I started a paper website business • Hacker News Board

Re: I started a paper website business

#101

Post by trulyme » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #84

noodle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't be HN without the "you can build this trivially" [ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ] response.

I'm not saying it's trivial to build this. I'm just saying that the "paper website" part is greatly exaggerated. The real meat of the pie is in website builder which _is_ more complicated than tweaking some parameters on some off the shelf OCR/GPT3 solutions. It's cool, I've never shipped a project like this, and probably never will. But I've worked on my fair share of software so I know what it takes behind the scen…

You both have a point, except yours is a narrow(er) engineering one. OP solved a real-world problem, and actually solved enough of it to be useful to many people, who were thrilled enough to become customers. That is impressive by itself, but what makes it even more impressive is that it is a new niche!

Would adding new features make it easier to create more complex pages? Yes. Would it improve the experience for the users? I doubt it. It's like adding full text editing mode to a chat - technically viable, but takes away the magic - just give me text and emojis and stop there.

Re: I started a paper website business

#102

Post by nzach » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

mbildner wrote: post #95

thinkski wrote: post #94

Feature idea: bundle a webring, so when viewing one paper website can get connected to others.

Can you clarify/ expand on this idea?

I think GP was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

Re: I started a paper website business

#103

Post by rileyphone » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #64

gambiting wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeaaaah, his handwriting is actual certified art compared to mine . I can't get anything to recognize my handwriting reliably, including the text recognition built into iOS with Pencil - it's just useless.

I can't even recognize my handwriting reliably.

Same - I find I typically use writing as a tool for thought moreso than a record that I will come back to, though I occasionally take a pass through old notes to see if I had any forgotten gems.

Re: I started a paper website business

#104

Post by throwawaycities » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

reginold wrote: post #68

throwawaycities wrote: post #60

All his projects are fun…one of his prior projects (mentioned in the article) is Mailoji. I registered a few and messaged him suggesting it would be cool if I could transfer the Mailoji email addresses with a code so I could hide them in NFTs only the owner could see…I think by the very next day he added the transfer code feature (and didn’t fail to give it the attention of his own style complete with an emoji gift b…

Mailoji looks neat! Do you have a link to the gift box feature? You and the author might also check out the new ENS (Ethereum Name Service), it support emojis for use as crypto identity/wallets. "Triple pures" (three base-level emoji) are popular as a wallet address.

At the time I used the gift feature it was just an option within the dashboard, but checking now there is an entire page explaining it (really well done)

https://mailoji.com/gifts

And I’m a giant fan of ENS as a protocol. FYI even though there is a 3 character minimum because they use Unicode there are a few hundred emojis that are technically 3 characters allowing for registration of single character emoji ENS names. Beware though Unicode also allows Zero Width Joinder characters so there are people who add them in bad faith in attempt to sell desirable names to unsuspecting buyers that don’t get what they think they are paying for.

Edit: the link was bad, but example of legit single character emoji ENS is [pirate flag].eth you can search it directly in the ENS App

Re: I started a paper website business

#105

Post by claytn » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #61

It feels less like a paper website business and more just like a traditional website builder except with some OCR to turn notebook pages into web pages. Like, you've still got to edit the page to add links, images, colours, etc. In fact, that seems like the most complicated part. It's a fun gimmick and a nice selling point. But someone will be able to use this idea for Wordpress/Wix/Squarespace plugin. Would be surpr…

I completely disagree. No one is ever going to write out a url by hand on notebook paper. Even in the rare case that a url would fit on a single line, it's just needlessly cumbersome work to do. I think the project author did a great job allowing for further site customization (styles, images, etc.) without overcomplicating the hand-written portion.

Re: I started a paper website business

#106

Post by floatingatoll » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

pkdpic wrote: post #40

dash2 wrote: post #9

Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc. I'd say this story refutes that one.

This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something. Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then. Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an ho…

Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead, because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not maintaining them. I wish they weren’t. They were a better form of curation than anything since.

Re: I started a paper website business

#107

Post by jgtrosh » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

zeckalpha wrote: post #29

I hope View Source shows an image of the paper using source mapping

I'd prefer the opposite: display the scanned page but with the OCR'd text virtually placed on the page (and accessible as alt text or something) like a proper OCR'd PDF.

Re: I started a paper website business

#108

Post by aaroninsf » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

This is so much less interesting than I was hoping based on the title and premise.

Oh well.

Re: I started a paper website business

#109

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: I started a paper website business

#110

Post by poxrud » Tue, Dec 14, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #10

abadger9 wrote: post #6

I've done some OCR side projects during hackathon weeks over the years (with google tesseract). This is a neat idea, I can only imagine the difficulty with which transcribing the variety of terrible handwriting will cause frustration and an eventual flood of refunds.

He really glosses over how he uses GPT-3 to correct the text...

It looks like he’s first using tesseract to recognize his handwriting and convert it into text. Tesseract doesn’t do a perfect job so the recognized text is full of mistakes. He treats the mistakes as spelling mistakes and “asks” GPT-3 to correct them. This is a very clever idea and will greatly improve current OCR efforts.