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Comment by red0point | Hacker News Reader

The rules implemented are very simple (taken from the patent application [1], the exact numbers are configurable).

  If there are <= 3 letters, one letter is bold.
  If there are == 4 letters, two letters are bold.
  If there are > 4 letters, 40% of all letters are bold.

There is this claim as the first text on the website:

  We are happy if as many people as possible can use the advantage of Bionic Reading. For this reason, Bionic Reading should be able to be integrated into existing apps and services. The benefit for the reader should be the main focus.

If that is truly correct, why not publish these 3 rules? Why hide it behind multiple patent applications and trademarks? Why spend all this time and money on patents and an API that probably involve sending all text to some servers, just so that these 3 lines of code can be executed?

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102017112916A1/en

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Because these folks deserve to eat and pay rent for a few years upon discovering something so useful.

So make that part of the mission statement. There's no need to pretend to be a bunch of saints.

I don't really see it that way. Yes, the about link leads to a page where the goal of improving the way people can read is described, but it would be odd to see them say, "and we expect to make money from working on this project".

Each of us is motivated by different goals. I am motivated to have a comfortable life, and I've worked for different companies over time to achieve this. I also find personal satisfaction in helping others so I've occasionally make charitable contributions of time and money, but I don't expect that everyone else is going to make the same choices I have. We don't know the motivation that drove the inventors of this new reading technology. Maybe it was to simply make money for riotous living, but it could be that they have a critically sick partner that needs expensive surgery. These are personal and private choices that I don't feel a need to weigh. Improved reading technology sounds like a good thing for not just the inventor, but for all of us.

When I buy some peaches from a farmer at a stand by the highway, I want the peach more than I want the dollar I have in my pocket. The farmer wants the dollar more than the peach. After I buy the peach we are both better off. I don't need to feel that the farmer is a non-profit farmer. I expect the farmer to be happier after the sale, for otherwise next year he may not even be there for my benefit during peach season. What I do expect, is that the farmer doesn't misrepresent his product, that he doesn't steal my credit card number, that he holds up his side of the bargain; if so, next year, I will be there to buy his peaches again.

I've invented a number of important technologies and benefited from doing so. Some, when I worked for others, ended up being patented. Such is the environment we find ourselves in, but for many of my ideas I chose not to protect them by patents and let these be adopted by standards organizations instead. Personally, I don't think patents are a good fit for software, and I would rather see better use of copyright protection for software or a simpler much shorter patent, say three years for software. The open source software movement has been an amazing gift to humanity, but so has the deluge of products (and peaches) produced for the profit motive.

If we expect everyone to innovate and build useful tools solely out of the goodness of their heart, then we can expect far fewer useful tools & innovations in the future.

I think the opposite is true. Patents are hampering further progress that would built upon the innovation or make use of it to increase productivity. but said progress often is not happening, if the costs of obtaining a license is high, or if first tedious communication has to happen with the author to obtain green light to use his invention. Rapid innovation looks different.

If you innovate without filing a patent, you get a head start. The time the you have until other catch on - that is how you can monetize your invention.

It’s disingenuous to say they want as many people as possible to use it while at the same time filing a patent application.

That’s like Microsoft saying they want as many people as possible to use Azure: no shit

I have mentioned this a few times here already, but I will mention it again, even if I risk looking like a spammer, as it seems this point hans't been made strongly enough in this thread: This discovery is not new.

A different company published almost an identical product more than 3 years ago (see https://web.archive.org/web/20190119032121/http://br.craftwo... as well as my top-level comment).

So I am absolutely against patenting something that is 1) not new 2) that has a very simple implementation and could thus easily be disseminated widely if patents weren't "protecting" it. Reminds me strongly of the various patent wars regarding scrolling on the smartphone and other simple user interface gestures; in the end everyone looses out.

Then take them to court to have the patent nullified.

Seems like a great use of time.

I wonder how bolding more on uniqueness would work? Instead of just first characters.

For instance now THeir and THere will be bolded the same, on a quick glance that can be confusing. (Using caps as HN can't do bold)

Would it increase pattern recognition in the brain if it instead was THeIr and THeRe, or some other variant where the bolding highlights the unique parts of a word compared to other common words?

Well I wrote the idea here, so don't try patent it, hehe.

Haha...nice The basic problem with reading is that your eye needs a fixed point...that's why they should be "blocks". This one doesn't have to be at the very beginning though ;) But cool comment Hehe

True. You made me remember a different concept, where words would flash at the same point, but centered around some fixed highlighted character per word. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ky8DP55YEO0

Edit: but thank you for sharing your concept here, very interesting, and I like the discussions it created.

Thank you matsemann

Ironically (given the GP comment) this tech also died because of their aggressive attempt to commercialise it.

I had an iOS speed-reading app at the time and considered integrating their API because users requested it. Not only would they have required individual users to sign in to their API via my app, IIRC their terms allowed them to track what each user was reading. Naturally I declined. I hope OP’s terms of use are more respecting of user privacy.

A giant hashmap generated by hours and hours of ab testing on humans with eye tracking

Being a cynical person I would answer your questions with:

Because money.

You could reduce this to just rounding using the 40% rule + minimum of 1 bold letter right?

1 * .4 = .4, 1 bold letter (minimum)

2 * .4 = .8, 1 bold letter

3 * .4 = 1.2, 1 bold letter

4 * .4 = 1.6, 2 bold letters

etc.

As GP said, the exact numbers are configurable, therefore your simplification may not work. BTW, none of the examples (the first text and all the subsequent variants) on the web site follows exactly these 3 rules, it must be something more.

I have hacked together an implementation of this here https://boldreader.github.io/boldreader/

I decided to take out a patent a long time ago. Unfortunately I had to make bad experiences, which is why I now want to offer BR as API.

With the rules it depends on whether it is short, medium or long words. But in principle it is simple.

As simple as we humans read. Eye - brain - representation products (words)

Great product that might get lost because of overthinking the business model (say that even as a fellow Swiss). Think the giga-opportunity here is for a chrome extension, releasing it for free or freemium won't interfere with your patent (and if you don't, someone else will, regardless of the legal aspects). Either way, congratulations on this innovation, it's elegant.

Ich danke Dir vielmals noeltock.

Ja ich hatte bereits zwei Browser Extensions (Chrome, Firefox) als Beta-Versionen. Aber die Erkenntnis war, dass sehr viele Websites — da diese ja individuell erstellt werden — keine gute Experience ergab.

Deswegen habe ich mit Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) getestet, wie es am besten nutzbar gemacht werden kann. Hab aus Fehlern gelernt, aber wir denken dass es viele Entwickler gibt, die BR in ihren Leseprodukten anbieten möchten...

Aber vielleicht liegen wir da ja auch falsch. Man muss es versuchen und dann weitere Erkenntnis daraus ziehen.

A liaba Gruass us Chur Renato

The problem is that since you've patented these 3 lines of code, I'm not sure many other can legally write a browser extension for this functionality. I'd like to use this in Safari on iOS, for example, but... I can't.

Just change the logic ever so slightly, I’m sure it’s possible to do this in many ways.

Clearly these three rules are a fact about human pyschology rather than an invention and should be ineligible for patents. I understand that New Zealand law for example classifies pure software inovation as categorically not being invention. I'm unsure of what hoops you'd have to jump through to take advantage of this fact to release a browser extension for example, but it seems like it should be possible, though code signing and stuff might cause problems.

Honestly it's just one hoop - are you confident you won't be sued, and if you're wrong, are you willing to pay for the legal defense?

Translation:

Thank you very much noeltock. Yes, I already had two browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) as beta versions. But the finding was that a lot of websites - since they are created individually - did not give a good experience. That's why I tested with Silvio Rizzi (Reeder5) how it can best be used. Learned from mistakes, but we think there are many developers who want to offer BR in their reading products... But maybe we're wrong about that. You have to try it and then draw further knowledge from it. A dear greeting from Chur Renato

Why did you reply in Lichtensteinian or whatever this is?

> Unfortunately I had to make bad experiences

That has to be the most unfortunate choice of wording !

More seriously though, does BR work in your native Swiss German ?

Sorry for my bad English traceroute66...

I came across BR during my studies as a typographic designer. There was a language problem there.

That's why I realized that reading and listening are completely different. You can understand a language by listening to it. But reading the same language does not mean that you can understand it.

No problem, but the second half of my question was genuine.

I can't imagine this working too well with German words ? e.g. how much of Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung, Lebensabschnittpartner or Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän would you need to highlight ?

I don't speak German, but surely with compound words, your concept doesn't work that well ?

Slightly off-topic - while I know that there are these lists of “crazy long German words” to make fun of each one of your examples besides the “Donau..” I actually used normally in conversations in the past.

Even just a couple days ago I came across “Personalisierungsinfrastrukturkomponente“ [0] in a news article, so it is not just a rumor that Germans like long-ass words :)

[0] Apparently these are the devices used by the government to verify passports and / or fingerprints of refugees.

For languages with compound words it looks like you'd need to parse out the sub-words and bold the first few letters of each one. That's doable but now you need language-specific dictionary files etc.

I'm quite certain I could fit BR logic in less than 300 bytes of JS Regex. There is no need for an API here.

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> If there are > 4 letters, 40% of all letters are bold.

Very cool :)

I would have thought there is also value in bolding the last-x-amount of letters.

I forgot the name of the "concept" but it's been shown that the beginning and ending parts of words are the most "recognizable". You usually see a sample of that on those 'silly-facebook-posts', example:

"I cnduo't bvleiee taht I culod aulaclty uesdtannrd waht I was rdnaieg"

[1] https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/can-you-read

Looking at the example in one of the apps (Reeder 5) doesn’t work 100% the same as the patent. For example, neumann (a last name) is bolded as NEUMANn the first time it appears and NEUMann the second time it appears.

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