MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: VJam – Browser-based VJ app with 180 beat-reactive visuals
by infoHiroki | 2026-02-27 10:31:09+00:00
Hey HN,

I built VJam, a browser-based VJ app that turns your phone into a live visual controller.

What it does: Listens to music through the mic, detects BPM, and generates real-time beat-reactive visuals. 180+ presets, touch gestures, blend modes, text overlays, video/image layers — all in the browser.

Tech stack: Vanilla JS, Web Audio API (FFT + beat detection), p5.js for Canvas rendering, PWA (works offline after first load). No frameworks, no build step, no server — just static files on Vercel.

Why I built it: Professional VJ software (Resolume, VDMX) costs $200-400 and requires a laptop. I wanted something that works on a phone, connects to a projector via HDMI adapter, and costs less than a night out.

How it works: Open the URL on your phone, allow mic access, and BPM detection kicks in. Tap/swipe to control visuals. HDMI adapter to a projector for the full experience.

Free tier: 36 presets + auto mode + tap controls + blend/filter + BPM picker. Full version ($27 one-time) unlocks all 180 presets + text editing + video/image layers + scenes + grid.

Try it: https://vjam.vercel.app

2-min demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nrSgubFBL8

Happy to answer questions about the Web Audio API, real-time canvas rendering on mobile, or anything else.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-02-27 10:32:10+00:00
don't make it out like its a favour. The US have done very well out of their defense umbrella ensuring its global dominance for most of last century.

Most powers have to pay in blood to do what they want geo politically without question. The US inherited a global state where many potential rivals were weak and helped keep them weak. It was a cost worth paying and its a shame that current US leaders are so cheap and foolhardy to not see what they're throwing away.
by soderfoo | 2026-02-27 10:33:16+00:00
How do you think this would play out? Changing the apportionment of the Senate, aside from being a political and legal nightmare, would also create monumental constitutional crisis.

First, the Connecticut Compromise is a democratic underpinning of the US. It was central to the formation of the nation, and any attempt to alter it would be a foundational structural change to the constitution to say the least.

I understand the concerns about one generation binding another without recourse. Legal scholars differ on whether Article V, which implements the compromise, can be amended or not.

But for the sake of argument, let's say it can. It would be an insurmountable task requiring the following:

1. A supermajority in both houses of Congress (67% in the Senate and 66% in the House) to propose the amendment.

2. Ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures (38 out of 50 states) or by conventions in three-fourths of the states.

3. Consent of the states that would lose their equal representation in the Senate.

4. Overcome any legal challenges that would likely arise at every step of the process.

The result would be a dramatic redefinition of federalism and democratic representation. This wouldn't be a cosmetic change, it would be a fundamental alteration to the structure of the government and constitution.

Very few things were deemed "unamendable" and entrenched in the constitution before, both explicitly and implicitly, but now it would all be up for grabs. Now nothing is irrevocable.

What's to stop future generations from altering other fundamental principles? While we may complain of being bound by the decisions of our ancestors, we would be opening up a Pandora's box of constitutional instability for future generations, binding them to the whims of a (slim?) majority of the current generation's political agenda.

I think that is the best case scenario. The worst, and I think a very possible scenario, is that states losing representation would claim that such a drastic and material change to the constitution upends the root of the bargain that led to the formation of the union, and would likely seek to secede. You may have achieved your goal of changing the apportionment of the Senate, but at the cost of the union itself. There are far easier and less risky ways to achieve political change.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-27 10:33:24+00:00
There aren't many situations today that make one think:

Why doesn't this business have a website?

Why is there no wifi here?

Why do they send these forms in the mail instead of email them?

Why can't I talk to this gadget with bluetooth?

Why can't I file this form electronically?

Why is there no electronic version of this book?

That was not the case, prior to the 2010's. There was the promise of new technology, but the reality was underwhelming.

With AI, we're still in 1998 or 1999. People like yourself, and most people on HN, see the promise, and benefit from what AI can already do. Still, AI has yet to benefit the average person much, if at all.
by guven0141 | 2026-02-27 10:33:50+00:00
Why I built this:
I’ve always felt that GitHub stars alone don’t tell the full story of a project's impact. I wanted to see if I could quantify the effort and "financial worth" behind a repository, even if just as a fun estimate. It started as a way to check the value of my own side projects and grew from there.

How it works:
The tool fetches real-time data from the GitHub API. The valuation algorithm takes into account several factors:

Total stars and forks (popularity).

Commit frequency and recent activity (maintenance level).

Number of contributors (community strength).

Repo age and issue activity.

The Tech Stack:
The app is built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, and it’s deployed on Vercel. I tried to keep it as lightweight and fast as possible.

I’d love your feedback:
Is the valuation logic too optimistic or too conservative? What other metrics should I include to make the estimate more "realistic" for the open-source world?
by snickerbockers | 2026-02-27 10:34:13+00:00
What on earth does "Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War" mean? Did they specifically forbid it in the contract or was it literally just not included? Because I can tell you that if it's the latter that does not generally entitle them to add extra conditions to the sale ex post facto.

>threatening them because how dare a company tell the psycho dictators what to do.

Dude it's a private defense contractor leveraging its control over products it has already installed into classified systems to subvert chain of command and set military doctrine. That's not their prerogative. This isn't a "psycho dictator" thing.
by jaen | 2026-02-27 10:35:00+00:00
This is roughly the same problem as syntactical macros in non-Lisp syntax languages.

There needs to be a way to indicate a "hole" (metavariable/unquote) in the syntax tree, and depending on the complexity of the language's grammar, that might be somewhat difficult, eg. in C++ having a hole for a type declaration runs into the common ambiguity between declarations (constructor calls) and expressions (regular calls).
This needs to be worked around by eg. having multiple types of holes to disambiguate...

For the article, the idea of using an "any" prefix on identifiers instead of eg. operators such as ` , ... (Lisp macros) is an interesting solution, as it does not require extending the grammar of the language... although it's not applicable in all situations (eg. for matching grammar elements where identifiers are not allowed).
For a very regular language like Smalltalk though, it's pretty good.

Grammar-based rewriting has a long line of history and research, so there's a deep well of knowledge to be mined if you feel like hitting up Google Scholar...

For modern implementations, there's eg. ast-grep and semgrep:
https://ast-grep.github.io/
https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/pattern-syntax
by anon_e-moose | 2026-02-27 10:35:36+00:00
A corporation is a bunch of people cooperating to achieve a common goal.

There is a very important factor that heavily influences (perhaps even controls?) how people act to achieve that goal, and sometimes even twists or adds goals.

Is that corporation publicly quoted in the stock market or is it private?

Look at how steam behaves, it's private and more ideological VS how many other publicly quoted companies, whose CEO often sacrifices his own corporation's long term survival for the benefit of short-term profiteering and some hedge fund manager's bonus.

Both need profit to survive, but the publicly quoted company is much more extreme.

When people say corporations only look to profit, what they really mean is that publicly quoted corporations will do everything possible to maximise short term profit at any cost. Is there a CEO caring for long term? Either he will be convinced to change or kicked out. It's almost impossible for someone to resist these influences in publicly quoted companies. It's just how Wall Street works and if that doesn't change neither will corporations.

The people running the world of finance and their culture are what causes enshittification and pushing a zero-sum game to extremes.
by Matl | 2026-02-27 10:38:33+00:00
The problem with that argument as I see it is that a lot of jobs can be described that way if you want.

And it's not just these; i.e. video generation is getting better every other week too. It's not yet good enough to produce full length movies but it's getting there and the main component that seems to be missing is just more control over the generated output, but that'll come too.

You might say these movies will be AI slop and you'd be right, but then that'll be enough for most people who just want to see a lot of shit blow up on screen and superhereos fighting other superhereos.

You will still have a niche for 'real actor' films, but it will become a niche.

Same for music, art etc.
by IanCal | 2026-02-27 10:39:22+00:00
But it will be simpler on a phone, as you don't need to do the same manual entering of data, and don't need to get a photo of your passport and a photo of yourself onto your computer.

> I don't really see a good reason to bury the links all the way at the bottom the way they are at present.

I'd not be surprised if the number of issues when using the app is significantly lower than doing it online. Particularly if lots of people are using phones to visit these sites anyway.
Ask HN: Where do you think the programmers jobs will go?
by quantum2022 | 2026-02-27 10:39:42+00:00
With the recent layoffs it got me thinking about this question. I see a huge opportunity for programmers to work for small-midsize companies integrating AI into their systems and maintaining and upgrading said systems. This will empower those small-midsize companies and give them a chance to potentially compete with the big ones. There might even be a consulting type firm that goes in, says here's where you can place some AI, and then connect the company with a programmer. Where do you all think the jobs will go?
by SatvikBeri | 2026-02-27 10:40:01+00:00
REPLs/notebooks are really nice in situations where you don't know what you want ahead of time and are throwing away 90% of the code you write, such as trying to find better numerical algorithms to accomplish some goal, exploring poorly documented APIs (most of them), making a lot of plots for investigating, or working a bunch with matrices and Dataframes (where current static typing systems don't really offer much.)
by jonasn | 2026-02-27 10:40:56+00:00
Thanks for the detailed read and the great questions!

Regarding the colors and thread counts in Figure 4: the key piece of context here is that the application thread (the Main thread) is completely paused during this phase. It isn't actually running anything at all. Because the application is halted, only the GC threads are doing active work. Therefore, rather than three threads running at once, we strictly have two things running concurrently. This is a helpful piece of feedback and I'll make sure to make this clearer in future writings.

Good eye on the 101% wall time. That was due to a minor bug in my plotting script that specifically affected the GC plots with no concurrent time. I have corrected this and updated the post. The fixed plot should be visible on the site in a future near you just as soon as the edge caches invalidate.
by Antibabelic | 2026-02-27 10:41:10+00:00
Developers never had "intellectual property". Under capitalism, only billion-dollar corporations do. So the problem with AI isn't that it violated some license. The real problems are that people are losing jobs, that the Internet and our community gets clogged up with more low-effort slop competing for our attention than ever before, and that the products we are all forced to use are becoming worse because corporations are trying to shove AI-features into them and put quotas on engineers to vibe-code as much as possible. There are definitely others. "Copyright" is not even scratching the surface of real problems with LLMs, and many of the people leading the charge in pointing out the evil and hypocrisy of AI companies are themselves copyright abolitionists.
by stackbutterflow | 2026-02-27 10:42:18+00:00
Because it's easy when you don't let facts block you. Spread lie number 1 on Monday morning, lie number 2 in the afternoon, lie number 3 the next day, and do that for years and decades.

Whenever someone spends the time, and it takes a long time, to correct you, laugh, mock them, spew a few more lies.

And it's easy to do when the rich, the owner class side with you, because they buy newspapers, websites, ads, which you can't do if you lean left because acquiring money at all cost is not a priority of left wing people.
by roryirvine | 2026-02-27 10:43:12+00:00
Interesting - it tracks with personal experience.

Honestly, I'd chalked it up as a one-off mistake by an inexperienced team (I had discussed my expected range in our first conversation, so found it odd that they they would waste their own time going through the hiring process only to make me such a stupidly low offer!)

So is this something that they're actually being advised to do? What's the intention behind it?
by stevekemp | 2026-02-27 10:44:20+00:00
One thing nobody seems to have mentioned here is how unusual it seems to be to have a switch on sockets.

I grew up with the famous British Plug, and while people make lots of comments about the safety-centric design and the fuse in the plug few people care about the switch.

I like to be able to turn off power to the TV when I'm not using it for a few weeks, etc, and that's something I genuinely missed when I moved to Finland with the EU-sockets.
by PonyoSunshine | 2026-02-27 10:44:25+00:00
As someone that helped open the Renton, Wa store, I can tell you the biggest problem with Fry's was their ethics. They treated their employees like crap, they lured people to come work for them with promises like health care after 90 days, only to fire most of them on their 89th day. I still have physical scars on my feet today from my time working there.

They would go in and buy failed brands, and use their sales floor to push known faulty products on the wager that if they sold enough of them, and they made it past that 14 day window, they won. They knew what they were doing They would force people to peddle their shit brands, masquerading as a just another product on the shelf. In short, they deserved to die in a fire and the world is better without them. If you are going to feel about about any of this, feel for the countless unnamed employees lives they used and threw away like a dirty rag after constantly guilt tripping you for not being enough.
by qdotme | 2026-02-27 10:45:56+00:00
FWIW, I don’t actually know if board of Anthropic has actual power to replace its CEO or if Dario has retained some form of personal super-control shares Zuckerberg style.

At some level of growth, the dynamics between competent founders and shareholders flip. Even if the board could afford to replace a CEO, it might not be worth it.
by hatmatrix | 2026-02-27 10:46:27+00:00
Do you have an idea whether these are specific types of problems that is giving Julia poorer performance? From what I recall, people were reporting better speeds with Julia than with Numba (e.g., [1]). My impression was that you are basically able to bring more of your code to LLVM with Julia than Numba, so it would make sense.

[1] https://gerritnowald.wordpress.com/2022/10/03/simulating-rot...
by jalapenos | 2026-02-27 10:46:32+00:00
I'm not sure if there's a name for this yet, perhaps "AI shit-eating grin artistry".

But the way you do it is: try to make the most aggressive, gleeful statements about people losing or will be losing their jobs, and in fact entire careers.

Make it as obnoxious as you and your AI can make it. Make references to burger flippers being more valuable than software engineers.

Make really flippant comparisons that deliberately and dishonestly mischaracterise the role. Refer to nonsense like LOC output rate as a proxy for value, or point at things like its ability to clone quickly as if that were where value comes from.

And then of course, double down at every criticism of the position.
by kryptiskt | 2026-02-27 10:46:38+00:00
People working with math or stats are often in an explorative mode, testing different things, applying different transforms to the data, plotting variables or doing one-off calculations. You need some form of interactive session for that to be feasible, whether it is a REPL or a notebook. There actually is a C++ REPL just for this use case from CERN, because they have a ton of HEP C++ code that they want to use interactively.
by throwthrowuknow | 2026-02-27 10:46:53+00:00
1. This sounds more like influencer marketing, I think people are already sick of it.

2. Yes and no. Depending on how you train the model they can output things that you’ve never seen before but the question is whether you want to look at those things. So yes a human has to judge and fine tune the output. This is why many models seem unoriginal, they’re designed to emulate specific styles and tuned based on broad appeal. If you go looking for LoRAs and merges created by “artists” you will see shit you couldn’t dream of.

everything else probably yes.
by lolive | 2026-02-27 10:47:13+00:00
unfortunately for terminal lovers, the best .gitconfig snippet is still this:

[diff]
tool = intellij
[difftool "intellij"]
cmd = idea diff \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"
[merge]
tool = intellij
[mergetool "intellij"]
cmd = idea merge \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\" \"$BASE\" \"$MERGED\"
trustExitCode = true
by maxmealing | 2026-02-27 10:47:24+00:00
My brother Alex and I have been building in the data space for over a year. We started with AI-powered report creation, triggered analysis, deep-dive automation and some other stuff for data teams, finance, and ops. Custom products we'd build for each client. We had some traction, but the AI could never deliver accurately on the last 10%. Insane amounts of context and prompt engineering went into it, but clients didn't want it unless they had full trust in the numbers. Which is, frankly, impossible.

We figured out a few things.

1. If someone else builds your analysis, you're going to redo it anyway. That's just how people work. If I handed you a presentation someone else made, you'd probably rebuild it from scratch. And with numbers, it's even worse because you're going to pick them apart regardless.

2. Unless you're an analyst iterating on SQL, there is no point putting code in front of a business user. So they can learn and debug SQL? lol.

3. Self-serve failed because it was the UI that was self-serve and not the actual data. Business users do not want to learn another UI low-code tool. The world is moving in the opposite direction.

Business users should just use the tools they already know: ChatGPT/Codex, Claude Desktop, whatever. Those tools are already insanely powerful at delivering cheap UI. All you need to do is make the data self-serve, fast and reliable for agents. It feels pretty obvious that every business with data to operationalise should let people do whatever the hell they need to do with it to get the job done faster, right? It's not the data team's problem anymore cause the UI is cheap. The only thing that the data team needs to do with it is keep enriching and maintaining the self-serve data layer. They can then actually get time to do the impactful stuff.

So we built Bonnard. Data teams (Analytics Engineer, Data engineers or whoever has been handed the AI delivery project) go from data model to self-serve in about 5 minutes, all through the CLI. Zero UI on the consumer side unless they build it themselves.

Would love to get your feedback! Will hang in the comments if you have any questions.
by justinclift | 2026-02-27 10:47:48+00:00
> Dad can either stand strong and live the example he wishes his child to follow, or cave displaying the opposite of what he said.

Or do what he told his kid, by getting his cousin (not a neighbor) to do the harming. Or perhaps to get the cousin to destroy the bully.

---

> Conversely if you live a life where you simply don’t lie for any reason, your kids will learn to live honestly.

The "your kids will learn to live honestly" doesn't necessarily track.

If you simply don't lie, that doesn't mean you won't be taken advantage of at times. Your kids might see that and decide it's not the best approach to doing things.
by sinnsro | 2026-02-27 10:48:16+00:00
While others have mentioned plenty of reasons, for this particular case I want to highlight 3 things:

1. Julia has great tooling for operations research/linear programming. JuMP provides an standardise interface to interact with solvers (e.g., Gurobi, CPLEX) via wrapper libraries.

2. I like its overall ergonomics. It is fast enough that a programmer might not need to use a compiled language for performance. The type system allows for multiple dispatch. And the syntax is more approachable than say Python for matrix algebra.

3. I would say the performance is overstated by the community but out of the box it is good enough to avoid languages like C/C++ to build solutions. The two-language problem in academia is real, and Julia helps to reduce that gap somewhat in certain fields.
by SatvikBeri | 2026-02-27 10:48:18+00:00
There are some big advantages to having it in the same language. You can write the easy, non-performant version quickly and gradually refactor while having an easy test case. This is especially nice in situations where you expect to throw away a lot of the code you write, e.g. research. Also, you don't have to write most code in a super performance obsessed way – Julia makes it really easy to find the key 5% that needs to be rewritten.

We've ported some tens of thousands of lines of numpy-heavy Python, and in practice our Julia code is actually more concise while being about 10x-100x more performant.