skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using Transcribro[0] on Android/GrapheneOS. It's FOSS and only local, and while it's not word-for-word real-time, it doesn't have to wait for the whole audio to be uploaded before it can work. This is on a Pixel 5a, so hardly impressive hardware.

It works well enough that I use it with Telegram to shove messages over to my Linux machine when I don't feel like typing them out, which is such an unsophisticated hack, but is getting the job done. I spent a couple hours trying to find a Linux-native alternative, or even get this running in Waydroid, and couldn't find anything that worked as well, so I decided not to let the "smooth" become the enemy of the "good enough to get the job done."

[0] https://github.com/soupslurpr/Transcribro
Really? Outside of pharma businesses do all kinds of time consuming, speculative and expensive foundational research.

I'm not quite sure why pharma is the exception.
This should probably be the main link, since NPR is a very familiar site and is also (presumably) not going to be slashdotted by us.

> Kaseya says that it’s particularly concerning that about 70% of cases in the DRC are in children under 18. “This one is a major alarm for the world,” he says. “We are losing the youth in Africa.”

That’s troubling.
That's a mouthful. They should call it roundtine.
The article says it's an industry-wide practice... but nearly all the examples in these articles relate to Travelers.
From the article:

"The researchers compared patients who had received prescriptions for semaglutide compared to those taking other diabetes or weight loss drugs. Then, they analyzed the rate of NAION diagnoses in the groups, which revealed the significant risk increases."

I don't interpret it at all as you do - if they're taking "other diabetes or weight loss drugs" they're clearly not part of the "healthy population".
This whole Irish were not considered white thing is a myth people like to throw around, but it's just not true. Also, Greeks are Balkan, which is its own thing.
Another tech asymmetry that puts consumers at a disadvantage.

I wonder if there exists any kind of service for similarly leveraging technology to help consumers find claims opportunities. E.g. run a drone after a hail storm to look for damages that consumers could file claims with. Ideally the carrier would also be doing this, but most aren't going to volunteer money away.
Show HN: Anyquery – A SQL query engine for anything (CSV, GitHub, Airtable,etc.)
Hey HN, I’m Julien, and after finishing my CS sophomore year, I wanted a project to keep me busy during the summer. So I built anyquery for fun, a SQL query engine for pretty much anything.

SQL is the industry standard query language for databases. But what if it could query other services? That’s what I wanted to explore. Kinda like Yahoo! Query Language, except that I was too young to see it.

Anyquery can run queries on local/remote files (CSV, JSON, logs with Grok, Parquet, HTML tables, etc.), SaaS (GitHub, Notion, Spotify, etc.) and local apps (Apple Notes, Git, Google Chrome tabs, etc.). I’ve built 35 integrations. Anyquery can also transform a Google Sheets or an Airtable base into a SQL database with INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE support. Additionally, it can act as a MySQL server to leverage its ecosystem (BI tools, ORMs, etc.). Finally, you can run PRQL and PQL (KQL inspired language) queries with it.

Under the hood, it uses Go and SQLite's virtual tables. Therefore, you can use the SQLite ecosystem (like sqlite-vec, datasette, etc.).
The project is licensed under the AGPL-v3.

Personally, I find the project useful for data migration (I’m using it to transfer my Pocket bookmarks to Raindrop) and data visualization (connecting my GitHub data to Metabase or Tableau)

I would love to hear your feedback about the project.

Website: https://anyquery.dev/docs/#installation

Source code: https://github.com/julien040/anyquery

Brief overview of the architecture: https://anyquery.dev/docs/developers/project/architecture/
I think this is just wrong.

Any "understanding" is a mirage.

Case in point. prompt: "Is it possible to combine statistical mechanics, techno music production and pizza?"

If the model had even the slightest understanding of the world the answer would just be no. Instead gpt4o:

"Yes, it is possible to combine statistical mechanics, techno music production, and pizza, though it might require some creative thinking. Here’s how these three seemingly unrelated things could be connected" then gives a list of complete nonsense.

The trick is that it can't say no because it doesn't understand ANYTHING.

It has no understanding of the difference between combining pizza with two completely disparate nonsense subjects/items with combining pizza with two other food items. The later would seem to have a mirage, high dimensional, understanding from data of "food" though in the response.
Yeah they are not milkshakes they are coffee! ;)
> I assume this means you have to release a separate App like "Firefox EU" to be able to use Gecko, right? Practically speaking, would any major players actually do it?

I can imagine browser makers creating names like “Freedom browser, by Firefox”, “Courage browser, by Brave”, “Live on the Edge, by Microsoft”, and so on.
Even if your entire control plane disappears your nodes will keep running and likely for enough time to build an entirely new cluster to flip over to.

I don’t get it either. It’s not hard at all.
I was so excited until the very end. I have the wrong hardware.
As a freelancer doing exactly this for nearly a decade now I wholeheartedly agree. Freelancers also tend to know other freelancers who are used to laying the tracks while the train is running, and can usually get a high quality team together real quickly. Downsides are that you don't really retain any of the expertise in-house, unless you also staff up internally and do a proper handover.
Email such suggestions to mods at hn@ycombinator.com.

"@dang is a no-op": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526450>

(Edit: I've emailed the suggestion, and we now have a black bar.)
There's every reason to assume that these applications are the ones actually backing Open AI and co's insane valuations. They want to use these products to lock consumers down even harder. Actively rewrite contracts that already favor them, to favor them even harder. Cancel contracts that look to need payouts soon. Determine risk assessment for insurance policies, mortgage holders, and screw every last customer out of every last nickel they can. And the privacy destruction will be smuggled in under the notion that "well no HUMAN is looking at these photos, only these machiiiiiines!" with the added side benefit of laundering the responsibility of awful decisions onto those machines, and assigning them the credibility of them too. "The decision is perfect, impartial and unbiased. A computer made it, after all!"

And these applications, crucially, are not pie-in-the-sky, someday-this-will-work type situations as is comprehension of knowledge by an LLM, or a video generator that can remember what a character looks like, no. This is exactly what ML is already used for: aggregate analysis of massive amounts of statistical data. This is it's bread and butter.

That's worth $80 billion. Not shitty melty royalty-free images.
Anyone knows a similar supplier in Europe I could source the parts from?
>as one of those people who makes New Year's Resolutions every year, and gets mildly depressed when I fail to reach them...

This statement made me think of the book: One Small Step Can Change Your Life

https://www.amazon.com/Small-Step-Change-Your-Life/dp/076118...

...it is written by a psychiatrist about the practice of Kaizen, where you take absurdly small steps to reach your goals. So small that you can't fail. And these build on themselves. He covers your exact case. People who make New Year's resolutions that fail after a month or two. One example was a woman who needed to get exercise for health reasons. Previous exercise attempts have failed. So the doctor prescribes her to march in-place for 60 seconds every day, when she was normally watching TV. Anyway, it snowballs, as she realizes she can do more and more, and then starts to enjoy it. It is a short, inexpensive, easy read that I recommend.
Motion (YC W20) Is Hiring Senior Back End Engineers
You know, I’ve really looked hard at what’s out there and haven’t been able to find anything else that’s totally free/open, that runs well on CPU, and which has better quality output than Tesseract. I found a couple Chinese projects but had trouble getting them to work and the documentation wasn’t great. If you have any leads on others to try I’d love to hear about them.

One of the benefits of this project is that it doesn’t seem to matter that much that there are mistakes in the OCR output as long as you’re dealing with words, where the meaning would be clear to a smart human trying to make sense of it and knowing that there are probable OCR errors. For numbers it’s another story, though.
Just read it. This is interesting. Definitely, we will be trying this on our team. Thanks!
Do you mean ephemeral, or are you actually wondering about something implanted under the skin? I'd think/hope if it goes under the skin, it ends up in "hearing aid" territory. I'm less sure about if it doesn't persist.
Such behavior seems like something that should be trivially illegal as an analogy to trespassing. How is it legal to fly a commercial drone over residential areas without consent?
If you look at the disease progression and his blogging history, it was a few months before he did open up about the situation.

(He may have discussed it earlier on HN, I haven't gone through his history to check on this.)

Once he began, however, he continued to the bitter end. And yes that is commendable.
Perhaps more people should use Mutual Insurance companies. Then you’re a shareholder in the structure and if they drop you it’s because all the other shareholders felt they didn’t want you.
I've recognized this sound of pouring water temperatures since I was young. But also different kinds of liquids, though sometimes I wonder if it is more about the fluid property or about the typical source and sink vessels used with them.

I also think I can hear atmospheric conditions in the area where I grew up. I mean temperature, humidity, and inversion layers in calm conditions. Obviously most people can recognize active weather sounds like wind, rain, or hail. And some can hear fog and snow, while others seem more oblivious to those details. This is an extension of that same thing, where the ambient sound environment is attenuated in a consistent way. It sounds different on a frosty morning versus a hot dry morning versus a cool damp morning with coastal marine layer influence.

I don't know how universal this is for careful observers. I can only do it well where I grew up, and I don't know if that is about length of exposure, age of exposure (more receptive to learning), or the local geography of hills and valleys and distant noise sources giving me more cues.
CPU, not GPUs. GPU dedicated encoding hardware is terrible in comparison to a single 32-core CPU by any metric for this usecase.

Same for those phones - that one CPU can replace a box of phones.
I'm curious if a multimodal model would be better at the OCR step than tesseract? Probably would increase the cost but I wonder if that would be offset by needing less post processing.
You honestly believe this whole document was prepared in such a short amount of time?
I always recommend having in house IT and software development. If you don’t, then you are captive to your vendor.
The title alone is a teensie bit hilarious
Kludged Linux A Linux distribution for the Psion 5mx (2022)
Yes, their chat is still compatible with IRC, albeit with lots of extensions (which you can opt into using IRCv3 capabilitiy negotiation). More recently they've been adding UI elements on the main site that are web API powered instead of chat though (eg. polls, sending bits).
An elder care insurance provider definitely sent private investigators after the parents of someone I knew. Their way of getting out of the plan was that he was lifting cardboard boxes: something that his condition should not have permitted.

Your car insurance isn’t high value enough but yes they already do this otherwise.
> A cost centre is, by definition, somewhere that only produces costs and is never attributed with any revenue or profit.

Which means that if investing in IT is an enabler for gaining revenue or profit, it's not a cost center by this definition--it's necessary to gain revenue or profit. As you note, many companies don't appear to be smart enough to see this, but that doesn't make it wrong.
When I read these stories, it's like a reminder of the incredible, albeit rare, resilience of the human body
Are these like military grade aerial drones or something? The one shown in the picture, and those many use to do prelim roof inspections, fly far too low - seems it would be encroachment of owner's property rights, no?
I helped coding oTranscribe+ [0], which does something similar to what you are asking for. Using ElectronJS and the current, at that moment, version of oTranscribe, there is this desktop application. It also exists as web version and PWA [1].

Language models were those from BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) at the time. The transcription is done via WASM, using Vosk [2] as base.

I hope it fits.

[0] https://github.com/projecte-aina/oTranscribe-plus
[1] https://otranscribe.bsc.es/
[2] https://github.com/alphacep/vosk-api
The answer is absolutely "yes". Your car will snitch on you, your house will snitch on you, your phone will snitch on you, your credit card will snitch on you, on an on.

This nation is built to support corporations, not personal freedom. This is the result of that architecture.
I may have put them in a rung higher than they are, since I didn’t listen to them back when they were big and touring, so I only know them more by who they tour with now, but his band is Sister Hazel.
> overhead from the memory controller

If you want to do it in a single step, you need 8 analogic comparators at the output of the memory, and one level of "and" and "or" gates to solve each bit.

Most ADCs use a single comparator + OpAmp and convert the value in 3 steps. But that would make your memory slower.

Either way, the task of converting it does not fall over the controller.
Evolved? There's a photo of the bar headlining the piece; milkshakes and ice cream are the only advertised products.
I ended up using EasyOCR. I assume it is too slow in CPU-only mode.
But the drive to test limits is understandable
Drone or no drone, insurance companies shouldn't be allowed to suddenly drop a covered customer, without having to work with the customer on correcting whatever they are concerned with. There should be a mandatory grace period allowing the insurer to provide notice and list whatever corrective actions they required, and for the customer to either dispute or take those action. "The Market" is clearly failing to provide this on its own. We need some kind of Insurance Customer Bill of Rights.
It's a very interesting idea, but the potential for hallucinations reminds me of JBIG2, a compression format which would sometimes substitute digits in faxed documents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Character_substitution_e...

> In 2013, various substitutions (including replacing "6" with "8") were reported to happen on many Xerox Workcentre photocopier and printer machines. Numbers printed on scanned (but not OCR-ed) documents had potentially been altered. This has been demonstrated on construction blueprints and some tables of numbers; the potential impact of such substitution errors in documents such as medical prescriptions was briefly mentioned.

> In Germany the Federal Office for Information Security has issued a technical guideline that says the JBIG2 encoding "MUST NOT be used" for "replacement scanning".

I think the issue is that even if your compression explicitly notes that it's lossy, or if your OCR explicitly states that it uses an LLM to fix up errors, if the output looks like it could have been created by an non-lossy algorithm, users will just assume it that was. So in some sense it's better to have obvious OCR errors when there's any uncertainty.
Shein, Temu and Chinese E-Commerce:Data Risks, Sourcing Violations and Loopholes
The craziest thing to me is he was still posting up to the very end. I've seen this multiple times in end-stage cancers, my grandfather's pancreatic cancer, he seemed "fine" (other than looking incredibly sick) til the last ~12 hours or so - he was even doing some yard work the day or two before he died. He knew the entire time how much time was left, too. I don't know why I find this so crazy, other than I hope I never have to go through it - you're very aware of what's going on for a long, long time up until the end.

Glad he is no longer suffering.
Compared to the EU, the ostensibly relies more on litigation and less on regulation to keep things in check. This has, in turn, led to a more permissive attitude where, in general, anything goes unless and until people can successfully sue over it. Which, in turn, doesn't happen because we have a thing called forced arbitration that prevents most consumers from suing over most things - instead they have to go to an "arbitrator" who is chosen and paid for by the corporation in question, and therefore extremely highly motivated to not decide cases in a way that might cause their client to take their business elsewhere.

And, thanks to our darn near unrestricted version of free speech and a Supreme Court ruling that tore down most restrictions on political lobbying by ruling that spending money also counts as a form of speech, corporations spend an obscene amount of money on getting buddy-buddy with legislators. So the legislatures also tend to be incredibly slow to act on these kinds of things because they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them, either.
Uhmm, No... no it will not. That is dangerously incorrect.

Mineral water may have a small amount of trace minerals, but it has basically zero electrolytes at relevant physiologic concentrations. Functionally, there'd be almost no difference between distilled and mineral water fasting with respect to electrolyte management.

Imbalances in sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium can get VERY serious very quickly. Mineral water does not really have relevant concentrations of those.

I think you're conflating the idea that distilled water isn't particularly good for you since it starts leaching out the trace minerals from parts of your body, with the entire concept of electrolyte management. These are VERY different things, occurring with VERY different relevant concentrations... like at least 1-2 orders of magnitude.
It's almost as if the proliferation of stories like "the district prosecutor found no grounds to open a hit-and-run and DUI case against the young man who just so happens to be the son of the local MP/mogul" makes people disappointed in their government, law-enforcement agencies, and the political system in general.
As I understand it, they are both being sued to return the assets they received from SBF.
One extremely common pitfall is that attempts to build dev teams in non-tech companies end up creating a clique of "big thinkers" who unfortunately can't code much themselves. They end up convincing the management to contract out the lowly work and essentially become middlemen to other people's work.

You possibly can avoid that via good hiring policy if you know what you are doing. However once you quit the chance of things deteriorating is huge.
This is my opinion too. The real profitable application of current AI is surveillance and the removal of human empathy from the corporate equation.
you somehow missed auditory and visual.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9759142/

"Gamma oscillations and application of 40‐Hz audiovisual stimulation to improve brain function"

"Currently, 40‐Hz audiovisual stimulation was demonstrated to affect synaptic plasticity and modify the connection status of related brain networks in animal experiments and clinical trials."
Normally homeowners do have an information advantage: they know more about what's going on with their property than the insurance company, or could find out. I don't think the occasional drone oversight is going to change that much, other than for the most obvious problems.

It seems like whoever pays for an inspection (such as using drone surveillance), it should be shared with the other party?
If you have more cars traversing the same road with the same commute time, you have increased throughput. While it might not mean much to the individual driver, it's beneficial for the community the road serves to be able to move more people and goods around.

There are also potential benefits to the individual besides reduced commute time. For many people the real pain point of congestion is travel time variability. If you expect a drive to take 30 minutes, that's not particularly onerous. But if a drive you expected to take 10 minutes winds up taking 30, that is terrible. When there is variability, either you are late to arrive or you need to add buffer to your travel time, both of which are highly undesirable. Even holding average travel time constant, if you can reduce the standard deviation through optimization, that is a huge quality of life improvement.

There is also a safety concern. Congestion causes increased rates of accidents for a variety of reasons - less clearance between cars, people driving abnormally trying to make up for lost time, overflow to alternate routes, road rage, etc - which obviously is a problem for both society and the individual driver. Getting traffic to flow more smoothly, even if there were no throughput increase at all, would be a substantial benefit.

Finally, induced demand is just demand that is currently unsatisfied. There are people who currently live where they don't want to, work where they don't want to, or avoid trips altogether that they want to make because of excessive congestion. Improving their quality of life while holding the quality of life of current drivers constant is a good thing.
I have seen excellent performance with Florence-2 for OCR. I wrote https://blog.roboflow.com/florence-2-ocr/ that shows a few examples.

Florence-2 is < 2GB so it fits into RAM well, and it is MIT licensed!

On a T4 in Colab, you can run inference in < 1s per image.
> Sumerians used a Base-60 numbering system, and were exceedingly advanced in mathematics.

I've sort of thought 60 might be a nice base to work in. Some mathematicians prefer base-12 because it works with a wide number of factors and base-60 is just adding a factor of 5 to base-12. The result would be a base with an even wider variety of factors and, ideally, fewer instances of fractional amounts.
"Core team members are expected to act as role models for the community."

Seriously? Who on earth could possibly say that Tim Peters isn't the embodiment of this? It’s utterly ridiculous to even question whether he’s a role model. This kind of talk is completely out of touch with reality.
Sorry, didn't realise that fund doesn't exactly translate directly. The Wikimedia Foundation have financial endowment set up, to ensure future funding. My question is why Mozilla doesn't have that? Perhaps they do, but then finding information about it is rather difficult.
The sounds incredibly like a version of hell.
Provable Emails
Or offer to pay them more.
what are examples of local LLMs that accept images, that are mentioned in the README?
I think the details around this vary a lot from country to country. I work for a Norwegian insurer, and I’m pretty sure that we couldn’t cancel a contract like this short of something like fraud. OTOH, contracts are renewed annually, and I think declining to renew would be an option. But damages due to lack of maintenance are not covered anyways, so I’m not sure if there’s much incentive for this kind of thing in our market.
Tim Walz seems pretty upstanding.