maurys

I have added two deeper "Behind the Scenes" pages for those interested in the linguistic philosophy or the specific agentic workflow:

WHY SWALPA? (https://swalpa.org/behind_swalpa/why/)

This section dives into the "Survival Kannada" philosophy. It explains why we prioritize high-frequency scenarios like negotiating auto fares or understanding local etymology (e.g., why tech hubs like Marathahalli still carry the "-halli" village suffix) over standard textbook grammar.

AI ARCHITECTURE & WORKFLOWS (https://swalpa.org/behind_swalpa/architecture/)

This page breaks down the "Local-First" stack and the agentic loop:

* The Staging "Brain": I maintain a private repository where I use Gemini Deep Research to crunch raw linguistic data. This verified "Spec" is what I then feed to Antigravity (the coding agent) to build out the game engines and lessons.

* Portability: The framework is designed to be "forkable." A sister project for Tamil (konjam.org) is already being built using these same architectural principles.

I am happy to dive into the weeds on the prompt engineering, the TTS pipeline, or the Bangalore-specific nuances if anyone is interested!

Hi HN,

I built SWALPA (https://swalpa.org) because learning spoken Kannada is a New Year's resolution for me and I realized most language apps teach you formal grammar, but not how to negotiate with an auto-rickshaw driver or handle the "daily chaos" of the city.

THE AGENTIC STACK (BUILT WITH ANTIGRAVITY)

I wanted to see how far I could push a "Human-in-the-loop" AI workflow to create high-quality content in a low-resource language.

* The Coder: Antigravity (an agentic coding AI) handled the heavy lifting—writing the JS game engines and drafting the core lessons based on a custom "grammar spec."

* The Knowledge Base: I used Gemini Deep Research to build a high-fidelity reference of Kannada linguistics. This acted as the "Source of Truth" to prevent AI hallucinations.

* The Content Engine: I fed my core curated lessons into NotebookLM to generate supplemental podcasts, slides, and flashcards to boost recall.

* Architecture: Simple and Boring—Static site (MkDocs Material) + Vanilla JS + Firebase.

THE EXPERIENCE

Instead of "The cat is on the table," SWALPA uses interactive games to simulate real-world Bangalore scenarios:

* The Auto-Rickshaw Negotiator: Use the right phrases under timer pressure to get the driver to use the meter ("Meter Haaki!").

* Rapid Translation: A high-pressure mode where you hear a Kannada phrase and must pick the correct translation from four options under a timer.

* Agglutination Mastery: Interactive drills for Kannada's unique word-stacking grammar.

The platform includes 10 core text lessons and Duolingo-style gamification—including badges, streaks, and an activity heatmap.

Games Link: https://swalpa.org/games

Source: https://github.com/saurabh-net/swalpa

I am a Software Engineer at Google, but this is a personal passion project. I would love to hear your thoughts on the AI workflow or the "street-smart" approach to language learning!

I've always wondered about this. I'd expect this to catch up with Amazon and not work out in the long term.

But their stock price keeps going up and they keep eating up new markets.

Yeah, as a neutral observer, I feel conflicted. What the CCP is doing feels wrong.

But on the other hand, China was forced to agree to the HK situation particularly since they were at a disadvantage militarily and economically to the British empire.

China (CCP) would understandably not be in a mood to comply with agreements they felt coerced into.

I genuinely don't understand the full situation, and I'm not trying to imply that the CCP is in the right.

I'm just trying to understand if the whole "bullied into a disadvantaged agreement" is a valid world view to take.

I'm hoping this is just a stale mail? It'd be weird to have the same discussion here all over again.

Everything the CEO mentioned last time is still applicable.

What's worse is I'm not sure we'll be able to collectively drum up enough outrage to get it reversed this time.

I don't know what it is about most of these pages, but their design feels very old school (in a good way)!

Got me a little nostalgic, and it's such a joy to read pages just focussed on the content and absolutely nothing else.

The search results are sometimes bewildering, I guess search quality could be a little better. But on the whole, a lot of fun.

Thanks for sharing :-)

Is there a reason the HN title is so flagrantly different from the title if you jump to the link?

"Huawei was able to eavesdrop on Dutch mobile network" in the original sounds a lot less incriminating than "Huawei eavesdropped"

Goldman Sachs is 150 years old and still kicking.

I wonder if a part of that longevity is the org/incentives structure.

And (cynically) maybe just that regulation entrenches existing finance players and there isn't anywhere near as much anti-trust conversation over there.

I have a Kinesis Freestyle 2. And it does tent. With the optional VIP kit that is, but most everyone recommends you buy the two together.

FWIW, I absolutely love the kinesis. I have 2 pairs and the older one is 4+ years old.

It helped me hugely with RSI around my wrist and fingers.

The other thing which really helped was classic strength training at a gym :-)

I wonder if over time, Golang will pick up more type features like Java and other languages have.

The general consensus seems to be that powerful type systems are very effective.

Personally, the low footprint runtime and concurrency primitives are enough for me and I wouldn't mind the language becoming "less simple" if it helps the ecosystem.

Once generics are implemented, I can imagine people requesting for the next "missing" thing.

I was wondering (and hoping), it's just a case of the title changing on the media site.

The original title definitely sounds more inflammatory than the one they changed it to later.

Thanks for clarifying!

My personal opinions on the protests aside, this is clearly a different title from the original article.

And it's deliberately titled to make it sound worse than it is (at the moment at least).

I'm not sure how one requests a title change on HN, but that would help here.

I've heard of in-toto at work and it's still very new and shiny. Even the article mentions early adopters adopting it in 2018.

I'm not surprised multiple vendors haven't adopted the system yet.

2.2 million on a research initiative and not immediately adopting it until it's proven and widespread seems perfectly reasonable to me.

The (abridged) title made it sound worse IMO.

I've had weeks and months like this.

The general healthy advice all worked for me to different degrees.

Exercise, meeting friends and having non-desk/screentime intensive hobbies.

Meeting friends and nurturing those relationships helped hugely. And sadly, the second most effective thing was switching to a less-intense team.

I've definitely seen other friends with unhealthy habits and anxiety in the industry too so I'd try some of these and see if it helps.

And you could definitely try therapy and/or medical help too.

This course (at least the videos) are on YouTube for the latest iteration. I found the YouTube interface a bit more familiar for sampling the course.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...

He mentions Reddit at the end of the article, which is close enough in mechanism to Hackernews.

While I understand that Twilio is probably not at fault for the actual leak, I'm curious if they gave Parler some time to migrate/shift before cutting them off from their services.

It's easy not to care since Parler is the "bad guy" here, but I do think that Internet infrastructure companies need to give a reasonable heads-up before pulling the rug under business customers.

I've enjoyed listening to the MIT Distributed Systems lectures too.

They do paper reviews and I pick the papers/topics which seem the most interesting (rather than doing them in order).

They are great if you've already gone over the basics using "Designing Data Intensive Applications" or "Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit".

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-W...

You aren't.

Especially with remote work on the rise.

This is one thing I hope all of us continue opposing vehemently.

It's a huge privacy concern and companies have too much incentive to want to monitor this kind of data.

It's more nuanced than that. Speaking as someone who has done the diet and had multiple people around me also have results with it when other diets haven't worked (as well).

The hormonal impact of what and when you eat tends to have a larger impact than what a pure "calories in, calories out" model would suggest.

I've taken blood tests before and after 6 months of intermittent fasting (with a similar diet) and saw massive improvement in blood work and hunger pangs.

YMMV but his ideas are worth exploring.

The first half seems like simple bandwidth sharing, like mobile hotspots.

But everything after "In the future", is super vague. Help find pets etc, looks like it'll try to make a pooled community video set-up and someone can search across all the cameras.

From what I understand, each of your devices can act as a mini-wifi extender.

And that extended WiFi is public (to other Amazon sidewalk devices).

And that's useful if you have say, smart outdoor lights which could be out of your Wifi range.

And later to use the devices as a sort of pooled resource for things like search-and-rescue in a community? I didn't really get what they are trying here.

Apart from the instinctive privacy and big-tech worries (an admittedly big aside), this seems like it could be pretty cool.

I switched off Chrome's recommended article feed after reading this.

Are there any tools that help limit bumping into news?

I've also been trying to reduce casual news consumption.

I've used Podman, SystemD and Buildah.

It's great to hack around with. SystemD is particular is very polarizing and I don't want to start a flamewar, but it helped me "get" init systems.

Podman seems to have a better security model than Docker, so we were trying it out at work too.

Redhat is clearly very invested in this.

There was excellent documentation and good tooling around all this.

As someone who doesn't fully understand the rules around these acquisitions, is there a clear enough framework for what companies one can acquire?

Are companies more frequently flouting that or is this a case of suing companies while the regulatory framework catches up?

Basically, is suing companies to block acquisitions standard procedure?

I might disagree with how "popularity" is computed here, but as long as they have been consistent, the trend is probably real.

IME Java still has a very real stranglehold on business logic code, especially in bigger companies.

Golang and Rust are eating away at it, but more for infrastructure related projects rather than higher-level business logic.

A large part of leadership/strategy in tech companies is ex-consultants and MBAs.

Engineers don't call all the shots with sunsetting projects.

If anything, we have a healthy (?) skepticism of product managers too but they definitely do talk to customers, look deeply into metrics and think about branding.

Unsubscribe then? You're likely paying monthly anyway.

It surprises me not to hear more concerns about strangling U.S. based tech giants at a time that China and the rest of the world is catching up.

I'm not sure I buy that line of argument myself, but I did expect it to come up more prominently.

Does anyone know the exact details of what Redis is using to prevent something like this?

I think they have a clause saying you can't provide Redis as a Service without paying royalty.

It does feel like we go in circles sometimes in tech, all these license discussions, closed v/s open v/s closed.

I really hope AWS does the decent thing and acknowledges and maybe even donates to the project.

This whole bit reeks of mercenary behaviour. Sure, the license allows it, but AWS still can afford to be a better citizen.