victop
victop on Hacker News
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Posted by
victop on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @09:41AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://signatureapi.com
Hey HN! Victor here from SignatureAPI (https://signatureapi.com)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...
Not OP, but would love to see those real world examples.
> 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...
> 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.'
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.’”
Posted by
victop on Tuesday May 03, 2022 @03:02PM
from the developers.cloudflare.com dept.
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
- ide.as
- nifty.art
- coinquadrant.com
Awesome. Thanks for sharing.
Another example: followupthen.com
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.
Posted by
victop on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @08:30AM
from the ask-hn dept.
By email-first I mean services that the email is the principal (or only) interface between the service and the user. For example: Posterous before Spaces. Thanks.
Posted by
victop on Monday April 26, 2021 @01:40PM
from the pdfblocks.com dept.
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/
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.
> 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?