getpolarized

There's a MASSIVE impact crater on the far side of the moon which we never see.

Imagine if it was inverted. It would look like a MASSIVE eyeball staring at us during our evolution.

Imagine how that would have impacted religion!

> I really don't see how this is going to end well, there could be perfectly innocent photos on someone's phone of their own children doing perfectly normal things that kids do. Like a kid running butt naked around the house, or a photo of something like a rash that is sent to a nurse friend for advice on what it is etc.

These are still illegal in the US right now right? It's been a major criticism of these laws that they can hurt people accidentally.

It's super sad that the history of Senet is mostly unknown.

The texture we have of Chess history for example is part of the allure. That the rules have changed, we know how they changed, why they changed, how people played in the past, etc.

The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.

The amount of people that personally attack you and accuse you of horrible things should be zero.

I've also seen users personally using our forums to try to get the software for free and complaining it costs too much money.

As soon as it's clear that one of the developers is listening they go quiet but it's super disheartening when your community, which should be supporting you, feels so entitled.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do.

It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species.

FAR FAR FAR more plausible.

Noe that when deployed properly, we MIGHT not need 85% if we have secondary protocols to inhibit the growth of covid.

For example, requiring all airline passengers or anyone leaving their state to be vaccinated and vaccinating frontline workers including those that work at grocery stores, etc.

About a year ago I was trying to figure out how important dark mode was for our app so I created a poll on Twitter and linked to it here on HN.

https://getpolarized.io/2019/11/19/Dark-Mode-Should-Be-The-D...

The idea being, if you were FORCED to pick one, would you rather have light or dark mode.

90% preferred dark mode with nearly 1000 votes.

That blew me away honestly.

Before that I thought that dark mode was a 'nice to have' but clearly I was wrong.

The other issue isn't just dark mode but 'true black' mode for mobile devices and OLED. True black just looks better on mobile devices.

Most dark mode skins can usually be converted to true black but you have to make sure the fonts don't become too strong.

When I first installed Growl I remember literally thinking "wow, this is really cool!"

... Being a tech geek means my nostalgia memories are 'weird' by normal standards.

Super happy now thinking about the time I first installed Growl

We went full dark mode when we released the 2.0 version of our app which has PDF and EPUB support:

https://getpolarized.io/2020/10/05/Polar-2-0-Release.html

the issue we had was that we were using a CSS filter like other commenters mentioned.

The problem is that it inverts images too and pdfjs doesn't actually specify which parts of the document are an image as it's just writing to a canvas.

My plan moving forward is to fix pdfjs so it can invert natively and the actual canvas is inverted so that images won't be inverted.

I think figures would STILL be a problem though.

EPUBs are much easier and we're not inverting there because we can see which one is an img.

This isn't official btw. I didn't even know about this! I suspect this is a 1.x build. Make sure it's 2.0 :-P

This is the interesting thing about Open Source is you get interesting developments like this that you didn't anticipate!

Thanks... broken link. I'll fix it now.

The link is: https://getpolarized.io/download/

Yes... if you delete documents it those won't count against your quota.

We've also tried to make it pretty cheap so if you have a huge repo it won't be super expensive. It also won't bloat your local computer so if you have a large repository most of that data will be on the cloud.

I also wanted to point out that Polar is Open Source.

https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf

If you'd like to look at the code.

We have a unique build environment so DM me on Discord if you want to build it... You just have to use lerna and our npm repo but should work well.

Totally agree.. We want to have a Safari and Firefox one and are working on having that resolved quickly.

The code actually is written to be portable as a 'web extension' as both Safari and Firefox use the same general API.

I'll try to get some time and see if it works on Firefox. The biggest issue we have is testing. If something breaks on FF I want to know and we don't have a testing environment there.

If few equals two then companies like Apple have some explaining to do as to why their hardware can't be serviced.

Hey Hacker News!

About two years ago we launched Polar on HN [1] and now we’re back to announce Polar 2.0!

https://getpolarized.io/

Polar is a tool used by software engineers, students, and professionals. Anyone who wants to manage academic research, technical documentation, textbooks, or web-based reading to build a personal knowledge base.

Polar is an integrated reading environment similar to your IDE that you use for writing code. Think of it like Visual Studio or IntelliJ but for books, web content, PDFs, EPUBs, etc.

What makes Polar special is that we’ve built an integrated workflow so that you can read, annotate (make highlights, add comments, pagemarks etc), and convert anything to flashcards. You can then use spaced repetition to review your material directly in Polar or sync it to Anki.

My co-founder and I have been working tirelessly on this since the lockdown started to get this shipped.

This release represents everything we’ve learned since 1.0 and includes:

- Dark mode!! This was by far our #1 requested feature

- Both EPUB and PDF supported (originally it was just PDF)

- Web pages capture content using Mozilla readability, then saving them to EPUB

- Web capture works entirely from our chrome extension so that your cookies, etc get captured too

- Easy reading management with flagging, tagging, archiving, pagemarks to mark specific sections in the book, and more

- Improved annotations and highlights management, including area highlights, annotation tags, margin notes, etc

- One-click flashcards directly from annotations

- We’ve greatly improved our Anki sync to make it more reliable, faster, and has more features like support for cloze deletions, front and back cards, HTML, etc.

What’s more, Polar is open source so you don’t have to risk being locked into a platform you don’t control!

We want to make obtaining an education as easy as possible. In addition, it shouldn’t cost a fortune to get a decent education. Be it tuition or overpriced textbooks. This is why we are building Polar with the vision to truly democratize education.

This is still early stage for us of course. Some of the upcoming features will include mobile apps, integrations with tools like Zotero, and much more.

If you’re someone who reads a lot and likes to remember the material, give Polar a shot! For power users, we also have a premium version with up to 500 GB of storage. For HN readers, we are doing a 20% discount promotion for a year-long subscription. Use the code hackernews20 to take advantage of that

We would love to hear what you think about Polar!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960

I think no-code is taking going a bit too far but definitely less code is becoming a major opportunity for innovation.

What I think is hilarious is how many takedown notices they've received!

https://github.com/github/dmca

Here's a good analogy for non-programers.

You're building a new car company.

You see all the existing cars, the roads, and the garages.

So you measure the width of the car and the garage and you decide that the car should be exactly 6' wide.

Then you ship your car. Enjoy 15 years of market success.

Then you find that Oracle created the first cars and says they have copyright on the width of your car.

That's how stupid this is...

Let me know what you think about Polar:

https://getpolarized.io/

We launched about a year ago and are REALLY close to a 2.0 release.

Does/can it integrate with CI? This is what I need now. While I want full integration testing I'd like to have stories/unit tests for UI components too.

Wow.. I hate it... the quality of IntelliJ has really fallen. I've been using it for like 5 years now and I'm constantly fighting it

There are literally 20-40 serious bugs that impact me daily.

My mid-2015 mac (last REAL MacBook IMO) won't install it at all.

It says it's installing, I reboot, it does some stuff, then I come back and the update isn't applied.

Quality stuff!

There is a trend to assume new technology will always replace old technology.

During the Vietnam war the F4 ditched its cannons for the sidewinder air to air missile.

The sidewinder is fire and forget for the most part and somewhat of a no brainer whereas cannons require more skill and training in dogfighting.

It also gave the US a MAJOR advantage (in theory) vs the MiG.

The problem is that the Vietnamese picked up on this and changed their tactics.

Before this the US had air superiority and a significantly higher kill ratio.

The Vietnamese built 'hidden' airfields and would dispatch their MiGs when the F4 was directly overhead and engage them in head to head dogfights.

The F4s needed to build distance to launch a sidewinder and this dramatically rebalanced the kill ratio and during this time it came out to close to 1:1 with the US having a slight advantage.

They US realized their mistake and subsequent F4s had cannons...

Same thing here with cars. When the new screens came out everything was done through software but it's just NOT a good design.

When I'm driving I want to push a button and be done. IF just for safety.

When the UI locks up or is slow it's literally a safety risk.

We're getting there.. The backend supports it now. If you send me a list of your requirements (just create a github issue here https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues) I will look at adding the functionality you need.

We're adding support for DOI lookup and APIs like Arxiv so you could just add a DOI to polar and it will fetch the PDF and keep the metadata.

Will also support export to bibtex too.

Our big focus right now is shipping 2.0 so that we have a more modern platform that can scale us moving forward.

We're thinking of adding an generic sync functionality into Polar so that you could keep external connections to thinks like Anki, Evernote, Roam, etc.

The biggest challenge is deletions though so I'm still trying to work out the ideal sync framework.

You can sort of do this now but part of the power of Polar comes from using our own tools as they support new annotation features not present in other PDF readers.

yes... I agree. I'm working on this too. The 2.0 UI will be all re-done in React, better mobile support, including transitions. So you will be able to deep link to other annotations by their ID.

Also, going to work on the ability to link them together with a search and auto-complete system so that you can just start typing tags, or the body of the note, and then they can be linked.