Regarding the AI receptionists, from the calls I've listened to, there's still a bit of the uncanny valley/overlapping speech issues that I'm unsure are ever fixable just due to latency.

But for low margin businesses like contracting and (I imagine) auto repair where labor is your most expensive cost, these owners are doing anything they can to reduce their overhead.

It's dead simple to use: send a request to `https://httpthing.com/{endpoint}` and the request will be logged for you to inspect. A unique URL will be returned so you can easily see the request details in a browser.

If you want to see all requests sent to `{endpoint}`, just go to `https://httpthing.com/_/{endpoint}`. Requests are public, so it's best to use a randomly generated `{endpoint}`.

Simple, I know, but I've started using it for all of my webhook testing. Let me know if you find it simple and useful as well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46123204

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Like everyone, I'm working on an product that uses LLMs to extract data from photos and documents. Part of the processing pipeline is extracting data from PDFs as raw text or a raster image.

As part of our leadgen strategy, we've opened our REST API that lets you process pages of a PDF. The API is completely free to use anonymously, but is rate limited to 1 page per 30 seconds. Creating a free account removes this restriction.

The two endpoints are:

- https://extract.dev/api/pages/extract/raster - Rasterize a page of a PDF

- https://extract.dev/api/pages/extract/text - Extract text from a page of a PDF

Both have the same request format:

    {
        "file": "https://assets.extract-cdn.com/data/hd-receipt.pdf",
        "page": 1
    }

Under the hood, the API is using Poppler to extract text and rasterize pages. Note that the text extraction functionality extracts actual text encoded in the PDF, and does not employ an OCR model. Give it a spin, I'm interested in your feedback if this is useful or not.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45581760

Points: 13

# Comments: 0

I spent hours painstakingly drawing similar grids that the author of this article made and manually doing the calculations [0]. I still have these notes somewhere, even though they're over 20 years old at this point, because I was so proud of the work I put into it.

At any rate, thanks for this article and the trip down memory lane.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/zRYaodL (apologies for the Imgur link)

When I asked the same model about what happened during the 1970 Kent State shootings, it gave me exactly what I asked for.

[0] https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct-GGUF/b...