Japanese City Name Generator
AI
text generation model
SHOW HN2025
How HN took it
2 positive, 2 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 3 critical, out of 7 comments about the project. Thread score -0.06.
Idea: 0 for, 2 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 againstPerformance: 1 for, 0 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Generated a real place name (Kanegawa), seen as accurate
From 1 comment
I got Kanegawa, which is a real place, so I'd say it's pretty accurate!
cedws on HN
Maker shared a tutorial request interest
From 1 comment
Can you please share a training tutorial? Thank you!
neuraldenis on HN
Objections
Output reads as random syllables without meaningful components
From 2 comments
If you used the kanji names of the cities and towns it would be a lot more realistic. I’ve lived in Japan since 1988 and this just seems like a list of jibberish to me. Japanese…
stuartcw on HNBecause Japanese words aren't simply a string of random characters, like a string of eight English alphabets doesn't suddenly make it meaningful city names such as Reading or…
asukachikaru on HN
Uniform random kana sampling would work equally well
From 1 comment
I'm not sure why ML is even necessary? Practically every combination of characters (kana characters, where there's always a vowel at the end of each mora unless it's an "n") is…
ranger_danger on HN
Trained on romanized kana, may produce illegal syllables
From 1 comment
One thing is that this is trained on an English, character-level representation of kana characters, so it's possible it generates names that are not legal in the Japanese syllabary
freemanjiang on HN
Requests
Use kanji instead of romanized kana for tokenisation
From 2 comments
Have you tried approaching this with the kanji instead? That seems like free tokenisation.
RestartKernel on HNIf you used the kanji names of the cities and towns it would be a lot more realistic. I’ve lived in Japan since 1988 and this just seems like a list of jibberish to me. Japanese…
stuartcw on HN
Share a training tutorial
From 1 comment
Can you please share a training tutorial? Thank you!
neuraldenis on HN
Questions
Whether generated names were already in the training set
From 1 comment
Maybe that name already was in the training set tho?
fph on HN
How the name Kanegawa is spelled
From 1 comment
Can you spell it?
ghfhghg on HN
Why ML is needed versus random kana selection
From 1 comment
I'm not sure why ML is even necessary? Practically every combination of characters (kana characters, where there's always a vowel at the end of each mora unless it's an "n") is…
ranger_danger on HN
Alternatives named
jp-hash
From 1 comment
@freemanjiang, you might enjoy jp-hash: https://www.kylheku.com/cgit/jp-hash/about/
kazinator on HN