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Here is an easier to read version, in clean markdown: https://github.com/cucho/magnifica-humanitas/blob/master/mar...

cuchoon Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25

> Not sure how we arrived at the present title

It was me. Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Chris Olah co-authored the encyclical with the Pope. I just found it noteworthy that there was someone from the “industry” at the encyclical presentation on May 25, which I think is a first. Usually, they are all clergy or academics.

cuchoon Ask HN: What is the underlying stack behind multi-agent platforms?

We are using LangGraph, which is quite low level, but has useful features like time travel, human in the loop capabilities (interruptions), flexibility on the paradigm.

cuchoon Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

Economic BCAs are typically handled by large eng firms like Arup, Jacobs, and WSP. However, the tricky task of modeling time savings (given that transport systems are complex) is often subcontracted to more specialized firms such as Steer.

Deloitte, KPMG, etc are usually more involved in writing the financial case (how to fund the project).

cuchoon Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people.

You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc.

IIRC, if you hit a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.0 or higher, the project is considered 'high value' and has a good shot at getting executed.

cuchoon Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down

All good security measures, for sure, but the blog post you linked doesn’t mention anything about telemetry (ie request data sent to those *.gw.postman.com endpoints). As a user, it would be great to know exactly what data is sent to Postman servers (eg we send resolved query strings, we don’t send headers, etc), as well as to have an easy way to opt out of telemetry altogether.

cuchoon Postman which I thought worked locally on my computer, is down

Please can you address the claim that Postman is silently leaking customer secrets to your servers as part of telemetry?

https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...

cuchoon Google Workspace ESignatures

At first glance, Google's e-signatures seems to check all the boxes for legally-binding electronic signatures: user consent to conduct business electronically, proper adoption of a signature symbol, and signed documents tamper-proof'd with a cryptographic signature.

(You'd be surprised how many e-signature platforms fail to meet the basic legal and jurisprudence standards for creating electronic signatures that can hold up in court)

I'm glad to see serious competition for 20-year-old dinosaurs like DocuSign, Adobe Sign (ex EchoSign), and Dropbox Sign (ex HelloSign). They've gone undisrupted for far too long.

Disclaimer: IANAL, but working at SignatureAPI.com I've been advised with the top e-signature lawyers in the US.

cuchoon Study: RTO mandates are making it harder for companies to hire

Offshore labor is already penalized: For tax purposes under Section 174, costs for US devs must be amortized over 5 years, while costs for offshore devs are amortized over 15 years.

cuchoon Show HN: SignatureAPI – Electronic Signature API

We cryptographically sign (or seal) the document to meet the integrity and tamper-proof requirements of most regulations.

Here on HN, we know you can seal the document by signing the hash with a private key and a self-signed certificate. Technically, the e-signatures inside are OK, the seal is cryptographically valid, and the document is tamper-proof, but good luck explaining that to a layperson (like a judge) when they open the document in Acrobat and get a scary red alert saying the signatures are invalid.

At SignatureAPI, we seal the document with a certificate that has a trust chain ending in a root certificate in the Adobe Approved Trust List. This gets you a reassuring green checkmark and a message "the signatures are valid" when the document is opened in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader.

You can check out an example here: https://signatureapi.com/docs/resources/deliverables/audit-l...

Not many e-signature providers offer this green checkmark. Docusign, Dropbox, and Adobe do, but most others don't even cryptographically seal the document—which should raise red flags about whether they really know what they're doing legally.

cuchoon Show HN: SignatureAPI – Electronic Signature API

Our API lets you create and track e-signature transactions ("envelopes"), while the actual signing (the "ceremony") happens in a user interface we provide. You can customize, localize, and brand this UI, embed it into your web or mobile app, or send a link to your signers to sign.

cuchoon Show HN: SignatureAPI – Electronic Signature API

Out of the box, we authenticate using email links, which is not the strongest method but sufficient for most cases and legally recognized.

You can also bring your own identity verification provider (eg ID card comparison with live video, biometrics, HSM token, etc) and integrate that verification into the signing process. Our API is flexible enough to support this.

cuchoon Show HN: SignatureAPI – Electronic Signature API

We believe using an independent third party (like SignatureAPI, Docusign, etc) for electronic signatures adds value. If you host your own electronic signature platform instance, you act as both the authority and the signer/signee. In case of a dispute, this could make the signature difficult to defend.

That said, there may be cases where a self-hosted solution makes sense (eg in high-trust situations), and I always like seeing new electronic signature platforms come in and challenge the incumbents.

cuchoon Show HN: OpenSign – Open source alternative to DocuSign

Not OP, but would love to see those real world examples.

cuchoon Ask HN: How do you start a startup in your 30s when you have wife/kids/mortgage?

> Are all startups at my age generally side hustles that become profitable enough to quit my day job?

Maybe yes. But that's only the first step.

40yo here, married, 3 kids (5yo, 3yo, 1yo), and a mortgage. I am more in the risk-averse side.

I was a CIO ('I' as in 'investment') in a family office. In 2019 I started building a document processing service (eg merge, encrypt PDFs) as a side hustle. It grew slowly and steadly, until, in May 2022 I got enough recurring revenue to ask my employer to reduce my load to half-time, taking a paycheck cut.

In the other half of the day, I am working in a more ambitious idea. I expect that at the time I am ready to launch, the income from my document processing service will be near 100% of my full-time FO paycheck, so I am taking very little financial risk.

Two resources that would have helped me a lot when I was having the same questions as you are:

- Rob Walling's "Stair Step Method" https://robwalling.com/2015/03/26/the-stair-step-method-of-b...

- Dan Hulton's "Evaluating Modest SaaS Business Ideas" https://greaterdanorequalto.com/evaluating-modest-saas-busin...

cuchoon Fly.io makes infrastructure easy for developers

> Heroku is going away because it no longer works as a business.

I would rather say 'It no longer works as a business for Salesforce.'

cuchoon Show HN: A Store Front for your Stripe account in 1 click

For a project, I did ask them about using “Stripe” in my product’s name. They replied: “ To quickly answer your query, we highly recommend NOT using the word Stripe because, although we do not have a public article specifically dissuading the use of the word Stripe for 3rd-party developed tools, it will most likely go against ‘Stripe Marks Usage Agreement.’”

cuchoon Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents

For higher volume, but simpler operations (merge, watermark, encrypt/decrypt, etc.) you can try https://www.pdfblocks.com/api. You get 10K docs processed for $29/mo, and 1M for $99/mo. We don't have conversion, OCR, generation, or chained operations though.

Source: I work at PDF Blocks

cuchoon Ask HN: List your "brandable" domains to find them a new home

  - ide.as
  - nifty.art
  - coinquadrant.com

cuchoon Ask HN: Examples of email-first projects or startups?

Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

cuchoon Ask HN: Examples of email-first projects or startups?

Another example: followupthen.com

cuchoon Ask HN: Examples of email-first projects or startups?

Thanks. By email I mean send to an email address, and something happens. FWD:Everyone is more a add-on to a tool (that happens to send/receive emails) than an email-as-interface service.

cuchoon Ask HN: What is the most beautifully typeset book you've ever encountered?

This question [0] in the TeX Stack Exchange has beautiful typesetted examples, like this LaTeX facsimile of (one page of) a Bible de Genève of 1564 [1], and Byrne's Elements of Euclyd from 1847 [2]

[0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/1319/777

[1] https://github.com/raphink/geneve_1564/releases/download/201...

[2] https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid/releases/downloa...

cuchoon 'Megascale' structures that humans could one day build

There is (was?) a project to do your first structure in the Atacama Desert in Chile:

> Espejo de Tarapacá (EdT) – one of the most innovative infrastructure projects in the world – is comprised of a 300 MW pumped hydro storage plant that operates with seawater, located approximately 100 kilometers south of Iquique. This project is essentially a large electricity storage system which will eliminate, at a low cost, the intermittency of non-conventional renewable energy – such as solar energy.

http://valhalla.cl/espejo-de-tarapaca/

cuchoon Ask HN: Best place to live for climbing, skiing and surfing?

Santiago, Chile. 1.5 hour drive to the ski centers in the Andes and 1.5-2 hour drive to the sea. Also, the shape of Chile ensures you have plenty of mountains and coast to chose from.

cuchoon I sold Baremetrics

> This (No time-based or performance-based earnout) was the greatest limiting factor on acquistion price.

For those who have gone through an acquisition, how much more Josh could have netted if he accepted to stay 2-4 years?

cuchoon The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing (2017)

Soon: "Amazon has teamed up with Lennar to transform select Lennar homes into Amazon Experience Centers" http://theopendoor.lennar.com/real-estate-news/amazon-lennar...

cuchoon Ask HN: What problems your industry has that desperately need a solution?

In my day job, I work as an advisor to UHNW families and individuals. They have their investments spread across multiple institutions, each providing their own monthly statement, holdings, etc. Our clients pay 4-figures fees monthly to have a consolidated statement (how much money I earned on August, what has been my return YTD, etc.) and portfolio holdings (How much fixed income do I have? How much I am exposed to the Turkish lira? to Argentinian stocks?). Most of the information is in the individual statements (in pdf) and the rest from providers such as Bloomberg and Morningstar. The solutions out there are custom-made and have a lot of manual input. I think a bit of AI and good visualizations can go great lengths to solve this problem.

cuchoon Ask HN: What paid email provider service

There is a less expensive ($5/mo) option without the desktop apps.

cuchoon Ask HN: How do you keep your ideas?

Thanks! How many ideas do you have in ideas.txt. How often do you read them?