skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: TranslateMyCall.com, an AI interpreter for phone calls
Hi folks, Alex here with a launch I’m hoping for some feedback on!

I recently finished what started as a hackathon-style project with a friend, which has now become TranslateMyCall.com.

The problem we set out to solve is that there’s currently no way to interpret phone calls between languages without a human in the loop. Apps like Google Translate work well for in-person conversations, and Skype (surprising, right?) is the best I’ve found for VoIP interpreting. But for traditional phone calls, your only option is paying $1 to $4 per minute for a human interpreter through a service like LanguageLine. Even then, it can take 5-10 minutes to get connected, and interpreter availability/quality can vary.

We thought building an AI app to interpret phone calls between languages would be simple (famous last words...) but quickly learned why nobody else has done it. Building telephony integrations through Twilio was a huge pain, and phone audio is low-quality (8KHz/8-bit), making high-accuracy transcription difficult, especially for non-English languages.

In fact, transcription turned out to be the crux of this whole project. Translating transcribed text and synthesizing translated speech were easier, but balancing transcription quality with low latency became our #1 challenge. High transcription accuracy is possible if you’re willing to wait 10+ seconds with models like Google’s Chirp 2, but for real-time conversations, that’s not acceptable. Other models like Whisper and Deepgram are much faster, but often gave us unusably bad results for phone audio, especially in non-English languages.

After months of iteration, we've put together a system that glues together a number of AI models, both open-source and API-based, in ways that compensate for each others’ weaknesses while minimizing latency. (Sorry I can’t share more details yet — we’re keeping a few secrets while we try to commercialize this.)

The funny thing is, what we’ve built is probably going to be obsolete soon as foundation models get better and better. But for now, it seems that we’re the first working solution for this problem.

Now that we have a working product, we’ll be exploring B2B use cases for TranslateMyCall.com, but for now and into the foreseeable future, we’re releasing it as a free public alpha. To try it out, go to www.translatemycall.com, select your language and phone number (we support 40 languages and 36 country codes), and the other person’s language and phone number, and both of you will receive a phone call connecting you through an interpreted line.

Please let us know what you think, especially any suggestions for improvement! And if you know someone who might benefit from this, we’d appreciate it if you share it with them. You can reach me with any questions or feedback here or at alex@translatemycall.com.
Isn't Ireland now effectively getting the penalty funds that their taxation malpractices caused in the first place?
They have value in the code because they save time when someone has to deal with that code a couple of years later. Certainly the explanation could be in the code reviews or the commit message, but it's easiest if it is right there.
I absolutely agree that the average tape will last longer than the average hard drive.

I've got 30 hard drives in use right now and at least 10 are older than 5 years. A few are over 7 years old. I've also had hard drives die in less than a week.

Even if the data is on tape I want to emphasize that the tape needs to be periodically read and verify that the data is still readable and correct. Assuming the data is stable for 30 years and you can just leave it there is a dumb idea unless you didn't care about the data in the first place.
I had to do a double take on this, as I associate Iron Mountain as the brand that shreds papers and hard drives as their most common service.
Really devastating. I think the rename from Realm is why people haven't noticed this, but I guess also its popularity really has dwindled. Even though I only use local RealmSwift, I don't trust that the community will be able to keep it going even in maintenance mode.
Hey man I'm not judging you if you can make money doing this!
> Apple Italy sold iPhones for 599€s + vat (thus avoiding to pay any corporate taxes in Italy while making billions)

Isn't that the whole point of the European Economic Area? That you can freely sell your goods to other countries within the EEA without having to pay corporate taxes to each individual country?
I mean that's fine?
If you still exist then your obligations remain. Maybe we will have some sort of "digital rights bankruptcy"
In general its used by remote devs who need to share things like API keys, tokens, credentials and other sensitive or auth related code.

It's actually used a lot.
The other weird part is that I beleive the situation had been resolved before any investigation.
The second M doesn't help.

Almost like the title was purposely crafted to mislead you to draw eyeballs.
Coming out of the games industry, I am constantly amazed by how rarely people outside of games use debuggers. And, how slow they are to debug everything because of that...
Yeah it's especially bad with video games. One of the most dishonest practices I've ever seen. People amass "libraries" and "accounts" worth tens of thousands of dollars and the corporation can just take it all away for any reason at all including no reason. They don't like a little comment you made somewhere, banned, entire account deleted, "your" "property" permanently revoked, and unless some legal miracle happens that forces them to overturn it they won't even reply to you.

They say "buy" but in reality it's a "licensing agreement" nonsense with a zillion lawyery rules nobody cares about or even reads. Judges should take one look at that and throw the whole thing out but they won't because the intellectual property industry is worth trillions of dollars which means they can buy laws that favor them via lobbyists. It feels like the world is unfixably wrong.
Was that on the front page? I just checked and couldn't find it there.
Efficient Secret Sharing for Large-Scale Applications [pdf]
> see tutorial on diffusion
> get excited
> it's all math in latex
> despair
Cool visualization!

It would've been nice to not assume only one lottery winner. People tend to pick numbers that are meaningful for them: birthdays, favorite numbers, lucky numbers. Thus it actually significantly increases your EV if you pick unusual numbers, which is not reflected here.
Partially off-topic, but I’ve seen complaints in the thread about microwaves in general. Here’s the trick — buy a commercial microwave. They’re reliable, powerful, and have only a few features. They come in all sizes.

You’ll put less duty on one in a month than a commercial kitchen does in one day, so it will last forever. Time is money in a kitchen so they’re powerful and fast. They tend to have very simple, direct controls, rather than a myriad of popcorn/pizza/whatever buttons. Commercial microwaves often have an integrated diffuser, so they don’t need the stupid rotating glass plate in the bottom.
Well, so far there's no model that knows what it doesn't know, and hallucination continues to be a problem.

So maybe you can enlighten us all, AI labs included, with your genius as to how to solve hallucination, and how to do so only via changes to the training set since that is what you suggest.

To make things easy for you, lets assume that every training text has been augmented with source information such that the model could potentially learn which sources are trustworthy on given subjects or not, and therefore assess whether it knows something or not.

So what else are you going to add to the training set that you claim would induce it to learn this self-referential "I know X" knowledge to better achieve it's next word loss ? Why do you think the AI labs have not done what you are suggesting ?
Interestingly enough, there are multiple exit nodes in Russia, as far as I know, law enforcements aren't taking them down
There are potentially many reasonable things to negotiate for. So far, all the information I can find is "stalled contract negotiations". Working without a contract is a perfectly valid reason to strike.

Things like making sure that AI isn't used in certain capacities to reduce the staff size wouldn't be unreasonable.

As of yet, the contents of the negotiation aren't public - so we can only guess.

In the meantime, the idea that everyone should be able to make Big Tech wages ignores the reality that most companies aren't Big Tech and have a revenue per employee that is a small fraction of it... and are running on much slimmer profit margins.
Why would they sell it directly? Works better if they can advertise their one of a kind, super stable, cloud specific data archival solution that nobody else can replicate. Or not even advertise it, but maintain lower storage costs per byte relative to AWS or Google.

As far as I know, the technology behind Amazon Glacier has never been shared. Glass disks could eventually be backing the Microsoft equivalent.
Hi! I made this tool. I saw it had way more traffic than usual and then realized it was from HN, very cool!

Would love to hear any feedback. I've been super interested in how well-designed web apps and visualizations can communicate things like probability, which I think is very hard to intuit for many of us.

The most surprising thing I learned from the tool was just how bad your payouts usually were even if you cut the pool of numbers to pick from in half (by using the "Custom" option).
What I’d really love would be a proportional version of Berkeley Mono.
like Max Headroom
> WSL2 is great these days and can interact fine with Windows files (despite what this article says)

is that true when using Docker with WSL2?
> but they should be able to investigate without placing an undue burden on exit node operators

Is the burden undue?

A Tor exit node operator has made the ethical judgment call that they're doing more good than harm. That might be a reasonable position to take, but I don't think it's unreasonable for us to expect an operator to face up to exactly what it is that they are doing. I'm fully on board with any bomb threats (as just one example) leading to a subpoena on the exit node operator who shielded the threat actor, even if the answer is the same every time.

Making the decision that you're doing more good than harm requires you to fully understand the harm that you're justifying, and law enforcement subpoenaing you every single time is one way to make it very clear what it is that you're choosing.
MongoDB Realm: Device Sync and Edge Server Are Deprecated
Great minds think alike. That is exactly the microwave I have, and for the same reasons. Such a brilliant tool.
Can you point me to your startups? I'm not entirely sure I understand how to implement this.
"Yet nobody thinks Finite Element Models have an internal mental representation of the world."

At this point, I'm not sure some wouldn't argue that.

The difference is, put the AI on a loop, with constant feedback, learning.
Instead of just a 'pre-trained' model. Make the actual model, live, always learning, so the context window is infinite. This of course would not be for everyone, because it would take all the resources of the training infrastructure to be focused on one person/view. But that gets closer to the human mind, and at that point, we probably couldn't say for sure that the 'perturbations' aren't experiencing something subjective.

Where is the proof that humans have an internal mental representation of the world.
It isn't spam. It is the present and the future. Advertising however is the spam.
And there's a further layer in the onion: the bureau of mines was shut down except this one guy's department. And he said it was actually a good thing.

Removing code is hard, I assume it's also hard with government agencies, but sometimes it's really useful to do.
Terminal Tinder: Find your next colorscheme
Hi HN.

I am teaching myself some more full-stack dev and try out AI assisted coding, I decided to build Terminal Tinder, a way for your machine to learn what colorschemes you like, and maybe generate some novel ones for you.

Would love for people to try it out and hopefully find some fun or use out of it!

Open to feedback, bugs, PR, etc here: https://github.com/tanishq-dubey/TerminalTinder and thanks!
Many types of income cannot be offset nor or they covered by tax treaties.

That's news to me and I've been doing international tax for 15 years. Please, tell me what types of income earned by a U.S. expat isn't covered by a tax treaty?

It is not uncommon to pay more taxes in aggregate as an expat than you would pay in either country separately.

This is objectively false. For an expat, income taxes paid to a resident country are a dollar-for-dollar credit against your U.S. income taxes, and that's on top of the inclusion threshold that doesn't subject the first $X of foreign income to any U.S. taxation at all.
absolutely right.

my mother was a mostly-deaf lip-reader. She needed conversational context in order to keep up 'legibly'; and it created a lot of fun between the two of us when she would come up with an oddball question or comment that had nothing to do with the conversation once-in-awhile when her guesses failed spectacularly.

With context, though, it's a great tool. She and I used to watch crime dramas with the sound off late at night and never miss a beat. It feels if you're trying to transcribe something that has a lot of structural context the success rate is higher than 50%, but I don't know that formally.

It's still a tool I use in conversation. Even with good hearing it's tough to hear people in crowded restaurants or concert venues, lip-reading helps immensely.
On the subject of winning the lottery, the story that goes untold is of the MIT crew that gamed Massachusetts' Cash Windfall circa 2007.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...

There's a movie out starring Walter White, of the Selbees side, called Jerry and Marge Go Large, but which talks about the story, but portrays the MIT kids poorly for dramatic effect.
I got in the beta a couple weeks ago and tried it out on some papers [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41020635
The same problem exists with spreadsheets. Should we get rid of excel (the single tool that literally runs half the world), and start manually writing markdown tables in text files?

The tool and the tool maker are supposed to serve the user. The user is not supposed to conform to the whims of the tool maker.
You can still document the why in commit messages![1]

I feel like I’m getting off the self-documenting code ride. In our own codebase we rely way too much on “descriptive names”. Like full-on sentence-names. And is the code self-documenting? Often not. You indeed cannot describe three or more axes of concerns in one name.

Do comments go stale? Well why does it? Too loose code reviews? Pull requests that have fifty lines of diff noise that you glaze over? We have the tools to do better on that front than some years ago at least.

It’s a joy to find a corner of the code base where things are documented with regular sentences. Compared to having to puzzle through five function call layers.

[1] But yeah, really. But also: sometimes also in comments. Sometimes both.
The question was about ISPs.
You still need to e.g. pass file paths to a program to open that file in that program.
I don't need to know anything about this, but I'm glad to know that it exists and gets used. Very cool.
Megan Jaegerman's brilliant news graphics (2007)
You've right to assert that, and I agree with you. there's not nearly enough information provided to be used safely as a tutorial. But that's the whole point of my disgust with the shift in tone away from hackers.

you wrote

> Please be careful. But I don't think you should be able to set yourself up as a counterculture medical authority and not have people ask questions about it, especially because a lot of people _won't_ ask questions.

And I agree, following this as written is dangerous. But knowledge is dangerous, the core of the hacker ethos is that knowledge and information should still be free.

I take issue with the hand wringing, and the lack of curiosity. The closing of the top comment for the thread is

> This kind of arrogance and lack of respect for the discipline required in organic chemistry is going to result is someone getting hurt.

This could serve as a prime example the epitome of counter hacker-culture

It's fine to say, this is dangerous, and to roast the author for a badly written guide resulting in an apparent indifference for the safety of others... but to frame it as a lack of respect for the discipline (and expatations and rules) isn't hacker culture.
Email hn@ycombinator.com. I wonder if abraxa's account tripped some spam filter or something. The mods should be able to help.

Edit: I sent the email myself.
Can someone explain to me how the EV can be so incredibly low? I know the answer is because people will buy the tickets no matter what, but even compared to other losing games the lottery comes away looking like an absolute bandit.

A run on the simulation (n=1000000) comes back with -92% EV. It looks like -10% [1] is a rough estimate for slot machine EV, which I would ballpark into the same game genre (-EV, no skill entertainment) as the lottery.

What accounts for this payout discrepancy in what I would consider similar games? On that train of thought, what prevents a new lottery from coming in and offering a _generous_ -50% lottery, offering ~5x as much money as before?

[1]* https://www.888casino.com/blog/expected-value
They're correct on both. The Irish government is running a budget surplus due to massive increases in the corporation tax intake over the last several years. The issue with delivery of housing and projects in this country isn't due to a lack of money, but a lack of capacity. The economy is already running at full capacity and there aren't enough workers available. Throwing more cash at things wouldn't have a material increase in output for several years until supply could ramp up.
I've been meaning be the all you need is attention paper for yours and never have. And I finally listened to that little generated interview as their first example. I think this is going to be very very useful to me!
The CPSC would be interested.
Migadu
Show HN: A Wordle-Inspired Puzzle Game with Images
Howdy HN folks!

I’ve been working on What The Pix Say (WTPS), a Wordle-inspired word puzzle game where you solve phrases by guessing the meaning of images.

Here’s how it works:

- Each phrase is represented by a set of images.
- You drag the images into place to form a phrase or sentence.
- The game accepts partial matches, so you don’t always need to be exact. For example, an image of a theater might represent “the,” or an image under a bridge could symbolize “under.”

I use AI to help generate the games and images (they can be quite hilarious at times).

Would love to get your feedback before I release this into the wild!

Cheers,
Shaun

PS: If you’re curious about how I built it, I recorded the whole process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnV0d-Nflqk&list=PLYM7y5xhAU....
Is something like this unexpected? I personally never ever thought so (which is the reason why I never ever even considered running a TOR exit node).

As much as I can respect the idealism about privacy and liberty etc..., I could not ignore the fact that any "really!!!" bad actor could use the same infrastructure to avoid investigation/prosecution, therefore I did not want to provide indirectly any help.

> I feel law enforcement realizes this is a big weakness they can target since a lot of Tor exit operators are individuals with not a lot of resources to fight them. They can use the legal system to scare operators into shutting down.

On one hand I admit that that might be the case, on the other hand even government organizations/departments/agencies can be "local" and scattered (e.g. similar IT departments for each "canton" in Switzerland) and not have huge amounts of resources/knowledge to track/identify perpetrators of all ongoing (sophisticated?) IT crimes => somebody somewhere might see the same IP involved in a lot of "bad" stuff not realizing it's just a TOR node.

I hate the current general trend pushing a position of an either absolute "yes/no" for any theme, including this one (of encryption for privacy/etc vs. crime).

In my opinion it's obvious that the current situation of solutions is in general bad: too much pressure on services that provide privacy because it's too easy for crime to misuse them :o(
Ask HN: Would you pick Unity for game development?
Curious if anyone feels like it’s fine now and their price model is fair or if they feel uneasy about starting a project in it. If you’re not using it, is Godot good enough for you or your business?
The Film Look: Why We're Stuck on an Aesthetic Plateau in Cinema [video]
the math is learnable and with gpt nowadays, extremely so
“I have no idea what I’m talking about with regard to the state of impediments to residential construction in the state of California, so am instead choosing to scapegoat a fictional set of demanding ‘immigrants,’ which happens to also be a common NIMBY retort, but I am not a NIMBY because that’s name calling. Instead, I just have a wild set of misconceptions about reality that are unique to me” is the position you’re staking out. You could instead begin with the fact of how insane it is that 95% of residential land in California is zoned single-family:

https://belonging.berkeley.edu/single-family-zoning-californ...

But why let that get in the way of all those immigrant monsters hiding in your closet?
Thank you for the context and info, good to know.
A huge issue with film is we went through this with audio 20 years ago.

Recording time use to cost a huge amount of money and then DAWs put that in the hands of basically everyone with a PC.

We got an infinite amount more of half finished demos that no one listened to. I would have a hard time saying with a straight face that music as a whole has got better. The sheer volume crowds out a lot the fringe from being worth the effort of creating.

AI Art is really a better example though. I just resubscribed to midjourney this weekend on the web. I could see the thousands of images I made on discord. I think some are cool but what use are they? Millions of synthetic photo realistic selfies that no one but the creator bothers to look at.

The arts ultimately need a network of people appreciating the art form or you have nothing. Just an infinite amount of board classroom notebook doodles that no one ever sees. It doesn't matter if it is Picasso doing bored doodling if there is no audience. You can't have all artists with no audience. Really good chance with no audience Picasso just does something else too.

I mean has the art world really been disrupted by midjourney? It is an absurd idea. What is most curious is how little disruption any of this seems to be having.
I've generally found that code review first, and rebase-centric systems like Gerrit tend to be much easier to review code in. One of the best parts of this is native support for stacking multiple patches, so people make smaller patches that are easier to review.

Code review in Github feels like a bad afterthought - the space-wasting interface that looks more like a forum thread, the inability to track over rebases, etc.
Chemical plastics recycling is ready to goo and all about the stirring