I don't... how do I put this nicely.
This is a kid. He is smart. He looked at the problem from a new angle. He came up with a nice hack. Presumably we want more kids with more of a hacking spirit.
I hope he doesn't read Hacker News.
If, like most Americans, you prepare your tax return in the next couple of weeks - an annual ritual which involves a truly mind-boggling amount of printed paper - take a look at the fonts on IRS documents. Almost invariably, the IRS uses thin Sans Serif fonts. As do a great many other government printing departments.
Now I don't expect the kid to think about this since he probably hasn't had to fill out a tax return yet, being only 14. But perhaps it's the sort of thing CNN ought to have mentioned, or asked the Government Printing Office about, if they were interested in presenting useful news. Of course, they're not, in this case; it's clickbait which relies on readers accepting all the assumptions in the article and patting themselves on the back for feeling smarter than Uncle Sam.
Maybe if the tax return is really complex and most of the software can not handle it you'd have to go back to paper. But for vast number of Americans, tax returns are simple enough.
And it's entirely debatable which is better: seeing your argument trigger a wave of patronising good-on-yous from adults you respect; or seeing your argument trigger a wave of intriguing discussion between the same.
I agree that we should be encouraging and not dismissive of it, but the kid is 14, he's nearly an adult himself. He can handle being exposed to deeper analysis.
"If you stand up and announce a new idea, hundreds if not thousands of armchair quarterbacks will tell you why your idea is wrong / how they could do it better / why they are smarter than you"
or
"Good job thinking critically about an issue that literally millions of people have taken for granted for years and trying to come up with out-of-the-box solutions, backed by actual quantitative research."?
Personally, I want to communicate the second. Will he have to learn that solving problems involves creating ideas and then iterating on those ideas, sometimes tearing the original idea to shreds in the process? Yes. Will he need to learn to divorce himself from his work and not feel that criticism of his work devalues him as a person? Yes.
But some (not all) of the HN comments, while critical, do not feel exceptionally constructive. Too often, when some unique or innovative new idea is touted, smart people rush to explain why it won't work or why it's not actually that great an idea or why it's solving the wrong problem in the first place. But none of these people are actually helping to solve the problem. It is important for us to have this talk about fixing the frankly toxic attitude that seems to pervade this space sometimes. And it's important not to hide behind the shield of "constructive criticism" when the criticism is less constructive and more just petty.
You could take any font with both "normal" and "light" weights, and then apply the leading and pair-kerning from the normal weight to the light weight, to produce a font that reflows text the same as the normal weight, but uses the ink of the light weight. I do wonder whether the results would cause typographers to gag, though.
This is a huge cost. Consider the U.S. Army, one part of the much larger Department of Defense. The Army has literally thousands of pre-prepared forms [1] and manuals. It's likely that these forms get printed hundreds of thousands of times per day. You could indeed save a lot of ink by switching to Garamond but that means that each form needs to be re-done. Some are simple MS Word forms where it might be easy. Others are PDFs and most are XFL (awful Lotus Forms), all of which will take a major effort to convert. Multiply that time and effort across an entire government's worth of forms and the effort required is mind-boggling. It would take many years for this to pay off.
In the military/government, forms, publications, and manuals are regularly updated, distributed, and printed. Rolling out a new font on each update before distribution wouldn't be a huge task.
As an example, these links are all 2010 or earlier.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/the-right-font-can-save-you-mone... http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1256396... http://www.sitepoint.com/cut-costs-by-saving-ink-with-ecofon...
etc.etc.
It's the same objection you'd have if CNN posted a story about "kid uses physical model to predict lava distribution from volcano using baking soda and vinegar".
I find that more and more often I think of something, then search on the internet, and if I see that someone somewhere has done anything similar, I abandon the project immediately. After all, it's been done, so what's the point?
Net result if we push this to an extreme: instead of pursuing interesting ideas people end up wasting time in useless discussions on Hacker News, thus adding exactly zero value and failing to move humanity forward.
At a first approximation, everything has been tried by someone. It is very, very rare to have a truly groundbreaking idea. But that's not a problem! Humanity advances mostly through incremental improvements, not just by giant leaps.
So stop criticizing and start doing.
Sometimes, though it's the other way around. This has been done, but it still sucks so I'm going to do it better. Or sometimes, it's been done and works great for these people but not for me, so I'm going to make it better for my use case.
It goes both ways.
Be fair: the internet also gave us the first version.
Or you learn how much progress has been made on the subject you're researching and, standing on the shoulders of giants, make new independent discoveries based on what has already been found.
It's not the Internet's fault if most people don't have the right mindset for research.
What's frustrating is the complete lack of historical context to most things on the internet. There is one version: current, and everything previous is deprecated. Is this kid aware of every similar attempt to alter typography to save ink? Probably not. Should we throw him under the bus for being ignorant? Probably not.
What I see when I close my eyes is a community that assumes the OP might be right. That's all it takes, the presumption that this person, as young/Blubby/naive as they are, can find a better route up the mountain. I think it just takes patience &/ humility.
There are lots of people in the world smarter then you (and me). This might be humbling, but this can also be used to your advantage.
Instead of being sad about someone having had already invented what you thought about, build upon it! It's magic: you just thought about it, and it already exists, often ready to be used. Use it and build the next level. Pick the ready-made wheels, steel beams, a motor, and build something new, say, a car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Basic_Plots
I am all for going paperless as much as possible, but think of the back of your toothpaste container and the warnings printed there. Could there be both a savings and an environmental impact in using a better font?
edit: There is some confusion; this was a response to parents "More importantly, this opens it up a new approach that can be used in lots of places.", not to the article. It doesn't really open anything up.
I think it was a fine school project, fwiw.
It's the spirit behind that counts. It can lead to other interesting hacking endeavors down the road in that young man's life.
As a somewhat related anecdote I was repeatedly told by my professors that in Physics everything is named after the last person to discover it, not the first.
(ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leon...)
I understood this as a story about hacker spirit in a kid, and it made me smile.
[1]: If he did already know, and presented this idea as his own? He may not be a great hacker, but he has a promising future as a manager.
Or, if this actually leads to adoption, a salesman.
Computers are great, but doesn't mean that they are the solution to every problem.
Also, given how fast the printing press prints and how many times a printed document can be read and for how long it can be stored, I'm not sure it actually is more electricity to print.
Then there's another problem. Try fetching electronic document from 50 years ago. What? You don't have tape reading machine? You are not even sure which format it is in? Oops. Now try looking at a printed document from 500 years ago. Provided it does not physically degrade, can be read pretty easily. You can see Gutenberg's bible in the Library of Congress and you don't need anything to perceive information there. How much of today's electronic info would it be possible to read in 550 years?
If the encoding standards are non-proprietary and you either kept data stored in a linear binary format compatible with modern persistent file encoding, or just translated the works over time, then all of them.
All ODF / PDF files should be readable in 500 years. You can back them up for minimal cost in facilities around the world, and since the specifications to render them are completely open standards, you can (at worst) write software to interpret them again if necessary.
When dead tree rots, it rots. You had to (painstakingly) transcribe dead tree papers over and over to insure they don't degrade. We already have ROM archive tape standards meant to last millenia in the absence of environmental decay of their containments.
And, of course, magnetic media can degrade and be physically destroyed as well as dead tree media. There are standards for long-term storage, but most of the info is not stored that way. We find most routine documents from thousand years ago written on paper, cloth, leather, bark, papyrus, etc. but today's routine information would never survive even a century, only specially preserved data - a tiny minority of it - would.
In many cases, agencies cannot simply stop printing because they are legally required by congress to put stuff on paper. Agencies cannot compel congress to fix badly written legislation but they can change their default font. Where I come from, cost-savings that don't require an act of congress are called good ideas.
(PS there are probably other considerations such as accessibility for the visually impaired that I don't know enough about.)
"If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away."
- Linus PaulingBut realistically, not a good idea. Garamond uses less ink because it is skinnier and less readable. It's a font for young eyes, or for Apple customers (long time user of Garamond).
Using slightly more literate ways to call critics "haters" is not any more constructive.
Rather, we need young impressive minds to solve real problems. Government spending is intentional.
If he doesn't get that, he's more likely to end up building pointless boondoggles for the government rather than solving real problems.
I hope he does, it's a good measure of the average hacker.
Unfortunately the two are not the same.
Yes, this kid is smart, and smart is good. But smarter is better. I don't understand the problem.
Therefore, it is in fact your comment that is more disrespectful to the kid than the other comments which are pointing out flaws with his proposal.
of course, the same could be said for changing the font, but hey, baby steps.
ps: i don't actually agree with the font switch idea. less ink means lower readability in marginal situations (at night, after photocopying 3x, etc etc)
http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/21la0q/14_yr_old_stude...
but with no trace of sneering - it congratulates the kid on a good idea, and points out that ecofont does it and better.
contrast this hn comment saying exactly the same thing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7487637
but with a far more condescending tone.