MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Voice Composer – Browser-based pitch detection to MIDI/strudel/tidal
by dioptre | 2026-01-11 23:06:18+00:00
Built this over the weekend to bridge the gap between "can hum a melody" and "can code algorithmic music patterns" (Strudel/TidalCycles) for live coding and live dj'ing.

What it does:

Real-time pitch detection in browser using multiple algorithms:
CREPE (deep learning model via TensorFlow.js)
YIN (autocorrelation-based fundamental frequency estimation)
FFT with harmonic product spectrum
AMDF (average magnitude difference function)
Outputs: visual piano roll, MIDI files, Strudel/TidalCycles code
All client-side, nothing leaves your machine
Why multiple algorithms:
Different pitch detection approaches work better for different inputs. CREPE is most accurate but computationally expensive; YIN is fast and works well for clean monophonic input; FFT/HPS handles harmonic-rich sounds; AMDF is lightweight. Let users switch based on their use case.

Technical details:

React, runs entirely in browser via Web Audio API
Canvas-based visualization with real-time waveform rendering

The original problem: I wanted to learn live coding but had zero music theory. This makes it trivial to capture melodic ideas and immediately use them in pattern-based music systems.

Try it: https://dioptre.github.io/tidal/

Works best on desktop. Will work more like a Digital Audio Workbench (DAW).

Source: https://github.com/dioptre/tidal
by vo2maxer | 2026-01-11 23:06:43+00:00
I’ve got this older laptop I just set up for dual boot with a Linux distro. Before installing GRUB, I stripped down Windows 11 using Chris Titus’s utility, though you can accomplish the same thing manually, as you probably know, to kill all that Microsoft telemetry garbage. Windows runs beautifully now, no lag whatsoever. Linux, on the other hand, locks up constantly. And it’s not a hardware issue. Plenty of RAM, confirmed all the drivers loaded properly. Ironic?
by devonhk | 2026-01-11 23:07:08+00:00
> I wish someone would just tell me exactly what to buy.

I’ll bite.
You can save a lot of money by buying used hardware. I recommend looking for old Dell OptiPlex towers on Facebook Marketplace or from local used computer stores. Lenovo ThinkCentres (e.g., m700 tiny) are also a great option if you prefer something with a smaller form factor.

I’d recommend disregarding advice from non-technical folks recommending brand new, expensive hardware, because it’s usually overkill.
by ottah | 2026-01-11 23:07:18+00:00
Krita and Inkscape have successfully replaced Photoshop and Illustrator for me. There isn't any good video editing options and lightroom still beats Gimp.

For me the biggest sticking point to windows is cad/cam software, lightburn and anything proprietary needed for hobby equipment. I'm glad though that 3d printer software has always had equal Linux support (as long as you don't use Bambu).
by jsight | 2026-01-11 23:07:39+00:00
I thought this way for a while. I still do to a certain degree, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in hurrying off into the change.

The most advanced tooling today looks nothing like the tooling for writing software 3 years ago. We've got multi-agent orchestration with built in task and issue tracking, context management, and subagents now. There's a steep learning curve!

I'm not saying that everyone has to do it, as the tools are so nascent, but I think it is worthwhile to at least start understanding what the state of the art will look like in 12-24 months.
Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone?
by kvaranasi_ | 2026-01-11 23:07:44+00:00
Is it just me or do you guys think Datadog pricing is crazy? I mean even to SEE APM you have to pay like $50/mo minimum. What if my app has just 10 requests per month, can I get for free? No, pay us. What if it's just me building? No, still pay us.

But hey we'll give you this metrics page for free which just basically tells you your RAM usage.

And the worst part is, there is no proper alternative for this. And people are ok with that too. Am I crazy for thinking this?
by KaiserPister | 2026-01-11 23:07:55+00:00
I needed some pixel art for a different project, so I made 8BitSmith, a simple pixel art & sprite generator.

I'm expecting it is pretty niche, but animations tend to be very time consuming for people like me, and getting quick sprites that I can drop into a platform is a big time saver.

The project was 90% vibe-coded and I documented the tech stack here: https://www.8bitsmith.com/tech-stack
by allreduce | 2026-01-11 23:08:45+00:00
Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS.

I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file).
But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every package to ever exist in this new language + add a boatloat of extra utilities and infra.
by immibis | 2026-01-11 23:09:07+00:00
I hear it used to be possible, back in the 2020s.

But ever since the YouWatch app came out in 2029, consumers could just say what they wanted to watch and get a personalized film tailored to their exact personality type. You just couldn't make money with single-version films any more, and nobody did. They shut down all the film schools, and destroyed all the archived knowledge online.

It was hard to get your hands on a camera anyway, after the passage of the Protecting Children And Securing American Economic Development Act (BIGGEST PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST Act) in Donald Trump's fourth term, which criminalised possession of a computing device capable of supporting independent thinking.
by drnick1 | 2026-01-11 23:09:09+00:00
> Linux isn't in position regarding display/UI. It doesn't handles HiDPI (e.g 4K) screen uniformly, leading to a lot of blurry apps depending on the display abstraction used (Wayland/X11) and compositor (GNOME, KDE, etc, all behave differently).

I have been using a 4K display for years on Linux without issues. The scaling issue with non-native apps is a problem that Windows also struggles with btw.
by swyx | 2026-01-11 23:09:15+00:00
"What might be more surprising is that even when we adjust the temperature down to 0This means that the LLM always chooses the highest probability token, which is called greedy sampling. (thus making the sampling theoretically deterministic), LLM APIs are still not deterministic in practice (see past discussions here, here, or here)"

https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
by manquer | 2026-01-11 23:09:42+00:00
Eutelsat Oneweb is a subsidiary of Eutelsat group which after the bankruptcy, merger and capital raises currently composed of

- French state(29%),

- Bharti Airtel -Indian telecom group (17%),

- UK government (10%),

- SoftBank (10%) -Japanese bank

- CMA CGM(7.5%) french shipping company

- a consortium of French insurance companies with 5% .

Till recently a South Korean conglomerate Hanwha also had 5% stake .

there is a significant concentration of holding by national governments,
UK do have a golden share protecting their strategic needs , but their investment is now a small minority.

it is mostly French company today with diversified direct interests from 4-5 major countries.
by cratermoon | 2026-01-11 23:10:43+00:00
I think it was Cory Doctorow who compared AI-generated code to asbestos.
Back in its day,
asbestos was in everything,
because of how useful it seemed.
Fast forward decades and now asbestos abatement is a hugely expensive and time-consuming requirement for any remodeling or teardown project.
Lead paint has some of the same history.
by nephihaha | 2026-01-11 23:10:51+00:00
I read both. I have to admit I was never much of a fan of Asimov's non-fiction or work outside of SF... I could take it or leave it. I do find most of EVD's examples to be ridiculous... The Nazca lines, for example, were clearly never landing strips, for a variety of reasons, although they may have been meant to be seen from above.

What Von Däniken did teach me as a child was to have a sense of wonder about the ancients and their achievements. Maybe not spaceships and electricity necessarily, but their feats of masonry and sculpture. I've seen dolmens capped by stones the size of a bus, that I felt uncomfortable walking under, even though they had managed to stay like that for thousands of years. We struggle to replicate some of these things today yet they apparently did so without metal tools, proper ropes or any number of other things. The planning alone would have taken many years.
by bsimpson | 2026-01-11 23:10:58+00:00
So apparently when Canonical was the gorilla in desktop Linux, they had a push to have apps make their menus accessible via API. KDE supports that protocol. There are KDE widgets that will draw a Mac-style menu bar from it.

That means you can take the standard KDE "panel" and split it in two halves: a dock for the bottom edge, and a menus/wifi settings/clock bar for the top edge.

There are some things I don't know how to work around - like Chrome defaulting to Windows-style close buttons and keybindings, but if the Start menu copy is the thing keeping you off Linux, you can mod it more than you think you can.
by jstummbillig | 2026-01-11 23:11:46+00:00
I find it increasingly confusing that some people seem to believe, that other people not subjecting themselves to this continued interrogation, gives any credence to their position.

People seem to believe that there is a burden of proof. There is not. What do I care if you are on board?

I don't know what could change your mind, but of course the answer is "nothing" as long as you aer not open to it. Just look around. There is so much stuff, from so many credible people in all domains. If you can't find anything that is convincing or at least interesting to you, you are simply not looking.
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-11 23:11:58+00:00
They don't need to, and shouldn't, use this service. It was not made for them and I doubt sincerely that it was made to harm them.

There were direct victims, but you also forget that the US now has a shared trauma over the handling of the Epstein situation and its systematic suppression, the gaslighting, and anything which continues to fuel discussion is a good thing, until the day that it has been properly addressed.
by al_borland | 2026-01-11 23:12:14+00:00
I look at my parents, both retired. My mom is on Facebook constantly and always talking about what people post. However, I’ve never hear her talk about actually getting together with these people. She doesn’t go do much.

My dad never talks about Facebook. I believe he has an account, but I don’t know if he frequents much. He calls people on a regular basis to catch and schedule stuff… golf, pickleball, lunches, etc.

My mom has the illusion of connection via Facebook. My dad has actual connection through actual conversation. While he didn’t meet up with these people in-person as much during the middle of his career and while raising kids, he still made it a point to keep in touch, and it’s paying off for him in retirement.

I guess the question you need to ask yourself is are these people really friends if they can’t make time to catch up from time to time outside of the walled garden of Facebook? When you say they don’t have time, are you waiting for them to reach out, or have you reached out to them? Understanding people are busy and reaching out, without judgement or expecting that it’s “their turn next time” seems to be a key to maintaining actual connections over time. At least that’s what I’ve seen with my dad.

I think my dad did reach out to someone on Facebook recently. Someone he knew freshman year of college who kind of disappeared. He very quickly sought to meet up in person for lunch to catch up, rather than do it through Messenger. Know the guy texts and calls him all the time, no Facebook required.
by silcoon | 2026-01-11 23:12:20+00:00
I perfectly agree with antirez about the importance of AI and the benefit for coders. In the last month we saw a big jump and we all are in the middle of the biggest technological revolution since the internet. He summarised the benefits, but omitted the rest.

Why we don't have to be anti-AI? Why in his opinion is just "HYPE"? I didn't find any answer in his post. He doesn't analyse the cons of AI and explain why some people might be anti-AI. He skipped the hard part and wrote a mild article that re-publish the narrative that is already getting spread on every social media.

Edit for clarification: I don't consider anti-AI the people that think LLMs don't work, they are wrong. I consider anti-AI people that are worried how this technology will impact society in so many ways that are hard to predict, including the future of software engineering.
by ost-ing | 2026-01-11 23:12:40+00:00
Apple software has noticeably declined from my experience, both iOS and macOS. I find the lifecycle of Apple products to be offensively short, also.

If I buy a product and the hardware is good for 10 years (because I looked after it), I expect the software to also run just as well as when I purchased it - that is the case with Linux, why isn't it the case with macOS?

Every year the software upgrades invariably degrade system performance. Outrageous.
by fsflover | 2026-01-11 23:12:48+00:00
Most HN users don't know about the alternatives, just like the public. If you say that those who know don't care, I will ask you for some evidence.

In my linked post I explain why the public doesn't matter at this point of time. Also I explain that the public doesn't need the alternative before it works flawlessly, i.e., before it becomes popular among technical users.
by lutusp | 2026-01-11 23:12:48+00:00
> Open-source only matters if you have the time/skill/willingness to download said source (and any dependencies') and compile it.

Not really. The fact that an application is open-source means its originator can't rug-pull its users at some random future date (as so often happens with closed-source programs). End users don't need to compile the source for that to be true.

> Otherwise you're still running a random binary and there's no telling whether the source is malicious or whether the binary was even built with the published source.

This is also not true in general. Most open-source programs are available from an established URL, for example a Github archive with an appropriate track record. And the risks of downloading and running a closed-source app are much the same.
by epistasis | 2026-01-11 23:13:18+00:00
The data doesn't fit for NRC being the problem. Hell look at the Summer reactor that was approved alongside Vogtle in Georgia: construction failure, billions wasted, and none of it to do with the NRC.

Or any the other many many other reactors abandoned at various states of development:

http://www.powermag.com/blog/nuclear-renaissance-recalls-pas...

There's an argument that the NRC could do things better, but placing all the well documented failures in the nuclear construction industry on the NRC doesn't make sense. Who are going to believe, the people who are always late and over budget, or the bystanders in the industry that have watched it all play out?
by iJohnDoe | 2026-01-11 23:13:25+00:00
Overall, it wasn't terrible, until it finally was.

We had pretty good luck with the hardware. Some refreshes were better than others. We would refresh about every three years when technology was rapidly changing. Then hardware got really fast and it would last longer. We always bought maxed out specs, which meant we could push the life of the hardware. The Precision series was pretty good. Some models had problems and others were rock solid. We always had spares on purpose, which I think helped save our sanity when dealing with Dell support.
by kimos | 2026-01-11 23:14:07+00:00
I’ve used this tool for years and it’s great. But it really saves just the raw data. You’d never get it back in to Apple Photos as nice as when you pulled it out. Metadata is missing. Live Photos come out as an image and a similarly named video. But I treat it as the emergency backup. If some Apple DC burns down or they ban my Apple ID for some reason, at least the photos still exist.
by vladris | 2026-01-11 23:14:09+00:00
I'm in the final stretch of self-publishing my debut sci-fi novel Sector 36. Been working at it for almost 2 years. I'm waiting for the final print proofs to make sure things look good before the "official" 1/31 launch date.

I vibe coded the book website over the holiday break - https://sector36.space/

I've been serializing chapters on Substack - https://sector36.substack.com/
by eviks | 2026-01-11 23:14:46+00:00
> Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing.

That should nudge users away from this rather primitive method of window resizing using tiny 19px corners and instead set up a productivity app where your can use the full 33% of the window size (so conveniently huge! and of course customizable) to resize via an extra trigger (for example, using a modifier key)

(nice plate picture joke!)
by peterohler | 2026-01-11 23:14:54+00:00
Over the last 2 or 3 years I've been building a Common LISP implementation in Go so that Go packages can be utilized by LISP code. Building a REPL with lots of interactive features was rewarding as was taking up the challenges of the object systems (CLOS and Flavors) and generics. Just open sourced it at the start of January. https://github.com/ohler55/slip
by tux3 | 2026-01-11 23:15:07+00:00
Well, I've reached the end of the book.

I like the systems mindset in the book. I think it's great to introspect and try to debug your own self.

Starting from pages 31-33, I found some interesting things. This book is the product of an internal fight. It's lucid in places, and those are the most interesting. In other chapters... my takeaway is that you can't always come out on top when fighting yourself, but you still have to try.

I was really rooting for the protagonist, there:

>Instead of treating the events
like a delusion and having to fight them, I chose to work through them—choosing to believe that somehow I was shown something.

>By treating it as real, working through it as a real problem, I was admittedly taking a gamble. I could totally succumb to my delusions and get stuck in the worlds of the Yoshu and the Mechanicals.

>It would be easy. What I found instead was opportunity

The parts of the book I liked the most are those that break free from Yoshu. The rest breaks my heart.
Ask HN: Cursor (LLM) Costs
by anonyfox | 2026-01-11 23:16:05+00:00
Hey guys just a simple question to all of you who heavily leverage LLM coding daily. I essentially have cursor run in 1-3 projects in parallel all day, asking for the next steps implementation like every ~10 +- 5 minutes, and with Claude opus 4.5 it just works for me naturally without much discussions these days, it just flows. But I see like more than 1000€ per week burned in token costs due to that. Currently employer pays for it and it’s mostly work projects, yet I kind of am concerned now that I would really be crippled if I wouldn’t have it on my own if I quit. Programmer for decades so I CAN still write by hand efficiently but it’s just night and day compared to when vibecoding after 2 years became natural and shipping speed like that is the new felt normal.

I tried different models to maybe get pricing savings yet ultimately only Opus 4.5 kinda oneshots my thoughts still. GPT is kind of autistic and useless at times (but good at research and abstract modeling), other models are „nice“ but still make mistakes or need much more guidance that slows down again or become too sloppy with increasing complexity. And unfortunately I seem to be unable to get Grok 4.1 thinking enabled in Cursor, it’s only grok code fast which is amazing for quick edits but complex issues the full grok model is the closest to Claude yet not properly in cursor.

I also haven’t seen the open models be comparable just yet, let alone one that runs fast enough on a M1 air.

So what do you guys do or think here? Everyone just enjoying the benefits of employers handing out access? Or just swallowing the costs? Or not yet there to fully max out usage day to day? It’s a increasingly serious issue in my head, essentially cursor costs per month would be higher than rent in my area, so this affects job retention/considerations already..
by llmslave3 | 2026-01-11 23:16:17+00:00
Why do you care so much to write a blog post? Like if it's such a big advantage, why not stay quiet and exploit it? Why not make Anti-AI blog posts to gain even more of an advantage?

One of the big red flags I see around the pro-AI side is this constant desire to promote the technology. At least the anti-ai side is reactionary.
by silcoon | 2026-01-11 23:16:32+00:00
Thanks for your reply. Mine wasn't a critique but a genuine curiosity. I was interested to see what where the base instructions used for a rust project.

> The .gitignore excludes AI config files because they where not needed in the project and aren't useful to others

I would disagree with this. Since it's an open-source project it would be beneficial to everyone, especially to future contributors, to agree in good code practices and conventions when using LLMs. I would say they're really useful.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-01-11 23:16:32+00:00
hey. if u haven't seen this book/author/ideas, check those:

The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software, 2003, Phillip Armour

http://www.amazon.com/Laws-Software-Process-Production-Manag...

about Software as knowledge medium, and effects thereof

some excerpts:

... software is not a product but a medium for storing knowledge, and software development is not a product-producing activity, it is a knowledge-acquiring activity.

... the real job is not writing the code, or even building the system - it is acquiring the necessary knowledge to build the system... Code is simply a by-product of this activity. The problem arises when we think the code, rather than the knowledge in the code, is the product.

... When we use models and mindsets that are rigid and deterministic to manage an activity that is fluid and variable, it is not surprising that people get disappointed.

"... for the most part, (software) engineers do not _know_ how to build the systems they are trying to build; it's their job to _find_ out how to do it."
i.e. programmers must be able to learn (and teach) - should learn that and/or be taught to it. All else are tools supporting that activity.

here some part: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-five-orders-of-ignorance/
by CSSer | 2026-01-11 23:16:38+00:00
I almost think what a lot of people are coming to grips is with is how much code is unoriginal. The ones who've adjusted the fastest were humble to begin with. I don't want to claim the title, but I can certainly claim the imposter syndrome! If anything, LLMs validated something I always suspected. The amount of truly unique, relevant to success, code in a given project is often very small. More often than not, it's not grouped together either. Most of the time it's tailored to a given functionality. For example, a perfectly accurate Haversine distance is slower than an optimized one with tradeoffs. LLMs have not yet become adept at housing the ability to identify the need for those tradeoffs in context well or consistently, so you end up with generic code that works but not great. Can the LLM adjust if you explicitly instruct it to? Sure, sometimes! Sometimes it catches it in a thought loop too. Other times you have to roll up your sleeves and do the work like you said, which often still involves traditional research or thinking.