key part is that Polar adds a metadata layer on top of PDF and the web: you can add notes, markups, reading progress, or even flash cards, and finally exchange both the documents and the metadata with anyone of your choosing.

Note that this makes Polar ideal for both spaced repetition learning (never forget anything), and for incremental reading (never forget what you're reading and where you left off)!

What We Are Building

Right now we support local mode and cloud powered by Google's Firebase. We intend to use our funding for X Y Z

Polar's design (though not yet implemented) can support end to end encryption and key sharing for group encryption. This means we can support fully private user networks that require zero trust.

Finally, in order for this project to reboot the internet as it is capable of, it is important that this remains Open Source. Because of this, Polar will never vanish and need never give in to special interests that are not our own.

I like this better. I would remove the spaced repetition paragraph, and everything below it. The key parts to convey are what and why. How comes later.

I would also skip the "metadata" term. Everyone that understands it can see that if there is a note layer on top of the content, it's metadata. To people that don't get it, it's techno babble.

I actually like the "reboot the internet" catchphrase.

@OP I trust you've been around the internets enough to not let the HN negativity get to you, but in case some of the shit comments in this thread pierce through: good job, keep at it :)

That is definitely a lot clearer. I'm dubious that it's a viable product, but it's at least coherent.

Man... love this!!! Thanks... very very constructive criticism and I appreciate it!

Is there a vision for interop with other OSS projects that have pursued similar goals, e.g. IndieWeb, https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks?

Who are the OSS or commercial competitors to Polar?

The internal design of Polar factors this in and I've been pretty aggressive of keeping the code isolated so people can just plugin in new Datastores.

The Datastore model means that someone can write a new Datastore and that will be support federation.

Have you looked into Solid, https://solid.inrupt.com/, for a distributed data store model? For annotations, have you looked at https://web.hypothes.is/ which uses the web annotations standard? These are both fairly large efforts and could be useful to build on

FWIW I have been using Polar for the past few months.

I use it as a place to store my ebooks (PDF) and articles (websites) that I want to read sometime in the future. In the past, I had a list for that but since I am not the reader type, that list was just growing and 'sometime in the future' might never have come. But with Polar that changed a bit.

Polar has three features which made it easier for me to actually read something from my reading list:

1. With just one click you are back where you stopped last time (Polar keeps an offline copy of every article).

2. Every document has a progress bar and you can mark what you read already. This doesn't sound like much, but in fact, it feels rewarding to fill the progress bar ;-)

3. You can add comments to the document and create Anki flashcards. That way you can create your own extract of a document to quickly review it in the future.

It is not like those things are not possible with other programs, but for me, Polar made the difference between not reading and reading (at least sometimes) because I can just start it and have everything I need in one place. I am not a particular fan of syncing all my documents via a 3rd party server, but syncing Polar via Nextcloud works just fine so far.

You are not Dan Libby, Ramanathan Guha, Dave Winer, or one of the members of the RSS-DEV Working Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History

So why are you claiming to be one of the inventors of RSS?

Yes.. I was. the initial documents were never amended as RSS evolved.

Here's one of the modules I created:

http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/

I think the archive is down but the rss-dev group has thousands of posts of me responding and supporting the dev or RSS.

https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev

Additionally, I don't really care about being famous for creating something and it's always seemed obnoxious to constantly insist that you were the creator of something.

I was involved in a massive public dispute where Dave Winer had a freakout when I tried to collaborate with him on RSS (he attacked the whole RSS 1.0 movement) and I got sick of constantly getting in flame wars when I'm just trying to improve the Internet.

I also created Apache Feedparser.

Thank you for answering. The members list is indeed incomplete.

Also, no other people who I would consider paramount in creating RSS are on that page including Sam Ruby and the dozens of other people who made massive contributions.

Here are a few more resources if you're interested:

Our roadmap:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html

Here's a discussion of using datastores to support a more distributed web:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p...

A high level mission statement which is still a work in progress:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/04/11/Polar-Mission-Statement.h...

The roadmap for a project should provide a marketing opportunity where you can explain the current direction of a project and the high level changes that are expected to be seen over the coming months or years. Right now your roadmap reads like a list of open feature requests on an issue tracker. IMO it is far too much in the weeds, like most of the site. After going through several pages it is still unclear what problem is being addressed and who is currently the target audience.

"too much in the weeds" is a good way to phrase this actually. I'm going to work on improving it but slammed for time.

Growth is hard man! :)

For what it's worth, I think Polar sounds awesome and excitedly downloaded it one of the last times it appeared here, but the tracking policy is a total deal breaker for me.

https://getpolarized.io/docs/tracking-policy.html

> Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features.

> There may be data leaks (such as the name of a book in an exception log) but we try to keep this to either zero or a minimum by iterating and improving any potential data leaks.

I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are entitled to my usage data and it's okay to introduce private data leaks (to third parties!) as long as you fix them later is enough to turn me off even if there was an opt out.

It's too late to win me back but I would have happily paid for this if you took privacy seriously.

Oh yes this needs to be opt-in. There really is no need to be tracking usage.

My own feature request here: I use Zotero for academic writing which takes care of formatting the bibliography. I would love to use Polar if it could also do this or if not, of it could somehow export a list of documents to Zotero (not sure if Zotero has an import module like this). I'd also need folders.

If it had those two things, I'd be immediate subscriber because I have a million PDFs open at any one time where I forget where I am and where the good highlights are.

Agreed, as soon as I looked at the main page and saw "flashcards" and highlighting, I wanted it to work either like or with Zotero.

Definitely this is not going away. I might make this a premium feature though.

I'm NOT tracking anything private. I'm tracking things like whether you're clicking a button or not.

This is how you're paying for the app.

I literally CAN NOT build Polar without this data.

> I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are entitled to my usage data

The reverse is true as well. I wrote this app for free. You're not entitled to use it unless you run the analytics because that's how you're paying for it.

I'm using your usage to improve the product.

If it has an exception or is slow on your platform I want to know about it.

If you're literally providing nothing of value in return I'm not interested in those types of users.

I'm going to write a blog post about this but this perspective is completely wrong headed.

You should be BEGGING developers to track your usage of the app as it greatly improves app design and reduces the cost of developing the app.

Cohort analysis ALONE has been a gods send in developing Polar.

> > I appreciate that you are up front about it, but the attitude that you are entitled to my usage data

> The reverse is true as well. I wrote this app for free. You're not entitled to use it unless you run the analytics because that's how you're paying for it.

Then you really should add a License file specific for polar (you only seem to have imported license files for electron, chromium, and two resource modules) clearly stating this limitation. Note the below comments are based on what was found in the tar.gz on github.

Right now, with no license file directed at Polar, it is ambiguous as to what limitations surrounding use/sharing exist.

And, three of your license files (electron and the two modules that leaked in) are the MIT licence, where one is granted rights to:

(quote) ... deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, ... subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. (end quote)

So if one interprets the ambiguity of Polar's license status such that the three imported MIT files likely apply to Polar, then you have no stated restriction which matches your restriction of "no use, unless you give me google analytics".

> I wrote this app for free. You're not entitled to use it unless you run the analytics because that's how you're paying for it.

Of course, I'm saying I would have loved to pay for it with money instead.

> If it has an exception or is slow on your platform I want to know about it.

You don't have to collect data behind my back to get that information. You could for example offer a way to review the information that is going to be sent, and let me decide for myself if it is too private to share. I would even prefer that to a blanket "opt out" for all the reasons you are saying.

> You should be BEGGING developers to track your usage of the app as it greatly improves app design and reduces the cost of developing the app.

I have never had the experience of seeing an application dramatically improved by forcing tracking on me. Usually it's been a sign that everything is about to become worse.

I'm perfectly happy to participate in opt-in tracking and submit crash reports, especially when I can see for myself there is nothing sensitive included. I'm also technical enough to help with investigating more complex bugs and an avid contributor to open source. Please don't think that everyone who is privacy-conscious has nothing of value to offer you as a user.

> Polar uses Google Analytics and other 3rd party services to track your usage of Polar for quality assurance, UI/UX and usability issues, fault detection, and adoption and usage of new features.

I agree, this is a showstopper. If this data is critical to the project, then the application should collect it directly and not use (or share data with) 3rd party services to do it.

More talk about "rebooting" the Internet (including TBL, et. Al.).

1. Is it really probable?

2. With what that won't cause further fragmentation?

Also, is this what they're using to reboot the internet?

> A powerful document manager for Mac, Windows, and Linux for managing web content, books, and notes - supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.

This is basically the entry point.. I need a front end app to get people to contribute content so that Polar can discover and build a larger system on top for content sharing, federation, etc.

It's in the roadmap and video.

This isn't tied to a specific storage platform / provider so this can run on AWS, Filecoin, Firebase, etc.

I talk about it a bit here:

https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/22/portable-datastores-and-p...

What about the other two questions, especially #2. (It's not just your effort.)

Whenever I hear someone attempt to make the case of rebooting the Internet they never identify to what end, how to replace the old internet (because there will be resistance), or (which is annoyingly untrue but I get that you have to market it) come clean in that they're not really rebooting the internet, just how data gets shared across it.

IDK, good luck to you. FB, all social media has its hooks into everything. Upending that is going to be a monumental task. _Disclaimer: not a social media user so I really don't care._

We're not going creating more fragmentation.

A metaphor would be "how could tearing down fences create more fragmentation"?

If you say so.

Do you really think your competitors are just going to roll over?

Serious question: Is here some voting ring upvoting or HN being hacked? Reading the weird submission and this thread full of confused users, I am surprised this got on #1 and even stays there.

It'll probably slide down quickly. It was only posted 30 mins ago and there are ~130 upvotes and ~40 comments. That shows HN lots of interaction and is surprisingly high for a post only 30 mins old.

The artificial inflation is probably real, but not malicious. For example, say 1 in 500 readers of a post normally leave a comment on HN. That would be the baseline that HN's algorithm compares stuff too.

This post has an extremely intriguing title, causing lots of people to click it. Then as people click it, no one understands it, so then they all come to leave a comment asking what the hell this product/service (i still don't get it myself) is. This confusion is actually helping the post on HN because so many people are confused that let's say 1 in 100 people leave comments instead of 1 in 500 which is the norm. This causes the HN algorithm to assume this post is causing discussion and must be particularly interesting to users because it has 5X the interaction of a normal post.

So the confusion is real, and I doubt it will hold for too long, but since the post is so new and has very high genuine interaction (comments of confusion is still interaction) points, the HN algorithm will rank it highly.

I feel the same way. These guys are in every thread about editors posting a link to their site. They posted about it so often, I wish I had a filter for it by now. I think HN has to step up their adblock game.

It's a catchy title, and that guy is spamming HN in the last months about his app, so he likely has some fans reacting to this.

Also, and serious answer. I would NEVER participate in anything like a voting ring and have been very vocal about paid advertising in the RSS community in the past.

Lost a very very high paying customer to Datastreamer who was using RSS content to create google spam.

We never sold to them as they violated our ToS out of the gate.

I'm not sure I understand how what looks like a poor Evernote clone is supposed to "reboot the Internet". We're far from Xanadu.

I'm all for open source, collaboration, personal knowledge management, spaced repetition learning, etc. but this document centric approach seems outdated to me. I thought we were supposed to move toward a more semantic web, something closer to a database than to a bunch of human-written documents. How does the rest of my data, such as quantified self style measurements, fit in this model?

"We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars"

I wouldn't make any assumptions based on what user's say they are willing to pay. Don't ask them how much they would pay; ask them for money. You will get very different results.

Yes.. if you've ever built anything you'll notice two things:

1. You can't build anything without user feedback.

2. You can't always trust user feedback. Something measurable is important.

I've also never personally launched a crowdfunding campaign in this manner so I'm trying to put together as many data points as possible.

Lots of others are confused about this project. I've never seen it before, but I think I get the idea behind it.

We have all this information we can learn from, but literally not enough time. Just think of all the articles you might have "to read" or books/papers/etc. of a similar status. Our best bet is to record our thoughts on the things which seemed to be important and come back to it later if it becomes more relevant.

If you had a Kindle book and you invest a ton of time using the highlighting, notes, and flashcard features of Amazon's app then all that data is stuck there. There exists a website to take them out and from the app you can "export" the notes, but it clearly feels forced.

You could simply write down your notes in another app, or in a notebook, but then you lose the whole purpose of why eBooks might be super interesting here (namely, that you might miss a part and you can simply click to view the original material).

A paper book, unless OCR'd, can't be searched and endlessly marked up the way an eBook could in theory, although it certainly does allow you to completely own the information and work you put in to understanding the topics.

In a sense this is trying to solve these smaller problems which make the original idea of collecting and annotating the information you find on the internet and elsewhere difficult and hard to maintain over any reasonable timeframe except as very simple document formats (e.g. HTML, Org, or Text files)

Yeah.. nailed it. That's one big part of it.. I want to be able to have the annotations on my documents as one repository too so I can actually build things with it directly.

Spaced repetition and incremental reading are impossible with Kindle or 3rd party apps and they also don't support offline / cached / archived content.

I don't know what this project is about (it's not explained in that page), but tokens like "Freemium" + "Premium" + "polarized" don't pass through my parser in regards about the future of the internet I want (or I think we deserve).

How so? How do you expect the Internet and sites will support themselves financially? Charge directly?

Is always about the money, isn't it? :)

I believe that we should reboot into a decentralized, accessible, encrypted and anonymous internet.

Otherwise if you are asking money for traffic/space/service, then you are just a storage/hosting/cloud/db provider. You're not rebooting the internet.

If rebooting the internet means transforming it into a freemium/premium model, then I think it is better as it is now.

And that name... "polarized" internet. We have enough (and getting really tired of) that kind of behavior ("polarized": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization).

Sorry for the negativity. Perhaps I didn't understand your project enough, or "rebooting the internet" was an ambitious clicky-baity title. Otherwise, if I understood it correctly, you want to store all the documents/information and want to charge for it. If so, I have no further comments.

I think this title needs to be changed by a moderator. It has seemingly nothing to do with the linked page.

What was your role in the invention of RSS and podcasting?

I was actively involved with the rss-dev list, and also submitted and supported many RSS modules, participated in the initial Atom specification initially.

I also created Apache Feedparser and other Open Source tools around RSS.

We've entered a future where not only does it give me an obnoxious cookie disclaimer (how about you just don't set a ton of cookies which make every request huge?) when I launch the web version, but if I try the desktop version it also shows me an obnoxious cookie disclaimer. Please don't launch multiple popups (there's also a welcome one) as soon as your app launches; it scares me away before I can actually try the product.

Thanks.. my plan is to put the cookie disclaimer into a ToS thing which is part of the tour... think it has to be there though for GDPR reasons.

You don't need a cookiebar if you don't set the cookies in the first place. In your own ideal scenario you would be receiving a ton of your users' information, but you don't even understand a pretty fundamental part of legislation which pertains to privacy. This doesn't inspire confidence.

For anyone else running into this sort of garbage, I just discovered that ublock lets you block individual elements. Block the GDPR notice and you haven't accepted it and they can't be assholes and set a ton of tracking cookies (or if they still do, someone in the EU please file a GDPR complaint).

You got a lot of critic here but feedback is good. I will try out your product. I am happy that its exits an an app and not web only. I don't know if this can "reboot" the internet or become a money making business. But looks interesting for sure.

What changed my life was recoll https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/

I also looked into OpenPaper but in the end it offers nothing that recoll does not and recoll does it better. https://openpaper.work/en-us/

Marking PDFs, make them searchable and adding comments in Polar could be great for grants and writing a thesis.

EDIT:

1. I really DO like the webcapture feature. I often save importent webpages since I know they may either not be available anymore in the future or I can't find the link anymore. This feature seems smooth already. But how can I sure that your software will still work in 10 years? Do you have an export feature already?

2. I would really like to be able to have folders as a feature to sort stuff better.

3. Your blog does not have an RSS feed.

Wonderful article, RSS needs to make a comeback. Especially among friends and family who love to make large posts about important topics. I try to tell them to build a blog and then just link to articles that they write. Your article and others inspired me to finally just put together a system to make it easier to start blogging. And gave me the idea to just mimic a social media platform. They do all of the design for you so why not have a blog generation system that a user doesn’t have to mess with, just make content.

Any feedback would be wonderful. https://your-media.netlify.com/post/make-your-own-media/

I will also mention that https://www.stackbit.com/ is doing basically the same thing but more from a “Make life easier for Website designers” perspective.

Kevin Burton is one of the inventors of RSS? Really? Back in 2006 I wrote what was one of the most comprehensive blog posts on the history of RSS, and somehow I never heard of him. If anyone is interested in some of the personalities who were fighting it out in the early days of RSS, I would encourage you to read my essay "RSS has been damaged by in-fighting among those who advocate for it". This essay was written during the last year when RSS still seemed like the wave of the future, before Twitter took off and changed the conversation completely:

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-...

I’m not terribly familiar with the history of RSS. In what way were you involved with its invention?

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.

Look under RSS 1.0. It’s not the same as RSS .91 or 2.0 userland/Dave Winer branches. To call it simply as “RSS”? I dunno

RSS 2.0 was a Dave Winer proprietary thing where no one else was involved.

Have you written a history of RSS article, because it seems like a juicy story to tell?

honestly I did on my old old blog from like +10 years ago but the URL has bitrotted ;)

I read through the entire pitch and I still don't understand what is special about Polar. There are a ton of apps that do all this and more in no particular order:

1) Xodo Reader 2) Liquid Text 3) Margin Notes 3 (AWESOME) 4) KOReader (Open source) And several dozen more...

What are the prospects on an ipad pro app?

I paid $1500+ for my ipad. I'm very willing to pay for a good, open-source incremental reading solution on my iPad (with exportable content and easy backup).

We are at the pre-history of spaced repetition learning. This will have very large effects on society. Just ask any engineer how much they already forgot of what they learned in college. Coursera et al will get into this space, I hope, but that's not enough.

We need good, open alternatives like anki (but better) and with incremental reading. But keeping a slew of apps on different platforms updated and running smoothly is expensive. Anki's model of charging for the apple app is not bad.

Great question. I'm working in improving our tablet support. It's a lot easier than the mobile support honestly.

If you try the polar webapp on your tablet and give me feedback I'll almost certainly implement any changes you need quickly.

The goal for us is that we're going to charge for crowd storage and maybe for the mobile apps but probably only for really aggressive users.

Still TBD

Nice. Just hit the front page! Today is my birthday too so good birthday present from you guys!

I'm the creator of Polar so AMA :)

The post left me very confused, and the mission statement didn't help clear up the confusion.

While the document manager might be a nifty tool (it does look very interesting to me), I fail to see how a document manager/personal knowledge repo (or adding ebook reader support and mobile apps) would enable rebooting the internet.

This definitely needs more information.

How a reboot of the internet involve using an electron app ?

Ha.. was waiting for the eventual comment hating on Electron ;)

I feel it though.. we might look at porting to Carlo or something in the future if possible:

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/carlo

I have checked out Polar. Love the idea even though I don't use it now. Maybe something I will use it in future.

Happy Birthday and wish you Good luck Man.

Happy Birthday!

A tldr would be a good start. What is Getpolarized in two sentences and why will users prefer it over existing stuff?

How many sugar packets can you eat before you start barfing?

I'm not sure if this is an Instapaper clone, an Evernote clone, an rss reader, or a flash card sync system. Not really sure anyone needs this.

You talk about walled gardens and privacy concerns and "rebooting" the web but say that you're using Google's firebase as a backend for sync. Personally, I'm just sort of at peace with the fact that Google has a copy of all my email and records of my location for the years I've had an android phone. But let's be super real - Google products and privacy aren't known for going together.

This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly. Google has no rights to your data. It's just stored there.

> This isn't the main part of what I'm concerned about honestly.

Exactly the problem mate, that is something you should be concerned about.

Do you feel you're sufficiently qualified to make that call on behalf of all your users ?

Edit: My bad, that[0] was your 'getpolarized' account, not this one. Your name seemed very familiar to me.

Weird, did you delete the post about App Store approvals taking a long time even when all you change is text in the description? On the long list of your posts about your product, I don't see that one. I remember it not going very well for you.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19585015

Yeah.. I don't think I deleted it though.

One thing I noticed about that post is that there was a core underlying premise that the community was assuming and I didn't realize that we were talking about completely different things. :)

Polar seems like a neat project, but I worry about things like this that are supposed to take on my whole digital life. At one time in my life, I trusted Thunderbird. It got slower and slower, until simple actions (rendering the preview for an email) took thirty seconds or more. At a small scale, this is all well and good, but a lack of foresight around performance means that the biggest power users get punished.

How do I know that this won't get dirt slow after the first 1000 (10k? 100k?) documents? Will it lock up my phone trying to crunch through a full text search of a gig of data?

It's almost never the case that I see a project like this and have distrust for the mission/philosophy/model/values. But if it can't do what I need it to reasonably, it'd might as well not exist. And I'm not willing to use it for years at a time to find out that it doesn't scale to the point where I need it to. And to be quite honest, I'm more than willing to pay someone to keep a server running to make sure that it does scale and doesn't melt my phone, but that rarely seems to be an option for projects like this.

I fully support the mission, but I would recommend making the post responsive for mobile devices. Opening this on iPhone is zoomed up in an area of a page with no text.

A big reason Facebook/Insta has been successful is because it “just works” and is easy to use. I feel like the open web has always had a usability problem for non-technical users and it never really compared to closed solutions.

Completely agree.. 100%. This is a big goal in Q2 and is already in the roadmap.

Usability and mobile are on the roadmap. Unfortunately, mobile is alpha right now and you should have received a warning that it's alpha when you went to the mobile site.

It's not a ton of work though which is good though. We'll get there.

The only issue for me is that the video iframe is so huge that everything else is made smaller.

Ah.. the POST ... sorry. the entire site is responsive but the post wasn't as it broke due to the youtube vid.

Thanks.

"Rebooting the internet" is a bit of a stretch. You are referring to the Port:80 and meant the "web". Also, you touched the topic "decentralizing the web" with this claim, which is a much more bigger concern compared to your plan.

Please consider a more narrow description of your idea.

It’s an interesting idea, but you could pitch it much better. What is the problem you are trying to fix? How do you fix it? Why is it different? It reminds me a bit of OMEA that Jetbrains developed about 15 years ago. It was a desktop based information manager built on RSS but with full text search capabilities across desktop, email integration with Outlook and others. https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/OMEA/Omea+Frascati+...

On the technical side, I think it would be much more powerful to have a native experience. The web is flooded with electron apps. How about a Flutter based UI, which would also work on mobile?

Looks like just another web annotation app. There is already getpocket.com and diigo.com, both cheap and already have free versions. Although I agree sharing is unsolved and there is so much more that can be done. So I like the new player in this space, especially with more ambitious plans but I think there was really no need to pull “I am the inventor of RSS...” perhaps. Also claims of rebooting internet seems to be overly grand for apps in this space. This shouldn’t need a lot of capital and could be bootstrapped easily with may be little ShowHN post.

Why should I support a project where the people involved can’t even clearly explain what it is?I seriously doubt the ability of anyone to execute a successful business who can’t even communicate their plan.

I know it's besides the point and this is probably a cool project but can we stop equating $5 with coffee? That's like saying popcorn costs $8.

Most of the time, my coffee is either free or costs like 30 cents maybe? (wild guess, probably less depending on beans) relatively rarely I will I pay $5 for it, but I associate it with the price of not otherwise having access to coffee (because I'm in a hurry, didn't bring a thermos, etc)

What's with all the moving parts to this business model? Why not just sell whatever this thing is (or maybe it's a service? I can't really tell).

I have gone through the article and trying to understand what is so different with this project compared to other I see on the internet that would make me to donate... I read on almost every startup blog that idea must be crystalised, short so everyone just get it, and if it takes long to explain then most likely it's not the right idea... Or maybe I'm not intelligent enough to get it.

Site needs a designer or at least better cookie-cutter layout. It just looks mediocre. Today marketing is everything...

I know... I'm not a designer and this is one of the reasons I'm raising funding ;)

Hi, I'm a designer and I can help you with the website design (as well as some feedback/advice on branding and marketing if you are interested) - email is in my profile.

I tried to get into polarized but ended up going back to zotero, which ticked more of my boxes (ref management, document storage options, install and sync library, notes, and saved webpages on any computer, free with cheap cloud storage upgrades, community built add ons).

I’ll keep checking in though.

> If we haven’t generated enough value for you that you wouldn’t buy me a cup of coffee I think we’re doing something wrong.

Or, maybe, just maybe, giving $5-“coffee” to 15 different services every month isn’t sustainable and none of this is your fault.

Regarding annotations, wouldn't it be wise to collaborate with hypothes.is?

There's overlap but it seems hypothes.is is more focused on .edus and honestly I don't even find their product usable nor does it have features like incremental reading or spaced repetition that I want to build out.

The biggest issue I have with the application is that it’s not following the Human Interface Guidelines for every platform. A native look and feel for the Mac would make me use it.

I hope GetPolarized succeeds as a funding model there need to be a way to fund Open source software instead of much of new SaaS being closed source and investor funded.

I just want to sync by documents somewhere I can control and have portable versions that can also sync with that location. Even if it's something like Git.

Is "RSS" treated as a generic term for 'syndication format', or does it actually mean the file format (as compared to including Atom/RFC4287)?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Is there a way I can import my pocket saved links to this app? Or what's structure I need to import from file?

After you mentioned academics/scientific content in the video, is when all of this came into focus and I understood how a document management/annotation app intersects with one possible interpretation of "reboot the internet". But I think there's some misguidance there.

Academic content gets paywalled for economic reasons, not technical reasons. The basic web as it exists right now can do just as good a job distributing such things as it did 20 years ago. If your technology doesn't change the economic equation, it's not going to change anything.

Social content on the other hand gets walled-in for social reasons. This is closer to being solvable by new technology, but the primary drivers are ease-of-use and network effects, not technical architecture. I don't see Polar really addressing those things. Facebook gained popularity because 1) any regular person could just visit a website and be off to the races for free, and 2) other people were on it. #2 isn't really addressable directly, but by requiring a native app download, you're already behind on #1.

If you want to usurp a walled-garden with an open one, you can't just build better technology, you have to give regular people something that's both effortless and uniquely compelling compared to what they already use. That's an incredibly difficult (if noble) thing to try and do in this space.

I like the ambition, has some similarities to this project:

  http://freedomcontroller.com

I'm trialling this to make some statistics flashcards, we'll see how it goes :)

Oh man classic burtonator right here. Never change.

$5 for a cup of coffee? Where is it that expensive?

But RSS runs on Windows XP!

So how exactly, will Polar "re-boot" the internet, deflate inflated tuition and decrease the cost of textbooks? What exactly does "re-boot" the internet even mean? Honestly, this seems like a whole lot of snake oil to me. If you have no intentions of directly combating tuition prices, which would require political intervention at the highest level of government, then why would you mention it? Unless of course your intentions were simply to evoke some emotional reaction in your viewers... reminds me of a family guy episode I watched where Louse ran for mayor. Eventually her campaign devolved from something substantial into a buzzword shouting competition between her and her running mate. I was half surprised when the article ended without talking about how Polar was going to rid the world of terrorism and the opioid epidemic.

True.. I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release.

I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend.

But fair criticism.

> I think part of this is that some of the more long term features I plan on implementing in Polar are pretty revolutionary and I don't really want to discuss then until we're ready to release.

Then you shouldn't even hint at them yet. It will just be confusing. I know that with products I've developed and sold in the past, I've always had much grander plans for them than what I actually told people at first.

> I'm worried of larger and more funded companies like Facebook simply running off with the ideas and not contributing back the way I intend.

That's a common and understandable fear, but I think a misplaced one. Truly, ideas are a dime a dozen. The value is in execution. Execute very well (and don't forget the "do one thing extremely well" advice -- it's a truism for a reason) and it doesn't matter if anybody else has lifted your idea.

Well funded companies like Facebook, etc., will be in a position to implement their form of your idea in the end anyway, even if it's just by buying and using your product. The protection from the big boys that you get from secrecy is largely illusory.

What makes this different than Feedly or any other unified feed service for them matter? The fact that I can archive and annotate? Unless this is explained more elaborately, all I see is yet another app, not an attempt at rebooting the internet.

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