As I type this comment, most other comments are pointing out how a 6th grader got this wrong, by failing to suggest the "correct" solution of abandoning printing.
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.
Indeed. He identified an approach that seemed off the beaten path, took a systematic and consistent approach, quantified the savings and wrote it up. I'm impressed. We should be encouraging this sort of exploration and rigour in school kids. It doesn't even matter if we 'grown-ups' think there's a 'better' solution.
Somewhat. The story rests on the assumption that all government printing is done with a wasteful serif font, and that $$$ could be saved by using a slimmer one. Sure, people discuss toner vs ink, government discounts vs retail prices, and the necessity/desirability of printing things on paper in the first place. But almost everyone has accepted the assumption at face value.
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.
The other side of the equation is that serif fonts are easier to read. What is the cost in time and/or productivity that a person might lose by utilizing a font that is less easy to read?
I've submitted tax returns for last 5 years without ever printing anything at all. I don't think you need any printed paper - in theory, it can be done with zero paper at all, in practice many places send you printed forms (though I believe they have an option to choose electronic delivery, many of them do not support it) but you could do without printing anything yourself if you want to.
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.
The government prints a lot less forms and booklets than it used to. You may remember you or your parents going to the public library or post office or IRS office to pick up printed forms and instructions, or receiving them in the mail. Today, in most cases, even if (like me) you still do your taxes on paper, you download and print the forms yourself. So the cost of paper and printing has been largely shifted to the individual.
It does matter. It's called 'constructive criticism', and learning how to accept it is a valuable asset. There's a difference between "nice work, but have you thought of..." and "nice work, you're the best!".
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.
No one in government is going to stop printing documents any time soon. Abandoning printing might be the most efficient solution but it's also the most disruptive solution. His solution is elegant in that it would receive little in the way of friction whilst providing tangible benefits.
It's not completely trivial to change what font the government uses. There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.
> There are a lot of documents that would need to be layed out differently after the change.
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.
I actually think it would be a lot easier to eliminate printing on a document by document basis than changing the font and dealing with all potential issues arising from that.
I agree, on a global scale this could have real impact, especially if the headline grabbing aspect can encourage people to look at other ways to save ink and paper usage in general. I understand that there is a financial impact in laying out new forms, the future savings on ink costs could go towards a usability and accessibility audit and use the findings to inform the new layout designs :)
> there is a financial impact in laying out new forms
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.
I use to work as a comsec custodian. It was my job to update or replace military publications with the newest version.
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.
My main issue with him is that he didn't spend 5 minutes researching this on the internet because it's come up many times previously and doesn't count as a nice hack worthy of any praise. Sorry kiddo.
As an example, these links are all 2010 or earlier.
This is why I think the Internet might actually be stifling innovation and creativity.
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.
> 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?
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 you describe is not stifled creativity but a hurt self-esteem.
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.
Sometimes I feel the same: I'm not going to be able to do this better or even as good, so I'll stop working on it.
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.
The Internet is stifling innovation and creativity? Which Internet are you on? Mine is -full- of innovation and creativity. There's too much, in fact, to keep up with on a daily basis which is why I have to subscribe to aggregators like Hacker News!
I think you're right. I wonder how productive I'd be cancelling my ISP subscription. No flavors of the month, just me, my bookshelf, my compiler.
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.
I don't think we should throw him under the bus but someone should reign in the overly gushing coverage because it benefits no-one - not us, not the kid, not future kids.
Spider Robinson(?) has a classic short story about how infinite copyright terms with perfect archiving) will destroy the human psyche when we discover that there really is nothing new under the sun and all creativity is rehash.
As others have pointed out: It wasn't the first time the idea had come up, but he came up with it and looked into it independently. That, at the age of 14, is the kind of thinking science fairs should be encouraging. As a Ph.D project? Not so much.
I'm suggesting that science projects which are not original ground-breaking research should not be portrayed in the media as original ground-breaking research.
Nowhere does it suggest that the kid is some kind of genius. Not in the original article, nor in these threads. It's clear that this was a school science project and that he was encouraged by his teachers (and his reviewers) to pursue it.
The fact that it's considered newsworthy enough ("man bites dog" & all that) to merit a CNN story is itself the claim that this is somehow novel or interesting.
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".
What I'm more interested in is: why did this kid get all the press coverage from this suggestion, as opposed to the numerous other people who have suggested it (many if them probably kids too).
The real issue is that a bunch of people have thought of this before, some even made websites and posted articles, but they didn't get on cnn.com (and the top of Hacker News) for it. So now they are hurt and upset.
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?
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 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'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.
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!"
Exactly. It's easier to get someone to modify his/her existing behavior than it is to get someone to stop a habit altogether. Additionally, do you know what doesn't require electricity to display text? Print on paper.
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.)
And you need electricity for every page printed. Considering the rotors of a printing press, it is likely more than it takes to broadcast the page over the net to a device, and then view it for a few minutes.
The problem is not volume, the problem is delivery. It is easy to deliver a lot of electricity to specific point (printing press) at specific time (when document is printed). It is much harder to ensure electricity will always be there and available when you need to consume that information.
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?
> 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.
They should be, but that assumes docs about what PDF format is survive, and they'd know how to read media on which PDF is stored (which is much more scarcely documented - do you know how your HD encodes data on physical level?) and have compatible hardware or know how to build one. That's a lot of hops and failure on any of them may render the whole chain unworkable.
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.
But 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).
Exactly. Great project. The media is to blame for trying to portray this kid as some sort of brilliant revolutionary, all externalities are being tossed to the side. It's not jealousy to point out that our current inefficiency is preferable to faux-fiscal conservatism.
I would guess the other commenters are jealous that their problem solving skills don't get as much attention. "No, this kid was WRONG!!!" is a way to justify that they are better thinkers, and therefore relevant. In a day and age when everyone has to justify their own existence, I suppose it's not that surprising really.
I actually meant that as, "I hope he doesn't read this stuff about him on Hacker News". I'm sorry it was unclear. Unfortunately it's too late to edit my comment.
Well it only applies to inkjet printers one one hopes that schools that are printing large numbers handouts use a cheaper laser printer and not a 6 color photo quality inkjet which are designed for small numbers of high quality prints.
You'll not abandon printing in the next 75 years. It's not a realistic solution. This kid provided a fix you can put into place in the next 12 months that will save a good chunk of change. Getting people to not print anything will take considerably more time and money to implement.
Well you're right but also the "just use digital" is flippant and ignorant. Changing fonts is simpler and cheaper on the short term than digitizing everything. It's also a more realistic goal. There us nothing with doing both. This is pretty sime stuff.
> 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.
Yes, this kid is smart, and smart is good. But smarter is better. I don't understand the problem.
Yes, he is a kid, but I believe that the best way to show respect to a kid is to treat him like an adult. The article mentions that he was encouraged to publish in the Journal for Emerging Investigators, and it goes on to say that this journal has the same standards as academic journals. The whole point of this exercise is to treat him like a grown up in the grown up world, because that's the best way of showing respect to a kid.
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.
The people saying he failed finding the "correct" solution are underestimating the challenge in getting people to change their behaviors so radically.
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)
this is why i prefer reddit comments to hn - sure, they can be rambunctious and troll-heavy, but the insightful comments are mostly free of that overlay of sneering cynicism. here's the top reddit comment on the story, pointing out that the idea is not new:
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.