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robon OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

> Doesn't YouTube do this for you automatically these days within a day or so?

Oh yeah, we do a check first and use youtube-transcript-api if there's an automatic one available:

https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api

The tool usually detects them within like ~5 mins of being uploaded though, so usually none are available yet. Then it'll send the summaries to our internal Slack channel for our editors, in case there's anything interesting to 'follow up on' from the meeting.

Probably would be a good idea to add a delay to it and wait for the automatic ones though :)

robon OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

There's a tool that uses YouTube's unofficial APIs to get them if they're available:

https://github.com/jdepoix/youtube-transcript-api

For our internal tool that transcribes local city council meetings on YouTube (often 1-3 hours long), we found that these automatic ones were never available though.

(Our tool usually 'processes' the videos within ~5-30 mins of being uploaded, so that's also why none are probably available 'officially' yet.)

So we use yt-dlp to download the highest quality audio and then process them with whisper via Groq, which is way cheaper (~$0.02-0.04/hr with Groq compared to $0.36/hr via OpenAI's API.) Sometimes groq errors out so there's built-in support for Replicate and Deepgram as well.

We run yt-dlp on our remote Linode server and I have a Python script I created that will automatically login to YouTube with a "clean" account and extract the proper cookies.txt file, and we also generate a 'po token' using another tool:

https://github.com/iv-org/youtube-trusted-session-generator

Both cookies.txt and the "po token" get passed to yt-dlp when running on the Linode server and I haven't had to re-generate anything in over a month. Runs smoothly every day.

(Note that I don't use cookies/po_token when running locally at home, it usually works fine there.)

robon OpenAI charges by the minute, so speed up your audio

For anybody trying to do this in bulk, instead of using OpenAI's whisper via their API, you can also use Groq [0] which is much cheaper:

[0] https://groq.com/pricing/

Groq is ~$0.02/hr with distil-large-v3, or ~$0.04/hr with whisper-large-v3-turbo. I believe OpenAI comes out to like ~$0.36/hr.

We do this internally with our tool that automatically transcribes local government council meetings right when they get uploaded to YouTube. It uses Groq by default, but I also added support for Replicate and Deepgram as backups because sometimes Groq errors out.

robon Opencode: AI coding agent, built for the terminal

Seems like there's a bit of controversy around this project [0][1].

[0] https://x.com/thdxr/status/1933561254481666466

[1] https://x.com/meowgorithm/status/1933593074820891062

robon Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page

They nailed it out of the park with the 12px default font size still in 2025. Probably the only site I have to use my browser's zoom feature on.

robon OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

What's with the black and white "couples" photo? Seems like they're on the verge of kissing or something for a romantic novel cover.

robon Internet Artifacts

I think domains were even free in 1994. I think the owner of rob.com told me he just had to send in a form or something back then.

robon My takeaways from DjangoCon EU 2025

Where? Two of the best languages. Sign me up.

robon Geocoding APIs compared: Pricing, free tiers and terms of use

Yes, without an active subscription.

https://docs.stadiamaps.com/geocoding-search-autocomplete/bu...

> Can I Store Geocoding API Results?

> Unlike most vendors, we won't charge you 10x the standard fee per request to store geocoding results long-term! However, we do require an active Standard, Professional, or Enterprise subscription to permanently store results (e.g. in a database). Temporary storage in the normal course of your work is allowed on all plans. See our terms of service for the full legal terms.

robon Geocoding APIs compared: Pricing, free tiers and terms of use

https://stadiamaps.com/terms-of-service/

> permanently storing results for future use (e.g., as a database column), in part or in whole, from the Stadia Maps Geocoding APIs without an active Standard, Professional, or Enterprise subscription with appropriate permissions;

robon OpenAI is building a social network?

I actually want to do everything you're outlining as well, but here in the northeast they're trying to sell ~1 acre for > $100,000 in a lot of desirable "rural" towns. Definitely makes it harder to get into unless you want to commit to far far north.

robon 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

You're trying to argue that 2003 isn't the early Internet. Seems like you're trying to have your "Ackchyually..." moment right now because you didn't know 4chan existed.

robon GPT-4.1 in the API

Bigger numbers are supposed to mean better. 3.5, 4, 4.5. Going from 4 to 4.5 to 4.1 seems weird to most people. If it's better, it should of been GPT-4.6 or 5.0 or something else, not a downgraded number.

robon LLM-hacker-news: LLM plugin for pulling content from Hacker News

Did you write this plugin by hand or did you use AI?

robon Coolify: Open-source and self-hostable Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative

Well then, luckily the name is "Coolify" and not "Coolie."

robon Doge staffer's YouTube nickname accidentally revealed his teen hacking activity

All this was pretty common back in the AOL days. Kelly Hallissey would call your parents, you'd get 2 char screen names just by editing the HTML source code before submitting, end users would run Sub7 and let you control their computers, DosFX and PatOrJK were thriving sites, Dolan would get pounds of dog food delivered to his house by anons for pissing them off.

robon Show HN: OpenNutrition – A free, public nutrition database

Not really sure how the author thinks anybody who tracks their calories/macros seriously is going to trust a website that literally just makes up values for the vitamins, minerals, etc:

> TL;DR: They are estimates from giving an LLM (generally o3 mini high due to cost, some o1 preview) a large corpus of grounding data to reason over and asking it to use its general world knowledge to return estimates it was confident in, which, when escalating to better LLMs like o1-pro and manual verification, proved to be good enough that I thought they warranted release.

robon Restructuring Announcement

"Either I'm an idiot, or something is going on that you don't understand. Let's check back in a month. :)"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wordpress/comments/1glejno/comment/...

...1 month later...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69221176/64/wpengine-in...

robon Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button

I agree with everybody else: it smells like ChatGPT. And I thought this before reading this chain.

Actually, going through their entire profile, it makes it even more obvious:

> Author here. No need to update the resume yet—titles do keep shifting! React’s monolithic style has muddied the waters, making it tough to build clean business logic, prioritize performance, craft CSS design systems, or just focus on user experience. Nue’s here to unblock that—giving each role room to shine with leaner tools, not cramming everyone into the same heavy stack.

> Author here. React’s absolutely mature—no question there, with a skilled team behind it. But the button example highlights something off: a single component outweighing an entire app feels fundamentally broken. There’s clear room for fresh alternatives, especially now. You can see it here on HN—seasoned devs wrestling with React’s wild complexity. Nue’s a stab at fixing that.

Looks like they switch to ChatGPT-mode for most of their Nue replies.

robon You should know this before choosing Next.js

PHP and Laravel (free starter kits, stable.)

Python and Django (SaaS Pegasus is a good paid boilerplate, complete with a standalone React frontend example.)

robon You should know this before choosing Next.js

Next.js is secretly a paid framework designed to be run on Vercel, masquerading as open source, and somehow they did it in a way where even the most popular YouTubers continue to shill for them as it being the "best" framework.

robon uv downloads overtake Poetry for Wagtail users

uv, ruff.... Astral doesn't miss. Excited to see what else they can bring to the Python world.

Had an issue running something on the latest Python version installed (3.13) but only needed to 'downgrade' to 3.11 to run that particular script. Just a simple:

`uv run --python 3.11 --with openai-whisper transcribe.py`

And no need to mess with anything else.

robon Bending Spoons lay off more than 85% of Brightcove staff after acquisition

So what would one do if they happen to be paying for Beacon right now (which imo is a mess switching between 'classic' and new versions)?

robon What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero

https://archive.is/emrAy

robon Posthog/.cursorrules

Was "ElectricSQL" made with with you using Cursor and "YOLO" mode while making coffee?

robon GPT-4.5

I bet simonw will be adding it to `llm` and someone will be pasting his highlights here right after. Until then, my mind will remain a blank canvas.

robon BritCSS: Fixes CSS to use non-American English

Only if we're served tuna and beans on a "jacket potato."

robon Run Ruby on Rails in the browser using WebAssembly

Nice work.

robon Show HN: Transform your codebase into a single Markdown doc for feeding into AI

Listen, I don't want to brag too much, but it even made me a function today.

robon YouTube's New Hue

I disagree. I use it every day for 4 years and the recommendations are great. I don't do any weird things like killing my session.