MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Emotive Engine – Animation engine with musical time (not milliseconds)
by emotiveengine | 2025-10-29 10:46:04+00:00
Hey HN! I'm the creator of Emotive Engine. I've been working on this for 2+ years and finally open-sourced it today.

The core idea: Most animation libraries work in milliseconds. Music works in beats. This creates a mismatch - hardcode a bounce for 500ms (perfect at 120 BPM), switch to 90 BPM, and everything drifts because 500ms is now 0.75 beats.

Emotive Engine uses musical time as the atomic unit. Specify animations in beats, and they automatically become: - 500ms at 120 BPM - 667ms at 90 BPM - 353ms at 170 BPM

Change tempo, everything adjusts. No recalculation needed.

Built for AI interfaces (chatbots, voice assistants) but works for any real-time character animation. Pure Canvas 2D, 60 FPS on mobile, 2,532 tests passing.

Live demo at https://emotiveengine.com/demo - the hero banner on GitHub was generated with the engine itself.

Happy to answer any technical questions! MIT licensed.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-10-29 10:46:22+00:00
>The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”

That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.

Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.

It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?

In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
by joduplessis | 2025-10-29 10:46:26+00:00
I wiped Win11 from my Ideapad and installed Ubuntu. I love Gnome & it's the closest it'll get to MacOS (am a Mac user mainly). Win11 was absolutely wild though - around every corner was some ad for Office365 or Copilot or some other shit product. You don't own Windows (anymore) - you borrow it.
by weinzierl | 2025-10-29 10:46:31+00:00
The headline talks about deviance and the the article starts with "People are less weird than they used to be." and continues talking about weirdness mostly.

Deviance and weirdness are not the same thing. I 100% agree that deviance is in decline. I also think the authors impression that people are less weird and express themselves more boringly comes only from him living in his conformist bubble.

The weirdness has always been a countercultural thing and that is well alive; even though of course not accessible to everyone - like it never has been.

What is different in my opinion is that there is surprisingly little visible deviance (in the sense of dissent, defiance, disobedience) nowadays. I have a hunch this is because most young people value security more than freedom but I am not very sure about this.
by NaomiLehman | 2025-10-29 10:46:43+00:00
yes. we have PCs. AFAIK, the cheapest PC that compares for my workflow is an EPYC/NUMA or another very expensive CPU/latency optimized server. We have a complex stack, with clients running unique queries that we can't predict and gigabytes loaded into RAM, L3 cache doesn't always save us. I haven't found another solution, I wish we could drop the Macs cause the OS is pretty awful.

We're using Macs as servers. But it's a small operation.
by DanielHB | 2025-10-29 10:47:48+00:00
It is funny that MVC as a concept started as a backend server-rendered pages where the V was what rendered the HTML, C was the business logic which pulled data from the M which was the database + adapters.

When bending it to apply to React + JSON-apis it kinda applies, but it is such a different approach that conceptually it is not relevant in the presence of a lot of client state.
by ayewo | 2025-10-29 10:47:55+00:00
> The next logical step would be to get into CPUs, to become a fully integrated computing solutions provider.

They already tried it 5 years ago [1][2] but it was promptly blocked by regulators.

[1]: https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-to-acquire-arm-for...

[2]: HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24464807
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-29 10:48:34+00:00
Tracking is a necessary precursor to being able to hassle wanderers.

Absent mass automated surveillance, the state's ability to do so at scale was limited.

Once implemented (and processed and stored), norms on use erode over time... and then anyone anomalous is being auto background-checked when showing up in a new area.

Or do we think someone won't find a use for all the dark datacenter GPU power after AI pops?
by jleyank | 2025-10-29 10:48:44+00:00
Why use the shorter chemical names when you can use the IUPAC name: N-(4-hydroxyphenyl)acetamide. If you’re talking about a chemical rather than a product, there’s established nomenclature rules. Or, if you’re a computer type, use the SMILES notation CC(=O)Nc1ccc(O)cc1.
by terminalbraid | 2025-10-29 10:48:54+00:00
There's a book "Against Creativity" by Oli Mould which is on this topic. The title is about the redirection of creativity into monetizing everything. It hypothesizes that any current counterculture gets bought out by the system and sold back to society while those creators effectively get golden handcuffs to not rock the boat meaningfully.

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Creativity-Oli-Mould-ebook/dp...
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-10-29 10:49:16+00:00
You're asking too much of society with such vague complaints. We should focus on getting basics right: prosperity, jobs, reduce crime, reduce road death, and so forth before navel-gazing about "abuse by society". In any case, even if society does somehow "address the abuse", it shouldn't come in the form of randomly abusing other people. But that's what you appear to be advocating for: Because some people were discriminated against, we should now randomly discriminate against some other people.
by prawn | 2025-10-29 10:49:59+00:00
In Australia, it feels to me like "participate in the system" is owning property. And unless you have a shrewd alternative path, you want to be in that game because the growth in value is aggressive (~ doubles in value every 10 years; enough that every month you wait puts you behind).

That said, while wandering off jobless is a ticking clock, it is easier than ever to work remotely while wandering. And if you have property rented while you're away, you can get some of the deviance without digging too much of a hole for yourself.
by bombcar | 2025-10-29 10:50:42+00:00
The onion URL is itself a public key - https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7... for example.

Proton Mail burned CPU time until they found a public key that started the way they wanted it to.

So that is the public key for an HTTPS equivalent as part of the tor protocol.

You can ALSO get an HTTPS certificate for an onion URL; a few providers offer it. But it’s not necessary for security - it does provide some additional verification (perhaps).
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 10:50:51+00:00
Consider a society where everyone has a different reality about something shared normally.

Societies are built upon unspoken but shared truths and information (i.e. the social contract). Dissolve this information, dissolve or fragment the society.

This, coupled with profiling and targeting will enable fragmentation of the societies, consolidation of power and many other shenanigans.

This also enables continuous profiling, opening the door for "preemptive policing" (Minority Report style) and other dystopian things.

Think about Cambridge Analytica or election manipulation, but on steroids.

This is dangerous. Very dangerous.
by ControlStack | 2025-10-29 10:51:48+00:00
The U.S. is investing $175B in “Golden Dome”—a next-gen, space-based missile shield designed to intercept ballistic and hypersonic threats in boost phase using AI, lasers, and orbital interceptors. But defense analysts warn it may be fundamentally vulnerable to Russia’s 9M730 Burevestnik: a nuclear-powered cruise missile with theoretically unlimited range, unpredictable flight paths, and no fixed launch signature.

This isn’t just a hardware mismatch—it’s a clash of paradigms: predictive, layered defense vs. persistent, non-linear threat. The piece breaks it down through the Control Stack framework: Physical, Technological, Informational, and Consciousness layers.

Worth reading if you’re interested in systems architecture, strategic deterrence, or how legacy assumptions fail in multipolar conflict.
by alyxya | 2025-10-29 10:51:50+00:00
The main issue is how opaque the system is, though that may also be a feature to limit people’s abilities in figuring out how to bypass various restrictions. No one should have to risk the existence of their channel and livelihood to some unknown automated algorithm. Although the reddit post only cites videos from one person running into this issue, the first video link has comments referencing someone else so I found a video from that other person as an additional data point.

https://youtu.be/vQ-RXzzU9u0
by deaux | 2025-10-29 10:51:54+00:00
> Investing in an Estonian startup from, say, the Netherlands is near impossible

If anything this would be due to Dutch regulations rather than Estonian ones. So that would be more of a problem for setting up VCs in the EU rather than attracting capital in general, as the same would apply to the rest of the world. Is it easier for a US or Singapore VC to invest in an Japanese startup vs an Estonian startup? As far as I know the answer is a "no", but I'm happy to be proven wrong.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-10-29 10:52:02+00:00
I understand GP like they want to browse normally and have that session's history feed into another indexing process via some IPC like D-Bus. It's meant to receive human events from the browser.

Chrome Devtools MCP on the other hand is a browser automation tool. Its purpose is to make it trivial to send programmed events/event-flows to a browser session.
by modo_mario | 2025-10-29 10:52:27+00:00
In which case you have to do that indefinitely and it's a pyramid scheme. Also most non eu migration doesn't end up being a net positive for those govs within the first generation (or even second depending). Far from actually and these migrants are not immune to aging then they end up requiring pensions too.

And all of this to serve dying generations when those younger than me starting out get ever increasingly shafted.

Here in Belgium pension plans existed that did not work like that. Then the socialist raided these funds and the future generations were going to pay for those pensions. My family's criticism was that they could only do that once and they were right.

I don't tie this issue to socialists tho. 2 decades ago the liberals(european, right wing) did the same to the railways who had a separate pension fund and more recently yet another party suggested doing the same for a 3rd pillar of selfemployed people.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-29 10:52:47+00:00
> It's a myth that Snow Leopard was a bug fix release.

> Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than 10.5.8

Somebody who worked on Snow Leopard has already disagreed with you here about those things:

> As the person who personally ran 10.6 v1.1 at Apple (and 10.5.8), you are wrong(ish).

> Snow Leopard's stated goal internally was reducing bugs and increasing quality. If you wanted to ship a feature you had to get explicit approval. In feature releases it was bottom up "here is what we are planning to ship" and in Snow Leopard it was top down "can we ship this?".

> During that time period my team and I triaged every single Mac OS X bug coming into the company every morning. Trust me, SL was of higher quality than Leopard.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431675#43439348

> Apple's strict yearly schedule makes "another Snow Leopard" impossible. At this point, Apple has accumulated so much technical debt that they'd need much more than 2 years of minor bug fix updates.

I don’t think the schedule matters. They just over-commit every time. I said elsewhere:

> [Apple] were never building and have never built software at a sustainable pace, even before the yearly cadence. They race ahead with tech debt then never pay it off, so the problem gets progressively worse.

> A while back, that merely manifested as more and more defects over time.

> More recently, they began failing to ship on time and started pre-announcing features that would ship later.

> And now they’ve progressed to failing to ship on time, pre-announcing features that would ship later, and then failing to ship those features later.

> This is not the yearly cadence. This is consistently committing to more than they are capable of, which results in linear growth of tech debt, which results in rising defects and lower productivity over time. It would happen with any cadence.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43436105
by y0eswddl | 2025-10-29 10:53:03+00:00
language we use actually very much dictates the way we think...

for instance, there's a tribe that describes directions only using the Cardinals. and as such they have no words for nor mental concept of "left and right".

and coincidentally, they're all much more proficient at navigation and have a better general sense of direction (obviously) than the average human because of the way they have to think about directions when just talking to each other.

===

is also why the best translators don't just do a word for word replacement but half to force think through cultural context and ideology on both sides of the conversation in order to make a more coherent translation.

what language you use absolutely dictates how and what we think as well as what particular message is conveyed
by Ygg2 | 2025-10-29 10:54:55+00:00
> but I think most C programmers won't be willing to take a 4× performance hit.

At a 4x performance hit, you might as well use C# or Go.

> Fil-C's target audience is users of C programs, not authors of C programs.

Sure, but then they don't get it for free. There is a perf penalty from GC. Plus you need all the original sources, right?

> we lose access to that intellectual heritage.

Declining usage of C is going to make you lose intellectual heritage[1]. A language no one can read or write is a dead language, regardless if you can translate it to English or not.

[1] And that is outside Rust's or Zig's influence. It's an old language from when people thought you can trust the programmer. Which may well be the case if only people using it were Bell Labs engineers. It's got UB up the wazoo, no safety, and no sane package manager.
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-29 10:55:10+00:00
It still runs hotter than any other distro and on my framework it's right on the fan threshold. I wish they would fix whatever is going on. Phoronix[0] did some tests 2022 but crickets from the fedora team ever since. You find some threads here and there but for me its a recurring problem over different machines.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/hp-devone-linux/8
by braebo | 2025-10-29 10:55:14+00:00
I lost access to decades of my albums which can no longer open on my MacBooks. Some open partially running Ableton Live with Rosetta. My record label recently reached out asking for stems for an old song for a sync deal with Rocket League — after spending a week trying to revive the old sessions I concluded that it was impossible and they were forever lost thanks to apples complete abandonment of backwards compatibility. It’s heart breaking really.
by martin- | 2025-10-29 10:55:49+00:00
I strongly prefer local software, but as someone coming from Photoshop who now only does the occasional edit (and therefore can't justify the price), I find Photopea to be a good alternative, especially since it closely mimics Photoshop's interface so I don't have to learn a new UI. Also, your images stay local on your computer and aren't uploaded to their servers.

It's developed by a single guy, which I think is very impressive given how much of Photoshop's functionality it has. I just really wish it were open source (and not a web app).
by deaux | 2025-10-29 10:56:06+00:00
Awesome! I'm also bootstrapping. My company is set up in a place where the local version of the GPDR is significantly stricter and more onerous than the GDPR itself - yes, you heard it right, this exists! GDPR isn't even the toughest privacy laws in the world .

Yet startups here have managed to compete with US bigtech incomparably better than the EU. Shows that tough privacy laws have nothing to do with it.

> All that requires lawyers and compliance consultants to help you figure it out, and that’s way too much for a fledgling startup.

It also really just doesn't unless you're doing really shady stuff, in which case, good. The huge majority of startups don't need a lawyer to deal with GDPR.
by le-mark | 2025-10-29 10:59:26+00:00
This is a great write up and thank you to the author! Just a note that graphviz dot is not purely Sugiyama’s, there is a paper on the site that details the actual implementation.

Also judging from the final two images (dot vs iongraph for the same large graph) it’s clear that dot is optimized for minimal area where iongraph does not. That’s the trade off. The author claims one is more easy to navigate than the other, I think that’s debatable.

Ultimately I found that visualizing large graphs is rarely helpful in practice; they can certainly look nice for some well defined graphs, but I rarely saw well defined graphs in the wild. Ymmv but maybe some would agree?
by usrusr | 2025-10-29 10:59:54+00:00
Could this be a strategy to scare away overoptimistic stock buyers?

When you have a money printing machine that you don't expect to run forever (but aren't afraid of the future beyond, optimistic that you can still make money, just not that easy), as a publicly traded company you have the problem that eventually all owners who have similar expectations will have sold to more optimistic owners who expect nothing less than the money printing machine running forever. And getting even bigger while at it. When that ownership change has happened, the company does not really have any other option than to die trying. Deliberately diluting the value of the company with ownership in "definitely not a money printing machine!" before that happens could be a way to avoid that death march, a survival strategy.
by phil-martin | 2025-10-29 11:00:03+00:00
It started waaaaay before backend server-rendered pages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93con...

"Trygve Reenskaug created MVC while working on Smalltalk-79 as a visiting scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the late 1970s. He wanted a pattern that could be used to structure any program where users interact with a large, convoluted data set. His design initially had four parts: Model, view, thing, and editor. After discussing it with the other Smalltalk developers, he and the rest of the group settled on model, view, and controller instead."
by int_19h | 2025-10-29 11:00:34+00:00
> That's unfortunate, but then wouldn't the sane way for localization-aware software be to ask the user and not make any such assumptions?

The sane way for any localization-aware software is to use the standard knobs that the user already has for setting such preferences. Which would be the appropriate LC_* in Unix and the corresponding user settings on Windows/macOS.
by darthnebula | 2025-10-29 11:01:46+00:00
Yes, if I type Taylor Swift Showgirls I get some helpful information and a lot of links, but not her website. It isn't very different than what Google Gemini displays at the top of Google search results.

Is it a webpage? Well... it displays in a browser...

But if I type Taylor Swift, I get links to her website, instagram, facebook, etc.

Is it a webpage? Well... it displays in a browser...

This isn't Web 2.0, Anil. Things change.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-29 11:02:01+00:00
On Linux, the really old games just work, as do virtually all new games with the exception of those very few big budget new releases. If those are the games you really want to play then Windows is the answer, have fun ponying up your drivers license to Microsoft for the privilege of getting root kitted by those games. Literally everything else just works on Linux, one click install and play through steam, no bullshit fiddling around.
by keepamovin | 2025-10-29 11:02:05+00:00
I made some videos of installing Windows 95, 98 and NT on DosBox-X on macOS ARM: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RBMSW1B6hKk

And a GitHub repo: https://github.com/BrowserBox/windows-dosbox-x

I tried different AIs to make the scripts to automate installs in DosBox-X as long as you have a product key and ISO or other media.

Most interesting to me was the different quirks between OSeS. NT was the most tricky in getting to work on DosBox-X and syncing up internet, IIRC. But overall a very fun project. Brings back nostalgia of 3.5" disks and seeing those install screen. Very cool times in the 90s ha! :)
by p00dles | 2025-10-29 11:02:19+00:00
novice -> informed -> asshole

I strive to be at the informed part of the spectrum.

Wine example:

- Novice: "I'd like any red wine" -> waiter brings you something you don't like

- Informed: "I'd like a red wine that is dry, not st" -> waiter brings you something you are quite likely to like

- Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences

*edit formatting
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-10-29 11:02:25+00:00
>However, later generations suffered from "helicopter parents" who won't let their kids out of their sight and arranged "playdates" and other organized activities for their kids, not allowing them to spontaneously choose for themselves.

I wonder how much of that is down to car culture. The amount of traffic I had to deal with as a child was tiny compared what my children faced.
by keiferski | 2025-10-29 11:02:30+00:00
It is definitely easier to work remotely, and I have taken advantage of that to travel, but realistically most remote jobs are for people that are already in demand economically. There isn’t really a remote equivalent to the cafe job for the average non-finance, non-technical person.

That used to be support, graphic design, and writing, but all are being offshored or replaced by AI. Marketing more broadly probably is one of the few career paths I can think of that is still viable remotely, excluding the groups I mentioned before.
by sd9 | 2025-10-29 11:04:14+00:00
In my domain (motorsports), almost all software is ancient 3rd party stuff only available as windows desktop apps.

I’ve tried emulators but performance is abysmal for these apps. There are also all sorts of weird networking things that don’t work.

And generally when you work with a new team which has a different tech stack, there just isn’t time within the context of a race weekend to faff.

I’m unfortunately locked in.