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Comment by renato_casutt | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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?

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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> 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.

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