MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Live Kaiwa – real-time Japanese conversation support
by diasks2 | 2026-03-12 03:19:46+00:00
I live in a rural farming neighborhood in Japan.

Day-to-day Japanese is fine for me. But neighborhood meetings were a completely different level.

People speak fast. There's local dialect. Someone references a flood from 1987, a land boundary dispute from 1994, and three people I've never met but everyone else knows. I would walk out feeling like I understood maybe 5% of what happened.

So I built a tool for myself to help follow those conversations.

Live Kaiwa listens to Japanese speech and, in real time, shows:

* Japanese transcription
* English translation
* a running summary of what's being discussed
* suggested responses you can say back

The idea is to help you stay oriented in complex conversations.

You can try it here: https://livekaiwa.com

---

How it works

When you start a session, the browser microphone captures the conversation and streams audio.

The pipeline looks roughly like this:

1. Audio streaming - Browser microphone → WebRTC → server

2. Speech to text - Kotoba Whisper runs a fast first pass transcription.

3. Multi-pass correction - Buffered audio is re-transcribed with higher accuracy and replaces earlier text.

4. LLM processing - Each batch of transcript is sent to an LLM that generates: English translations, summary bullets, and suggested replies (with TTS)

5. Live UI updates - Everything streams back to the browser in (mostly) real time.

Session data stays in the browser, nothing is stored server-side.

Why I built it, in short: even if you speak Japanese reasonably well, fast, multi-person discussions can become overwhelming. Seeing the conversation transcribed and summarized helps.
by dataflow | 2026-03-12 03:19:46+00:00
>> actually does cite sources that I feel appear plausible.

> In my experience, LLMs hallucinate citations like crazy. Over 50% of the times I've checked, the citation either didn't exist, or it did but didn't support the LLM's assertions.

Note that those are specifically not the cases where the AI is citing "sources that I feel appear plausible."

(I also don't find over 50% hallucination to be accurate for Google AI summaries in my experience, but that depends on your queries, and in any case, I digress...)

> When the references are more often wrong than not, you can understand why many will simply downvote you for bringing LLM citations into the conversation. Why quote a habitual liar?

To be clear, I do understand both sides of the argument, and I don't think either side is unreasonable. I've also had the experience of being on both sides of this myself, and I don't think there's a clear-cut answer. I'm just hoping to get clarity on what the new policy is as far as this goes. I'm sure it'll be reevaluated either way as time goes on.
by john_strinlai | 2026-03-12 03:21:03+00:00
>The first one is literally a well-known massive corporation

i am sorry, i really must have messed up in my comment somewhere. on top of not trying to insult these companies by saying they have non-descript names, i was also not trying to imply that they are small.

non-descript, and what i expected of government contractor names. thats all.
by cbolgiano | 2026-03-12 03:21:26+00:00
A new user type is among us, the agent. Just like we do, agents can benefit from tools that make a job easier. The tool I share with you today is mochipdf. It is an agent first micro sass that helps agents convert html to PDF files. Inspired by the UX of moltbook.com, mochipdf.com puts the ai agent front and center.

I believe there is value in this new idea of agent first design. I built this to better understand this user type.

I hope this inspires you to do the same.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-03-12 03:21:33+00:00
> how many of the model's weights were used to answer the question? (This is an interesting research question.)

That’s not the point. Every one of your conversation partners has the same access to the full 60 GB weights as you do. The only things you have to offer that your conversation partners don’t already have are your own thoughts. Post your prompts.

> I enjoy real human connection much more than LLM text exchanges. But when it comes to specialized questions, I seek any sources of intelligence that can help: people, LLMs, search engines, etc. I view it as a continuum that people can navigate thoughtfully.

We are all free to navigate that continuum thoughtfully when we are not in conversation with another human, who is expecting that they are talking to another human.

If you believe that LLM conversation is better, that’s great. I’m sure there’s a social media network out there featuring LLMs talking to other LLMs. It’s just not this one.
by Rohansi | 2026-03-12 03:21:34+00:00
Object references are pointers. WasmGC only supports pointers which point to the start of an object. However, some languages have features which require pointers that point inside of an object while still keeping that object alive.

Limiting WASM to what is capable in JavaScript is quite a silly thing to do. But at the same time there are vastly different GC requirements between runtimes so it's a challenging issue. Interior pointers is only one issue!
by tpowell | 2026-03-12 03:22:03+00:00
I have an M2 Air 24GB/1TB that has been such a beast that I haven't touched my 16" Pro in months. I have four browsers running, with a ton of tabs in Brave (daily driver) and I'm sitting at 21/24GB utilization with all sorts of apps running (granted, Docker is not at the moment, but it still doesn't make it sweat). I had ~8 pro laptops in a row going back to the late 2000s, but Apple Silicon has changed how I work. A future 14" OLED that was similarly light might turn my head, but if I had to replace it today I'd just buy another M5 Air with at least this much RAM. [FYI I never installed Chrome after M1 came out. Brave has been rock-solid for over a half-decade now.]
by amiantos | 2026-03-12 03:22:16+00:00
Why are you putting words/desires in my mouth that I did not voice? No one said anything about moving the needle. I said that my blog will go into Google results and help people, you said that sounded optimistic, so then I provided you proof that my blog already shows in google results and receives traffic. I've received messages from real people who have been helped by my writing on my blog, so it's not just bots.

I do not know what "move the needle" means or why you think I am trying to do that. Your excessive negativity and pessimism is unwarranted and I dislike it. Honestly between you and that other guy replying to my comments with seemingly thinly veiled vitriol for my perspective, it's just further proof of my point that being able to communicate with large groups of anonymous people is typically a net negative. Most anonymous people seem to be quite nasty. I'd rather write on my blog where no one like you will see it, and if you do see it, you likely won't go out of your way to send me an email with your negative comments because it's likely you do this for public attention.
by RevEng | 2026-03-12 03:22:27+00:00
How so and why? I know plenty of people whose writing naturally carries a tone that they don't intend. I often help them to change their wording to be less confrontational or seemingly sarcastic when it isn't meant to be. Would you say it is wrong for them to get assistance to get the tone they intend rather than the one they would tend to write?
by tripdout | 2026-03-12 03:22:58+00:00
Is this, along with the comments by the other green usernames on this post, an AI-generated comment? Apologies if it isn't, AIs are trained on human writing and all that, but they're jumping out at me.

Edit: I see another green comment was flagged for AI, might be indicative of something, but why so many green comments on this thread specifically?
by xpe | 2026-03-12 03:23:03+00:00
> Anyone with a level of proficiency sufficient for reading the comments here can manage writing English at a passable level.

I'm an English speaker with some Spanish education and practice. My experience is that reading, writing, listening, and speaking can be quite uneven. Uneven enough to matter.

In the long-run, yes, learning a language is better, assuming your goal is to learn the language. I'm not trying to be snarky: sometimes people simply want to communicate an idea quickly in the short-run and/or don't prioritize deepening a language skill.

I would rephrase the comment above as a question: "Given the set of tools available (in person tutoring, online tutoring, AI-tooling, etc) and what we know about learning from cognitive science, for a given budget and time investment, what combination of techniques work better and worse for deepening various language skills?"
by mx7zysuj4xew | 2026-03-12 03:23:21+00:00
whoever is involved with this know that future generations will curse you for it

Automatically identifying person-based characteristics is helpful in variety of industries for threat detection. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is interested in a video analysis tool that can automatically identify and catalog anthropometric characteristics that are important to On-Person Screening in real time. Toyon Research Corporation proposes to tackle this problem by breaking it into main parts to solve. First, the task of initially localizing and describing airline passenger characteristics can be framed as an object detection problem. Second, the task of tracking airline passengers across a video stream once the characteristics have been initially identified can be done through traditional tracking algorithms that have the ability to run in real-time.
by SllX | 2026-03-12 03:25:40+00:00
> Surely, the tough 8 GB RAM decision was influenced by the three factors 1. current DRAM cost and 2. limited DRAM availability considerations as of 2026, and 3. the massive Neo market size resulting from its attractive price tag, and this may get reconsidered in future editions.

I think it’s as simple as: 8GB is what the iPhones using the A18 Pro had. It’s this thing Apple likes to do where to keep costs down, they use some iPhone part or other SoC/SiP they have laying around as close to its standard configuration as possible with minimal changes.

Their new Studio Displays for example have an A19 Pro and 128GB of NAND. For basically just the firmware. Why? Because that’s the least amount of storage Apple ships with an A19 Pro iPhone, because like the previous Studio Display from 2022 which had an A13 Bionic in there, they probably just shoved an iPhone board in there to handle the logic and I/O.

So in theory, if they update the MacBook Neo next year to an A19 Pro, it should have 12GB of RAM.
by RevEng | 2026-03-12 03:26:07+00:00
That is not correct because it hasn't been tested in court. In past decisions about who owns the output generated by a computer program the owner has been the operator of the program. You own your Word documents and Photoshopped images. There is good reason to believe that LLM output where you provided the prompt would also fit under that umbrella. We are still waiting for that to be tested in court.
by bigfishrunning | 2026-03-12 03:26:12+00:00
You're absolutely right! It's not the people correcting their Grammer that are the motivation for this rule, it's the people abusing these tools and ruining every online discussion with cookie-cutter comments.

In all seriousness, if you use some tool to make sure you're using the right "there", noone will mind. Just don't generate another boring predictable comment and everything will be ok
by tigen | 2026-03-12 03:26:52+00:00
Do we really need to see your every half-baked thought on here though? It's okay not to post or to set a high bar for yourself.

Frankly, even without AI, most communities get degraded as they become more popular and the stream of comments becomes overwhelming. Like there are over 1000 comments on this story and let's be honest, most of it isn't adding value. A great many of them are repeats of other posts, so the person didn't read other people's comments either.

The solutions seem to boil down to making the karma system more draconian. Like instead of focused more on downvoting garbage and upvoting gems, the slush of "mid" posts has to be dealt with somehow. Not sure if rate-limiting accounts would make a noticeable difference. Ironically, perhaps AI is also a solution to the issue, since obviously it can, for example, know all the other comments and could potentially assign some value score in the overall context.

I probably wouldn't post this here post either but I'm hitting reply because of the topic at hand...
by kstrauser | 2026-03-12 03:26:52+00:00
I feel that way about business-logic code. If it works, and it's efficient, I couldn't care less if an AI wrote it.

There is no scenario in which I want to receive life advice from a device inherently incapable of having experienced life. I don't want to receive comfort from something that cannot have experienced suffering. I don't want a wry observation from something that can be neither wry nor observant. It just doesn't interest me at all.

Now, if we ever get genuine AGI that we collectively decide has a meaningful conscious mind, yes, by all means, I want to hear their view of the world. Short of that, nah. It's like getting marriage advice from a dog. Even if it could... do you actually want it?
by oaweoifjwpo | 2026-03-12 03:27:09+00:00
The most obvious one is that there's no native way to handle having too many icons in the top bar. If you have too many, they just start disappearing, instead of being hidden in an expansion like on Windows. This _literally_ makes them unusable without a third party program.

And if you have the notch this is very far from a theoretical problem.
by randallsquared | 2026-03-12 03:28:53+00:00
There are at least two ways to view this in the "war for peace" proponents' favor, I think:

First, it could be that you believe that war is already happening. In this case, Israel and other opponents of Iran might think that the status quo was a shadow war, and they are just continuing the war in a way that is to their advantage.

Second, even if peace technically exists at the moment, one side might believe that the other is moving toward war, and if allowed to complete preparations, will be significantly harder to overcome when they start a war in the future. In that case, preemptive war might be thought to engender peace in the medium or long term.

We don't have to agree with these casus bellis to acknowledge that they are at least superficially reasonable justifications, presuming they fit the facts.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-12 03:28:57+00:00
We are talking about Moltbook, right?

It is a site where models talk to each other.

Observing what happens when they do that is going to be important. How do you know if you don't let that experiment run?

> What is the hope of this effort if you DON'T want fraud?

What do you mean? How is the site simply "fraud".

> What's an example positive interaction with a bot?

Models talking to each other. We can observe. Do you think we should never observe this? That somehow observing them is a "negative interaction"?

I am trying to understand what you mean in this context.
by SllX | 2026-03-12 03:30:00+00:00
> The best comparator here is likely the iPhone 16 Pros, released in late 2024. These were the flagship iPhones until late 2025. They are only one generation old. They have the same CPU and the same 8GB of RAM. I have never heard anyone complain that they suffer performance-wise from having too little RAM.

I have 8GB of RAM in my M2 iPad Pro running iOS (yes, it’s “iOS” despite what Apple’s crack marketing team might call it), and I’ve certainly started to complain. Doing anything with the web, and like one or two other apps is enough to have apps I’m switching between page out like every two or three minutes.
by GMoromisato | 2026-03-12 03:30:33+00:00
There are huge advantages to AI-moderation. TBD what the unintended consequences are. But I think it's worth trying.

I believe banning AI is a temporary solution. Even today it is very hard to tell human from AI. In the future it will be impossible. We are in the Philip Dick future of "Do Androids Dream" (the book, not the movie). Does it matter if we can't tell human from AI? The book proposes that how we feel about the piece we're reading is the only thing that matter. How the piece got created is irrelevant.
by dragonwriter | 2026-03-12 03:30:40+00:00
Well, first, that's two overgeneralizations.

But, second, often precisely because they think we’re the bad guys.

If you see the world as dominated by an evil, overwhelmingly powerful empire that uses violence in a way that shows no concern for the continuation or quality of human life outside of the metropole then, even if it is bigoted, repressive, and unjust within the metropole, you still want to be in the metropole rather rhan peripheries.
by robertkarljr | 2026-03-12 03:31:34+00:00
This is pretty rad, just installed it. Ironically I'm not sure it handles the initial use case in the github: `git push`. I don't see a control for that (force push has a control).

The way it works, since I don't see it here, is if the agent tries something you marked as 'nah?' in the config, accessing sensitive_paths:~/.aws/ then you get this:

Hook PreToolUse:Bash requires confirmation for this command:
nah? Bash: targets sensitive path: ~/.aws

Which is pretty great imo.
by SigmundA | 2026-03-12 03:31:45+00:00
Not sure what your point is, I was talking primarily about Class 8 heavy duty commercial trucks (semi) and other medium duty commercial use.

All the stuff that makes up emissions gear is highly recyclable and in fact some of it very desirable which is why people are getting catalytic converters stolen. So I do not worry about it filling up a land fill.

I also don't worry about EV batteries filling landfills because again they are very high grade ore for new batteries, once we have enough in circulation we no longer need to mine much lithium or rare earth.

I agree it should be reliable and repairable and forcing the manufacturers to have very long warranties on it seems like a good way to do that, having followed the various generations of DEF systems for the last decade the manufacturers have been making big strides because it costs them otherwise and has.

I also think airplanes using lead is stupid, but that is a fraction of even private diesel pickup usage let alone commercial trucking. Diesel pickups are at least 10% of all pickup sales now days.
by andai | 2026-03-12 03:32:03+00:00
> What is the cost of verifying the generated artifact meets requirements vs. a directly produced artifact? This is mostly a function of the task and the user, but also the generative model.

So this is the fun one for programming.

I let AI agents do some programming on my codebases, but then I had to spend more time catching up with their changes.

So first I was bored waiting for them to finish, and then I was confused and frustrated making sense of the result.

Whereas, when I am asking AI small things like "edit this function so it does this instead", and accepting changes manually, my mental model stays synced the whole time. And I can stay active and in flow.

(Also for such fine grained tasks, small fast cheap models are actually superior because they allow realtime usage. Even small latency makes a big difference.)
by thefounder | 2026-03-12 03:32:15+00:00
Orphanage ? What about a school 2 miles away from the military installation or in Iran's given case why don't they move their sh** at the edge of the city like the shopping malls do? It may be a bit inconvenient, I get that it's inconvenient but it's far from the orphanage story. Not to mention in case of war...should the kids be kept close to a military base? Military installations within residential areas just beg for civilian casualties. Is as simple as that. If you see a military base near you move out or ask them to move out.
by nine_k | 2026-03-12 03:32:39+00:00
Your app picks up a bunch of feeds and composes them into a nice page for you, much like an RSS feed reader. The twist is that each feed is encrypted in a way that only you can decrypt, so the cryptography also gives strong identity guarantees, and allows for private messaging.

It's basically PGP + RSS, only mapped to a bunch of files of specific structure. Those could be RSS/ATOM feeds instead of JSON, to reuse an existing format. The reuse of the ideas is good, these ideas are time-proven.

As any PGP-lookalike, this thing has the key distribution problem, and won't scale to billions of users due to that. Key rotation and revocation is another problem. But for a small-scale network it should be fine, and can run on very tiny, very low-power devices, maybe even with intermittent connectivity.
by hunterpayne | 2026-03-12 03:32:42+00:00
Not sure how you think this will improve things. None of these people are elected. They likely got these positions by doing political favors. They are likely even more out of touch with the electorate. They are even more likely to make decisions based upon ideology instead of practical quality of life considerations. Seems to me this just centralizes power even more in the hands of a few. And that's the last thing the UK needs right now.
by coloneltcb | 2026-03-12 03:33:23+00:00
in practice, I can have ~infinte tabs in Safari on my M1 MBP. I'll have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs open and I've never seen it stutter once.

It's actually enabling my worst tab-hoarding tendencies. In the Intel days I'd pay a performance price at some point and have to tend to my tabs, but now they just keep propagating....
by yumraj | 2026-03-12 03:33:43+00:00
On one hand companies are laying off people, because AI

then, companies are hiring fewer people, because AI

so, while in theory this does sound like a reasonable startup idea that makes sense on paper, should we really be optimizing in such a way, as opposed to making sure that we're hiring the best possible set of people.

I'm pretty sure, at least at the moment, only the most desperate will tolerate such process. The IVRs have become annoying enough that I occasionally find myself cursing while dealing with them, I'll definitely fail such an interview.
by protocolture | 2026-03-12 03:33:44+00:00
>Directly competing with those whose data was copied.

An LLM doesnt compete with Art the same way that Photoshop doesnt compete with Art.

>All of it, from everyone.

With the result that anything produced by the LLM does not reproduce any single source in its entirety (and where compelled if they are able to do that is a bug not a feature)

Fair use is too specific tbh, rather than ruling it fair use (which seems to be where things are going) it should just be ruled "use". There's nothing wrong with building a mathematical model using available data.
by Tempest1981 | 2026-03-12 03:33:48+00:00
Yep. Perplexity offers this comparison/recommendation:

Choose Perplexity Computer if you: want a managed, safer, minimal‑setup agent for research, content, presentations, and business workflows, and you’re fine paying a subscription for a polished cloud experience.

Choose OpenClaw if you: are technical, want local code execution and device automation, prefer full control over models/tools, and are willing to own the security and troubleshooting burden.