15:I[981,["658","static/chunks/658-a698693f56d0116a.js","183","static/chunks/183-6beeeb801c274aaa.js","474","static/chunks/app/%5Btype%5D/layout-631c4730b83c8223.js"],"Posts"] 16:T5d3,Hey HN!

Last week, Joe Barrow released CommonForms [1], a set of open models for automatically detecting form fields in PDFs.

He trained two models, FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L, on a dataset of 55k documents. You can read more about his approach in the arXiv paper [2].

As someone who's been searching for reliable models to auto-detect form fields (one of the last hard problems in PDF form filling), I was seriously impressed by the quality of these models. I wanted to give them the attention and distribution they deserve, so I created a fully browser-based implementation that handles both detection and field addition.

My implementation relies on his models and onnx runtime web + some post-processing. I plan on publishing a small browser library to encapsulate it in the coming days to make it easier to deploy anywhere (currently you'd have to fork / copy my code)

Happy to answer any questions about the browser-based implementation!

Questions about the models themselves should be directed to Joe, who I believe is also on HN [3]

[1] https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jbarrow17:T46f,I built dumbsmartphones.com for people who want to use their phone less — without switching to a clunky flip phone or giving up iMessage.

The idea is simple: we take an iPhone and configure it through Apple’s device management tools to remove addictive apps and lock down distractions. You can still text, call, navigate, and take photos — but no TikTok, n

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