4 ms·
> You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs Wherein you discover that unless you ask it to consider the fact that
by svieira 2y ago
> You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs
Wherein you discover that unless you ask it to consider the fact that PDFs are ... very hard to parse [1] [2] you get something that misses whole blocks of text or turns them into something they aren't and the rest of the program misses chunks of the document.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22473263
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction https://web.archive.org/web/20200303102734/https://www.filin...
- bongodongobob 2y agoWhy are you expecting they are all very different? They're all likely very similar.
- svieira 2y agoBecause presuming that all of them are produced by the same utility is a _presumption_. They could be - but they could also be produced by many different vendors using many different methods all of them simply conforming to the specification "a PDF with HIGH LEVEL DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA".