Life & fun · December 12, 2023
A dictionary of untranslatable words from around the world
Have you ever come across a word in another language that just perfectly captures a feeling or concept you can't quite express in your own tongue? I created coolforeignwords.com because I wanted to share those "aha" moments with fellow language lovers, and created a website to make those words easier to find. So, whether you're a word nerd, a traveler, or just curious about the world, please feel free to visti my website. Try it out and please share your feedback. It's still very early stage, so would love any advice. Thank you
Does the same job
all alternatives →- WCWordsForThat.com - A new site that's like a reverse urban dictionary2013 · wordsforthat.com · ▲151
- CCCarefulwords.com, a more inspiring thesaurus2022 · carefulwords.com · ▲258
I began this in late September purely on the whims of frustration with thesaurus.com, which does not bother to focus the input box! So I made my own site that focuses the input box. And because I wanted a thesaurus where I could type just the term in the address bar (eg type carefulwords.com/word) to get my results. It is very rough around the edges right now. There are far too many synonyms, which themselves are only organized alphabetically. I hope to take the site in a more inspiring direction over time than merely synonyms. Perhaps euphemisms, or other poetic uses from the past, or…
- AWA word of the day that doesn't suck2025 · ▲82
I’ve long thought that the Word of the Day was a wasted genre. The goal should be to give you words you can use; to enrich your understanding of words you already know; or at least to use words to tell you something neat about the world. Instead, what you usually get is words that will never be used in conversation, held up as curios. Some examples from Dictionary.com’s daily email: thewless, balladmonger, vagility, contextomy. These words are... not useful. I’ve always thought I could do better. My friend Ben recently created a daily puzzle game, called Bracket City, launched here on HN…
- ICInsteadofvery.com2024 · insteadofvery.com · ▲47
As non-native English speakers, we're often advised to avoid overusing intensifiers like "very". This is a simple app to find synonyms of "very x" phrases that are not always possible to find using a standard thesaurus. Built it using OpenAI, FastAPI, and MongoDB (to cache the results).
- PDPersonalized Duolingo (kind of) for vocabulary building2025 · github.com · ▲161
Hi! Wanted to share the project I really wanted to have. TLDR; this app lets you create your own list of words and you get a Duolingo-like experience (kind of, still needs a lot of features) practicing those words in their context. My English is not the best but not the worst either. But I realized I can't boost it up after a certain level! In my belief, in order to truly learn a language, you need to be exposed to that language often. Vocabulary is the key factor here if you really want to improve in any language. My experience is that when I read a book to improve my English vocabulary, I…

More life & fun this month
the category →- TL
Life & fun · 10d ago · louisabraham.github.io

Photosynthesis fires two of your iPhone
Life & fun · 29d ago · photosynthesis.camera
SoloUno▲310Take control of hair pulling, nail biting & skin picking
Life & fun · 28d ago · solouno.io

Scroll through all 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 reachable Rubik's Cube permutations.
Life & fun · 27d ago · everycube.alen.is


Hi HN, I built Eigendrum, a web tool that solves the 2D wave equation for arbitrary shapes so you can hear what they sound like as drums. How it works: * Solves -∇²u = λu using finite element analysis (Kφ = λMφ) on a triangle mesh. * Validated to <0.1% error against closed-form solutions for circles (Bessel zeros) and rectangles. * Sound model factors in strike location, Rayleigh damping, and mallet width. * Includes Kac drums I & II to demonstrate identical sound spectra from different geometries. * No frameworks, build steps, or dependencies. Repo and tests:…
Life & fun · 27d ago · baselashraf81.github.io
Launched alongside, December 2023
the whole month →- BM
Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…
Commerce · 2023 · beeper.com
- HA
Hey! I made Heynote entirely for my own use case. For many years, I always had an Emacs instance running with the scratch buffer open, even long after I had abandoned Emacs as my programming editor in favor of more recent IDE:s. The simplicity of having just one big scratch buffer appeals to me, but I still want to separate the different things I jot down somehow (without using tabs or similar). Previously, my solution was to insert a bunch of blank lines between the notes, but hitting C-A would still select the entire buffer. That's why I came up with the concept of "blocks", which turned…
Work · 2023 · heynote.com

FuseBase▲941Client collaboration platform for professional services
Dev tools · 2023 · thefusebase.com
Beep! 2.0▲871Fastest tool to assign and share visual tasks with your team
Work · 2023 · justbeepit.com
