Show HN: Get conversational practice in over 20 languages by talking to an AI
582 by Hadjimina | 273 comments on Hacker News. Hi everyone, Let me introduce you to Quazel, where we want to enable people to talk their way to fluency. We have all tried various language learning apps and tools, however, one aspect of language learning current services are really bad at is conversational practice. You might get a chat-like interface, but in the end, the conversation partner will only respond with a predefined "if the users say X I say Y". With Quazel that's completely different. In completely dynamic and unscripted conversation you can talk about pretty much anything you want. For example, you can try ordering food at a restaurant and even hold a philosophical discussion with Socrates. Additionally, you can analyze the grammar of your responses or use hints to help you out when you get stuck. We want to change how languages are learned from a grammar-centric approach to a more natural, conversation-focused one.
Ask HN: Books on designing disk-optimized data structures?
11 by memset | 11 comments on Hacker News. Are there canonical books, resources, or readings for how to design data structures that will be primarily read and written to a disk rather than memory? Most of what I learned in school about big-O assumes that, for example, random access is O(1). However, random disk reads are really slow due to spacial locality. People who write databases obviously have solutions to this problem - for example, DuckDB is based on a number of papers that have come out over the years on this topic. If I wanted to design, ie, a tree structure which was intended to be read/written from a disk, are there general principles or patterns the have been developed to take advantage of locality of reference, minimize random reads, or decrease the overhead of writes, that I could familiarize myself with? What is the CLRS for disk?