MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Veena Chromatic Tuner
by v15w | 2025-09-08 06:38:34+00:00
We're happy to present Veena Chromatic Tuner, an app we've developed for musicians, instrument makers, and ethnomusicologists who need more than just a standard chromatic tuner. Our goal was to create a tool that not only supports pitch detection but also provides deep support for diverse musical intonation systems and offers intuitive visual feedback.

The Problem We're Solving: Many tuners are good for Equal Temperament, but has limited support when it comes to the Just Intonation, microtonal music, or the specific requirements of instruments like the Veena where fret positions are determined by precise ratios.

Oscilloscope-like Visual Feedback: Instead of just a needle, you get a dynamic, oscilloscope-like waveform display.

In Tune: The waveform appears stabilized, giving you an immediate, confirmation of perfect pitch. Sharp: The waveform rotates right. Flat: The waveform rotates left.

This dynamic visual feedback, akin to a digital oscilloscope's trigger synchronization, offers immediate, precise adjustment cues that go far beyond what a static needle can provide, allowing for incredibly fine-tuned adjustments.

Unmatched Intonation Flexibility: We understand that music isn't just 12-TET.

Just Intonation Support: Perfect for Indian classical music, early music, and any tradition that relies on pure harmonic relationships between notes. This is crucial for achieving the rich, resonant chords and melodic purity that Equal Temperament can't always deliver.

Custom Temperaments: Go beyond presets! Create, save, and manage your own unique temperaments with personalized ratio settings. This empowers composers, researchers, and performers to explore microtonal scales and historical tunings with ease.

Dedicated Veena Instrument Mode: It allows users to play and tune notes across 24 fret positions, specifically highlighting how note positions on the fretboard vary relative to each other when pure intonation is applied. This feature is invaluable for instrument makers and those studying the physics of string instruments.

Other Key Features:

Multicultural Note Naming: Display notes in Western, Indian classical (Carnatic/Hindustani), and Solfege, with support for multiple Indian language scripts (Tamil, Devanagari, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam).

Adjustable Reference Pitch: Customize A4 frequency from 440Hz to 432Hz or anything in between.

Transposition Support: Easily transpose notes for different instruments.

This app is would be useful for string players (veena, violin, guitar, sitar, etc.), wind instrument musicians, vocalists, music teachers, students, ethnomusicologists, and especially instrument makers and tuners who need to work with precise intonation and fret setting. Anyone exploring microtonal music will also find it incredibly useful.

We're actively developing the app, continuously adding features and improvements. While pitch detection is resource-intensive, we strive for broad device compatibility.

Check it out on Google Play: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.magima.digi...]

We welcome your feedback, questions, and thoughts!
by jedberg | 2025-09-08 06:39:33+00:00
I actually worked on security for Skype in 2005/2006. And I knew Dan at eBay too.

Using databases for queues isn't a new idea, but a couple things make it different now. One is that I think this is the first time a solution has been open-sourced (not 100% sure on that).

And two, Postgres added SKIP LOCKED in 9.5 (around 2016), which was the performance unlock to make this work without needing a whole DBA team like Skype had.
by arcticbull | 2025-09-08 06:39:59+00:00
It does actually perform a security function. The lid angle sensor is used to know when the device is open or closed, and when closed, it physically disconnects the microphone. If you were to be able to recalibrate it at any time, you would leave your device vulnerable to having the microphone enabled when the lid is closed. You can argue whether that justifies the practice, but it's not as simple as just burning the EEPROM serial number in that tells it to turn the display on or off. It defends the user against an attack vector.

From that perspective making it one-time programmable is not unreasonable.
by disillusioned | 2025-09-08 06:40:23+00:00
This. This this this this this this this. MaximumPC wrote up the FPS2000 kit and I, an obsessed 14 year-old, saved up as much money as I could to buy it. I _needed_ surround sound.

I was then similarly obsessed with 4.1 sound in, eg, Half-Life, and other games, but also the dumb helicopter demo. My friends loved it too: no one else had a 4.1 system, so this was a Big Deal.

Eventually, some component or another failed in the sub/amp, and I moved on to the vaunted Logitech Z-5500, which was a pretty solid choice, but a lot "boomier" and less even.

I then migrated my way to the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1, which I am _still using today_, having kept it on life support by finding some guy online who refurbishes the very testy "BASH" boards inside them, and, after several swaps, eventually ordered a rebuilt amp with a newly designed BASH board that he had printed up.

No one makes true PC audio 5.1 systems anymore, really. Logitech has their Z906, which I could get if I had to, but my understanding is my precious little Klipsch system still kicks its ass.

But it all harkens back to the FPS2000. Cambridge Soundworks put something _special_ together with that bit of kit.
by baq | 2025-09-08 06:40:49+00:00
> they make so much misdirected code with LLMs

just points to the fact that they've no idea what they're doing and would produce different, pointless code by hand, though much slower. this is the paradigm shift - you need a much bigger sieve to filter out the many more orders of magnitude of crap that inexperienced operators of LLMs create.
by wonger_ | 2025-09-08 06:41:01+00:00
Yeah, if any language has potential for AST source of truth instead of textual source of truth, it's Unison.

I'm just waiting for a breakthrough project to show that it's ready for wider adoption. Leaving text-based tooling is a big ask.

The principles behind Unison, for those who haven't read them yet: https://www.unison-lang.org/docs/the-big-idea/#richer-codeba...

> Each Unison definition is identified by a hash of its syntax tree.
by jeschiefer | 2025-09-08 06:41:12+00:00
"some invalid states" - what does this mean, please? How do I constrain the "some" part? If you can't, you might as well say "mostly invalid states", which is what tends to happen in practice.

The whole point of state machines/type constraints/foreign key constraints/protocol definitions is that there is a clear boundary between what is allowed and what is not. And I would argue that this is what makes life easier, because you can tell one from the other. And with the right tooling, the compiler or some conformance tool will tell you that the change you just introduced, breaks your implementation in 412 places.Because this allows me to stop and think whether I can make a different change that only creates 117 problems. Or estimate the cost of the changes and compare it with the business benefit, and have appropriate conversations with stake holders. Or find out that my domain model was completely wrong to begin with and start refactoring my way out of this. And all of this before the first successful compile.

For me, this gives me maximum flexibility, because I have a good idea of the impact of any changes on the first day of development. This does require appropriate tooling though, like you would find in Ocaml, F#, Rust, State Machine Compilers, ... <insert your favourite tool here>.
by a_e_k | 2025-09-08 06:41:19+00:00
Yes, so much this!

I've often wished that formatters had some threshold for similarity between adjacent lines. If some X% of the characters on the line match the character right above, then it might be tabular and it could do something to maintain the tabular layout.

Bonus points for it's able to do something like diff the adjacent lines to detect table-like layouts and figure out if something nudged a field or two out of alignment and then insert spaces to fix the table layout.
by jere_id | 2025-09-08 06:42:28+00:00
Think about the risks: you’ll need to install, configure, update, and secure the server yourself. It will be a single point of failure, and the new VPS IP can still be blocked by some platforms (I see you Red*it). You must trust the VPS provider or choose a privacy‑friendly region, since the host can see metadata and some providers don’t allow tunneling. if you can afford to do this then yes sure.
by hollowonepl | 2025-09-08 06:42:40+00:00
The only people who still pitch demoscene dead are those with unrealistic expectations or who just returned and are surprised it’s still alive, ran by a number of 40+ people while they remember themselves joining at the age of 15. But the conversation about new generation is missed by solid 20 years and all of us who just stay focused on producing don’t waste time on rants, only to have 5 mins on hacker news that by default won’t get the idea of demoscene anyway. Way too many different scenes here to focus only on one that finally turned into a hobby, not a life changing experience.

/hollowone^oftenhide
by rich_sasha | 2025-09-08 06:43:01+00:00
I'm not sure I agree.

My perfunctory reading is thus: first you couple your state representation to the business logic, and make some states unrepresentable (say every client is category A, B or C). Maybe you allow yourself some flexibility, like you can add more client types.

Then the business people come and tell you some new client is both A and B, and maybe Z as well, quickly now, type type type.

And that there's a tradeoff between:

- eliminating invalid states, leading to less errors, and

- inflexibility in changes to the business logic down the way.

Maybe I misunderstood, but if this is right, then it's a good point. And I would add: when modelling some business logic, ask yourself how likely it is to change. If it's something pretty concrete and immovable, feel free to make the representation rigid. But if not, and even if the business people insist otherwise, look for ways to retain flexibility down the line, even if it means some invalid states are indeed representable in code.
by fishstamp82 | 2025-09-08 06:43:44+00:00
The tickers for months are not obvious to me, and since its a 6-week moving average and not point in time, the numbers are a bit hard to intuitively grasp.

To me it looks like the drop is harder since averaging smooths out the points, so end of july 2025 the adoption is not exactly 12%, but probably more like 8%, where its closer to end of 2023.

It seems big tech is putting a big break on AI tooling, for now.
by karel-3d | 2025-09-08 06:43:44+00:00
People creating interesting visuals in a very, very small computer program; often with some artificial constraints. Often it was put together with cracking scene, I guess the skills involved used to be similar (lot of low level hacking?).

My personal involvement with this scene is nil - I always just saw some interesting thing playing with crack.exe that I got from some dubious source, thought "huh it's neat", and went on with my life.

I have no idea what are the constraints do they have in 2025, or what platform do they even target. How are you gonna do demos on iOS that's all locked from top to bottom and you can't even run anything without involving Apple in the process?
by disillusioned | 2025-09-08 06:44:18+00:00
I bought a _lot_ of Creative Labs products over my pre-teen and teen PC building years. Saving up to get the SB2 or the AWE32 or the AWE64 or SBLive... so that I could eventually get something that supported 4.1 for my Cambridge Soundworks FPS2000 kit that I got... (mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).

This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.

It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-08 06:44:26+00:00
He did have the Fractal Define 7 Compact case, and the pictures[1] only show a single 140mm case fan. From personal experience the Fractal Define cases are great at sound reduction due to the thermal padding, but those pads also insulates well.

Given the motherboard and RAM will also generate quite some heat, if the case fan profile was conservative (he does mention he likes low noise), could be the insides got quite toasty.

Back when I got my 2080 Ti, I had this issue when gaming. The internal temps would get so hot due to the blanket effect of the padding I couldn't touch the components after a gaming session. Had to significantly tweak my fan profiles. His CPU at peak would generate about the same amount of heat as my 2080 Ti + CPU I had then, and I had the non-Compact case with two case fans.

[1]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2025-05-15-my-2025-high-...
by ktallett | 2025-09-08 06:44:44+00:00
Firstly for everyone this is obviously a generalised statement. However cognitive ability can be improved by changing ways we learn and do, ways we approach tasks, and using the right resources or support networks. Therefore whilst the older amongst us may not be able to brute force a task or subject matter like I did at one point in my life, I now have the knowledge to make better connections between pieces of information and I think that gives me a greater ability to learn overall. My methods as a teen were not optimal, they just appear better due to some success, but I feel I'm at my peak now despite going thru some health issues that has actually caused me to have to work around many things from number of useful hours, to less ability to concentrate. I feel that I am better than ever at prioritising, and analysing what is key and what is just frivolous time sinks that will serve me no purpose.
by defrost | 2025-09-08 06:45:24+00:00
It answers the question you asked.

Another answer, mine, is that one grandmother flew bombers, jets, spitfires, etc. in WWII and ran a post war international logistics company after that. The other did "stuff" with math.

ie. Both capable of understanding a security posture.

How about your grannies?

You might want to ask well formed questions in future, on a site such as HN the set of all grandmothers is hardly homogeneous.
by jml7c5 | 2025-09-08 06:45:33+00:00
The big problem with ECC for me is that the sticks are so much more expensive. You'd expect ECC UDIMMs to have a price premium of just over 12.5% (because there are 9 chips instead of 8), but it's usually at least 100%. I don't mind paying reasonable premium for ECC, but paying double is too hard to swallow.
by tsuyoshi_k | 2025-09-08 06:45:49+00:00
Vue I18n is a powerful and flexible internationalization plugin for Vue.js. It supports lazy loading, dynamic translation, locale fallback, and seamless integration with the Composition API.

It’s also used in full-scale production projects like OS Yamato, a poetic multi-language web OS supporting Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and French.

GitHub: https://github.com/intlify/vue-i18n
by aurareturn | 2025-09-08 06:47:21+00:00
Because buying a house now has a limited upside in value appreciation compared to the stock market. High interest rates and high prices make home price appreciation very limited - in many cases, going down. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to go up. Owning a home also locks your money in while your money is liquid in the stock market.

Further more, I'm still getting 4% return on cash. A lot of people probably think that's still a better return than real estate in the current situation.

So in the end, it's really all about interest rates.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-08 06:47:57+00:00
> 10 limited edition ones autographed by CEO Sim Wong Hoo. Like "Who cares about U2 and other artistes (admittedly there were few famous ones in SG then) right? We've got a special one signed by our CEO!" The person who thought of this should have been fired and condemned to never work in marketing ever again.

Honestly, having the decision between a "U2 Special Edition" and "CEO-signed Special Edition", I would without hesitation (all other things equal) choose the latter one.

A great middle finger to all this musical band fandom, and the hypocrisy of lots of insanely commercially successful musicians who claim that they do this all for the love of music instead of love for money (just to be clear: there exist lots of indie bands for which I immediately do believe their love for music, but these bands are nearly always far too unknown to be suitable for being poster children for selling MP3 players).

No need to mention that I love this kind of marketing. I guess I sometimes have a non-mainstream taste. :-)
by neRok | 2025-09-08 06:49:57+00:00
> Invalid state is usually due to a bug

I don't think the article is referring to that sort of issue, which sounds fundamental to the task at hand (calculations etc). To me it's about making the code flexible with regards to future changes/requirements/adaptions/etc. I guess you could consider Y2K as an example of this issue, because the problem with 6 digit date codes wasn't with their practicality at handling dates in the 80's/90's, but about dates that "spanned" beyond 991231, ie 000101.
by _ZeD_ | 2025-09-08 06:49:58+00:00
good luck with that.. I didn't had a decent IDE capable of even implementing elastic tab stops... I expect people using hex editors to flip bytes directly on the binary blob saved on disk instead of using the appropriate tools to view the "source" files.

btw: have a look at how much disdain was reserved for systemd and its pletora of binary blobs + custom tools (e.g. the journal stuff) ... and that was basically forced upon from the distributions
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-09-08 06:50:18+00:00
> I've never understood why we still look at the plain text representation of code, and not a visualization of the code that makes more sense.

My guess is it is the same reason why the most common form of creating source code is typing and not other readily available mechanisms:

Semantic density

Graphical visualizations are approachable representations and very useful for introductory, infrequent, and/or summary needs. However, they become cumbersome when either a well-defined repetitive workflow is used or usage variations are not known a priori.

An example of both are the emacs and vi editors. The vast majority of supported commands are at most a few keystrokes and any programming language source code can be manipulated by them.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-08 06:50:51+00:00
If your linter is enforcing subjective aesthetic constraints, then I'd argue it's not really a linter but a formatter at that point, and it should be automatically fixing all that stuff for you rather than have you do that manually. Things like import order, empty lines, white space etc can all be fixed automatically in most languages I've worked with.

Linters enforcing rules that need to be broken is a pet peeve of mine, and I agree with you there. Most linters allow for using comments to explicitly exclude certain lines from being linted. This should ~never be necessary. If it is regularly necessary, then either you're programming bad (always a possibility!) or the rule has too many false positives and you should remove it.
by Zanfa | 2025-09-08 06:51:01+00:00
I disagree completely.

You’re already paying the cost of abstraction for using a certain database or protocol, so get the most bang for your buck. If you can encode rules in a schema or a type, it’s basically free, compared to having to enforce it in code, hoping that future developers (yourself or others) will remember to do the same. It just eliminates and entire universe of problems you have to deal with otherwise.

Also, while relaxing constraints is usually easy or at least doable, enforcing new constrains on existing data is impossible in practice. Never seen it done successfully.

The only exception to this rule I typically make is around data state transitions. Meaning that even when business rules dictate a unidirectional transition, it should be bidirectional in code, just because people will click the wrong button and will need a way to undo “irreversible” actions.
by micksmix | 2025-09-08 06:51:59+00:00
Loved this “lead bullets” framing, especially the parts on taint checking, scanners, and pre-processing/sampling logs. One practical add-on to the "Sensitive data scanners" section is verification: can you tell which candidates are actually live creds?

We’ve been working on an open source tool, Kingfisher, that pairs fast detection (Hyperscan + Tree-Sitter) with live validation for a bunch of providers (cloud + common SaaS) so you can down-rank false positives and focus on the secrets that really matter. It plugs in at the chokepoints this post suggests: CI, repo/org sweeps, and sampled log archives (stdin/S3) after a Vector/rsyslog hop.

Examples:

kingfisher scan /path/to/app.log --only-valid kingfisher scan --s3-bucket my-logs --s3-prefix prod/2025/09/

Baselines help keep noise down over time.

Repo: https://github.com/mongodb/kingfisher (Apache-2.0)

Disclosure: I help maintain Kingfisher.
by tho23i4324234 | 2025-09-08 06:53:46+00:00
That's hardly surprising no ? These 'revolutions' only happen once every few decades, and looking back everything looks insignificant (because their significance shrinks to nothing when you're at the wake of the exponential function).

If you look back there's basically "nothing" that happened till the 90s; and if widen the horizon a bit and look back 'nothing' appears to have happened till the 20th century and so on.

We grow in ability, not wisdom (which is why 'forgetting' is so much more catastrophic).
by bruce511 | 2025-09-08 06:53:51+00:00
Solar is likely what will power anything we put there, in the short term at least. But Mars only gets 43% of the solar energy that earth gets. So you need at least twice the panels. Not to mention the batteries.

This is fine for "residential", but perhaps not suited to industrial scale.

Yes, I expect nuclear is the best choice of a list of 1, but it will be substantially harder to build one on Mars than here. For starters the lack of water, and the lack of atmosphere density would result in substantial cooling challenges.

However you slice it, energy on Mars is completely dependent on earth. Panels, batteries, uranium- none of it can be made on Mars, and all have "short" lifespans.
by mcv | 2025-09-08 06:53:55+00:00
> (and revocation of my Prime account and a lifetime ban from AWS and cancellation of any other services I might otherwise run there)

Also a vital lesson from the big tech companies that sell a wide variety of services: don't get your cloud hosting from a company that you also use other services from.

I had to disable photo syncing because Google photos eats up my Gmail space. Having Amazon's cloud billing fuckup threaten your TV access is another level.

We clearly need to keep the option open to burn those bridges.

In any case, if I ever host anything, I'm going to host it from my home.