1. OTranscribe: A free and open tool for transcribing audio interviews
Total comment counts : 31
Summary
The article discusses a web app called oTranscribe that helps make transcribing recorded interviews easier. The app, created by Elliot Bentley and supported by the MuckRock Foundation, offers features such as italic and bold formatting and the ability to play, pause, and insert timestamps.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article used a tool called Whisper-Diarization on GitHub to transcribe an interview with multiple speakers. They found that the tool performed excellently and generated two types of files: one with uninterrupted speech from each speaker prefixed with their speaker number, and another file with timestamps that could be used as subtitles.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article explains that OTranscribe is not an automatic speech-to-text tool but rather a user interface (UI) that helps with manual transcription. It clarifies that there is no artificial intelligence (AI) involved in OTranscribe.
2. Do quests, not goals
Total comment counts : 30
Summary
The article discusses the concept of setting personal aspirations and achieving them through a quest-like mentality. It highlights the problems with traditional goal-setting, such as waiting for the right time and associating goals with uninspiring institutional words. The author introduces the idea of One Big Win, a program that helps people achieve personal victories while living their everyday lives. The author suggests using the term “quest” instead of “goal” to create a more adventurous and transformative mindset. A quest is seen as an adventure with unexpected challenges and personal growth. The article emphasizes that the journey itself shapes who you are and what you are capable of, rather than just achieving the end result.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the distinction between focusing on the process (quest) of something versus the outcome (goal). The writer suggests that they may enjoy having written a book but wouldn’t necessarily enjoy the act of writing it. They also argue that labeling something as a quest instead of a goal likely wouldn’t make much difference.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article emphasizes the importance of certain principles over others. These include prioritizing the process rather than focusing solely on outcomes, adopting a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, and valuing professionalism over amateurism. The author also advocates for embracing boring fundamentals rather than relying on flashy tricks, and promoting agency and presence over passivity and regret. The article discusses the concept of unlearning perfectionism.
3. Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool
Total comment counts : 9
Summary
The author reflects on their background in music and how they stumbled upon web development. They explain their experience with recording and tracking their own music, as well as their limited skills with different instruments. The author shares their renewed interest in coding and specifically Sonic Pi, a software synth controlled entirely through code. They describe the language and functions used in Sonic Pi and share their goal of composing music purely through code. The author provides examples and demonstrates how to create musical sequences and parallel instruments using loops. They also mention the possibility of constructing layered notes manually.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article recommends trying out Glicol if you are interested in live coding. It also mentions another tool called TidalCycles and praises the ability of Haskell and Ruby in creating Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). The author explains that Glicol focuses on language design with a synth-inspired syntax, composition speed, and convenience of sound design. The goal is to create a DSL that incorporates programming habits while not being limited to existing languages.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article suggests that programming in Ruby is advantageous due to its syntax, which is described as being almost like English.
4. Jake Seliger has died
Total comment counts : 43
Summary
This article is about a website that is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. It states that the action the reader just performed triggered the security solution. There are various actions that could trigger this block, such as submitting a specific word or phrase, a SQL command, or malformed data. The article advises the reader to contact the site owner to inform them of being blocked, including details of what was being done when the page appeared and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of the page.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the experiences of Jake, who shared his insights on various topics including his experience with cancer. One of his essays on the concept of ‘agenticness’ received little discussion but was considered insightful. The article also mentions Jake’s wife, Bess, who writes a blog called Everything is an Emergency, where she shares her perspective as a wife, caregiver, expectant mother, and emergency-room doctor.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article is about a person named Jake who was actively engaging with a community by reading and responding to their posts. Despite his enjoyment of being part of the community, he mentioned that it was both satisfying and sad to leave while being at the peak of his involvement. Jake’s sister expresses gratitude to all those who supported him and read and shared his writing.
5. ‘Agua, Agua’
Total comment counts : 8
Summary
The article discusses the experiences of two individuals who found themselves in extreme danger in the Sonoran Desert. In 1905, a Mexican prospector named Pablo Valencia went without water for a week as he traversed over 100 miles in the desert. In 1980, high school teacher Bill Broyles retraced Valencia’s route and found himself running out of water as well. The article details the challenges they faced and the risks they encountered in one of the hottest deserts in North America.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article tells the story of a man who managed to survive for six days without water and traveled up to 160 miles during that time. The feat is impressive because it is commonly believed that once a person loses 4-6 kg of water due to sweat, the body cannot function properly due to the altered mineral concentration in cells.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author of the article shares their experience of doing a 10-day ‘dry’ fast, where they abstained from both food and water. Unlike water fasting, dry fasting suppresses hunger but intensifies thirst. However, the author explains that thirst can fade into the background in humid conditions and by refraining from excessive talking. During dry fasting, the body obtains water from lipolysis, known as “metabolic” water. The author offers to answer any questions through an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) format.
6. USPS text scammers duped his wife, so he hacked their operation
Total comment counts : 23
Summary
The article narrates a story about someone who received a scam text message and partnered with an individual named s1n to take revenge on the scammers. The person, s1n, engaged in reconnaissance by scanning the scammers’ website and intercepting its traffic. They discovered that the scammers were impersonating the USPS website and found a potential vulnerability called Local File Inclusion (LFI). By exploiting this vulnerability, s1n gained access to the scammers’ PHP files, which were obfuscated and difficult to read. They also discovered that the scammers used a Telegram channel and stored data in a MySQL server. However, s1n was unable to find any sensitive data that could provide further access to the web server. While browsing through the files, s1n found evidence of an SQL injection and successfully gained access to the scammers’ database. Within the database, they discovered personal data of the scammers’ victims, as well as records of website visits. The article concludes by suggesting that the evidence will be sent to an internet crime center to shut down the scam site and bring the culprits to justice.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article contains links to two blog posts titled “Hacking the Scammers” and “Systematic Destruction: Hacking the Scammers Pt. 2.”
Top 2 Comment Summary
NanoBaiter is a YouTube channel that exposes scammers by hacking into their systems and disrupting their operations. The channel’s creator goes into detail to identify the scammers, scares them, reports them to the police, and attempts to inform and refund their victims. In one video, NanoBaiter accesses a scammer’s Stripe account and refunds payments made by elderly victims for fake IT security products. In another video, NanoBaiter gains access to the scammer’s office building CCTV footage and captures a police raid on the scammers.
7. Show HN: LLM-aided OCR – Correcting Tesseract OCR errors with LLMs
Total comment counts : 31
Summary
The article discusses the LLM-Aided OCR Project, which aims to improve the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) output for scanned PDFs. The project utilizes natural language processing techniques and large language models to transform raw OCR text into accurately formatted and readable documents. The article provides details on the various features and capabilities of the project, including PDF conversion, OCR processing, error correction, formatting, and quality assessment. The project uses a .env file for easy configuration and provides detailed logs and output files. The article also mentions that contributions to the project are welcome, as it is licensed under the MIT License.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the advancements in vision models and the need for captioning datasets to improve these models. The author mentions the Schnell model of the Flux series as a new release that will provide the necessary datasets. They also note that most vision models still rely on outdated captioning methods and express the need for improved pre-trained vision components. The article discusses the use of Tessy and LLM for transcription via vision modality adaption and suggests that multi-lingual models will be able to read and translate, providing new opportunities for scholars searching through digitized works. The author anticipates a significant jump in quality once the next state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision models are released, with potential for various scripts becoming readable simultaneously. The article also mentions the current limitations and the author’s plans for future experiments in this field.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The author of the article discusses the limitations of different models when summarizing various types of documents. They mention that while their own approach works well, it does not scale to all document types. For scientific papers, another model called meta’s nougat is more suitable due to its ability to accurately render formulas. Similarly, for invoices and records, a model called donut performs better. However, both of these models have their own shortcomings, so the author suggests running LLM (Language Model) to address any issues. Despite this, LLM is unable to effectively handle tables and charts, as the details are often lost during the optical character recognition (OCR) process. The author then goes on to express their preference for vision models, which have the advantage of having the original document or image. Clear prompts can help improve results, but no vision model currently provides fine-tuning for images, except for Google Gemini, which the author has not yet tried. Finally, the author recommends using prompt injection and providing a few shots to keep the LLM from generating inaccurate summaries and to adhere to the requested format.
8. SQLite FTS5 Extension
Total comment counts : 14
Summary
FTS5 is a virtual table module in SQLite that provides full-text search functionality. It allows users to efficiently search a large collection of documents for specific search terms. To use FTS5, users create a virtual table and populate it with data. There are options available to configure various aspects of the table. Users can execute full-text queries against the table using operators or table-valued functions. By default, searches are case-independent, and results can be sorted by relevance. Additional information about matching rows can be retrieved using auxiliary functions. FTS5 also supports advanced searches with more complicated query strings. It is included in the SQLite amalgamation starting from version 3.9.0 or can be built as a loadable extension. The FTS5 source code consists of files that can be used to build the extension.
Top 1 Comment Summary
This article highlights the merits of an underrated search engine that is highly capable. It is worth noting that this search engine is included in the Python standard library, making it easily accessible if Python is already installed on the user’s machine. Additionally, the article provides a link to a CLI tool and Python library for utilizing this search engine.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The article discusses the usefulness of SQLite and its compatibility with the wa-sqlite tool. It provides an example and includes links to the wa-sqlite GitHub repository and a specific line in a prompta_schema.sql file on GitHub.
9. Base 3 Computing Beats Binary
Total comment counts : 26
Summary
The article discusses the concept of base 3, also known as ternary notation, as an alternative way of counting. It explains that ternary notation is efficient and economical for representing large numbers. The article explores the computational advantages of base 3 and notes that it has been used in certain computing systems, although it didn’t become popular due to convention and the dominance of binary computing. However, there have been recent advances in ternary computing, such as proposals for building ternary logical systems on binary-based hardware and the development of cybersecurity systems using base 3 computing.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The article discusses the concept of radix economy and challenges the belief that hardware complexity for each logic element is proportional to the number of logic levels. It argues that base 2 is the most efficient radix for computation, contrary to the prominence of ternary circuits.
Top 2 Comment Summary
This article discusses the computational advantages of using base 3 instead of binary logic systems. Base 3 allows for a reduction in the number of queries needed to answer questions with more than two possible answers. However, the article argues that base 3 has limitations in practical applications because modern systems, such as 64-bit systems, have more than enough space to represent greater than/less than/equal. The article also mentions hardware issues with ternary circuits, such as the increased voltage requirements. The author criticizes claims about ternary computing and argues that binary systems are the best choice based on current systems and engineering reasons.
10. Show HN: Attaching to a virtual GPU over TCP
Total comment counts : 22
Summary
This article discusses Thunder Compute, a cloud platform that allows users to scale their usage up or down without limits and be billed only for what they use. The platform enables users to switch GPUs instantly with a single command, without leaving their instance, and run existing code on Thunder Compute without any changes or configuration. It emphasizes the cost-saving benefits of developing on CPUs and accessing a cluster of GPUs on-demand when scaling is required. Thunder Compute eliminates worries about configuration, quotas, and reservations, and ensures that users never pay for idle GPUs. The platform enables direct access to GPUs for developers, allowing for quick scaling. It claims that other cloud providers only utilize GPUs 15% of the time, resulting in wasted payments, and long-term reservations often result in shortages and overpayment. Thunder Compute provides a cluster of high-performance GPUs without the need to involve IT. By eliminating idle GPU time, users can shrink their cloud budget. The Thunder Compute CLI allows users to run their existing GPU code without any setup. The platform automatically matches user requests to a GPU, eliminating the need for manual instance setup. Thunder emphasizes that it never stores user data and uses end-to-end encryption for all data transfers. By sharing GPUs, Thunder claims to achieve over 5 times greater utilization than other cloud platforms, ultimately saving users money. The article encourages readers to contact their team for questions or to request a demo.
Top 1 Comment Summary
The author of the article developed a solution for transcoding videos using GPU-over-IP. They had a low-power AMD GPU that caused the kernel to crash when video encoding was attempted. They also had an NVIDIA RTX 3080 in a separate gaming machine. The author wrote a tool called “ffmpeg-over-ip” and successfully ran it on the gaming machine as a server, while using a media server (such as Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin) as the client. The solution worked without any issues.
Top 2 Comment Summary
The writer is confused about how a system that operates at the CPU/GPU boundary could create a bottleneck for datasets that do not fit into VRAM. They question whether the system intercepts GPU I/O and streams the entire dataset on every epoch to a remote machine, which seems wasteful. The writer admits they may not fully understand how the system works.