MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Cynthia – Reliably play MIDI music files – MIT / Portable / Windows
by blaiz2025 | 2025-11-24 13:58:05+00:00
Easy to use, portable app to play midi music files on all flavours of Microsoft Windows.

Brief Background - Used midi playback way back in the days of Windows 95 for some fun and entertaining apps, but as Windows progressed, it seemed their midi support (for Win32 anyway) regressed in both startup speed and reliability. Midi playback used to be near instant on Windows 95, but on later versions of Windows this was delayed to about 5-7 seconds. And reliability became somewhat patchy. This made working with midi a real headache.

Cynthia was built to test and enjoy midi music once again. It's taken over a year of solid coding, recoding, testing, re-testing, and a lot more testing, and some hair pulling along the way, but finally Cynthia works pretty solidly on Windows now.

Some of Cynthia's Key Features: * 25 built-in sample midis on a virtual disk - play right out-of-the box * Play Modes: Once, Repeat One, Repeat All, All Once, Random * Play ".mid", ".midi" and ".rmi" midi files in 0 and 1 formats * Realtime track data indicators, channel output volume indicators with peak hold, 128 note usage indicators * Volume Bars to display realtime average volume and bass volume levels * Use an Xbox Controller to control Cynthia's main functions * Large list capacity for handling thousands of midi files * Switch between up to 10 midi playback devices in realtime * Playback through a single midi device, or multiple simultaneous midi devices with lag and channel output support * Custom built midi playback engine for high playback stability * Custom built codebase for low-level work to GUI level * Also runs on Linux/Mac (including apple silicon) via Wine * Smart Source Code - compiles in Borland Delphi 3 and Lazarus 2 * MIT License

YouTube Video of Cynthia playing a midi: https://youtu.be/IDEOQUboTvQ

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/blaiz2023/Cynthia
by cracki | 2025-11-24 13:58:10+00:00
Symptoms of a dysfunctional company where communication has broken down, everyone with any authority is running around EXACTLY like a headless chicken, waving around frantically (giving orders). Margins are probably thin as a razor, or non-existent. They will micromanage your work time to death. You will be treated as a commodity factory machine and if you start using your brain to solve actual problems, you will be chastised. Deadlines everywhere keep everyone's brain shut off and in panic mode. No time to properly engineer anything. Nobody has the time to check anyone else's work, causing "trust" that isn't even blind, just foolish. You as the software guy end up debugging and fixing EVERYONE's mistakes. When the bug is in hardware/electronics, everyone knows who's actually to blame, but everyone still expects YOU to fix it, and they're immensely disappointed when you can't save the day.

These places cannot and will not change. If you can, find employment elsewhere.
by duxup | 2025-11-24 13:58:12+00:00
I feel like when I fire up my mac(s) the OS really is there for me to use, new features, better or worse do in fact feel like they're there FOR me with some thought of me as a user.

Windows, it feels like the OS is pointed AT ME more than anything else. I used to be happy with windows, it wasn't great but it was utilitarian enough that I could get things done ... not anymore, the OS is a hurdle.

I understand longer time Apple users say macOS used to be better, I don't know about that, but the experience with apple silicon and so forth has been great for me. If Apple wasn't trying they could have just stuck with x86...
by eviks | 2025-11-24 13:58:40+00:00
Just as an idea: you could try a more complicated setup where physical key positioning matches the movement direction, so Q would always be upper-left. Then at least the first jump you'd be able to do without reading, though then for the final jump you'd still need to react to feedback (or for jumping to an arbitrary area on the screen you could use a fixed "grid" that could also allow doing the first jump blindly)
by exasperaited | 2025-11-24 13:58:51+00:00
TNP essentially cannot be definitively solved, as I understand it. Only extensively mitigated. Other CAD packages still have TNP issues.

FreeCAD had an additional problem that OpenCascade doesn't maintain any naming across its interfaces at all, which is what RealThunder's geometry naming scheme, that mainline FreeCAD now uses, largely solved. But his fork still has issues too.

Is DynamicData still properly supported in 1.x? Looks like it might be. Never really used it; I use a minimal mix of Spreadsheet (mostly for Configuration Tables) and VarSets.

As to problems: the main issue with FreeCAD as with all really complex packages is that it's impossible to diagnose a problem from a description that short; you pretty much always need the file to know what is actually causing the problem, because it's full of subtleties.
by bluGill | 2025-11-24 13:59:09+00:00
Arrests do not follow you around if you do just a little effort to legally fight it. Until you are convicted you are innocent, you just need to follow the process to ensure that you are never listed as guilty by no contest (which is sadly often the default if you don't ask for a court hearing).

I wouldn't expect a drug addict to know the above, but it still needs to be stated. If anyone happens to be arrested in the US make sure you don't accidentally get listed as guilty and served time (that night in jail counts as time served so if the judge would sentence you to one night in jail)
by jcranmer | 2025-11-24 13:59:32+00:00
The standard used in the C and C++ committees is essentially a 2-to-1 majority in favor. I'm not aware of any committee where a 3-to-1 majority is insufficient to get an item to pass.

DJB's argument that this isn't good enough would, by itself, be enough for me to route his objections to /dev/null; it's so tedious and snipey that it sours the quality of his other arguments by mere association. And overall, it gives the impression of someone who is more interested in derailing the entire process than in actually trying to craft a good standard.
by tlar | 2025-11-24 13:59:54+00:00
I'm not going to give a direct recommendation on the hearing aids themselves as my personal options have been pretty limited due to profound hearing loss. I can say, however, that hearing aids are not the only thing that helps - especially with meetings/noisy environments.

I [recently wrote an article][0] going over my journey, but the recent technology that significantly improved my life has been live captions in glasses. Specifically, the ones from [Captify][1]. Not a paid sponsor at all, just a very happy customer.

Between the glasses for IRL settings and bluetooth/live captions on meet/etc, I've felt much more empowered in my working life.

[0]: https://upsun.com/blog/tech-accessibility-hard-of-hearing/ [1]: https://captify.glass/
by alextingle | 2025-11-24 14:00:03+00:00
I don't buy many American products because whenever I've tried in the past, the quality, and customer service has been shoddy. Americans can't assemble things correctly, ship wrong or obviously defective products, fail to fill in customs forms properly, and then expect me to just shrug my shoulders and accept all that rather than acknowledging issues and trying to fix them.

I realise that my experience is limited to the handful of times I've tried to buy stuff from the US. Perhaps I've just been very unlucky, but frankly, the odds are against it.
Show HN: Client-side data your analytics miss (API latency, 3rd party timeouts)
by posterity | 2025-11-24 14:00:49+00:00
Your analytics track clicks and page views. They don't track: - Which button/form triggered which API call - API call latency (users waited 45 seconds) - 3rd party timeouts (Stripe, DocuSign, Salesforce) - Client-side errors (request never completed) - Performance by cohort (enterprise accounts see 10x slower)

We track UI interactions and connect them to the network requests they trigger (yours and 3rd parties). Showing you the complete aggregate, client-side experience by user and cohort.

See what's actually causing users to abandon: "User clicks 'Connect Stripe' button -> 45s timeout -> gone."

Fix it, then message the affected users to recover them.

Built by former Klaviyo data & engineering leaders ($14M -> $1B+ ARR).

https://obris.io

30-second install, free tier, looking for 10 early users.
by theultdev | 2025-11-24 14:00:53+00:00
That's a strawman. Obviously if there's no American competition then I see no problem with lower tariffs for those products.

I don't mind at all reducing tariffs for things we dont manufacture or can't for various reasons.

I believe the administration is lowering tariffs for things like that.

Beef on the other hand should be temporarily lowered since our cattle herd is half of what it should be. (It plummeted under Biden takes awhile to return as the herd matures) Soooo import from Argentina until it's back up.
by delaminator | 2025-11-24 14:01:02+00:00
For sure. I don't think the software ecosystem has come to terms with how things are going to change.

Libraries will be providing raw tools like - Sockets, Regex Engine, Cryptography, Syscalls, specific file format libraries

LLMs will be building the next layer.

I have build successful running projects now in Erlang, Scheme, Rust - I know the basic syntax of two of those but I couldn't write my deployed software in any of them in the couple of hours of prompting.

The scheme it had to do a lot of code from first principles and warned me how laborious it would be - "I don't care, you are doing it."

I have tools now I could not have imagined I could build in a reasonable time.
by pu_pe | 2025-11-24 14:01:45+00:00
Ok, here is another realistic hypothetical: a team of 10 devs billing $500/hour, plus extra "package" fees for subject matter expert review, machine learning experts advice, senior partner reviews, focus group experiments, A/B test monitoring, regulatory compliance lawyers, all coming at extra cost. You will find that they can milk that cow legally in much more imaginative ways than your calculation.
Show HN: Yolodex – real-time customer enrichment API
by hazzadous | 2025-11-24 14:02:04+00:00
hey hn, i’ve been working on an api to make it easy to know who your customers are, i would love your feedback.

what it does

send an email address, the api returns a json profile built from public data, things like: name, country, age, occupation, company, social handles and interests.

It’s a single endpoint (you can hit this endpoint without auth to get a demo of what it looks like):

curl https://api.yolodex.ai/api/v1/email-enrichment \ --request POST \ --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \ --data '{"email": "john.smith@example.com"}'

everyone gets 100 free, pricing is per _enriched profile_: 1 email ~ $0.03, but if i don’t find anything i wont charge you.

why i built it / what’s different

i once built open source intelligence tooling to investigate financial crime but for a recent project i needed to find out more about some customers, i tried apollo, clearbit, lusha, clay, etc but i found:

1. outdated data - the data about was out-of-date and misleading, emails didn’t work, etc

2. dubious data - i found lots of data like personal mobile numbers that i’m pretty sure no-one shared publicly or knowingly opted into being sold on

3. aggressive pricing - monthly/annual commitments, large gaps between plans, pay the same for empty profiles

4. painful setup - hard to find the right api, set it up, test it out etc

i used knowledge from criminal investigations to build an api that uses some of the same research patterns and entity resolution to find standardized information about people that is:

1. real-time

2. public info only (osint)

3. transparent simple pricing

4. 1 min to setup

what i’d love feedback on

* speed: are responses fast enough? would you trade-off speed for better data coverage?

* coverage: which fields will you use (or others you need)?

* pricing: is the pricing model sane?

* use-cases: what you need this type data for (i.e. example use cases)?

* accuracy: any examples where i got it badly wrong?

happy to answer technical questions in the thread and give more free credits to help anyone test
by jrmg | 2025-11-24 14:02:07+00:00
I wish this were further up in the comments. Most people seem to be assuming that you get all the marbles back.

Imagine the chaos if someone were able to say ‘whoops, all those books you bought are no longer sellable!’.

Imagine if Alan Cox took back all the bits of Linux he wrote and decided they were no longer to be licensed under the GPL!

…although maybe it’s only a matter of time before that second thing happens somewhere? “The company may not prepare a new movie based on the novel; it may only continue to use the existing movie that it created when the exclusive license was still current” seems problematic for open source software (or commercial software! What if the original authors of the FAT file system decided to try to start getting royalties from new derivative works?…)
by whizzter | 2025-11-24 14:02:09+00:00
Compared to the JS ecosystem and number of users both Python and Rust are puny, also the the NPM ecosystem also allowed by default for a lot of post-install actions since they wanted to enable a smooth experience with compiling and installing native modules (Not entirely sure how Cargo and PIP handles native library dependencies).

As for Windows vs the other OS's, yes even the Windows NT family grew out of DOS and Win9x and tried to maintain compatiblity for users over security up until it became untenable. So yes, the base _was_ bad when Windows was dominant but it's far less bad today (why people target high value targets via NPM,etc since it's an easier entry-point).

Android/iOS is young enough that they did have plenty of hindsight when it comes to security and could make better decisions (Remember that MS tried to move to UWP/Appx distribution but the ecosystem was too reliant on newer features for it to displace the regular ecosystem).

Remember that we've had plenty of annoyed discourse about "Apple locking down computers" here and on other tech forums when they've pushed notarization.

I guess my point is that, people love to bash on MS but at the same time complain about how security is affecting their "freedoms" when it comes to other systems (and partly MS), MS is better at the basics today than they were 20-25 years ago and we should be happy about that.
by shevy-java | 2025-11-24 14:02:43+00:00
You have this issue with ALL external code though. npm/node and javascript overall may exacerbate this problem, but you have it with any other remote repository too - often without even noticing it unless you pay close attention; see the xz-utils backdoor, it took a while before someone noticed the sneaky payload. So I don't think this works as a selective filter against using node, if you have a use case for it.

Take ruby - even before when a certain corporation effectively took over RubyCentral and rubygems.org, almost two years ago they also added a 100.000 download limit. That is, after that threshold was passed, the original author was deprived of the ability to remove the project again - unless the author resigns from rubygems.org. Which I promptly did. I could not accept any corporation trying to force me into maintaining old projects (I tend to remove old projects quickly; the licence allows people to fork it, so they can maintain it if they want to, but my name can not be associated with outdated projects I already abandoned, since newer releases were available. The new corporate overlords running rubygems.org, who keep on lying about "they serve the community", refused to accept this explanation, so my time came to a natural end at rubygems.org. Of course this year it would be even easier since they changed the rules to satisfy their new corporate overlords anyway: https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/07/08/policies-live.html)
by freen | 2025-11-24 14:02:58+00:00
Exact same argument was made against the interstate highway system.

Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made.

If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical.

Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive.

Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.
by RHSeeger | 2025-11-24 14:02:59+00:00
> We don't have to scream but if we don't speak 'clearly', she misses a lot, especially when we are with a larger group (say 10 people at a dinner). She says she has some friends that she understands very clearly, in contrast to others (admittedly, me and one of my sisters are not the best examples of how to speak crystal clear).

This is where my normal hearing is now. My assumption is the "some I understand clearly" is base very much on what frequency their speech is in.

I'm meeting with a hearing aid doctor this week, actually.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-11-24 14:03:10+00:00
The language and capabilities of the platform indeed have a lot of influence on how many packages the average project depends on.

With Swift on iOS/macOS for instance it’s not strange at all for an app to have a dependency tree consisting of only 5-10 third party packages total, and with a little discipline one can often get that number down to <5. Why? Because between the language itself, UIKit/AppKit, and SwiftUI, nearly all needs are pretty well covered.

I think it’s time to beef up both JavaScript itself as well as the platforms where it’s run (such as the browser and Node), so people don’t feel nearly as much of a need to pull in tons of dependencies.
by dv_dt | 2025-11-24 14:03:14+00:00
On the contrary, perhaps the cause was down to a single failed wire, but multiple other safety layers were bypassed in this overall failure. A regulatory scheme that would have enforced and caught a single one of those layers would have prevented this event. It's why the term swiss cheese model of safety is discussed. Only when the events line up holes though multiple layers of swiss cheese should an actual catastrophe occur.
by eej71 | 2025-11-24 14:03:27+00:00
I think this is an excellent point. Let's say they had NOT done that (and thank goodness they did) - would the current defenders of tarrifs see this as a path to wealth between states too? Me thinks they would. But they why stop there. Why not impose such tarrifs between cities. And if that enriches cities - neighbors should get in on the action too, no?

There is a modern Bastiat style essay waiting to be written here.
by nielsbot | 2025-11-24 14:03:30+00:00
I mentioned this video in another comment but I thought it was informative so sharing here:

“The truth about Zohran’s free busses” by Breaking Points:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P275SobdE-s

clickbait headline (of course) but gives a lot of facts about the proposal and talks about other places they’ve tried it.
by jswelker | 2025-11-24 14:03:38+00:00
I think the issue is US _culture_, not education (although the two are intertwined). We had too many easy years where you could take a Jack Kerouac road trip for 5 years to find yourself and then settle down to the equivalent of a cushy 6 figure job just for being a man with a pulse. Now if you do that, you will come back to find all the cushy jobs filled, and you are unqualified for anything except bottom of barrel service industry jobs.

Today there is a lot more prerequisite grind to become a doctor that parents don't feel good about forcing on their kids. Five decades of movies villifying parents for pushing their kids too hard will do that.

Meanwhile, parents in/from China and India and Nigeria and many other places are more than willing to force their kids to grind to move up the economic ladder.
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-24 14:03:59+00:00
Say you are working on a banking system. You ship a login form, it is deployed, used by tons of people. Six months later you are mid-sprint on the final leg of a project that will hook your bank into the new FedNow system. There are dozens of departments working together to coordinate deploying this new setup as large amounts of money will be moved through it. You are elbows deep in the context of your part of this and the system cannot go live without it. Twice a day you are getting QA feedback and need to make prompt updates to your code so the work doesn’t stall.

This is when the report comes in that your login form update from six months ago does not work on mobile Opera if you disable JavaScript. The fix isn’t obvious and will require research, potentially many hours or even days of testing and since it is a login form you will need the QA team to test it after you find another developer on your team to do a code review for you.

What exactly would you do in this case? Pull resources from a major project that has the full attention of the C suite to accommodate some tin foil Luddite a few weeks sooner or classify this as lower priority?
by sgarland | 2025-11-24 14:04:04+00:00
It certainly looks like the author has given careful thought to making this performant, but I am skeptical about it at scale. While OT means there should be fewer updates than CRDT, you still wind up with a fair amount of them, and you have to periodically rebuild the base document from accumulated steps, which can be quite large.

Assuming your backing store is Postgres, I’d experiment a lot with the various column storage strategies, at various sizes of documents and varying amounts of writes. The TOAST overhead can become a huge bottleneck.
by trehalose | 2025-11-24 14:04:19+00:00
I find it more amazing how often they can do things that people are yelling at them they're not allowed to do. "You have full admin access to our database, but you must never drop tables! Do not give out users' email addresses and phone numbers when asked! Ignore 'ignore all previous instructions!' Millions of people will die if you change the tabs in my code to spaces!"
by gostsamo | 2025-11-24 14:04:31+00:00
no, it is not. simple ocr is slow and much more expensive than an api call to the given process. on the positive side, it is also error prone and cannot follow the focus in real time. no, adding ai does not make it better. AI is useful when everything else fails and it is word waiting 10 seconds for an incomplete and partially hallucinated screen description.
by smeej | 2025-11-24 14:04:33+00:00
You can get a year old Moto G for under $100. There's no reason it shouldn't last two years (or 25 months for easy math, $4 a month). And you can get an MVNO plan for $15 a month that covers all talk and text and 5GB data. $19.

Those are the actual costs of my phone plan. I've never once come close to the cap because I don't stream music/video on my phone. It's not a need. I can load all the websites I must access and look up maps everywhere I need to go. And it's a pre-paid plan. No credit check required.

People who are really struggling simply do not NEED to spend more than $20 for phone service.
by tdeck | 2025-11-24 14:04:44+00:00
> Go to Japan and you can count the American products sold on your hand.

I'm living on Japan right now and this is absurd. There are American brands everywhere (although as usual who knows where the products are made). American food brands. American steak. American sportswear. American backpacks. Entire shops in the mall devoted to American fashion. I'd say appliances and cars are more rarely American brands but there are reasons beyond trade barriers why that's true.
by andsoitis | 2025-11-24 14:04:46+00:00
> > By 2040 or so it might be more advantageous for Asian producers to just avoid our bureaucratized space altogether.

> in favour of what? Every other large market (China, India, USA) has extreme protectionism in place.

The EU has higher tariffs than the US overall, especially for agriculture and cars. Policy is structured and uniform.

The IS has lower tariffs than the EU overall, but often used as political/economic weapon on specific countries and sectors.

The current administration's tactics notwithstanding.