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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

I agree. More importantly, this opens it up a new approach that can be used in lots of places. Perhaps development of fonts that require less resources when printed. While printing government forms may seem like a waste to us, there are lots and lots of places where paper is still the cheapest and best solution: name tags, business cards, flyers, posters, billboards, random one off signup forms, booklets with info (think of populations without access to the web that need to be educated about things like STD's, etc.), instruction manuals, product packaging, official documents (passports, etc.), paper money.

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?

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It's hardly a new approach - people have tried this sort of thing for decades. I don't know of any significant adoption analysis, but it pops up as an idea fairly regularly.

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 may not be a new approach. But I liked how the kid experimented and tried to think of other ways to solve an issue.

It's the spirit behind that counts. It can lead to other interesting hacking endeavors down the road in that young man's life.

I'm sure it's not a totally original idea, but if this gets enough publicity it might push for actual innovation.

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.

And in mathematics, because you can't name everything after Euler.

(ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leon...)

Yeah, but he was just that good.

I can't find the quote now, but I'm sure that I've read of someone saying (when told that a result had been found earlier but forgotten), "Yes, but when I discovered it, it stayed discovered!"

You and I know that, but presumably the kid didn't.[1]

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.

"he has a promising future as a manager."

Or, if this actually leads to adoption, a salesman.

I really hope you and 6cxs2hd6 are being tongue in cheek. First, this kid clearly has a good head on his shoulders, and is even able to do some pretty cool technical stuff that most of the population cannot. Second, judging someone based on a single action you've seen from them is... less than scientific. By that logic you should be a "short comment writer" :).

Note that the conversational tangent my comment was in response to was "if it wasn't actually his idea". In that case, the thing it best shows is that he did a good job presenting it. Which is itself a valuable skill, is my point. Obviously there's a question of how well the little we know about him generalizes, regardless of what skills we're considering.

I guess I should also note, I hadn't meant "salesman" to be derogatory...

Re "manager", yes I was being mostly tongue in cheek; I recently re-read The Gervais Principle and was thinking of Sociopaths. :)

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

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