A neat idea would be to allow prisoners that don't have internet or computer access to publish their own writing in an easy way. Sure, a family member could take the letters and published themselves, but it might be neat to see the image of the letter from prison as well.
I started a paper website business
181–190 of 268 posts
Re: I started a paper website business
#182That is not the first time I see one of your stories and it always brings me a smile to see your new ideas and how implement them. It also amazes me how some countries make it so easy to open a business. Doing so in Brazil would be a legal nightmare. Your projects are super inspiring and I always have a mind to leave my job and start doing the same. I should probably move to the US or Canada first, otherwise it might…
Why would it be a legal nightmare in Brazil?
Just for starters, every company is a liability for you as a person. Your "equivalent of credit score" will be forever impacted by each legal entity you start.
A company in Brazil needs to fit into categories. So if you have an e-commerce company that sells food, you can't use the same entity to provide a service, for example, the email provider with emojis the original poster did previously. You need a new legal entity for that.
If you have one of the companies not pay by itself, closing it is a nightmare. I have a company that is closed, not debts, not a single problem, for 15 years already inactive. That company is considered a liability for my current company and me as a person. Once you have 3 companies in your name, you start having trouble in Brazil, as you fall into "risk" territory for taking credit, opening accounts, renting offices or apartments, etc. And if one company wants to receive payment in foreign currency, you also have to generate quarterly financial reports, and all sorts of bureaucracy. Each step of the way you find new problems.
The rules are so extensive and so hard to navigate that you can't be the only person working on that. If you want to be like the original poster, you need an accountant that will charge you per company a fair amount of money, and it will still give you a lot of work to communicate with your accountant about each of the issues.
Yes, it is OK for someone that was always an employee to open a restaurant and have a living from that afterwards. Specially since it is a well stablished business category. But serially opening companies in Brazil is not a good time at all.
Disclaimer: I am not a professional in this area, I am a software engineer and I do have 2 companies in Brazil, one operating and one closed. Most of my knowledge is either self-taught or learning through my business accountant.
Re: I started a paper website business
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an old idea, using a language model on top of character level OCR. Works well for general text but doesn't solve random sequences of digits and letters. So you can't use it to correct your invoices where you have lots of out-of-dictionary tokens.
I've always found it somehow ironic that a human can correctly recognise printed characters even if parts of them are missing and the word is misspelt or in a language the human does not know at all, but computers have to resort to language models because an exact comparison of part of the image with other parts of the image (where the same letter is printed in the same font) for some reason is not feasible?
Brains do patten recognition much better than computers (albeit slower)
Re: I started a paper website business
#184Reminds me a little of jeffbridges.com/latest. Dude hand letters and draws his entire website. Might be cool to have an option to keep the original writing without the OCR?
Re: I started a paper website business
#185This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models. I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible. [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600026614…
This is cool, but what's GPT-3's pricing model and roadmap?
Re: I started a paper website business
#186How does it handle images?
Re: I started a paper website business
#187Why isn't this marked as a Show HN?
Also this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year. Of course, hopefully you get some more subscribers to make it worth while.
Re: I started a paper website business
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 are not looking at this from user perspective. It's very much a paper based flow for them. Where it wins is that it lets people forget about digital devices while creating their content while letting them choosing to share some of it online post that. There are magic notebooks, magic pens etc that use ocr to achieve the same but you still need to do the creation using those devices (which are at least twice the $…
> You are not looking at this from user perspective.
They are looking at it that way. Because what you just described would be great for the user. The only problem is that what you described doesn't match how this service actually works. That it should work like but doesn't is the entire basis for Philip-J-Fry's comments. Both comments here make it clear enough what he or she is talking about, so the response admonishing them (to empathize with the users) is odd.
Re: I started a paper website business
#189Excellent idea/project and result, and interesting&funny to read. And I loved your second-last sentence :D
Re: I started a paper website business
#190Why isn't this marked as a Show HN? Also this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year. Of course, hopefully you get some more subscribers to make it worth while.
> this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year
Is this Hacker News or Get Rich Quick News?