logoalt Hacker News

percentcerlast Thursday at 11:25 PM5 repliesview on HN

This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.


Replies

quuxplusoneyesterday at 9:06 PM

As TFA says, the hard part is that "1" and "l" look the same in the selected typeface. Whether your OCR is done by computers or humans, you still have to deal with that problem somehow. You still need to do the part sketched out e.g. by pyrolistical in [1] and implemented by dperfect in [2].

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906897

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916065

sjducbyesterday at 8:06 PM

The first week of my PHD was accurately copying DNA sequences from an old paper into a computer file. 10 pages in total. I used OCR to make an initial version then text to speech to check it

76 pages is a couple of months of work

jjwisemanyesterday at 12:57 AM

Or one person types 76 pages. This is a thing people used to do, not all that infrequently. Or maybe you have one friend who will help–cool, you just cut the time in half.

show 1 reply
WolfeReaderlast Thursday at 11:28 PM

You think compelling 76 people to honestly and accurately transcribe files is something that's easy and quick to accomplish.

show 1 reply
fragmedelast Thursday at 11:31 PM

> Just get 76 people

I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage.

show 2 replies