Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by Alex-Programs on Sunday May 25, 2025 @06:24PM (#44091779)

I'm working on https://nuenki.app. It's a browser extension that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so you learn through immersion as you go about your day.

I've been doing a lot of experiments evaluating LLM translation performance, and I used what I learnt (that LLMs make mistakes, but different LLMs make different mistakes, and they're better at critiquing translations than producing them) to make a hybrid translator (https://nuenki.app/translator) that beats everything else.

And I was invited to do a talk about that to a company, which was really cool! I'm 19, doing this in my gap year before uni.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by rriley on Sunday May 25, 2025 @10:21PM (#44093365)

This is incredibly impressive work, especially at 19! The insight about LLMs being better at critiquing than producing translations is brilliant, and using that to build a hybrid system that outperforms individual models is exactly the kind of innovative thinking the field needs. Congrats on the company talk, well deserved recognition for solid research and execution!

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by psyklic on Monday May 26, 2025 @04:22AM (#44095220)

Nice work and blog! You might consider crossposting some blog entries to LessWrong for more visibility of your research. People are very interested in new ideas on benchmarking.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by Alex-Programs on Monday May 26, 2025 @06:35AM (#44095989)

That's a good idea, thanks for the suggestion. I'm thinking of writing one big blog article about everything I've found, loosely based on the talk, and I'll crosspost it there.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) by tipofthehat on Tuesday May 27, 2025 @02:58PM (#44109722)

Hi Alex, lovely work. I have just started working on a similar idea, to have level-aware language support in a podcast player (extending Anytime Player) to help the listener recognise words, phrases and meaning in native content.

I'm a non-techy person learning from scratch so it's slow going but as a language learner who selfishly wants more tools to support immersion learning if you want to support audio I think something podcast based would be super interesting.

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