[Philip-J-Fry]

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.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Disagree because:

* I primarily see this as, not a traditional website builder, but as a way to take paper journals and transform them into web journals/blogs.

* As someone who has tried all manner of tools and software for journaling (literally like tens of software apps), I've found that my brain just works best with a nice paper journal and a great pen (I highly recommend the prismacolor premier fine marker). It just works far better for me than anything else.

I'm so glad this project is at the top of HN. It is the ultimate "hacker project" of someone that scratched a personal itch, and found out other folks would be willing to pay for it.

[claytn]

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

[Philip-J-Fry]

I don't mean writing out a URL...

You could name pages like "Home", "About", "My trip to Paris". And then write on the piece of paper "[link to My trip to Paris]"

Or you could write "[link from Posts]" to add it to a common listing.

You'd basically just create a written form of Markdown.

[claytn]

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

[underdeserver]

A blog is more about the content of a single post than about the links inside.

When I'm reading a post, I rarely click any links at all.

[closetohome]

Yeah it's integration of OCR and a lightweight CMS that also conveniently rolls together fees for hosting and GPT3.

I was a little surprised that the paper part is used only for plain text. It would sort of make sense to have at least a few formatting and layout features.

[noodle]

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

[InGoodFaith]

Wouldn't also be HN without the misinterpretation of BrandonM's response.

Here is dang's comment about that topic/meme [1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29178442

[Philip-J-Fry]

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]

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.

[cxr]

> You are not looking at this from user perspective.

They are looking at it that way. Because what you just described would be great for the user. The only problem is that what you described doesn't match how this service actually works. That it should work like but doesn't is the entire basis for Philip-J-Fry's comments. Both comments here make it clear enough what he or she is talking about, so the response admonishing them (to empathize with the users) is odd.

[trulyme]

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.

[bluecatswim]

That's not what parent said at all, if anything he meant the very opposite. He was just suggesting missing features. The site is a nice tiny project but it's not what you'd expect when you think of making websites from paper, you'd think it would understand layouts and convert them to CSS or let you create a sitemap from a tree but as it is it's just OCRing text and uploading it to a page with an editor next to it.

[Drew_]

"You can build this trivially" is a fair criticism once you build your own products and realize how rampant IP theft is. Aside from that, the infamous dropbox comment you linked doesn't at all say "you can build this trivially".

[habibe]

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

[MCneill27]

It's pathetic. So many egos that need to be assuaged every time a clever execution they didn't do is brought to their attention.

[dang]

"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.

[setr]

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.

[1123581321]

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.