HN user

dwhly

109 karma

I make payroll at Hypothes.is

Posts5
Comments46
View on HN
[dead] 5 years ago

I recently prototyped a Youtube annotation interface. It's based around the Hypothesis annotation service. Let's you annotate youtube transcripts (approx 95% coverage from what I can tell) inline w/ the video itself. Super early sketch in code. Controls to play the video and sync it to the transcript. Full transcript search for keywords, etc. It was a fun project. Code is at https://github.com/dwhly-proj/droppdf, major kudos to Paul Genho, who did the lifting. This is part of the overall document conversion, hosting and annotation service at docdrop.org-- which we'll incorporate natively into Hypothes.is.

Feedback on what's most important next. Submit or upvote at https://github.com/dwhly-proj/droppdf/issues

This statement that "If you want to build a commons, first you have to have something to share" doesn't relate in any way to a need to own this concept. Trademarking "Internet of Agreements" doesn't somehow give you more of "something to share", rather it gives you less. Whatever your reasons for capturing your IP, so that you can monetize and control it, generosity isn't among them IMHO.

What you're trying to do is define a space so that you can capture an outsized share of the attention and therefore the financial value from it. Plenty of people name spaces without needing that capture.

I disagree. Dealing with large volumes of annotations is a UX challenge, but a very solvable one. Certainly current implementations don't handle pages w/ 10s of thousands or millions of annotations (think: the bible), but neither do traditional comment widgets.

Happy to have a more thoughtful discussion if you're interested.

To state the obvious-- Hypothesis is eager, and is running one. If we can be so bold, we think we are also trustworthy. We knew that this could not work unless we also created a service.

We welcome all others.

The key difference is that proxy servers don't copy content. They reflect it. You can put any URL on the internet behind a proxy server-- that does not mean that the proxy server has already copied the entire internet. Nor does it mean that once a URL has been proxied by a proxy server does the content remain cached or copied-- since in our case at Hypothesis, and we presume at Genius, it does not.

This is a key distinction that separates proxies from caches and archives.

Thank you for saying so.

The climate change effort using Hypothesis is located at http://climatefeedback.org/

Also, it may not be readily apparent, but Hypothesis is a non-profit, particularly because we think this technology if ever widely deployed and integrated should be done in a way that aligns with the interests of citizens over the long term.

Hypothesis supports private "only me" annotations, as well as the ability to create ad-hoc private groups. Only about 24% of annotations made through our service are public.

Part of the goal of making it a standard, and one in particular where annotation clients could listen to multiple annotation service providers, is precisely to avoid "Annotation Central". Our client does not currently operate this way, but our intention is to move that direction this year. Many underlying architectural changes are being made now to support that change.

Certainly if browsers integrate annotation natively, it would increase the discoverability of conversation considerably which is of course the point.

I personally think if that is done it should require the user to purposely choose an annotation service as well. The actual act of inviting the conversation to pages should involve a user choice.

See further thoughts on the question of page owner consent-to-be-annotated in another of my replies above.

In terms of controlling for trolls/spam, etc annotation service providers will need to use the same combination of automatic filtering and editorial or community moderation that are relied on widely elsewhere. The success of any individual service will presumably at least partly depend on how good of a job they do.

Ultimately annotation is something that readers choose to enable by adding to their browser, and by choosing the service they prefer-- just as they may elect to have a discussion about the page on reddit, twitter, facebook, etc.

With regard to whether sites should be able to have editorial privileges on their own domain, or to what degree should page owners have consent over annotation, we've blogged about that here: https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation...

There's a wide diversity of opinion. Some suggested a flag where site owners could register their preference not to be annotated. Overriding that flag would invite additional scrutiny from moderators. Others have suggested that such a flag not be able to be overridden.

We also facilitated a panel discussion on this discussion at our last I Annotate conference in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2yFnu_pCGI&list=PLmuJEyeapl...

Thanks @jmathai.

I'm the founder of Hypothes.is, and here to say that we're delighted for researchers us to use us in this way. So far, our primary emphasis has been on collaborative annotation with others on documents vs individual annotation. That said, we hope to layer on additional features where appropriate, and to collaborate with other products and services when we can--particularly ones that support open standards and open source software.

On Dec 1, we announced an initiative to bring an open annotation client to all scholarly works over the next several years. https://hypothes.is/annotating-all-knowledge/

Genius API 11 years ago

Thanks for this comment Ben! +1000

Feel free to try an alternative, open annotation api, like ours: api.hypothes.is

This.

As someone who started the first travel site on the web (GetThere) and built it to 600 employees, an IPO and later sale to Sabre, and who debated this with my co-founders and myself, there is a most definitely a happy medium (we started with 18 months of vesting on a 48 month plan).

If founders start 100% vested then the pre-money will simply be a different calculation, and founders will earn additional shares to continue to provide incentive post-funding. Don't delude yourself that somehow your equity will provide sufficient incentive for you to continue to perform. This might be somewhat true in startups with one founder, but it's considerably less true when there are 2 or 3. And it's also protection for you as a founder. Why let one of your co-founders be able to cut out early on and get the same deal you did when you still have to put in the time in order for the opportunity to truly prove its potential. It's important for the founders to continue to vest-- and also, when things take longer than 4 years, as they did for us, more shares are appropriate for founders that remain essential to the business.

As the founder of a 501c3 non-profit that makes FOSS (http://hypothes.is), let me strongly second the points that Philip has made here.

1) Get expert counsel. It can make the difference in the ultimate determination, and also in the number of years (!) it takes to get approved. We were lucky in that we granted our determination without question-- and it still took nearly two years to get.

2) Don't focus on the software, focus on your mission. It's not just a ruse-- it really makes sense. Become knowledgeable about the nuances of the exemption, and why it is granted when it is.

3) Proactively call your agent, once one is assigned. Not only can it dramatically shorten the time to determination, but it can also often head off questions that, once asked, require formal replies and often lead to further clarifications, which all take time.

Unless the molecular weight is about 10 pentillion (?) you ain't gonna see diddly! Avogadro's number is a big thing. (6 x 10^23). Now agreed that you don't need a mole of something (especially w/ a high molecular weight) to be able to see it in a microscope. But it's probably at least w/in 4 to 5 orders of magnitude of the right number.

From a conversation with Brewster a few years ago: The doubling of density of disk drives has allowed them to stay relatively neutral with respect to space for the Wayback machine. It still occupies approximately the same size as it has for the last 10 years, which is essentially a set of racks about 15-20 feet long altogether I think?

However, the new TV news and search capability requires substantially more space than even the archive IIRC, or certainly is heading that way.

how inelastic people's income really is.

I think you mean "how inelastic the demand for gas is in the face of higher prices".

Of course people's income is fixed in this equation. Though I suppose you might try to earn more if gas prices go up.

What you're trying to say is that demand for gasoline is inelastic in the face of higher prices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

And here's a bit on gasoline... http://economics.about.com/od/priceelasticityofdemand/a/gaso...