Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287293

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268413

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187201

Points: 294

# Comments: 235

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

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.

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

(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.

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.

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.

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.

SignatureAPI is an electronic signature platform via API. Our customers use SignatureAPI to add electronic signatures to their apps and workflows.

SignatureAPI was born out of the frustration of a friend of mine who needed to integrate electronic signatures into his app, but found Docusign API, at $1+ per envelope, too expensive for his use case. We quickly realized that many others shared this same frustration.

We are different from other platforms such as Docusign, Dropbox Sign, Adobe Sign, etc in two key ways:

1. API-First. We are focused on the ease of integration and the developer experience (we are proud of our docs). With SignatureAPI, the API is not a second-class citizen to the UI. The API _is_ the product.

2. Pricing. Our pricing ranges from $0.10 to $0.25 per envelope. Compare that to Docusign API at $1.25–$4.80, Dropbox Sign API at $1.50–$2.50, or Adobe Sign API at $1.80–$2.50.

Our electronic signatures are legally binding in many places, including the US and the EU. The legal foundation of SignatureAPI was developed by a top team of electronic signature lawyers. (And yes, we have the “green checkmark” in Acrobat).

We’d love to hear your honest feedback—likes, dislikes, feature requests—whatever you’ve got.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41708272

Points: 22

# Comments: 12

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...

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