getpolarized

I love discussions about browsers on Hacker News! They're amazing. Half the people ranting how some insanely complicated technical decision is going to ruin the world, the other half yelling at them that this is necessary, others ranting about how the vendor is evil for some reason, etc. Just lovely!

I'm the author of Polar:

https://getpolarized.io/

Spaced repetition is a game-changer but right now it's not really adopted outside of say Duolingo and Quizlet.

I think the reason why is that integrating spaced-repetition into your workflow is painful.

If you use Evernote or Onenote and Kindle or maybe something like Anki then you're constantly switching back and forth.

Polar changes this by making a fully integrated reading, annotation, note and spaced repetition platform.

You can read a PDF, highlight an important piece of text, convert it to a flashcard, then sync it to Anki directly - all without ever leaving Polar.

Further, we also have our own spaced repetition algorithm if you just want to use Polar directly. If you're not an Anki user this might be easier since Anki can be difficult for some people to configure.

We're REALLY close to 2.0 and have some important features including EPUB, annotations for tags and a web-based annotation system so that you can highlight and create flashcards directly in the browser.

We also support a really cool feature called incremental reading which allows you to easily suspend/resume your reading to resume where you left off. All your highlights can also be reviewed by spaced repetition algorithms so you can re-read core parts of your document repository.

I'm on Discord if you guys have any questions:

https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6

I'm the author of Polar if you guys have any questions.

We're working on EPUB. We want to do it right so it's taking a bit longer. A lot of our users are using Calibre to convert from EPUB to PDF.

We've seen a LOT of uptake among students/academics so PDF has been the main focus so far.

We also have HTML capture and are working to unify the EPUB and HTML capture functionality.

We're trying to be far far more than a reader and view polar as more of a spaced repetition platform with integrated reading so that it's insanely easy to read while learning using spaced repetition.

Anyway... if you have any questions AMA.

Just moved from CA to CO. 7.25 to 4.6 ... Not a massive change mind you but I'll take it.

The main problem with CA are the "hidden" taxes WRT quality of life. Real estate prices being insane. Serious homeless problems in SF. Smoke from all the fires. PG&E being evil, etc.

What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I imagine?

CSS feature queries and these other strategies are also hacks to determine the actual device being used. Most other UAs don't just flat out lie about the CPU and platform.

I've been a Software Engineer for 15 years now... 10 years in the industry as a systems engineer before that.

I sort of agree but what I try to do is put more comments and documentation in the source code directly.

The problem is that commit messages are usually hidden only when there's a problem.

Comments are there for the life of the code.

The problem with comments though is that they could go stale and something could be refactored.

I try to put them directly on methods/functions more and not on specific lines of code.

If I have to document a line of code it probably is a sign that it should be a function/method itself as it's a bit too funky to just stand alone.

Commit messages are GREAT for tracking down when something is broken though.

Would be nice to have your IDE take your code comments and make commit messages for new methods and the documentation for that method/class.

The same reason millions of Americans voted for "trickle down" and other irrational economic decisions. They're overly manipulated by propaganda.

> Partly, and I won't deny it, this is because of serious chemical changes that happened almost instantly when our first child was born. It was like someone flipped a switch.

I have a step-daughter. It's amazing how protective I am over here. I'm not violent or confrontational by any means.

One time this drunk guy didn't like that she was on her phone (she wasn't doing anything wrong).

This guy was basically yelling at her... my adrenaline spiked and I was immediately in this guys face protecting her.

I mean you'd think this was the natural thing to do right? Of course it is... but what's interesting is that I don't have any recollection of actually making a conscious decision to take this action.

It was almost done and over with before I realized what happened.

The guy was actually arrested for public intoxication and taken away. He had been drinking in the movie theater and came out drunk.

For spam purposes, IPv6 is just as rare as IPv4... you can generally assume that anyone in a /64 is the same owner.

... so really if you have 1000 IPv4 or 1000 /64 IPv6 it's about the same number of IPs that you can use to spam from.

Go is a horrible language in which to write a crawler. The main problem is that NLP and machine learning code simply isn't as prevalent and robust as it is in Java and Python.

I've been heads down in PDF for about 6 months and looking at all the various and supported libraries.

Within Polar (https://getpolarized.io) we support pdf.js which is rather nice but ONLY supports viewing of the PDF and text extraction.

You can't create NEW PDFs.

Our plan is to use something like OpenPDF to get the best of both worlds. Editing PDFs for doing things like exporting could be done on the server and the rest done on the client.

This is why I didn't buy a Tesla... It's half pregnant basically.

My 2019 Mazda 6 has adaptive cruise control and I think this gives you 80% of the features set for 1/3rd of the price.

FSD would allow you to only supervise which is definitely a lot LESS work.

We didn't vote with our feet regarding Facebook.

Every startup founder defected and surrendered to Facebook in favor of more pageviews.

It's like the prisoners dilemma only with startups and instead of going to prison you have to use Facebook.

I don't understand the goal of this. Is it to replace React/Angular or are these components like tree controls, tab controls, etc?

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.

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 :)

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...

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...

Everything new is inspired by something in the past. Literally nothing comes from whole cloth. I think the point I was trying to make is that we're going to see more of these types of apps.

CRA is a set of best practices for setting up a React app.

Even if you do stuff by hand you can run CRA and see how the experts do it.