MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why not have a stadium of 30k people composing music with AI?
by amichail | 2025-12-16 21:48:27+00:00
What if a music concert had no performers, only the audience and an AI that composes music in real time?

Imagine 30,000 people humming, chanting, or clapping while an AI translates their collective input into evolving music. The crowd hears the results instantly and adapts, creating a feedback loop of shared creativity. Rising chants create tension, steady hums create calm, and rhythms shape the groove.

It is less a performance and more a living system where the audience is the composer and the AI amplifies their impulses into something larger than any individual could make. Every show would be unique, ephemeral, and shaped entirely by those present.

Could massive audiences really co-compose music with AI in real time? How would that feel emotionally and socially?

What do you think of this idea?
by Zigurd | 2025-12-16 21:48:46+00:00
SwiftKotlinDartGo blur together by now. That's too many languages but what are you gonna do?

I was ready to find that it was a bit much. The conjunction of ATProto and Dart was almost too much for the coding agent to handle and stay useful. But in the end it was OK.

I went from "wow that flutter code looks weird" to enjoying it pretty quickly.
by notahacker | 2025-12-16 21:48:49+00:00
Yep. There are some implicit cultural expectations around "best possible life" which vary from country to country, but it's not quite as much a "is the word in your local language we've rendered as happy closer in meaning to satisfied or ecstatic?" question, and it's also less about short term emotions on the day of the survey and much more about satisfaction with life opportunities, which is generally more relevant for international and longitudinal comparisons...
by echelon | 2025-12-16 21:48:55+00:00
Images make this even easier to see (though predictable and precise video is what drives the demand) :

gpt-image-1: https://imgur.com/gallery/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-x8t1ij... (fixed link - imgur deleted the last post for some reason)

gpt-image-1.5: https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-gpt-image-1-5-3fq042U

nano banana / pro: https://imgur.com/a/previz-to-image-nano-banana-pro-Q2B8psd

gpt-image-1 excels in these cases, despite being stylistically monotone.

I hope that Google, OpenAI, and the various Chinese teams lean in on this visual editing and blocking use case. It's much better than text prompting for a lot of workflows, especially if you need to move the camera and maintain a consistent scene.

While some image editing will be in the form of "remove the object"-style prompts, a lot will be molding images like clay. Grabbing arms and legs and moving them into new poses. Picking up objects and replacing them. Rotating scenes around.

When this gets fast, it's going to be magical. We're already getting close.
by burningChrome | 2025-12-16 21:49:15+00:00
>> even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?

Longer than writing code from scratch, with no templates or frameworks? Longer than testing and deploying manually?

Even eight years ago when I left full-stack development, nobody was building anything from scratch, without any templates.

Serious questions - are there still people who work at large companies who still build things the conventional way? Or even startups? I was berated a decade ago for building just a static site from scratch so curious to know if people are still out there doing this.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-16 21:49:37+00:00
>Does fil-clang have `-fno-` flag to control disabling fil-c stuff?

No. I could add a flag like that, but that would make my patch to clang larger, which would make rebasing to new clang versions harder.

So I'm choosing not to add such a flag. For now.

> Do you depend on glibc, or is it that LFS doesn't support building with musl?

I support both glibc and musl.

LFS is glibc-based.
by mingabunga | 2025-12-16 21:49:52+00:00
Did an experiment to give a software product a dark theme. Gave Both (GPT and Gemini/Nano) a screenshot of the product and an example theme I found on Dribbble.

- Gemini/Nano did a pretty average job, only applying some grey to some of the panels. I tried a few different examples and got similar output.

- GPT did a great job and themed the whole app and made it look great. I think I'd still need a designer to finesse some things though.
by keeda | 2025-12-16 21:49:53+00:00
There was a huge discussion on this a few weeks ago, seems still far from settled: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503867

Personally I think "vibe-coding" has semantically shifted to mean any AI-assisted coding and we should just run with it. For the original meaning of vibe-coding, I suggest YOLO-Coding.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-12-16 21:49:56+00:00
"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.

Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
by drnick1 | 2025-12-16 21:50:08+00:00
> not all banks support them, of course.

And this is the problem. We should insist on standard web pages for everything, and never allow closed source apps on our devices. Native apps are far less sandboxed and under certain conditions make it trivial to spy on the user by accessing contact lists, other apps installed and more.

AFAIK the only Android derivative that has patched the most obvious security issues of this kind is Graphene.
by gen220 | 2025-12-16 21:50:23+00:00
Yeah, I'm no GitHub apologist, but I'll be one in this context. This is actually a not-unreasonable thing to charge for. And a price point that's not-unreasonable.

It makes sense to do usage-based pricing with a generously-sized free tier, which seems to be what they're doing? Offering the entire service for free at any scale would imply that you're "paying" for/subsidizing this orchestration elsewhere in your transactions with GitHub. This is more-transparent pricing.

Although, this puts downward pressure on orgs' willingness to pay such a large price for GH enterprise licenses, as this service was hitherto "implicitly" baked into that fee. I don't think the license fees are going to go down any time soon, though :P
by szatkus | 2025-12-16 21:50:35+00:00
The main problem with Firefox OS was that it was really slow. At the same time it was targeting budget phones.

But on the other hand progress was quite good. Back in the days I was maintaining unofficial images for Alcatel Fire. Each version was a little bit faster, but you really can't do much when the whole OS is a browser running on a device with with 256MB of RAM and a single core CPU.
by mattkrause | 2025-12-16 21:50:44+00:00
I read that paper as suggesting that development, behavior, and fMRI are all hard.

It's not at all clear to me that teenagers' brains OR behaviours should be stable across years, especially when it involves decision-making or emotions. Their Figure 3 shows that sensory experiments are a lot more consistent, which seems reasonable.

The technical challenges (registration, motion, etc) like things that will improve and there are some practical suggestions as well (counterbalancing items, etc).
by pseudalopex | 2025-12-16 21:51:05+00:00
Most of these projects are open source. Anyone can see how much more active Firefox development is.

Mozilla.ai's featured projects sounded like things Firefox's AI features would use.

Orbit was a Firefox extension. Firefox integrated its features. You considered this not Firefox development?

Mozilla VPN and Mozilla Monitor are interfaces to other companies' services. And they are non Google revenue sources.

Mozilla Social was a Mastodon instance. How much software development did you believe running a Mastodon instance required?
by gus_massa | 2025-12-16 21:51:13+00:00
For math it's easy, everyone just ignore it. There is no Daniel to blame. There are a few post about P=/!=NP or the Riemann conjeture or rewriting physics each week that are posted to HN. I'm just ignoring them. Other mathematicians are just ignoring them. But you will not find anyone to blame.

There are a few "solutions" of conjetures that may be correct, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture I'm not sure about the current state. There may be a few mathematicians trying to read some parts, or perhaps no. Perhaps in a few years the easy parts will be refactored and isolated, and published as special cases. And after a while, it may be verified or someone will find a gap and perhaps fix it. Just wait a few decades.

> Can someone make a very complicated automated proof that ultimately reveals itself to be useless?

It depends, on what you consider insightful. Take a look at "Determination of the fifth Busy Beaver value" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45273999 in particular the first comment. Is that an heroic result that opens a lot of paths or a useless combination of tricks that no one will ever understand? (In my opinion a proof is a proof [standing applause emoji].)
by pc93 | 2025-12-16 21:51:24+00:00
An Open Platform to Backtest Trading Strategies(MVP)

Hey HN!

I built a platform to backtest any Trading strategy (currently MVP, and I'll continue if I see there's support/interest)

I've never found a profitable strategy, and stupidly lost money trying several strategies from scammers.

TBH I don't believe a profitable strategy exists. Now anyone can proof me wrong :)

I created a platform which allows you to create (or add from Tradingview, python) your trading strategy, and analyses how would perform on historical data.

Tired of fake traders promising guaranteed returns, I build this for me, and sharing with everyone, to see if anyone would want it.

No sign-ups, no hidden fees, no marketing fluff—just paste your code, or add your strategy and run backtests with real market data.

It automatically tells you if your strategy is profitable, showing the backtesting trades, statistics etc.

What this is NOT? A trading platform, or a promise of profits. In fact, is the opposite.

The vision:

1. MVP of the backtesting platform (check audience) 2. Improvement of the platform 3. Run infinte agentic strategies to see if we find a profitable one (aparently rentec did it years ago, but no one knows how?)

I'd be interested in feedback to know your thoughts, and if its an interesting project .

Try it out, and let me know how it performs with your strategies.

I'm Pablo, and I built this in a few days as a side project.

GitHub: The community who solved the market, will publish soon! Live demo: https://backtesting-dashboard-sage.vercel.app
by jrowen | 2025-12-16 21:51:29+00:00
Before this O'Saasy situation, I hadn't fully understood how much ideological purity was baked into the the term "open source," which to be fair is not really implied by such a general term.

I still feel like it would be a happier world if open source was more of an umbrella advocacy organization containing free software and source available, but now I understand that that's not going to happen.
by faalantir | 2025-12-16 21:51:37+00:00
Hi HN,

I built cwhy this weekend because I was tired of fixing the same Terraform and Kubernetes errors multiple times.

It’s a CLI tool (written in Go) that acts as a pipe for your stderr. Usage: `terraform apply | cwhy` or `docker logs container | cwhy`

It does two things: 1. Explains the error using OpenAI (GPT-3.5/4). 2. Caches the fix to a shared "Team Memory" (Supabase). If a teammate encounters the exact same error hash later, they get the cached solution instantly without hitting the AI API.

The stack is simple: - Go for the CLI (cobra) - OpenAI API for generation - Supabase for the shared vector/hash storage

I’m currently scrubbing standard API keys before sending logs, but looking for feedback on better PII sanitization strategies.

Repo is here: https://github.com/faalantir/cwhy Binary releases available for Mac/Linux/Windows.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the "shared memory" approach.
by user34283 | 2025-12-16 21:51:46+00:00
After working for years with GitLab professionally, you know exactly where everything is.

Particularly making a contribution should anyhow be trivial - you push the branch and it shows a banner in the repo asking if you want to open a MR for the recently pushed branch.

I don't know why anyone would use GitHub actions. They seem like a weird, less powerful version of the GitLab CI. Now they want to charge for runtime on your own runner.
by andreasgl | 2025-12-16 21:51:58+00:00
> And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc.

I wouldn't be surprised if cultural differences are actually the largest factor that explains a country's suicide rate. Not easy to prove, of course, but I would be very careful drawing any conclusions from differences in suicide rates between countries with vastly different cultures.

I think you can also expect large differences in how countries report their suicide rates.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-12-16 21:52:11+00:00
> How do you debug consteval, if you cannot put printf in it?

This will be massively improved in the next std release hopefully since Compile Time Reflection looks like it's finally shipping.

And of course there exist special constexpr debuggers but more generally you really should be validating consteval code with good test suites ahead of time and developing your code such that useful information is exposed via a public (even if internal) interface.

And of course in the worst case throws function as decent consteval printf even if the UX isn't great.

But of course there's more work on improving this in the future. There's a technique I saw demoed at one of the conferences this year that lets you expose full traces in failure modes for both consteval and non-const async code and it seems like it'll be a boon for debugging.

----

> Not everyone can use clang or even latest gcc in their project, or work in a familiar codebase.

Sure note everyone is that lucky but it's increasingly common. AFAIK TI moved entirely to clang based toolchains a few years back and Microchip has done the same. The old guard are finally picking up and moving to modular toolchain architectures to reduce maintenance load and that comes with upstream std support.
by modeless | 2025-12-16 21:52:33+00:00
The title of this story should be "Announcing the Beta release of ty". A lot of people have been waiting for the beta specifically.

I've been using Pyrefly and loving it compared to Pyright, but they recently shipped some updates with crash bugs that forced me to pin to a previous version, which is annoying. Unfortunately my first impression of ty isn't great either. Trying to install the ty extension on the current version of Cursor says "Can't install 'astral-sh.ty' extension because it is not compatible with the current version of Cursor (version 2.2.20, VSCode version 1.105.1)."
by phildini | 2025-12-16 21:52:47+00:00
Hi! I've written crawlers for about a dozen municipal hosting platforms, and you can learn the bare-bones of it from our "How" page: https://civic.band/how.html

I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w

The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.
by dang | 2025-12-16 21:53:06+00:00
This is one for https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights!

(I mention this so more people can know the list exists, and hopefully email us more nominations when they see an unusually great and interesting comment.)

p.s. more on the salmon paper in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291600

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288560

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288557
by llsf | 2025-12-16 21:53:08+00:00
Do you think that the velocity of change is different from previously ?

I am wondering if we are touching on a human biological limitation. Human are adaptable and flexible, but there is a limit to that flexibility. Some sort of biological limit on how fast we can turn around.

The technology acceleration is increasing, and I am wondering if there would be a point where the technology would evolve faster than what human biology can comprehend.

1,000 years ago, anyone could pretty much build or fix the current technology (anyone could fix a cart). 50 years ago, a majority of people could build or fix the current technology (e.g. most could fix a car). this year, a limited number of people can build or fix the current technology (e.g. how many people can fix a self driving car?) 10 years from now, a very limited number of people if any could build or fix the current technology (e.g. explain how is AI doing this thing?)

If AI evolves at the same pace, and replacing labor (robots) and services (AI), I am not sure that human would turn around? How do you think we can turn things around ?

Education ? but we are reaching the limit already of how much technology we can teach in a student lifetime. Now we could argue, that one does not need a PhD in computer science to use AI, but eventually do we even need someone to use AI ? Would AI be cheap and pervasive enough that AI would drive AI would drive AI... why would you add a 20W analog brain in the loop ?

What activity would require human involvement ? Genuinely curious how the technology acceleration in general and AI in particular would affect the economy.
by dieggsy | 2025-12-16 21:53:10+00:00
I'm not sure I'd say this is "the other way around"; Coalton strives to implement Haskell or ML-adjacent semantics (in the type system, for example) with Lisp syntax. "With" here meaning that it is both implemented in and written with Lisp syntax.

Edit: I think I see what you mean now. Lisp backend vs Haskell backend.

Anyway, Coalton is a joy to use and IMO a breath of fresh air in CL. It's quite easy start using as a library; go all-in or only use it in specific parts of the code. It's great to be able to choose between (or intermix)the flexibility of CL and the guarantees of a statically typed language (as well as some nice performance boosts with arguably less work). Some aspects are still young (some of the standard library, ecosystem, editor support), but it's quite thoughtfully crafted and I'm excited to see where it goes.
by clowncubs | 2025-12-16 21:53:37+00:00
It definitely felt different to me in the beginning years. I've been at the web thing for about 12 years now. In the beginning, while it was often very difficult, there was an excitement and freshness. It could have simply been because we were moving to web 2.0, CSS and all of its "magic".

While making stuff is only a side thing, it makes the grind during the week tolerable. I feel like I have something meaningful in my life (outside of my family) and it has given me purpose. I'm grateful for it. And it is so damn fun!
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-16 21:53:49+00:00
The day after I first heard about the Internet, back in 1990-whatever, it occurred to me that I probably shouldn't upload anything to the Internet that I didn't want to see on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper.

Apart from the 'newspaper' anachronism, that's pretty much still my take.

Sorry, but you'll just have to deal with it and get over it.
by formerly_proven | 2025-12-16 21:54:00+00:00
Not so sure about formal verification though. ime with Rust LLM agents tend to struggle with semi-complex ownership or trait issues and will typically reach for unnecessary/dangerous escape hatches ("unsafe impl Send for ..." instead of using the correct locks, for example) fairly quickly. Or just conclude the task is impossible.

> automatic code formatters

I haven't tried this because I assumed it'll destroy agent productivity and massively increase number of tokens needed, because you're changing the file out under the LLM and it ends up constantly re-reading the changed bits to generate the correct str_replace JSON. Or are they smart enough that this quickly trains them to generate code with zero-diff under autoformatting?

But in general of course anything that's helpful for human developers to be more productive will also help LLMs be more productive. For largely identical reasons.
by rocqua | 2025-12-16 21:54:08+00:00
I've been trying to convince others of this, and gotten very little traction. One interesting response I got from someone very familiar with the Tamarin prover was that there just wasn't enough example code out there.

Another take is that LLMs don't have enough conceptual understanding to actually create proofs for the correctness of code.

Personally I believe this kind of work is predicated on more ergonomic proof systems. And those happen to be valuable even without LLMs. Moreover the built in guarantees of rust seem like they are a great start for creating more ergonomic proof systems. Here I am both in awe of Kani, and disappointed by it. The awe is putting in good work to make things more ergonomic. The disappointment is using bounded model checking for formal analysis. That can barely make use of the exclusion of mutable aliasing. Kani, but with equational reasoning, that's the way forward. Equational reasoning was long held back by needing to do a whole lot of pointer work to exclude worries of mutable aliasing. Now you can lean on the borrow checker for that!
by alexpadula | 2025-12-16 21:54:28+00:00
Hey! I'm Alex the creator of TidesDB. I'd like to share the latest major as it's a huge milestone in the development of the open-source project. In recent benchmarks for TidesDB 6 against RocksDB 10.7.5, TidesDB is pulling ahead across most if not all workloads in efficiency and speed. I've written about the design, the benchmarks are available and more. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Website has documentation, design write ups, and benchmarking articles

https://tidesdb.com

Cheers!
by glenstein | 2025-12-16 21:54:34+00:00
It's another damned if you do, damned if you don't. FirefoxOS is regularly listed by commenters as an example of a wasteful side bet, whereas my feeling is more along the lines of yours, that it was striding greatly, as the saying goes, and attempting to be a major actor.

A big part of the market share loss was due to monopoly and distribution lockdown of a controlled platform tightly tied to hardware, so I can certainly see the strategic wisdom of the attempt. I suspect they didn't have the resources to press forward, they had a lot less money then than they do now. Which makes it all the more maddening that Yahoo's role as a partner was so muted; it could have made the difference for both of them.