This is amazing!

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

Inspiring

Awesome.

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.

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

Oh well.

Oh I misread. That type of linking definitely feels doable. Images & styles are a whole other can of worms though

Not word for word, but pretty close: "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially..."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

No doubt we're all more motivated by ego than we believe we are, but comments that take a supercilious stance and put everybody else down don't help—and are not part of the culture we're hoping for here.

IMO it’s a generally good mentality — the fact that dropbox is not that hard for your average programmer to replicate (by plumbing with existing tech) is exactly why you have so much variety in the software space.

Of course, turning a functional program into a function business is no simple feat, but no one should be looking at these things and thinking “it takes a genius with a once-in-a-lifetime idea” — because, well, it clearly doesn’t. And it’s really not the most incredible or innovative idea.

The intelligence was largely in transforming something you could do into something you could easily do — and identify that it has a potential for profit, and identify how to extract that profit, and executing on it long enough to achieve that profit.

I think that's in play either way--people need to tell or be told that their idea is actually technically challenging, unusually insightful into business or users, etc. Critics are silenced because there must be no way they've read patio11 if they're posting, etc. Capacity for mutually appreciative disagreement is low on HN.

The average business is not brilliant and yet is still not easy to execute long enough to succeed. Life is hard.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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

It would be cool if this could spit out research papers.

Computers are useful tools but they can be quite attention-destroying.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

How does it handle images?

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

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!

> 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

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.

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

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

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

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

i love that it doesn't scale!

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

Best article I read in a long time, kudos

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.

How are you handling international tax?

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.

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/ 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-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/. As explained in 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

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.

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)

That's probably fair enough in many cases, but it should be doable to make the display togglable; and some handwriting is very enjoyable.

Hello fellow ENS fan :)

Glad OpenSea puts up warnings about any emojis or Zero Width Joinders etc.

Use you imagination.

I . . . Bet he could buy more . . .

Ordering from an established supplier connection (in China) scales.

just wait 2 decades and maybe he'll be top1 online shop

Fun fact - I worked for a bit in Japan for Yupo (the company that makes the paper of the same name and used in this notebook) as part of the project team that was overseeing the construction of the Yupo plant in Virginia. I was originally hired through an English language school on contract to help with editing the English translations of their technical documentation but also got to do some things like porting a sheet temperature simulator from MS-DOS to Windows.

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.

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

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.

“Facebook didn’t provide me what I wanted…THE WEB IS DEAD!”

Thanks!

I wonder how realistic a hybrid of human and algorithmic curation would be.

Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.

Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com. Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling robots. Just a $300k domain squat.

Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats sake or something. Good times.

or much much worse. NSFW klaxon alarms and visits from HR for viewing this content at work type situations.

Parking domains have been a staple of the internet since its inception.

Or a page full of ads.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that you are training yourself using a reinforcement learning approach to meet the needs of an imperfect machine learning application.

Could you post a link to this guide? My handwriting while not horrible could use some improvement, and is not helped by the fact that I am left handed.

I've found Reddit improved by careful curation of my subscribed subreddits. If I spent most of my time in there rather than /r/all then it's great. I still feel like scrolling through memes on /r/all from time to time and that has the beneficial side effect of helping me add to those subscriptions.

I don’t get complaints like this, my Reddit front page looks fine. Are people subscribing to crappy subreddits and then getting mad at the inevitable results?

I decided I hated having chicken-scratch handwriting around the end of high school / beginning of college. I literally did writing worksheets (tracing over letters) like I was in kindergarten. And if I wrote a messy word / letter on my homework I'd cross the word out and do it again. It made a huge difference, and I started getting compliments all the time on my writing. It's slipped back into average territory since, but it definitely works!

I disagree on the suggested method, but I agree that handwriting can be improved. Someone who writes in prescription cursive isn't going to get better with a new pen and different paper. It takes deliberate practice and attention to detail.

This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an adage.

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.

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.

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.

I feel like even with moderation, Reddit has a natural limitation by dint of being "adoration by upvote". You can't start a conversation outside of the boxes defined by the sub. If your post comes across as even slightly promoting of an undesired subject it mostly falls into the spam and downvote bucket, unless the sub is very specifically trying to include that, you have gained pre-approval, or you have manufactured some kind of storyline that loopholes both rules and human emotions. The average mod team is prone to abuse of power, so they also come down hard on anything potentially disruptive to the intended discourse. The incentives then move towards posting on Reddit in an intentionally deceptive "influencer" mode at all times - equal parts hype, pity, and outrage.

And there's both a reason for that being the case(nobody wants spam, and moderating can curate effectively in the best subs) and for it being harmful(community interaction ossifies into a familiar set of things that get upvotes, which subsequently pollutes every thread).

This is absolutely true for most companies, but in this specific case he could open a “MEI” type of business (individual micro-entrepreneur) on the government website and use the CNAE 8219-9/99 (“Digitator” or typist) to receive immediately a CNPJ, which would allow him to launch the site on the first day and charge customers, paying very few taxes and without a lot of bureaucracy (well, he would end up needing to deliver some papers to the city hall after that and also generate all the invoices, but this can be done days later, during the first month of CNPJ creation).

Stripe's Atlas program seems to be available in Brazil?

https://stripe.com/atlas

Humans must be using a language model for image recognition when reading though. Otherwise things like failing to spot the the is a duplicate word wouldn't happen so often.

Brains do patten recognition much better than computers (albeit slower)

People do things like include two suburbs because they know that (eg) in order for it to reach their address correctly, it must first reach the human at point A that will correctly pass it to the human at point B, where it otherwise cannot arrive at point B because point B does not receive normal postal service, possibly because of a jurisdiction dispute in 1974 that placed their address in a zip code that’s different from all of their neighbors.

Can you tell that I know a bunch of people with these kinds of issues? You may already know that programmers mess up names all the time, telling people that their last name must be their surname, or that you can’t be an O’Reilly or a Robertson-Peele, or that “Mary Anne” is not a single name, or that your middle name cannot be your “primary” name, or that you must have more than one name, or that your legal name is invalid because it’s not the name you were born with, or that all 3yos have names, etc.

Well, take all of those issues, and add the vagaries of geography, and you’ve got mail delivery.

I have a weird address, and easily 30% of websites insist on fucking it up by applying validation rules that might make sense from 20,000 feet, but don't actually work in practice for our address.

The most straightforward of them is that some validation services insist that our ZIP code is for the next town over instead of the one we live in, which has its own post office. Nothing correct happens if our mail goes to the wrong post office because they (rightly) have no idea how to deliver mail to us.

I wouldn't be so confident that 100% of that 70% don't know their own address. For at least some of those cases, I'm willing to bet they know something you don't about the vagaries of mail and package delivery to their address.

Modern postal OCR is generally good enough to detect bad addresses, but my point was people still beat it when the domain is so constrained.