hoodwink

Same.

It doesn’t matter if the foreign workers are contractors or employees. The expense is considered R&D and must be amortized over 15 years. I’ve dealt with this personally since 2023 for my company working with a legion of tax consultants. There’s no loophole here, I assure you.

Met my cofounder on HN in 2017. We’ve since been working on a consumer saas app called Readwise for past 6 years.

thank you.

we were testing bionic reading’s claim. they make no claims to only working when reading challenges are present.

i made the dataset publicly available. all the distributions are approximately normal.

these might be the kindest words i've ever gotten in a hacker news thread so thank you! :D

we've actually built an app for reading articles and ebooks (and RSS and PDFs and email newsletters and Twitter threads): https://readwise.io/read

still in private beta but we'll be entering public beta before summer is over!

giant hero section on bionic-reading.com:

"Did you know that your brain reads faster than your eye?"

title of bionic-reading.com:

"Faster. Better. More focused. Reading."

does "faster" not refer to speed to you or something?

thanks marc! appreciate the kindness.

ps- philly native here :)

hey there! thanks for the kind words :)

on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting article by OpenAI on the topic: https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/

*any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased) that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's what you're asking)

*is there a random quote API that references all sources at once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets

*has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?* not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x better than they were before

thanks rasul!

on an individual basis, there is some evidence that reading with your "best" font may have a meaningful impact on reading speed with no loss of comprehension. but you could probably unlock these gains by simply switching from, say, arial to garamond (i made that up for illustrative purposes), rather than implementing this complex font style.

i got that feedback a lot after initially posting the experiment:

> Since posting this experiment, I've received a lot of side comments along the lines of, "Well, of course I don't expect Bionic Reading to work for most people, but for [my subpopulation], it really works." If that were the case, we might expect to see disproportionate benefits for those participants who read faster with Bionic Reading than for those who read faster without Bionic Reading. Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains.

there might be some specialized effect on folks with known reading problems, but bionic reading makes no claims to specifically work for those people but rather the whole population so that's what we decided to test.

nice to meet you, Nick! shooting you an email now :)

My best interpretation of the test results is that Bionic Reading is just an exotic text styling that has no impact -- positive or negative -- on reading speed or reading comprehension.

If it were a form of speed reading, we would have observed faster speeds when using Bionic Reading (and probably lower comprehension as a trade-off). This is NOT what we observed.

Hey everyone, this is the follow up post to the experiment posted here on Hacker News a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204.

I'll be hanging out in the replies today if there are any questions I can answer :)

for sure. due to this improved experiment design, we should now have the data to perform paired analyses rather than just looking at means.

what test do you use to compare variances though?

yeah i acknowledged that in the experiment design discussion

> We recognize this is clearly not a gold standard, double-blind RCT. Researcher and participant alike knew what Bionic Reading claims to achieve. We simply did not have time to (1) develop a mock Bionic Reading placebo that, for example, might bold the middle of the word instead of the beginning and/or (2) find a set of test subjects who are blissfully offline and unaware of this viral sensation. That said, we controlled for what we could and we think we've already gathered some fairly compelling evidence.

sorry about that. that was an oversight on our part, but we're collecting the comprehension scores in the dataset and will include in our results hopefully sometime next week.

we’re capturing desktop versus mobile :)

we'll definitely make a follow up post once we've gathered enough data here! hopefully in a week or so :)

(my results were 2% faster with BR)

what app is he talking about?

Met my co-founder thru HN comments. We’ve since operated a delightful consumer SaaS business called Readwise for the past 4 years. I think this speaks to the main benefit for me: hanging out with forward-thinking technologists I couldn’t in real life.

One of the creators of Readwise here :)

Love what you’re doing and we’re about to ship a public API.

Hit us up at [email protected]!

This article has my Kindle highlights + Anki setup at the end:

https://blog.readwise.io/remember-more-of-what-you-read-with...

Make sure you’re disconnected while trying to read. Either a physical book or Kindle.

It helps to ritualize this disconnection by walking to a park or special reading chair.