20 ms·

I started a paper website business

1511 points by tinyprojects 5y ago

giarc 5y ago
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.
ushakov 5y ago
where is your business based and have you registered an LLC? do you make a separate LLC for each project? how much did it cost to launch the business and what does is cost to keep running (lawyers/paperwork/admin)? i'm scared of starting my own tiny projects, because of all the bureaucracy involved to even get started
- mwint 5y ago
  It’s not that bad - make an LLC right now (in most states, it’s a single form to start one), then you have no excuse. Taxes are easy. You probably don’t even need the LLC, but I like having a bit of a legal umbrella (though chances are, no one is going to sue you unless your project gets big)
- soared 5y ago
  You don’t really need to register an llc or do any of that for your projects that are not big.
  - ushakov 5y ago
    how do you legally accept money then? clarification: i'm in EU
    - benmmurphy 5y ago
      If your turnover is low enough you don’t need to be VAT registered in the UK. Also, in the UK you can be VAT registered and be a sole trader.
      - ushakov 5y ago
        do you think as a foreign citizen i'd be able to setup a UK Limited? i'm familiar with Companies House though
        marci 5y ago
        Are you in the EU or the UK?
        rosndo 5y ago
        If you’re not on any sanctions lists there shouldn’t be any issues. Your residency/citizenship does not play any part in forming a UK LTD. It might affect your ability to open an account with some banks though. These guys are okay https://www.99pcompanyformations.co.uk/ https://www.99pcompanyformations.co.uk/ The whole process takes a few minutes and costs almost nothing.
    - cbushko 5y ago
      I think you just take the cash using Stripe or whatever. It gets deposited in your bank account and you claim income tax on it.
      - ushakov 5y ago
        i don't want liability
        chinathrow 5y ago
        What are you talking about? You make revenue, you disclose the revenue, you file taxes. Doesn't matter if you do it as a private person or as an LLC. You can incorporate to reduce liability easily, it does not cost a lot of money in most jurisdictions.
        gnopgnip 5y ago
        You have personal liability either way if you are the one writing the code, marketing to customers, etc.
    - spiffytech 5y ago
      In the US, anyone can sell good or services and do business without formally registering as a business. You're automatically classified as a sole proprietorship, with your legal name as the business name. But there's no liability protection, since you and the business are the same legal entity. That's where LLC or incorporating comes in, along with lots of other reasons to want to formalize the business as a legal entity.
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
  I have a number of smaller businesses/products that are part of one business entity: - IT Consulting practice - Eletronic device business (sells a single product via internet/mail order) - YouTube channel/blog - Fledgling SAS product that's not yet launched (consumes money, not makes it) I live in the US. To incorporate here, you file paperwork with your state. You don't need a lawyer, just send in the filing fee(s) with the completed paperwork. If I remember correctly, fees were somewhere around $100-$200. I have an accountant do my corporate taxes. He charges me $400. I file the sales tax paperwork myself on my state's web site. It's basically: How much do you owe us? And then you pay it. Most eCommerce storefronts keep track of the sales-tax stuff for you so it's easy.
FalconSensei 5y ago
My main impediment for using anything like that is that my handwriting is incomprehensible to anyone except me. Like, my wife takes some time to figure out what it's written there, and sometimes - after long enough time passes - even myself
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  Maybe there's an inherent bias that people who prefer to hand write have better handwriting and therefore have a better experience. It's possible that most people with bad handwriting are more prone to want to type.
  - FalconSensei 5y ago
    Yeah, I think it's kind of a vicious cycle: I have terrible handwriting, I'm not used to the movement - my hands hurt more with a pen than keyboard, I'm extremely slow (or the result is unreadable). So I keep typing
nathanfig 5y ago
Inspiring
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rado 5y ago
Awesome.
mh- 5y ago
This was a fun read. Love the twist at the end.
asicsp 5y ago
Discussion about the site mentioned in this article: "Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 (32 days ago, 271 points, 70 comments)
abadger9 5y ago
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.
- deegles 5y ago
  He really glosses over how he uses GPT-3 to correct the text...
  - etskinner 5y ago
    They might consider it a trade secret of sorts. If I were them, I wouldn't want someone to just take the idea and undercut me.
    - folli 5y ago
      I think from his explanation in the article it's quite straightforward to implement it yourself: get a GPT-3 subscription at OpenAI or MS Azure, use the API as described in the article, voilà. But the idea is genius indeed.
  - jsmith99 5y ago
    From the screenshot I suspect the real secret is that it gives the user a chance to correct errors after scanning.
  - poxrud 5y ago
    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.
  - amenod 5y ago
    That's a really interesting part, and probably why the OCR works good enough for such case. Not sure about legal implications of using it though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-is-giving-microsoft-exclusive-access-to-its-gpt-3-language-model/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-i... EDIT: it seems I have misunderstood the article - OP probably uses MS API to access GPT-3 anyway, so the point is moot.
rambambram 5y ago
Big smile on my face, fun read and nice video.
OliC 5y ago
What a great idea. We need more of this sort of thing.
dash2 5y ago
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.
- duxup 5y ago
  We remember the fun stuff, but you had to look for it even back in the day.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    "Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have known a time without it to truly get the difference.
    - duxup 5y ago
      “Facebook didn’t provide me what I wanted…THE WEB IS DEAD!”
- pkdpic 5y ago
  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 hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
  - MMS21 5y ago
    If you did that now you'll run into sites with no content but a banner at the top with contact details so you can buy the domain.
anonymouse008 5y ago
Incredibly cool! This should invite a whole new type of blogger to the internet - well done! Curious - I'm looking at your other projects as well and the design is quite good. Are you using a firm for design, or do you have any front end frameworks to recommend? For some reason design consistency the way you have it is extremely hard for me.
bicx 5y ago
This is the kind of project that keeps me inspired. Well done!
helipad 5y ago
Fun idea. I have a memory a website from years ago that was photos of writing on a whiteboard or fridge. I'm certain it wasn't accessible nor SEO-friendly though it was inadvertently mobile friendly.
n9com 5y ago
How are you handling international tax?
- ushakov 5y ago
  not the OP, but Stripe has a Tax feature (they bought TaxJar last year) https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/tax https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/tax
_nickwhite 5y ago
I love the ending. Seriously, if you're a TLDR; person and just here for the comments, go read the article (it's short) and come back.
- slingnow 5y ago
  OK, I did that. I'm back. Now what?
  - mikestew 5y ago
    Spoiler: the author of TFA eats their own dogfood. If you were looking for a big, M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end, you'll be disappointed. OTOH, the article is worth a read.
ushakov 5y ago
i love that it doesn't scale!
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
Humanity can be awesome. I Love the whole spirit of this project.
cableshaft 5y ago
So I diligently kept a pen and paper journal about my game designs for three years (wrote about 100,000+ words on paper). Switched to digital for a year, wrote 120,000 words just in 2019 (starting every morning sitting at a Starbucks and writing it helped), switched back, then switched back again, doing less and less words each year (for 2021 I'm at like 15,000 words, so pathetic, it's only like 12 entries total, need to get back into it). But for the pen and paper I was manually transcribing it to digital (and still only transcribed about half of it). I didn't know OCR had gotten that good (and still suspect my writing isn't clean enough for great OCR). But maybe I should give this a try, might be enough to get me back in the habit. Also trying to avoid doing as much typing lately (because of some arthritic-like pain in the fingers on one hand, although it's my writing hand :/)
- artificial 5y ago
  Bummer with the hand! Have you taken any supplements or do any exercises? Not sure if it’s an RSI but there’s hope out there!
- atlantic 5y ago
  I occasionally suffer from arthritis in my right hand. I've found that regular use of Baoding balls keeps it at bay.
- bserge 5y ago
  Google's OCR (as found in Lens, Docs and whatever) is insanely good. At least that was my impression based on my own notes (my writing is horrible and I often add very small side notes). Oh yeah, camera quality makes a big difference.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  So this got me trying out various things for dictation and transcription, as that would mean I wouldn't have to type quite as much. I tried using Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage. Tons of mistakes I had to manually correct, couldn't say too much at all without it being so garbled I didn't remember what I really said to correct it manually. But then I found out about built-in Apple Dictation on Macbook, which sends it to Siri, and I tried reading some old journal entries, and it's actually pretty darn good! I might be able to get through transcribing my other notes using it with minimal corrections. Just need to make sure you state punctuation, or else it doesn't really put any into it. Still didn't seem that great for programming code though. Would be cool if I could find something decent for that.
swlkr 5y ago
This is really cool. The idea to separate the writing part from the computer entirely (not just the internet) is genius. Also, GPT3 helps out a bit there too.
- criddell 5y ago
  The OCR coupled with GPT3 worked much better than I would have guessed it would. I wonder how much of that is on the device and how much is in the cloud?
zeckalpha 5y ago
I hope View Source shows an image of the paper using source mapping
- jgtrosh 5y ago
  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.
  - ComputerGuru 5y ago
    No, thanks. It’s terribly hard to read strangers’ handwriting.
    - jgtrosh 5y ago
      That's probably fair enough in many cases, but it should be doable to make the display togglable; and some handwriting is very enjoyable.
enryu 5y ago
Best article I read in a long time, kudos
johnnyo 5y ago
How do you add things like emojis and inline images? I don’t see anything in the text that maps to either in the output?
- klohto 5y ago
  Web editor
didip 5y ago
When Pg told people to build a business that doesn’t scale, he meant this.
- chinathrow 5y ago
  Well, this business scales easily, what am I missing?
  - thepete2 5y ago
    I think the point is that him sending out notebooks (he only has 100 of) doesn't scale.
    - chinathrow 5y ago
      Ordering from an established supplier connection (in China) scales.
    - jethro_tell 5y ago
      I . . . Bet he could buy more . . .
    - tester756 5y ago
      just wait 2 decades and maybe he'll be top1 online shop
- rkangel 5y ago
  PG did NOT tell people to build businesses that don't scale. He told people to OPERATE businesses in ways that don't scale. That is of course true for this business - the overall model scales extremely well, but obviously what they're doing at the moment isn't scaleable. It is however an excellent proof of concept of the business model.
martneumann 5y ago
I could see a good use case for those planning/kanban/mind mapping meetings where you plaster a whiteboard with notes and drawings. Scanning or photographing that isn't so nice. Formatting it into a pleasant, readable wesbite would be pretty cool.
codebook 5y ago
I like write on paper. I have written journals for 14 years, which now fill one section of my bookshelves. This year I switched from fountain pens and clairfontaine notbook to E-ink tablet, Supernote A5x. the main purpose is to keep the record in digital formats, And so far I am satisfied. The OCR sucks, though. I hope Supernote may adopt the GPT-3.
thepete2 5y ago
Out of curiosity: Is the first OCR example really the best you can find? Is there no open source solution that outputs good results for handwritten notes?
- foxhop 5y ago
  There are open source "computer vision" libraries which work really well, but, also there is a file on your filesystem with all the words, so you could pass over the OCR'd text to fix "typos". Paper website will likely be cloned if it works.
  - gwern 5y ago
    If you're referring to /usr/share/dict/words, no, you can't just pass over it to fix typos - it doesn't even have the proper noun 'Bel-Air' in it!
    - foxhop 5y ago
      Use you imagination.
allie1 5y ago
There’s a “dunder mifflin” joke somewhere in here
- dgritsko 5y ago
  It's actually in the post itself, if you read it!
throwawaycities 5y ago
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 box).
- reginold 5y ago
  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.
  - throwawaycities 5y ago
    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 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
    - reginold 5y ago
      Hello fellow ENS fan :) Glad OpenSea puts up warnings about any emojis or Zero Width Joinders etc.
Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
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 surprised if they didn't produce their own feature to do the same thing eventually. It'd be way cooler if you could draw links on the page and it would figure that out. Or draw a box with some links in it and generate a header. Draw a box for a place holder image and generate that. The next iteration would obviously be using paper to design the actual site and then using CV to generate the markup/styling.
- noodle 5y ago
  Wouldn't be HN without the "you can build this trivially" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224] response.
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  - Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
    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 scenes.
    - option_greek 5y ago
      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 $99 price). Because you are a developer, you are thinking in gpt/ocr/website building etc. Lot of people especially older generations eager to share stuff will find this useful if not amusing. For them its write something on paper and get a link back. Real users don't care about WordPress plugins.
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_virtu 5y ago
Slightly off topic, but I'm a bit of a paper snob at this point. While Moleskine is not the bottom of the barrel I still find for use with fountain pen inks they're not the best. You haven't lived until you try out some Tomoe river paper. Check out TarokoShop's notebooks: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=725110826 https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-....
- picture 5y ago
  The Clairefontaine paper used in Rhodia's Rhodiarama notebooks are also excellent. The soft cover Rhodiarama are some of the best paper for really watery inks. Another fantastic option is Midori's notebook paper, their whole design and the open grid option are really pretty. https://www.midori-japan.co.jp/md/en/products/mdnote/ https://www.midori-japan.co.jp/md/en/products/mdnote/ Also if you're willing to over pay, the Kleid 2mm grid notebook with OK Fools paper are among the highest quality I've used. It has handy feature of detachable pages too.
  - jen729w 5y ago
    While we’re on paper, I have a Field Notes “Expedition” special edition. [0] It has waterproof paper which is ‘fun’ but actually pretty useless as ink doesn’t really hold. So I had it for years and it went unused. And then I used a pencil! (Mitsubishi 9850 HB, thanks for asking.) [1] Oh and it is the most fun in the world! It’s like writing on a pat of butter with the tail of a fox. It’s the smoothest thing you’ve ever felt. Now it lives in the kitchen and I record meat temperatures and whisky cocktail ratios and it is my favourite book. That is all. [0]: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/expedition https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/expedition [1]: https://pencilly.com.au/product/mitsubishi-9850-hb/ https://pencilly.com.au/product/mitsubishi-9850-hb/
    - noahbradley 5y ago
      If you want some waterproof notebooks that aren't quite as impractical as those Expedition ones (they always smeared for me too), you might try Rite in the Rain. Had a great time using those over the years.
thinkski 5y ago
Feature idea: bundle a webring, so when viewing one paper website can get connected to others.
- mbildner 5y ago
  Can you clarify/ expand on this idea?
  - nzach 5y ago
    I think GP was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
georgecmu 5y ago
This 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/360002661437-Convert-handwritten-notes-into-text https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000266143...
- visarga 5y ago
  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.
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    > using a language model on top of character level OCR But if you know you're going to use a language model after the OCR, then you don't OCR to a single character, but rather to a distribution of character similarity (e.g. the 90% least similar or clipping at a certain similarity threshold). Then the language model should have more to work with (although TBH its work becomes more complicated).
  - georgecmu 5y ago
    If a dictionary satisfies your definition of a language model, yes, with predictably poor results[1]. If I understand correctly, Google Books approach[2] represented a major improvement in accuracy of automated OCR (and this is for printed text!), but I would venture to say that implementing a language model like this would be far beyond the scope of a 'tiny project'. [1] https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Limits_on_the_Application_of_Frequency-based_Language_Models_to_OCR.pdf https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Limits_on_the_Applicati... [2] https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Improving_Book_OCR_by_Adaptive_Language_and_Image_Models.pdf https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Improving_Book_OCR_by_A...
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aaroninsf 5y ago
This is so much less interesting than I was hoping based on the title and premise. Oh well.
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arbuge 5y ago
It's a wonderful project. There's something romantic about it, for sure. And if I could plug my own project, you could also do it by just sending emails: https://publicemails.com https://publicemails.com.
- kroltan 5y ago
  Ironically, it seems like half of the emails there are just spam.
  - arbuge 5y ago
    It's a free service right now. I'm thinking converting it to a paid one like the one in the article might solve this problem.
    - kroltan 5y ago
      To be clear I did not mean it as a dig on your service! It's a really cool idea, sorry for not saying it before. It was just a perfect irony. You could also do some heuristics like not accepting emails with excessive HTML. Though I'm not sure how much it'd work, since you already require confirmation so presumably the spammers actually have someone authorizing the publication. (I didn't test your flow since I have nothing that warrants posting to say)
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Neat idea :)
- q-base 5y ago
  That is a really neat idea. Thanks a lot for sharing!
phantom_oracle 5y ago
I like this idea for the very simple fact that I now know its plausible to write blog content with a pen and paper and then some GPT-3 AI will scan those words and make it into digital text for me. Sparing my hands from using a keyboard! Brilliant idea!
ricardobayes 5y ago
I love this, for the simple fact it's one step closer for me to be a programmer without needing to sit at a computer or even use one. It's very far fetched right now, but I would love that.
- donio 5y ago
  We've had that before (mainframes, punch cards), it's not that great.
tmjdev 5y ago
Ben Stokes is an inspiration to me. I get excited reading any of the TinyProjects posts. It's so refreshing to see a solo dev building and shipping so much. Hoping I'm tracking for that kind of ability as a full stack dev.
- zoom6628 5y ago
  Second that. His thinking and what he does is astounding. I am envious of his ability to string things together but most so of his thinking of new ideas.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I'm mostly curious to know about the long term financials and time dedicated to support. I really want to know if these are viable means of spending your time or if they make you a decent amount of cash at first, then fall off immediately. On top of that, I'd like to know hours spent. As it stands, he's definitely in a deficit when we include time spent and taxes taken out. Although if it took 40 hours to make, sure it probably wasn't so bad. If it took 80+, then yeah he's not making much more than some Wal-mart employees. Which is why I'd like to see the long term feasibility of this.
strzibny 5y ago
Love it, best of the tiny projects so far;)
SeanFerree 5y ago
Love it!
SCUSKU 5y ago
Hey Ben, just wanted to say great post! A lot of these comments are fairly negative, and I imagine they can weigh on your psyche. I just wanted to say I am thoroughly impressed with your execution on the project as well as your ability to market your product. Really impressive stuff, big fan :)
twobitshifter 5y ago
This is a great idea and I’d love a future with an explosion of paper websites. However, I’m saddened that after all the attention and clicks the annual revenue is only $3600. It really shows the difficulty of getting someone to pay for your service. I wonder if an alternate revenue model would have been more successful?
- andrethegiant 5y ago
  The goal doesn't need to be to make money. The goal could just be to think of something new and have fun. And I think the author has clearly done that.
twobitshifter 5y ago
It would be great to see Gpt-3 taken further than this so there’s less need to mess with the layout afterwards. Maybe you describe a sketch and Gpt-3 draws you their best bike riding avocado? Or you add something that says “photos from todays trip” and it spins up the album roll. This would detract from the simplicity and may not make the product any more successful- but it would be very cool.
einpoklum 5y ago
> My girlfriend watched me, puzzled. After convincing her that I hadn't gone crazy Now _there_s a startup idea for you! How did you manage to do that? Much more interesting story :-P
Gtex555 5y ago
Whitelisting this website on my Adblock cause you opened with a TL:DR.
bee_rider 5y ago
It would be cool if this could spit out research papers. Computers are useful tools but they can be quite attention-destroying.
fourtrees 5y ago
Aw man, almost did this myself a few months ago when I was down with COVID. You make me reall want to revisit the idea! Grats on your success.
rexreed 5y ago
How does this GPT-3 based correction system work on unique names (last names) or on numbers or on things that can't be learned from an Internet corpus?
- distrill 5y ago
  Likely not great, if it hasn't seen it before. You could fine tune it if you had large amounts of data that sat outside of the internet corpus, but it doesn't sound like that's happening here.
throwaway47292 5y ago
next step, self hosted paper website on a pi zero :) send them the notebook and the pizero, make dyndns ipv6 only thing and let people selfhost nice project!
irae 5y ago
That 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 not be possible for me.
- TekMol 5y ago
  Why would it be a legal nightmare in Brazil?
  - irae 5y ago
    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.
ineedasername 5y ago
I love this. It's hilariously written at the same time that it shows building something that is useful into a business without worrying about whether it would scale to Unicorn size. On the downside, the Moleskin IDE the custom one the author had made in China are extremely biased against people with bad handwriting. More attention to accessibility may be required. Seriously though this seems great if you have a bunch of notes and journals that you'd like to digitize. I have a small journal with my own recipes from over the years, and digitizing it has been in the back of my mind for a while-- if Paper Website can defeat my astoundingly awful handwriting.
TurkishPoptart 5y ago
How do the domains work for this? Are they automatically created?
TwelveNights 5y ago
I like using paper to journal about my day or write about random thoughts I might have that I'd like to flesh out further through writing. A few inconveniences of writing it though is that you might want to selectively share some stuff from time-to-time, lack of ability to add media (though a portable printer kinda solves this problem), and having a limit of space, relying on indexing journals when they fill up. A lot of the caveats are solved by privately blogging, though I do miss writing instead of typing everything. Something like this is almost a sweet spot of keeping the paper version as a "draft copy" while being able to enrich a digital version of your journal. As someone in the thread mentioned, being able to have private pages would likely encourage people to try it out for their journalling purposes. Otherwise, the project looks amazing!
FunHearing3443 5y ago
Trying the free trial - this is awesome! And it actually read my truly awful handwriting quite well. The website design and the technology is inspiring. Thank you!
xwdv 5y ago
Wow, the ending of this blog post felt like an incredible twist in a movie was just revealed.
- giarc 5y ago
  To me it felt more like a magician revealing a hidden twist.
maliker 5y ago
Reminds 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?
rackjack 5y ago
How does it handle images?
- SirYandi 5y ago
  Also how about italics / bold and heading / date subheading formatting. Perhaps there is a short manual editing step before publishing?
Graffur 5y ago
Why 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.
- folli 5y ago
  > this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year Is this Hacker News or Get Rich Quick News?
  - Graffur 5y ago
    What is "Get Rich Quick News"? The author included those specific details so I responded to them. I don't think either action reflects too much on this forum.
zepearl 5y ago
Excellent idea/project and result, and interesting&funny to read. And I loved your second-last sentence :D
FarmOfFriends 5y ago
whats the input to gpt-3? is it only the text outputted from the handwriting recognition? im just wondering if GPT-3 can be used as a spell check for speech to text use cases
094459 5y ago
I am so happy about this site as a few months ago I had a similar idea after speaking to some relatives who wanted badly to blog but was just terrified of the tech. After chatting for a while afternoon in between copious amounts of tea and cake, we came upon a design that involved pen/paper or a typewritten page, and an app that would convert this into a blog post. I hope this does really well and will be sharing this with that group.
kragen 5y ago
I wonder what value you could add to this with a notebook printed with digitally referenced paper? By printing an unobtrusive sort of barcode on each page, you could determine which part of which page of which notebook each scanned pixel came from, and what lighting conditions it was photographed under. What could you do with that? Well, the simplest and most greyface application is forms; you can define particular areas of each page as being particular form fields. If you're blogging, you might have a field for a "slug" that appears in the URL, for example, or a field for tags, or checkboxes for some tags (plus a special page to declare the meanings of the checkboxes). Or, if you're tracking expenses, you could have a checkbox for each expense category and columns for the date and the amount. For recipes, you might have a section for listing ingredients, with a column for unit of measure, a column for quantity, and a column for the ingredient name. Etc. For me, the special feature of paper notebooks that cellphones and other computers suck at is drawing. If I want to draw a diagram or illustration, it just works much better on paper: my pencil point occludes much less drawing area than my finger does, there's no tracking error where the ink appears 2 mm to the side of the point, it has much lower latency, and I can draw finer lines. But scanning those drawings into a computer is a pain, because I have to illuminate them evenly and hold them flat while I photograph them, which still probably involves some perspective distortion. Barcodes on the paper, together with reference lines and reference color swatches, could solve that problem, as well as providing information about which parts of the paper are occluded, if any. For a few special applications like numismatics and entomology, the paper could provide a precise physical measurement reference for specimens. Combining drawing with filling out forms, you can make a font from your handwriting; this is enormously easier if you can correct the various distortions. In http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/ http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/ I spent about 24 hours fiddling with various graphics programs, but there was a website I found somewhere where you can print out a form, draw the font on it, upload the scan, and download your TrueType font. This kind of thing might help with training OCR, too, especially if you don't have access to GPT-3. (Or if OpenAI decides to peremptorily destroy everything you've built because one of your users uses your service to write about their dead fiancee: https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-opens-gpt-3-for-everyone-fb7fed309f6 https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-opens-gpt-3-for-everyo...) Other ways to combine drawing and filling out forms include sketching orthographic projections to build 3-D models; coloring a coloring book; drawing maps for Minetest and similar grid-cell games (especially 2-D ones); drawing heightfields; and sketching different keyframes of an animation to automatically morph between. You could even draw a 2-D continuum of keyframes, thus providing an animation character that's continuously variable along two different axes; you might put time on the theta axis and some sort of emotion along the radius axis. (You can also apply these ideas with drawings that are input via other media, such as touchscreens, Wacom tablets, and mice, not only scanning paper. When you're scanning paper it's hard to get feedback as you're drawing, although you could maybe glance at your cellphone screen periodically, or use a projector like DynamicLand, or have a continuously updated monitor using a webcam feed. It could even use the occlusion information from the barcode to patch in remembered images wherever your hands were occluding the paper.) What should the barcodes look like? In 02001 Anoto announced their "Digital Paper" approach: https://www.wired.com/2001/04/anoto/ https://www.wired.com/2001/04/anoto/. As explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper this uses an unobtrusive 2-D barcode scanned by a camera in a "digital pen" (later called the "Fly Pen", 02005) to locate the pen in an enormous global "virtual desktop"; I think the NeoLAB "Neo smartpen" works the same way. This was all before cameraphones went mainstream and high resolution. They got 300 patents but fortunately everything they filed in 02001 expires this year. Anoto's barcodes use a grid of slightly displaced grid dots. The Fly Pen provided a sort of graphical user interface on the paper, using audio for output. It was sort of aimed at kids doing schoolwork and playing games. It failed in 02009. The founder started a new company called Livescribe focusing on notetaking; the Livescribe smartpen allows you to spatially organize and annotate a continuous audio recording. It has been more commercially successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe Tiny unobtrusive dots might not reproduce reliably on a cellphone camera, though having been published in WIRED in 02001 means the technique is in the public domain (or will be next year). A better idea might be to use thin horizontal and vertical grid lines whose thickness varies slightly, perhaps in a pastel subtractive primary like cyan, magenta, or yellow; then you can optionally remove them in software after scanning. Scanning a whole page at a time, instead of a tiny area around a pen point like the "digital pens" described above, gives you a great deal more space for redundant page ID data in the barcode; probably 48 bits or so is sufficient.
hyperpallium2 5y ago
Reminds me of David Rees' Artisanal Pencil Sharpening https://youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ Hipster co-marketing opportunity?
mNovak 5y ago
All I want is a dead easy way to make a landing page + account + payment options for a tiny prototype SaaS like this (e.g. I supply a few APIs as 'backend' and the rest just works) -- quite similar to the One Item Store the author made. I can only imagine how many people have had to repeat all the same boring steps for some small proto.
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  Hey have you tried/considered BulletTrain[0] or lemonsqueezy[1]? I also have something that I'm working on for this -- I've used my tool (which isn't productized yet, it's still ~4 templated repos) to launch 2 projects (in bio) so far and am working on a third product, but BulletTrain/lemonsqueezy are two much more polished options I know about -- maybe you should give them a try? Is the thing you're trying to sell an API? Or is it a resource-provisioning sort of SaaS (they sign up, you spin off a persistent worker or something). I model them as the same in my thing (the provisioned "resource" is the API key), but I think that's one of the big differences in which tool will work easily for you. [0]: https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/ [1]: https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/ https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/
aerovistae 5y ago
A lot of this seems manageable to me - like I could imagine myself being able to build it - but I have no idea how the author handled the domain names part and hosting all these websites. How did you just "throw together" a registrar and a hosting service? Seems like they built heroku and namecheap as side facets to their "tiny project." I must be missing something.
- codazoda 5y ago
  Startup Founders often say, “do things that don’t scale”. If I were trying this, I might just register the domains in my account, list myself as the admin, and list them for everything else. No building necessary until you prove the idea.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    Exactly. For a $99/year subscription it makes sense to manually perform a one-time setup. That being said, domain name registration APIs are a thing [1]. Hosting should be even more trivial with a multi-tenant architecture. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_domains_RegisterDomain.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_...
adfm 5y ago
Marshall McLuhan would have appreciated this. Most everyone is familiar with his “The medium is the message” phrase, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll come to appreciate his fascination with “Technology as extension of the human body.” That brio pen; the light bulb illuminating your workspace; the words you write; they’re all extensions of your body — from transcribing your internal thoughts, through your extremities, through transmission and distribution. If the author is reading this, I hope you’ll consider connecting with a few reputable online stationary retailers to offer a curated collection of reasonably-priced premium notebooks and pens. Additionally, consider expanding your original scope to include tags, which would open up your platform to paper-based automation opportunities. If you’ve made it this far and are just looking for the best cross-platform handwriting recognition, check out the Nebo app. It requires a stylus, but it’s the best I’ve come across and it reads PDFs, too.
mikabozu 5y ago
I really like the gpt-3 idea. I have a notebook full of short story ideas that I've been too lazy too transcribe, but now I have a way to get things onto my computer!
esjeon 5y ago
This idea carries some decent vibes. Pretty cool, seriously. But I think I can't use this service: (1) It requires "editing" for web publication, and I know I'm too lazy to keep up with that. (2) I find myself mostly scribble with pencil and paper, and write on computer. This is partially because my handwriting is in another dimension in terms of recognizability. (3) I sweat a lot, and that ruins paper notebooks pretty quickly, normally within 2~3 months of daily use. (So I use legal pads.) So, personally, I've always thought about the reverse: write pages with computer, and make a book out of it for archival, like, yearly. Still, I'm yet to carry out this idea, because: (1) I'm unsatisfied with currently available text-based document formats - either too limited (markdown), too biased (ReST), or too verbose(HTML/XML). I'm hoping to build something like Notion(block-driven) out of plain-text document format. (2) I fiercely hate proprietary note-taking services and apps. I've already had enough headaches: pages lost, broken import/export features, backup restoration failures, etc. Never gonna spend a single penny on them.
syntaxing 5y ago
Pardon my ignorance, how do you deploy a GPT-3 model cheaply?
- mylons 5y ago
  you don't deploy it, you go to openai.com and use their API.
peterkelly 5y ago
Every time someone adds a new package to npm, they should be forced to write it out by hand like this.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Well, then enjoy having me never contribute to npm ever again.
  - SixDouble5321 5y ago
    That seems to be the point. XD
dirtybirdnj 5y ago
I don't know if I want to use it, but I love this idea. The post promoting it was fantastic and the "you've been on a paper website the whole" time thing at the end was great. Serious inspiration food, thank you for posting.
jpswade 5y ago
This is amazingly inspiring. Not only is it a whole end to end brand and product but it solves a problem that keeps coming up in this community, about making the web fun again.
nephanth 5y ago
Fron an engineer's point of view, it's impressive how technically simple this is (author is basically assembling preexisting common building blocks) Yet how great the added value is: it opens a whole new way of blogging
everydaybro 5y ago
This is amazing!
JamesAdir 5y ago
Great work! Would love to hear more about the technologies/languages used in this site.
kenjackz 5y ago
Isn't this one have already endorsed their project here in HN a while ago?
gkfasdfasdf 5y ago
How about a notebook that scans for you? I.e. one side is a notepad, other side has a tiny camera on rails, close the notebook and it automatically scans and uploads the written page.
tdehaene 5y ago
Supernice! We actually did something similar using a more explicit seq2seq model, using ByT5: https://blog.ml6.eu/ocr-correction-with-byt5-5994d1217c07 https://blog.ml6.eu/ocr-correction-with-byt5-5994d1217c07

1511 points by tinyprojects 5y ago

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.

ushakov 5y ago

where is your business based and have you registered an LLC? do you make a separate LLC for each project? how much did it cost to launch the business and what does is cost to keep running (lawyers/paperwork/admin)? i'm scared of starting my own tiny projects, because of all the bureaucracy involved to even get started

mwint 5y ago
It’s not that bad - make an LLC right now (in most states, it’s a single form to start one), then you have no excuse. Taxes are easy. You probably don’t even need the LLC, but I like having a bit of a legal umbrella (though chances are, no one is going to sue you unless your project gets big)
soared 5y ago
You don’t really need to register an llc or do any of that for your projects that are not big.
- ushakov 5y ago
  how do you legally accept money then? clarification: i'm in EU
  - benmmurphy 5y ago
    If your turnover is low enough you don’t need to be VAT registered in the UK. Also, in the UK you can be VAT registered and be a sole trader.
    - ushakov 5y ago
      do you think as a foreign citizen i'd be able to setup a UK Limited? i'm familiar with Companies House though
      - marci 5y ago
        Are you in the EU or the UK?
      - rosndo 5y ago
        If you’re not on any sanctions lists there shouldn’t be any issues. Your residency/citizenship does not play any part in forming a UK LTD. It might affect your ability to open an account with some banks though. These guys are okay https://www.99pcompanyformations.co.uk/ https://www.99pcompanyformations.co.uk/ The whole process takes a few minutes and costs almost nothing.
  - cbushko 5y ago
    I think you just take the cash using Stripe or whatever. It gets deposited in your bank account and you claim income tax on it.
    - ushakov 5y ago
      i don't want liability
      - chinathrow 5y ago
        What are you talking about? You make revenue, you disclose the revenue, you file taxes. Doesn't matter if you do it as a private person or as an LLC. You can incorporate to reduce liability easily, it does not cost a lot of money in most jurisdictions.
      - gnopgnip 5y ago
        You have personal liability either way if you are the one writing the code, marketing to customers, etc.
  - spiffytech 5y ago
    In the US, anyone can sell good or services and do business without formally registering as a business. You're automatically classified as a sole proprietorship, with your legal name as the business name. But there's no liability protection, since you and the business are the same legal entity. That's where LLC or incorporating comes in, along with lots of other reasons to want to formalize the business as a legal entity.
hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
I have a number of smaller businesses/products that are part of one business entity: - IT Consulting practice - Eletronic device business (sells a single product via internet/mail order) - YouTube channel/blog - Fledgling SAS product that's not yet launched (consumes money, not makes it) I live in the US. To incorporate here, you file paperwork with your state. You don't need a lawyer, just send in the filing fee(s) with the completed paperwork. If I remember correctly, fees were somewhere around $100-$200. I have an accountant do my corporate taxes. He charges me $400. I file the sales tax paperwork myself on my state's web site. It's basically: How much do you owe us? And then you pay it. Most eCommerce storefronts keep track of the sales-tax stuff for you so it's easy.

FalconSensei 5y ago

My main impediment for using anything like that is that my handwriting is incomprehensible to anyone except me. Like, my wife takes some time to figure out what it's written there, and sometimes - after long enough time passes - even myself

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
Maybe there's an inherent bias that people who prefer to hand write have better handwriting and therefore have a better experience. It's possible that most people with bad handwriting are more prone to want to type.
- FalconSensei 5y ago
  Yeah, I think it's kind of a vicious cycle: I have terrible handwriting, I'm not used to the movement - my hands hurt more with a pen than keyboard, I'm extremely slow (or the result is unreadable). So I keep typing

nathanfig 5y ago

Inspiring

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rado 5y ago

Awesome.

mh- 5y ago

This was a fun read. Love the twist at the end.

asicsp 5y ago

Discussion about the site mentioned in this article: "Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 (32 days ago, 271 points, 70 comments)

abadger9 5y ago

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.

deegles 5y ago
He really glosses over how he uses GPT-3 to correct the text...
- etskinner 5y ago
  They might consider it a trade secret of sorts. If I were them, I wouldn't want someone to just take the idea and undercut me.
  - folli 5y ago
    I think from his explanation in the article it's quite straightforward to implement it yourself: get a GPT-3 subscription at OpenAI or MS Azure, use the API as described in the article, voilà. But the idea is genius indeed.
- jsmith99 5y ago
  From the screenshot I suspect the real secret is that it gives the user a chance to correct errors after scanning.
- poxrud 5y ago
  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.
- amenod 5y ago
  That's a really interesting part, and probably why the OCR works good enough for such case. Not sure about legal implications of using it though: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-is-giving-microsoft-exclusive-access-to-its-gpt-3-language-model/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-i... EDIT: it seems I have misunderstood the article - OP probably uses MS API to access GPT-3 anyway, so the point is moot.

rambambram 5y ago

Big smile on my face, fun read and nice video.

OliC 5y ago

What a great idea. We need more of this sort of thing.

dash2 5y ago

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.

duxup 5y ago
We remember the fun stuff, but you had to look for it even back in the day.
- dylan604 5y ago
  "Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have known a time without it to truly get the difference.
  - duxup 5y ago
    “Facebook didn’t provide me what I wanted…THE WEB IS DEAD!”
pkdpic 5y ago
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 hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
- MMS21 5y ago
  If you did that now you'll run into sites with no content but a banner at the top with contact details so you can buy the domain.

anonymouse008 5y ago

Incredibly cool! This should invite a whole new type of blogger to the internet - well done! Curious - I'm looking at your other projects as well and the design is quite good. Are you using a firm for design, or do you have any front end frameworks to recommend? For some reason design consistency the way you have it is extremely hard for me.

bicx 5y ago

This is the kind of project that keeps me inspired. Well done!

helipad 5y ago

Fun idea. I have a memory a website from years ago that was photos of writing on a whiteboard or fridge. I'm certain it wasn't accessible nor SEO-friendly though it was inadvertently mobile friendly.

n9com 5y ago

How are you handling international tax?

ushakov 5y ago
not the OP, but Stripe has a Tax feature (they bought TaxJar last year) https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/tax https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/tax

_nickwhite 5y ago

I love the ending. Seriously, if you're a TLDR; person and just here for the comments, go read the article (it's short) and come back.

slingnow 5y ago
OK, I did that. I'm back. Now what?
- mikestew 5y ago
  Spoiler: the author of TFA eats their own dogfood. If you were looking for a big, M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end, you'll be disappointed. OTOH, the article is worth a read.

ushakov 5y ago

i love that it doesn't scale!

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

Humanity can be awesome. I Love the whole spirit of this project.

cableshaft 5y ago

So I diligently kept a pen and paper journal about my game designs for three years (wrote about 100,000+ words on paper). Switched to digital for a year, wrote 120,000 words just in 2019 (starting every morning sitting at a Starbucks and writing it helped), switched back, then switched back again, doing less and less words each year (for 2021 I'm at like 15,000 words, so pathetic, it's only like 12 entries total, need to get back into it). But for the pen and paper I was manually transcribing it to digital (and still only transcribed about half of it). I didn't know OCR had gotten that good (and still suspect my writing isn't clean enough for great OCR). But maybe I should give this a try, might be enough to get me back in the habit. Also trying to avoid doing as much typing lately (because of some arthritic-like pain in the fingers on one hand, although it's my writing hand :/)

artificial 5y ago
Bummer with the hand! Have you taken any supplements or do any exercises? Not sure if it’s an RSI but there’s hope out there!
atlantic 5y ago
I occasionally suffer from arthritis in my right hand. I've found that regular use of Baoding balls keeps it at bay.
bserge 5y ago
Google's OCR (as found in Lens, Docs and whatever) is insanely good. At least that was my impression based on my own notes (my writing is horrible and I often add very small side notes). Oh yeah, camera quality makes a big difference.
cableshaft 5y ago
So this got me trying out various things for dictation and transcription, as that would mean I wouldn't have to type quite as much. I tried using Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage. Tons of mistakes I had to manually correct, couldn't say too much at all without it being so garbled I didn't remember what I really said to correct it manually. But then I found out about built-in Apple Dictation on Macbook, which sends it to Siri, and I tried reading some old journal entries, and it's actually pretty darn good! I might be able to get through transcribing my other notes using it with minimal corrections. Just need to make sure you state punctuation, or else it doesn't really put any into it. Still didn't seem that great for programming code though. Would be cool if I could find something decent for that.

swlkr 5y ago

This is really cool. The idea to separate the writing part from the computer entirely (not just the internet) is genius. Also, GPT3 helps out a bit there too.

criddell 5y ago
The OCR coupled with GPT3 worked much better than I would have guessed it would. I wonder how much of that is on the device and how much is in the cloud?

zeckalpha 5y ago

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

jgtrosh 5y ago
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.
- ComputerGuru 5y ago
  No, thanks. It’s terribly hard to read strangers’ handwriting.
  - jgtrosh 5y ago
    That's probably fair enough in many cases, but it should be doable to make the display togglable; and some handwriting is very enjoyable.

enryu 5y ago

Best article I read in a long time, kudos

johnnyo 5y ago

How do you add things like emojis and inline images? I don’t see anything in the text that maps to either in the output?

klohto 5y ago
Web editor

didip 5y ago

When Pg told people to build a business that doesn’t scale, he meant this.

chinathrow 5y ago
Well, this business scales easily, what am I missing?
- thepete2 5y ago
  I think the point is that him sending out notebooks (he only has 100 of) doesn't scale.
  - chinathrow 5y ago
    Ordering from an established supplier connection (in China) scales.
  - jethro_tell 5y ago
    I . . . Bet he could buy more . . .
  - tester756 5y ago
    just wait 2 decades and maybe he'll be top1 online shop
rkangel 5y ago
PG did NOT tell people to build businesses that don't scale. He told people to OPERATE businesses in ways that don't scale. That is of course true for this business - the overall model scales extremely well, but obviously what they're doing at the moment isn't scaleable. It is however an excellent proof of concept of the business model.

martneumann 5y ago

I could see a good use case for those planning/kanban/mind mapping meetings where you plaster a whiteboard with notes and drawings. Scanning or photographing that isn't so nice. Formatting it into a pleasant, readable wesbite would be pretty cool.

codebook 5y ago

I like write on paper. I have written journals for 14 years, which now fill one section of my bookshelves. This year I switched from fountain pens and clairfontaine notbook to E-ink tablet, Supernote A5x. the main purpose is to keep the record in digital formats, And so far I am satisfied. The OCR sucks, though. I hope Supernote may adopt the GPT-3.

thepete2 5y ago

Out of curiosity: Is the first OCR example really the best you can find? Is there no open source solution that outputs good results for handwritten notes?

foxhop 5y ago
There are open source "computer vision" libraries which work really well, but, also there is a file on your filesystem with all the words, so you could pass over the OCR'd text to fix "typos". Paper website will likely be cloned if it works.
- gwern 5y ago
  If you're referring to /usr/share/dict/words, no, you can't just pass over it to fix typos - it doesn't even have the proper noun 'Bel-Air' in it!
  - foxhop 5y ago
    Use you imagination.

allie1 5y ago

There’s a “dunder mifflin” joke somewhere in here

dgritsko 5y ago
It's actually in the post itself, if you read it!

throwawaycities 5y ago

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 box).

reginold 5y ago
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.
- throwawaycities 5y ago
  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 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
  - reginold 5y ago
    Hello fellow ENS fan :) Glad OpenSea puts up warnings about any emojis or Zero Width Joinders etc.

Philip-J-Fry 5y ago

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 surprised if they didn't produce their own feature to do the same thing eventually. It'd be way cooler if you could draw links on the page and it would figure that out. Or draw a box with some links in it and generate a header. Draw a box for a place holder image and generate that. The next iteration would obviously be using paper to design the actual site and then using CV to generate the markup/styling.

noodle 5y ago
Wouldn't be HN without the "you can build this trivially" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224] response.
- deleted 5y ago
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- Philip-J-Fry 5y ago
  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 scenes.
  - option_greek 5y ago
    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 $99 price). Because you are a developer, you are thinking in gpt/ocr/website building etc. Lot of people especially older generations eager to share stuff will find this useful if not amusing. For them its write something on paper and get a link back. Real users don't care about WordPress plugins.

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_virtu 5y ago

Slightly off topic, but I'm a bit of a paper snob at this point. While Moleskine is not the bottom of the barrel I still find for use with fountain pen inks they're not the best. You haven't lived until you try out some Tomoe river paper. Check out TarokoShop's notebooks: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-name&listing_id=725110826 https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-....

picture 5y ago
The Clairefontaine paper used in Rhodia's Rhodiarama notebooks are also excellent. The soft cover Rhodiarama are some of the best paper for really watery inks. Another fantastic option is Midori's notebook paper, their whole design and the open grid option are really pretty. https://www.midori-japan.co.jp/md/en/products/mdnote/ https://www.midori-japan.co.jp/md/en/products/mdnote/ Also if you're willing to over pay, the Kleid 2mm grid notebook with OK Fools paper are among the highest quality I've used. It has handy feature of detachable pages too.
- jen729w 5y ago
  While we’re on paper, I have a Field Notes “Expedition” special edition. [0] It has waterproof paper which is ‘fun’ but actually pretty useless as ink doesn’t really hold. So I had it for years and it went unused. And then I used a pencil! (Mitsubishi 9850 HB, thanks for asking.) [1] Oh and it is the most fun in the world! It’s like writing on a pat of butter with the tail of a fox. It’s the smoothest thing you’ve ever felt. Now it lives in the kitchen and I record meat temperatures and whisky cocktail ratios and it is my favourite book. That is all. [0]: https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/expedition https://fieldnotesbrand.com/products/expedition [1]: https://pencilly.com.au/product/mitsubishi-9850-hb/ https://pencilly.com.au/product/mitsubishi-9850-hb/
  - noahbradley 5y ago
    If you want some waterproof notebooks that aren't quite as impractical as those Expedition ones (they always smeared for me too), you might try Rite in the Rain. Had a great time using those over the years.

thinkski 5y ago

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

mbildner 5y ago
Can you clarify/ expand on this idea?
- nzach 5y ago
  I think GP was talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

georgecmu 5y ago

This 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/360002661437-Convert-handwritten-notes-into-text https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000266143...

visarga 5y ago
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.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > using a language model on top of character level OCR But if you know you're going to use a language model after the OCR, then you don't OCR to a single character, but rather to a distribution of character similarity (e.g. the 90% least similar or clipping at a certain similarity threshold). Then the language model should have more to work with (although TBH its work becomes more complicated).
- georgecmu 5y ago
  If a dictionary satisfies your definition of a language model, yes, with predictably poor results[1]. If I understand correctly, Google Books approach[2] represented a major improvement in accuracy of automated OCR (and this is for printed text!), but I would venture to say that implementing a language model like this would be far beyond the scope of a 'tiny project'. [1] https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Limits_on_the_Application_of_Frequency-based_Language_Models_to_OCR.pdf https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Limits_on_the_Applicati... [2] https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Improving_Book_OCR_by_Adaptive_Language_and_Image_Models.pdf https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Improving_Book_OCR_by_A...
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aaroninsf 5y ago

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

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arbuge 5y ago

It's a wonderful project. There's something romantic about it, for sure. And if I could plug my own project, you could also do it by just sending emails: https://publicemails.com https://publicemails.com.

kroltan 5y ago
Ironically, it seems like half of the emails there are just spam.
- arbuge 5y ago
  It's a free service right now. I'm thinking converting it to a paid one like the one in the article might solve this problem.
  - kroltan 5y ago
    To be clear I did not mean it as a dig on your service! It's a really cool idea, sorry for not saying it before. It was just a perfect irony. You could also do some heuristics like not accepting emails with excessive HTML. Though I'm not sure how much it'd work, since you already require confirmation so presumably the spammers actually have someone authorizing the publication. (I didn't test your flow since I have nothing that warrants posting to say)
robertlagrant 5y ago
Neat idea :)
q-base 5y ago
That is a really neat idea. Thanks a lot for sharing!

phantom_oracle 5y ago

I like this idea for the very simple fact that I now know its plausible to write blog content with a pen and paper and then some GPT-3 AI will scan those words and make it into digital text for me. Sparing my hands from using a keyboard! Brilliant idea!

ricardobayes 5y ago

I love this, for the simple fact it's one step closer for me to be a programmer without needing to sit at a computer or even use one. It's very far fetched right now, but I would love that.

donio 5y ago
We've had that before (mainframes, punch cards), it's not that great.

tmjdev 5y ago

Ben Stokes is an inspiration to me. I get excited reading any of the TinyProjects posts. It's so refreshing to see a solo dev building and shipping so much. Hoping I'm tracking for that kind of ability as a full stack dev.

zoom6628 5y ago
Second that. His thinking and what he does is astounding. I am envious of his ability to string things together but most so of his thinking of new ideas.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I'm mostly curious to know about the long term financials and time dedicated to support. I really want to know if these are viable means of spending your time or if they make you a decent amount of cash at first, then fall off immediately. On top of that, I'd like to know hours spent. As it stands, he's definitely in a deficit when we include time spent and taxes taken out. Although if it took 40 hours to make, sure it probably wasn't so bad. If it took 80+, then yeah he's not making much more than some Wal-mart employees. Which is why I'd like to see the long term feasibility of this.

strzibny 5y ago

Love it, best of the tiny projects so far;)

SeanFerree 5y ago

Love it!

SCUSKU 5y ago

Hey Ben, just wanted to say great post! A lot of these comments are fairly negative, and I imagine they can weigh on your psyche. I just wanted to say I am thoroughly impressed with your execution on the project as well as your ability to market your product. Really impressive stuff, big fan :)

twobitshifter 5y ago

This is a great idea and I’d love a future with an explosion of paper websites. However, I’m saddened that after all the attention and clicks the annual revenue is only $3600. It really shows the difficulty of getting someone to pay for your service. I wonder if an alternate revenue model would have been more successful?

andrethegiant 5y ago
The goal doesn't need to be to make money. The goal could just be to think of something new and have fun. And I think the author has clearly done that.

twobitshifter 5y ago

It would be great to see Gpt-3 taken further than this so there’s less need to mess with the layout afterwards. Maybe you describe a sketch and Gpt-3 draws you their best bike riding avocado? Or you add something that says “photos from todays trip” and it spins up the album roll. This would detract from the simplicity and may not make the product any more successful- but it would be very cool.

einpoklum 5y ago

> My girlfriend watched me, puzzled. After convincing her that I hadn't gone crazy Now _there_s a startup idea for you! How did you manage to do that? Much more interesting story :-P

Gtex555 5y ago

Whitelisting this website on my Adblock cause you opened with a TL:DR.

bee_rider 5y ago

It would be cool if this could spit out research papers. Computers are useful tools but they can be quite attention-destroying.

fourtrees 5y ago

Aw man, almost did this myself a few months ago when I was down with COVID. You make me reall want to revisit the idea! Grats on your success.

rexreed 5y ago

How does this GPT-3 based correction system work on unique names (last names) or on numbers or on things that can't be learned from an Internet corpus?

distrill 5y ago
Likely not great, if it hasn't seen it before. You could fine tune it if you had large amounts of data that sat outside of the internet corpus, but it doesn't sound like that's happening here.

throwaway47292 5y ago

next step, self hosted paper website on a pi zero :) send them the notebook and the pizero, make dyndns ipv6 only thing and let people selfhost nice project!

irae 5y ago

That 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 not be possible for me.

TekMol 5y ago
Why would it be a legal nightmare in Brazil?
- irae 5y ago
  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.

ineedasername 5y ago

I love this. It's hilariously written at the same time that it shows building something that is useful into a business without worrying about whether it would scale to Unicorn size. On the downside, the Moleskin IDE the custom one the author had made in China are extremely biased against people with bad handwriting. More attention to accessibility may be required. Seriously though this seems great if you have a bunch of notes and journals that you'd like to digitize. I have a small journal with my own recipes from over the years, and digitizing it has been in the back of my mind for a while-- if Paper Website can defeat my astoundingly awful handwriting.

TurkishPoptart 5y ago

How do the domains work for this? Are they automatically created?

TwelveNights 5y ago

I like using paper to journal about my day or write about random thoughts I might have that I'd like to flesh out further through writing. A few inconveniences of writing it though is that you might want to selectively share some stuff from time-to-time, lack of ability to add media (though a portable printer kinda solves this problem), and having a limit of space, relying on indexing journals when they fill up. A lot of the caveats are solved by privately blogging, though I do miss writing instead of typing everything. Something like this is almost a sweet spot of keeping the paper version as a "draft copy" while being able to enrich a digital version of your journal. As someone in the thread mentioned, being able to have private pages would likely encourage people to try it out for their journalling purposes. Otherwise, the project looks amazing!

FunHearing3443 5y ago

Trying the free trial - this is awesome! And it actually read my truly awful handwriting quite well. The website design and the technology is inspiring. Thank you!

xwdv 5y ago

Wow, the ending of this blog post felt like an incredible twist in a movie was just revealed.

giarc 5y ago
To me it felt more like a magician revealing a hidden twist.

maliker 5y ago

Reminds 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?

rackjack 5y ago

How does it handle images?

SirYandi 5y ago
Also how about italics / bold and heading / date subheading formatting. Perhaps there is a short manual editing step before publishing?

Graffur 5y ago

Why 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.

folli 5y ago
> this seems like a lot of effort for 4k a year Is this Hacker News or Get Rich Quick News?
- Graffur 5y ago
  What is "Get Rich Quick News"? The author included those specific details so I responded to them. I don't think either action reflects too much on this forum.

zepearl 5y ago

Excellent idea/project and result, and interesting&funny to read. And I loved your second-last sentence :D

FarmOfFriends 5y ago

whats the input to gpt-3? is it only the text outputted from the handwriting recognition? im just wondering if GPT-3 can be used as a spell check for speech to text use cases

094459 5y ago

I am so happy about this site as a few months ago I had a similar idea after speaking to some relatives who wanted badly to blog but was just terrified of the tech. After chatting for a while afternoon in between copious amounts of tea and cake, we came upon a design that involved pen/paper or a typewritten page, and an app that would convert this into a blog post. I hope this does really well and will be sharing this with that group.

kragen 5y ago

I wonder what value you could add to this with a notebook printed with digitally referenced paper? By printing an unobtrusive sort of barcode on each page, you could determine which part of which page of which notebook each scanned pixel came from, and what lighting conditions it was photographed under. What could you do with that? Well, the simplest and most greyface application is forms; you can define particular areas of each page as being particular form fields. If you're blogging, you might have a field for a "slug" that appears in the URL, for example, or a field for tags, or checkboxes for some tags (plus a special page to declare the meanings of the checkboxes). Or, if you're tracking expenses, you could have a checkbox for each expense category and columns for the date and the amount. For recipes, you might have a section for listing ingredients, with a column for unit of measure, a column for quantity, and a column for the ingredient name. Etc. For me, the special feature of paper notebooks that cellphones and other computers suck at is drawing. If I want to draw a diagram or illustration, it just works much better on paper: my pencil point occludes much less drawing area than my finger does, there's no tracking error where the ink appears 2 mm to the side of the point, it has much lower latency, and I can draw finer lines. But scanning those drawings into a computer is a pain, because I have to illuminate them evenly and hold them flat while I photograph them, which still probably involves some perspective distortion. Barcodes on the paper, together with reference lines and reference color swatches, could solve that problem, as well as providing information about which parts of the paper are occluded, if any. For a few special applications like numismatics and entomology, the paper could provide a precise physical measurement reference for specimens. Combining drawing with filling out forms, you can make a font from your handwriting; this is enormously easier if you can correct the various distortions. In http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/ http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/ I spent about 24 hours fiddling with various graphics programs, but there was a website I found somewhere where you can print out a form, draw the font on it, upload the scan, and download your TrueType font. This kind of thing might help with training OCR, too, especially if you don't have access to GPT-3. (Or if OpenAI decides to peremptorily destroy everything you've built because one of your users uses your service to write about their dead fiancee: https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-opens-gpt-3-for-everyone-fb7fed309f6 https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-opens-gpt-3-for-everyo...) Other ways to combine drawing and filling out forms include sketching orthographic projections to build 3-D models; coloring a coloring book; drawing maps for Minetest and similar grid-cell games (especially 2-D ones); drawing heightfields; and sketching different keyframes of an animation to automatically morph between. You could even draw a 2-D continuum of keyframes, thus providing an animation character that's continuously variable along two different axes; you might put time on the theta axis and some sort of emotion along the radius axis. (You can also apply these ideas with drawings that are input via other media, such as touchscreens, Wacom tablets, and mice, not only scanning paper. When you're scanning paper it's hard to get feedback as you're drawing, although you could maybe glance at your cellphone screen periodically, or use a projector like DynamicLand, or have a continuously updated monitor using a webcam feed. It could even use the occlusion information from the barcode to patch in remembered images wherever your hands were occluding the paper.) What should the barcodes look like? In 02001 Anoto announced their "Digital Paper" approach: https://www.wired.com/2001/04/anoto/ https://www.wired.com/2001/04/anoto/. As explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper this uses an unobtrusive 2-D barcode scanned by a camera in a "digital pen" (later called the "Fly Pen", 02005) to locate the pen in an enormous global "virtual desktop"; I think the NeoLAB "Neo smartpen" works the same way. This was all before cameraphones went mainstream and high resolution. They got 300 patents but fortunately everything they filed in 02001 expires this year. Anoto's barcodes use a grid of slightly displaced grid dots. The Fly Pen provided a sort of graphical user interface on the paper, using audio for output. It was sort of aimed at kids doing schoolwork and playing games. It failed in 02009. The founder started a new company called Livescribe focusing on notetaking; the Livescribe smartpen allows you to spatially organize and annotate a continuous audio recording. It has been more commercially successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe Tiny unobtrusive dots might not reproduce reliably on a cellphone camera, though having been published in WIRED in 02001 means the technique is in the public domain (or will be next year). A better idea might be to use thin horizontal and vertical grid lines whose thickness varies slightly, perhaps in a pastel subtractive primary like cyan, magenta, or yellow; then you can optionally remove them in software after scanning. Scanning a whole page at a time, instead of a tiny area around a pen point like the "digital pens" described above, gives you a great deal more space for redundant page ID data in the barcode; probably 48 bits or so is sufficient.

hyperpallium2 5y ago

Reminds me of David Rees' Artisanal Pencil Sharpening https://youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=KabOfnbS4TQ Hipster co-marketing opportunity?

mNovak 5y ago

All I want is a dead easy way to make a landing page + account + payment options for a tiny prototype SaaS like this (e.g. I supply a few APIs as 'backend' and the rest just works) -- quite similar to the One Item Store the author made. I can only imagine how many people have had to repeat all the same boring steps for some small proto.

hardwaresofton 5y ago
Hey have you tried/considered BulletTrain[0] or lemonsqueezy[1]? I also have something that I'm working on for this -- I've used my tool (which isn't productized yet, it's still ~4 templated repos) to launch 2 projects (in bio) so far and am working on a third product, but BulletTrain/lemonsqueezy are two much more polished options I know about -- maybe you should give them a try? Is the thing you're trying to sell an API? Or is it a resource-provisioning sort of SaaS (they sign up, you spin off a persistent worker or something). I model them as the same in my thing (the provisioned "resource" is the API key), but I think that's one of the big differences in which tool will work easily for you. [0]: https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/ [1]: https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/ https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/

aerovistae 5y ago

A lot of this seems manageable to me - like I could imagine myself being able to build it - but I have no idea how the author handled the domain names part and hosting all these websites. How did you just "throw together" a registrar and a hosting service? Seems like they built heroku and namecheap as side facets to their "tiny project." I must be missing something.

codazoda 5y ago
Startup Founders often say, “do things that don’t scale”. If I were trying this, I might just register the domains in my account, list myself as the admin, and list them for everything else. No building necessary until you prove the idea.
- selcuka 5y ago
  Exactly. For a $99/year subscription it makes sense to manually perform a one-time setup. That being said, domain name registration APIs are a thing [1]. Hosting should be even more trivial with a multi-tenant architecture. [1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_domains_RegisterDomain.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_...

adfm 5y ago

Marshall McLuhan would have appreciated this. Most everyone is familiar with his “The medium is the message” phrase, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll come to appreciate his fascination with “Technology as extension of the human body.” That brio pen; the light bulb illuminating your workspace; the words you write; they’re all extensions of your body — from transcribing your internal thoughts, through your extremities, through transmission and distribution. If the author is reading this, I hope you’ll consider connecting with a few reputable online stationary retailers to offer a curated collection of reasonably-priced premium notebooks and pens. Additionally, consider expanding your original scope to include tags, which would open up your platform to paper-based automation opportunities. If you’ve made it this far and are just looking for the best cross-platform handwriting recognition, check out the Nebo app. It requires a stylus, but it’s the best I’ve come across and it reads PDFs, too.

mikabozu 5y ago

I really like the gpt-3 idea. I have a notebook full of short story ideas that I've been too lazy too transcribe, but now I have a way to get things onto my computer!

esjeon 5y ago

This idea carries some decent vibes. Pretty cool, seriously. But I think I can't use this service: (1) It requires "editing" for web publication, and I know I'm too lazy to keep up with that. (2) I find myself mostly scribble with pencil and paper, and write on computer. This is partially because my handwriting is in another dimension in terms of recognizability. (3) I sweat a lot, and that ruins paper notebooks pretty quickly, normally within 2~3 months of daily use. (So I use legal pads.) So, personally, I've always thought about the reverse: write pages with computer, and make a book out of it for archival, like, yearly. Still, I'm yet to carry out this idea, because: (1) I'm unsatisfied with currently available text-based document formats - either too limited (markdown), too biased (ReST), or too verbose(HTML/XML). I'm hoping to build something like Notion(block-driven) out of plain-text document format. (2) I fiercely hate proprietary note-taking services and apps. I've already had enough headaches: pages lost, broken import/export features, backup restoration failures, etc. Never gonna spend a single penny on them.

syntaxing 5y ago

Pardon my ignorance, how do you deploy a GPT-3 model cheaply?

mylons 5y ago
you don't deploy it, you go to openai.com and use their API.

peterkelly 5y ago

Every time someone adds a new package to npm, they should be forced to write it out by hand like this.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Well, then enjoy having me never contribute to npm ever again.
- SixDouble5321 5y ago
  That seems to be the point. XD

dirtybirdnj 5y ago

I don't know if I want to use it, but I love this idea. The post promoting it was fantastic and the "you've been on a paper website the whole" time thing at the end was great. Serious inspiration food, thank you for posting.

jpswade 5y ago

This is amazingly inspiring. Not only is it a whole end to end brand and product but it solves a problem that keeps coming up in this community, about making the web fun again.

nephanth 5y ago

Fron an engineer's point of view, it's impressive how technically simple this is (author is basically assembling preexisting common building blocks) Yet how great the added value is: it opens a whole new way of blogging

everydaybro 5y ago

This is amazing!

JamesAdir 5y ago

Great work! Would love to hear more about the technologies/languages used in this site.

kenjackz 5y ago

Isn't this one have already endorsed their project here in HN a while ago?

gkfasdfasdf 5y ago

How about a notebook that scans for you? I.e. one side is a notepad, other side has a tiny camera on rails, close the notebook and it automatically scans and uploads the written page.

tdehaene 5y ago

Supernice! We actually did something similar using a more explicit seq2seq model, using ByT5: https://blog.ml6.eu/ocr-correction-with-byt5-5994d1217c07 https://blog.ml6.eu/ocr-correction-with-byt5-5994d1217c07