MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built a video-to-text tool – 10 min free daily, no signup
by howardV | 2025-10-10 13:29:53+00:00
Hi HN! I'm the founder of Harku (https://harku.io ), a video/audio transcription tool I've been working on for the past few months.

The backstory: I was frustrated with existing transcription services - they either required expensive subscriptions upfront, had poor accuracy for non-English content, or forced you to create accounts just to try them. As someone who frequently works with meeting recordings and content in multiple languages, I needed something better.

Technical approach: - Built on OpenAI's Whisper V3 (latest model) for 98.5% accuracy - GPU-optimized processing pipeline that transcribes 1-hour videos in ~2 minutes - Supports 100+ languages with automatic detection - No user data retention - files are deleted within 24 hours

What makes it different: - 10 minutes free daily without any signup (just drag and drop) - Works directly with YouTube URLs - no download needed - 500MB file limit even for free users (vs 100MB industry standard) - Clean exports without watermarks, even on free tier

Current limitations: - Real-time transcription not yet available (coming soon) - No mobile app yet (web works on mobile though) - Custom vocabulary only for Pro users

Technical challenges solved: - Implemented efficient audio extraction to handle 25+ video formats - Built a queuing system that scales automatically during peak hours - Optimized Whisper inference to run 30x faster than real-time

I'd love to hear your feedback, especially on: 1. What features would make this more useful for your workflow? 2. Any edge cases with specific accents or technical content? 3. Interest in API access for developers?

You can try it without any signup at https://harku.io - just drop a video and see the results.

Thanks for checking it out!
by luciodale | 2025-10-10 13:30:05+00:00
Good points.

1) I thought of giving an easier to read example. I just moved the example to react, so the snippets actually match exactly what's going on in the background.

2) It is true! Though, using shadows on the optimized code doesn't slow it down. I added more toggles to test same effects on transform and top/left implementations.

3) I think it's still interesting to start with some thought and then observe that in practice things are different really. In fact, thanks for all the feedback, as it made me go back and do more investigation.

If you don't mind you can give the article a second look now :)
by sunir | 2025-10-10 13:30:50+00:00
I long ago accepted a career in B2B software meant my job was to put people out of work. And as it turns out, programmers always start by putting other programmers out of work.

Programmers and Managers by Kraft (1977) is my favourite book on the subject. It's unabashedly Marxist and from the very early days of the industry, which tickles me, since that is a different way of thinking than I usually do.

https://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Managers-Routinization-Pr...
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-10 13:30:58+00:00
It's not even necessarily corruption; we address each other by different names depending on context.

To acquaintances, I might be a Pavel; to close friends, I might be Pasha. To my mom, I'm Pavlik. In a business or other more formal setting, I would be Pavel Dmitrievich.

I think it's a common complaint when reading Russian novels, non-Russians get confused about who's who because of these types of shifts. And it totally makes sense; at least my various nicknames start with the same letter, but many Russian "short" names don't particularly resemble the full name. Who would expect Aleksandr to be Sasha, if you didn't grow up in the culture?
by zmgsabst | 2025-10-10 13:31:27+00:00
I’m unconvinced: machine made fabrics go into my nicest shirts, at a price I can afford several.

How would quality be improved by making the fabric by hand? — how would I benefit from a less standard, less fine, more expensive weave of those textiles?

Machines enable cheaper goods; but the preference for buying them is down to individuals — eg, I think it’s great I can also get cheap, relatively disposable tshirts. According to you that “depresses the overall quality”; but I’m struggling to understand how the facts that a) I have better and cheaper dress shirts and b) I have cheap tshirts I don’t care about damaging when cleaning, sweating during exercise, etc together make my life worse.

Even if by some obscure metric the existence of the tshirts and my ownership of them “depresses” quality.
by brazukadev | 2025-10-10 13:31:43+00:00
> But that’s true of everything we use. Someone made that fork you use

I paid a fair price for my forks and plates and shoes, I don't need to be grateful for that. Using a platform for free and then complaining that now they focus on making money is not the same.

> Deserving of something is a 3rd person observation. You can not demand that you deserve anything.

I'm not OP nor Replit owner.
by pansa2 | 2025-10-10 13:31:45+00:00
I did some recent testing that showed both Lua and LuaJIT-joff (its interpreter-only mode) to be about 2x faster than Python. Both PyPy and full-on LuaJIT were about 10x faster.

Years ago, I even found Ruby to be faster than Python. This was back in the Ruby 2.0 / Python 3.5 days - I'd be interested to know if it's still the case.
by deltarholamda | 2025-10-10 13:32:10+00:00
>Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name

I know this pain.

What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.

I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.

Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.
by psadauskas | 2025-10-10 13:32:30+00:00
Plus, its not a good look for RubyCentral for trying to smear Andre for it, when it is perfectly acceptable within their own Privacy Policy[1]:

> We may share aggregate or de-identified information with third parties for research, marketing, analytics, and other purposes, provided such information does not identify a particular individual.

[1]: https://rubycentral.org/privacy-notice/
by gchamonlive | 2025-10-10 13:32:35+00:00
> it’s not a hard class system — as you’re given capital in reward for your labor

The latter doesn't justify the former. If you are rewarded for your work, but it would require you many lifetimes of labor to reach the next class, that's for all intents and purposes a hard class system.

The argument for class mobility based on initiative doesn't make it a soft class system.

> Capitalism is substantially more malleable as a class system than traditional feudalism (what came before in Europe) or modern communism (its main rival), which trades feudalistic class for status within the party.

Doesn't make it malleable, just comparatively more malleable.

The problem is with the later stages of capitalism where everything is big and rigid, but you still need growth for the system to work.

What we need is a different system that improves on capitalism, but has at its heart a welfare state, doesn't reduce each individual to an economic actor and have incentives set so that each actor (or machine which seeks connections) can converge to the mean, instead of each one trying to reach the top.
by martin-t | 2025-10-10 13:33:56+00:00
Bad analogy.

In the past, workers complained that automation took away their jobs. The (roughly) same amount of wealth was created but the income went to fewer individuals (the owners).

This was a valid criticism but at least they could move onto other jobs.

AI, if successful, is different. Combined with robotics[0], it makes all jobs obsolete. Regardless if the amount of wealth created will be less, the same, or greater than before, the income will only go towards the owners and everyone else will become a beggar. That is the endgame.

If you believe the endgame is different, please game it out in your head and share what you think. Don't just reject this idea without thinking about it.

[0]: And even without robotics, true AI (AGI) would obliterate such a huge percentage of jobs it would create a shock and massive unemployment.
by Retric | 2025-10-10 13:34:16+00:00
People sometimes take leisure train trips that drop them off at the same location they boarded the train. That destination can be reached faster if the trip never occurred, so that’s not what people are paying for.

Similarly leisure trips can be vastly less sensitive to moderate delays, thus some sleeper trains stop at night so people can get a better rest even if it defeats the purpose.
by sgarland | 2025-10-10 13:34:18+00:00
> But then again, Aurora is pretty awesome

Why do you like Aurora? Genuinely curious. Here's my list of pros and cons, after having used Aurora MySQL.

Pro: Buffer pool persistence after restart is admittedly a very cool trick. That's it. That's the pro. The cons are long.

It's slow as hell. I don't know why this comes as a shock to anyone, but it's probably due to my statement answering your other question about a lack of knowledge of computing fundamentals. When your storage lives on 6 nodes spread dozens of miles apart, and you need quorum ack to commit, you're gonna have some pretty horrendous write latency. I have run benchmarks (realistic ones for a workload at a previous employer) comparing Aurora to some 13-year old Dell servers I have, and the ancient Dells won every time, by a lot. They didn't technically even have node-local storage; they had NVMe drives in a Ceph pool over a Mellanox Infiniband network.

The re-architecture - for MySQL anyway - required them to lose the change buffer. This buffers writes to secondary indices, which is quite helpful for performance. So now, not only do all writes to indices have to go directly to disk, they have to do so over a long distance, and achieve quorum. Oof.

Various InnoDB parameters that I would like to tune (and know how to do so correctly) are locked away.

I believe that AWS is being deceptive when they tout the ability to have 128 (now 256) TiB of storage. Yes, you can hit those numbers. Good luck operating there, though. Take one of the most common DDL operations performed: secondary index builds. AWS fully knows that this would take forever if written to the cluster volume, so they have a "local storage" drive (which is actually EBS) attached to the instance that's used for temporary storage of things like on-disk temp tables for sorts, and secondary index builds. This drive is sized vaguely proportionally to the size of the instance, and cannot be adjusted. If you have a large table - which you're likely to have if you're operating close to the cluster storage limits - you will likely discover that there isn't enough room on this drive to create an index. Sorry, have fun with that!

Finally, purely on a philosophical level, I find the idea of charging for I/O to be absolutely atrocious. Charge me a flat rate, or at the very least, a rate per byte, or some other unit that's likely to be understood by an average dev. "We charge you per page fetched from disk, except we charge for writes in 4 KiB segments, but sometimes they get batched together" - madness.
by marcuskane2 | 2025-10-10 13:34:26+00:00
Sending innocent people to prison would absolutely be a horrible form of violence against those people.

That's why we have trials, with independent judges, juries and rules.

Remember when the Boston marathon bombing happened, and Reddit users identified dozens of different people as obviously, and definitely, the bombers (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/reddit-regre...)? Remember when the LAPD opened fire on multiple random civilians who they thought might be Christopher Dorner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...) remember when the DC sniper was active and the tip line received thousands of calls from people claiming to have 100% certainty that they saw the sniper, then describe people of conflicting races, ages and physical descriptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks)

We have trials so that we make sure we put the bad guys in prison, not random innocent people who were misidentified. They're for the benefit of everyone else, not for the criminal.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-10 13:34:29+00:00
You sure can! But that doesn't mean it won't cause you problems.

For example, if you're male, and decide to change your name to Sarah, you totally can - but don't be surprised when people assume you're a woman.

And there are many countries, of which you are unaware, that do have pretty strict laws about what you are and aren't allowed to name your children. Iceland is the one that springs to mind off the top of my head. As I recall, Germany also has some limitations.
by rafaelquicdb | 2025-10-10 13:35:04+00:00
hmm, that makes sense, thank you!

The reason I'm asking is I'm trying to validate if something I'm building would be useful for dev teams to enhance their productivity.

Not trying to sell anything, just looking for honest feedback if people would pay for this or if I'm wasting time.

https://quicdb.com/

It's basically postgresql ephemeral, isolated, secure, branches, like Neon/Supabase have, but works with any setup.

In any case, thank you for your insights @benoau!
by mcv | 2025-10-10 13:35:48+00:00
Adam Smith was not in favour of capitalism, and in fact warned against it. He was in favour of the free market, which is not the same thing. A market is free when it's transparent and accessible for everybody. Extreme discrepancy in wealth and capital leads to powerful parties dominating and controlling the market. Smith recognized that and warned against it, recognizing the need for workers to organize, and to prevent cartels and monopolies.

Whether capitalism is distinguishable from traditional feudalism depends entirely on how you regulate it.
by lqm | 2025-10-10 13:36:36+00:00
Lucia | Senior Machine Learning Engineers, Senior React Engineers, Fullstack Engineers | Remote | Luciaprotocol.com

Lucia is changing how data can be used for growth and revenue generation. With our open source SDK you can collect 10x the amount of data from your visitors whether that’s in your website, web app or mobile app. Read more about us at https://docs.luciaprotocol.com

We’re looking for a mix of positions.

- Sr ML Engineer ($135k-240k)

- Senior React Engineer ($120k-215k)

- Fullstack Engineer ($155k-220k)

● Are self-motivated and can work independently

● Driven to constantly learn and are always searching for the bigger picture

● Strong in clear thinking and written communication

We are looking for a Fullstack generalist to help us continue our mission of building a Multi-chain intelligence layer. We’re looking for a Senior ML Engineer to create a language interface that helps our customers resolve identities of pseudo-anonymous visitors into high fidelity profile pages. Our vision is to make the work after building your MVP a breeze. Think of our platform as a compass guiding you towards your northstar which is product market fit.

Our ideal engineer has a broad set of experience across frontend, backend, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and data(bases). If you've been responsible for managing production infrastructure, talking to customers, and having full ownership of your features from start to finish.

Please email apply[at]luciaprotocol[dot]com with the subject line HN + the name of your role applying for, if this sounds like the right fit for you.
by robocat | 2025-10-10 13:37:04+00:00
> restaurant menus/wine lists

I wonder how much of that is due to the abnormal social pressure situation where your buying is public and you don't want to be seen as cheap.

A similar dynamic might occur with a bunch of people shopping together, for clothes maybe? I'm a guy that doesn't shop with others so I don't have experience here.

One bar in an upmarket area in my own town had a house wine on the menu much cheaper (I think 7 when the cheapest labeled wine might have been 14 or so). Seemed smart to me.

Although there is also some internal pressure, to not feel cheap to yourself.

For gifts the dynamics change completely since the recipient might not know the price.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-10 13:37:11+00:00
There are so many issues with doing something like this that it's almost never going to be financially viable for small companies.

- Some jurisdictions require some level of warranty, extended refund periods, or limit your ability to avoid liability for product defects.

- You need to spend time doing research to set prices for each country or region.

- You need to combat fraud from people trying to buy your product using a VPN from low cost regions.

- This one is a big one. Chargebacks tend to be higher from low cost of living countries. Payment processors will drop you if your chargeback rate gets too high. Risking a $25 chargeback fee and being dropped from your payment processor for $5-10 payments is often not worth it.

- There are only 20 million professional software developers in the world. If you say half of those are web developers and you are phenomenally successful and 1 out of every 1000 web developers in the whole world buys your software. That's 10k sales. At $5 per sale that's $50k revenue across the entire life of the product. $50k for a team of people isn't a financially viable endeavor.
by ljm | 2025-10-10 13:37:20+00:00
Notably I didn't use the word 'blame' but correctly assigned accountability to the people who made the decisions they did, for whatever reason they had. The parenthetical examples are yours alone, not mine.

Beyond that, yes...the Ruby community is dramatic and this is not the first time a furore has been made over some inter-community conflict with a bunch of reactionary stuff kicking off.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-10 13:37:48+00:00
At the risk of repeating myself, I was talking in general terms about the business model and the uncertainty about the licensing it creates concerning possible future features.

I wasn't aware that they are a non-profit organization and agree that my remark doesn't necessarily apply to them since they're not a business. If the pro subscription helps them to maintain the open source project without making any profits, then that seems alright to me.
by philipallstar | 2025-10-10 13:37:51+00:00
Thanks - interesting! I was more thinking of a workflow where a designer makes a component in Figma, and it's probably polished and made available in a component library by a frontend/UI person, and it's probably a React component or a Web component. I was wondering whether that workflow was at all compatible with any of the non-JS backends that are reclaiming frontend a little.
by hopelite | 2025-10-10 13:38:58+00:00
Far more importantly, this might force Trump to continue the pressure on the Israelis, whose very nature is to be untrustworthy, not worth trusting, since they love not just violating agreements but also using agreements as a lever for abuse. There are all the typical Israeli fingerprints all over the current deal that the Israelis will likely use to bring the whole thing back down around Trump unless he can maintain pressure. This prize increases the slim likelihood that he will have to of he covers that prize as much as it seems he does. I do not think he can or will though, and the Israelis may just even persuade him that they have a far more juicy prize to offer him instead.

I think Trump wanted to force the rather compromised committee to make a similarly foolish decision as giving Obama the prize, which would have then permitted immediate Israeli breach of the settlement.

Not to take away from Machado’s work, but this year’s prize is at the very least political, to both appease Trump in line with the above and also send a message in the face of the war build-up against Venezuela. At the same time their decision also facilitates the American takeover through less than lethal means by CIA revolution and the combined pressure of it all on the Venezuelan government. Machado is in fact a CIA asset, whether she realizes it or not.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-10 13:38:59+00:00
That teacher started teaching at about the time a friend of mine started schooling to become a teacher. She came across her own grade school teacher who inspired her to make that career choice and thanked him.

His response to hearing that she was going into the field was to look her straight in the eyes and say "For your own sake, get out."

She became a teacher anyway and a few years ago told me "he was right, I should have listened."
by sudodevnull | 2025-10-10 13:39:20+00:00
Datastar author here. Yes nothing is new here, that's kind of the point. You seemingly lost her way with jQuery which was just sprinkle on the page but then spa wasn't interesting approach at reactivity while missing all the points of the back end controlling most the state. I'm not trying to be innovative I'm just trying to get us back to some normalcy
by pixl97 | 2025-10-10 13:39:31+00:00
I want to agree with you and counter the other replies to your post so far.

Anyone that looks at the 'glorious past' of weavers has a very skewed view of how much of humanities time it took. Pre-industrial timelines and you're talking about massive amounts of effort for even a single piece of clothing. Deaths from exposure were a common thing due to lack of clothing.

Now the world is awash in clothing, so much we dump thousands of tons of it on other poor countries (yes, this is a problem in of itself). Even what we consider expensive fitted clothing is cheap.
by imtringued | 2025-10-10 13:39:39+00:00
Based on the title I would have assumed that the programming model would be inverted, but it wasn't. What is needed is something akin to the Haskell model where the evaluation order is unspecified while simultaneously allowing mutation. The way to do this would be a Rust style linear type system where you are allowed to acquire exclusive write access to a region in memory, but not be allowed to perform any side effect and all modifications must be returned as if the function was referentially transparent. This is parallel by default, because you actively have to opt into a sequential execution order if you want to perform side effects.

The barriers to this approach are the same old problems with automatic parallelization.

Current hardware assumes a sequential instruction stream with hardware threads and cores and no hardware primitive in the microsecond range to rapidly schedule code to be executed on another core. This means you must split your program into two identical programs that then are managed by the operating system. This kills performance due to excessive amount of synchronization overhead.

The other problem is that even if you have low latency scheduling, you still need to gather a sufficient amount of work for each thread. Too fine grained and you run into synchronization overhead (no matter how good your hardware is), too coarse grained and you won't be able to spread the load onto all the processors.

There is also a third problem that is lurking in the dark and many developers with the exception of the Haskell community are underestimating: Running programs in a suboptimal order can lead to a massive increase in the instantaneous memory usage to the point where the program can no longer run. Think of a program allocating memory for each request, processing it and then deallocating, then allocating again. What if it accepts all requests in parallel? It will first allocate everything, then process everything and then deallocate everything.