frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Show HN: Vocab Top – AI-powered vocabulary builder that helps you retain words

https://www.vocab.top/
16•LandoLorinse•1h ago

Comments

Paaul01•1h ago
Great Concept, Kudos!
anon1094•59m ago
Anyone who's learned a language to an advanced level knows that after a while you have to use the language itself to learn the language. You can't keep relying on translations because there are so many language-specific and culture-specific nuances that translations can't quite capture.
ivansavz•52m ago
You can choose English -> English in the UI for explanations in English.
bunderbunder•45m ago
That said growing vocabulary is widely regarded as one of the most important steps towards being able to interact with the language in a more authentic way.

My concern is that AI-generated translations and example text still tend to get the subtleties wrong. I’ve seen that cause a lot of confusion for beginning learners who don’t know their target language well enough to know when something isn’t quite right. The help forum on a learner community I’m in is full of cases where the answer is, “You’re confused because what the AI told you is incorrect.”

And that’s a big part of why I still prefer a good old fashioned keyword search over GenAI when I’m looking for more examples to help me understand a new word.

NarcisMirandes•51m ago
I have tried and it works well. I bookmark it to use it in next days.

What I do now: I am in a small country in Europe and I use translations a lot, every day literally. I am in a Mac and I have a "space" dedicated to that with three things:

  - dictionary and Tesaurus. Free app in all Macs
  - translation. https://translate.google.com/
  - a Excel file where I save and review the new words
My first impressions:

  - Your tool could be useful as it groups all three in one place.
  - I have checked that it works well and it is nice and well designed.
  - I would have to spend time to reorganize myself, try a new way. There is and investment in time and the fear that it is not clear that that new way is much, much better. Perhaps it is only a bit better and I am not sure it is worth the time.
Why?:

  - Why do you do that?
  - Will it be premium layer later? What will happen with the people who has "invested" time and effort in your project?
  - What is your revenue model?
Aachen•46m ago
I thought it would be some sort of scheduler (spaced repetition) based on the title, but putting in a word I just learned in German (hinfaellig), it shows what looks like a Wiktionary page. Except of course it took idk how much energy to generate instead of serving static content that already exists

It gives a different definition as what I just learned from a native speaker (was literally just watching a German lesson before opening HN: https://youtu.be/6QA7YBhnU0I 2:45). They said obsolete or no longer valid. The bot says frail, dilapidated, decrepit. This sounds to me like another valid translation, but I had to check to make sure, and yep it's valid, just incomplete. Not sure why I would use this instead of the place I'd check anyway (https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/hinf%C3%A4llig)

I like the UI theme and that the only animation, around the search box, is subtle enough not to distract from reading but still look cool. UI-wise one thing I'd improve is being able to copy text from the page instead of having to type things over

Edit: and maybe fix that it'll make up definitions for invented words. I'm having trouble understanding who the target audience is here, since language learners can't use it (see also the other comment about pronunciations being very unreliable) and it's not a vocab builder either

theSherwood•42m ago
Interesting concept. But you might want to ditch the pronunciation audio. At least for Welsh and Spanish, the pronunciation audio is pretty far from the mark. I would guess that is the same for many other languages.
Aachen•34m ago
Two German sentences are good. It picks a regional variant and sticks with it

Putting a whole sentence in the search field makes it just echo the input back to you. If you then ask it to pronounce that, it does it in English but with a strong accent (Turkish maybe, hard to say) :D

Edit: ok I tried some more in Dutch and it's hit and miss even within one language. Indeed not ready for language learning... better just read IPA or visit a site that has a traditional pronouncer or even human recordings (e.g. dict.cc for German, Wiktionary for various languages, Merriam Webster for English, etc.)

timeattack•40m ago
It doesn't really check that word really exist, and instead it hallucinates slop definition, usage examples and memory tip.
Retr0id•36m ago
Putting in made-up words leads to some rather amusing results, though.

Fortunately I can't paste any here because they block text selection...

Looks like they cache the results globally, so here are my favourite non-words it's defined so far: extranguate, volupinous

FuturisticLover•38m ago
How exactly it is different from Google translate?

Citigroup, Idaho, and Build-a-Bear Launched a Coordinated Attack on Me

https://knock-knock.net/blog/citigroup-idaho-build-a-bear/
35•djkurlander•34m ago•3 comments

Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-os/
177•speckx•1h ago•97 comments

Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness

https://www.campion.edu.au/blog/top-25-aristotle-quotes-on-virtue-knowledge-and-happiness/
43•teleforce•1h ago•15 comments

Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck

https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/intelligence-is-not-the-main-bottleneck
33•rruxandra_l•1h ago•10 comments

Building an Advanced Agentic Harness

https://data4sci.com/blog/building-an-advanced-agentic-harness
32•Anon84•1h ago•16 comments

The Entropy of a Markov Chain

https://chillphysicsenjoyer.substack.com/p/the-entropy-of-a-markov-chain
24•surprisetalk•1h ago•0 comments

Faster Than Ninja

https://build2.org/blog/faster-than-ninja.xhtml
33•elasticdog•2h ago•4 comments

Position: LLMs Can't Jump

https://openreview.net/challenge?redirect=%2Fforum%3Fid%3DklU4737opt
157•theanonymousone•4h ago•102 comments

Painting with Gaussians

https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-08-03-splat-painter.html
18•yogthos•2h ago•0 comments

Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeg8299
17•_____k•5d ago•0 comments

Cloudflare OS

https://os.cloudflare.app/
7•coloneltcb•23m ago•4 comments

TSON – A JSON superset with immutable, hash-pinned schemas

https://tson.io/
25•andrewjneumann•1h ago•18 comments

Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

https://www.wired.com/story/a-civilian-plane-crashed-in-new-mexico-was-the-militarys-tech-to-blame/
293•dzdt•4h ago•134 comments

Google's HTTP/2 codec slows Envoy

https://apoxy.dev/blog/oghttp2-vs-nghttp2
30•dilyevsky•2h ago•0 comments

Cloudflare OS – an open-source AI productivity environment

https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os
25•berlianta•2h ago•3 comments

Why Erdős Problems Are Falling to AI

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-legendary-erdos-problems-are-falling-to-ai-20260803/
88•pseudolus•3h ago•70 comments

Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/stateless-mcp/
332•tosh•4d ago•187 comments

TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In

https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/time-serves-ai-bots-a-different-website/
136•vincent_s•2h ago•47 comments

Energizing a vacuum-tube flip-flop module from a 1948 IBM system

https://www.righto.com/2026/07/ibm-604-trigger-tube-module.html
15•Jimmc414•4d ago•1 comments

Rubin Observatory's first LSST Camera release: 500k galaxies in the COSMOS field

https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-new-window-cosmos-field
13•MarcoDewey•1h ago•1 comments

Not hiring junior engineers won't solve the problem you think you have

https://franciscotrindade.me/blog/the-kids-are-alright/
52•gpi•1h ago•53 comments

Scaling NumPy on Free-Threaded Python

https://labs.quansight.org/blog/scaling-numpy-on-free-threaded-python
66•ngoldbaum•5d ago•11 comments

“Gravity is worth asking about”

https://unsung.aresluna.org/gravity-is-worth-asking-about/
171•nozzlegear•6d ago•104 comments

Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines for a Pretextual Weed Search

https://www.404media.co/cops-used-flock-to-track-a-man-across-state-lines-to-create-pretext-to-se...
10•cdrnsf•15m ago•0 comments

BSD Make extravaganza: Mandelbrot Set In bmake

https://github.com/b-aaz/bmake-extravaganza/tree/master
16•signa11•6d ago•1 comments

Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage

https://earendil.com/posts/pi-autoresearch-and-databricks/
479•luispa•17h ago•251 comments

Bubble Memory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory
56•jacquesm•2d ago•20 comments

Birduino: A card-triggered audio player for [learning] the birds

https://hannahilea.com/blog/birduino/
40•austinallegro•5d ago•7 comments

KTX Images Converter for WebGL/GPU and Threejs

https://ktxconverter.robertborghesi.is
5•dghez•2h ago•1 comments

Google Assistant is going away on Mobile Devices

https://images.seroundtable.com/google-assistant-going-away-laEdSzU1.png
12•franze•26m ago•7 comments