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Show HN: Mermaid Formatter – CLI and library to auto-format Mermaid diagrams

https://github.com/chenyanchen/mermaid-formatter
1•astm•1m ago•0 comments

RFCs vs. READMEs: The Evolution of Protocols

https://h3manth.com/scribe/rfcs-vs-readmes/
1•init0•7m ago•1 comments

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

https://altermag.com/articles/kanchipuram-saris-and-thinking-machines
1•trojanalert•7m ago•0 comments

Chinese chemical supplier causes global baby formula recall

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/nestle-widens-french-infant-formula-r...
1•fkdk•10m ago•0 comments

I've used AI to write 100% of my code for a year as an engineer

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qxvobt/ive_used_ai_to_write_100_of_my_code_for_1_ye...
1•ukuina•12m ago•1 comments

Looking for 4 Autistic Co-Founders for AI Startup (Equity-Based)

1•au-ai-aisl•23m ago•1 comments

AI-native capabilities, a new API Catalog, and updated plans and pricing

https://blog.postman.com/new-capabilities-march-2026/
1•thunderbong•23m ago•0 comments

What changed in tech from 2010 to 2020?

https://www.tedsanders.com/what-changed-in-tech-from-2010-to-2020/
2•endorphine•28m ago•0 comments

From Human Ergonomics to Agent Ergonomics

https://wesmckinney.com/blog/agent-ergonomics/
1•Anon84•32m ago•0 comments

Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Inertial_Reference_Sphere
1•cyanf•33m ago•0 comments

Toyota Developing a Console-Grade, Open-Source Game Engine with Flutter and Dart

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fluorite-Toyota-Game-Engine
1•computer23•36m ago•0 comments

Typing for Love or Money: The Hidden Labor Behind Modern Literary Masterpieces

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/typing-for-love-or-money/
1•prismatic•36m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A longitudinal health record built from fragmented medical data

https://myaether.live
1•takmak007•39m ago•0 comments

CoreWeave's $30B Bet on GPU Market Infrastructure

https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/coreweaves-30-billion-bet-on-gpu
1•gmays•50m ago•0 comments

Creating and Hosting a Static Website on Cloudflare for Free

https://benjaminsmallwood.com/blog/creating-and-hosting-a-static-website-on-cloudflare-for-free/
1•bensmallwood•56m ago•1 comments

"The Stanford scam proves America is becoming a nation of grifters"

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/students-stanford-grifters-ivy-league-w2g5z768z
2•cwwc•1h ago•0 comments

Elon Musk on Space GPUs, AI, Optimus, and His Manufacturing Method

https://cheekypint.substack.com/p/elon-musk-on-space-gpus-ai-optimus
2•simonebrunozzi•1h ago•0 comments

X (Twitter) is back with a new X API Pay-Per-Use model

https://developer.x.com/
3•eeko_systems•1h ago•0 comments

Zlob.h 100% POSIX and glibc compatible globbing lib that is faste and better

https://github.com/dmtrKovalenko/zlob
3•neogoose•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Deterministic signal triangulation using a fixed .72% variance constant

https://github.com/mabrucker85-prog/Project_Lance_Core
2•mav5431•1h ago•1 comments

Scientists Discover Levitating Time Crystals You Can Hold, Defy Newton’s 3rd Law

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-scientists-levitating-crystals.html
3•sizzle•1h ago•0 comments

When Michelangelo Met Titian

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/michelangelo-titian-review-the-renaissances-odd-couple-e34...
1•keiferski•1h ago•0 comments

Solving NYT Pips with DLX

https://github.com/DonoG/NYTPips4Processing
1•impossiblecode•1h ago•1 comments

Baldur's Gate to be turned into TV series – without the game's developers

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g457y534o
3•vunderba•1h ago•0 comments

Interview with 'Just use a VPS' bro (OpenClaw version) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40SnEd1RWUU
2•dangtony98•1h ago•0 comments

EchoJEPA: Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Echocardiography

https://github.com/bowang-lab/EchoJEPA
1•euvin•1h ago•0 comments

Disablling Go Telemetry

https://go.dev/doc/telemetry
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Effective Nihilism

https://www.effectivenihilism.org/
1•abetusk•1h ago•1 comments

The UK government didn't want you to see this report on ecosystem collapse

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/27/uk-government-report-ecosystem-collapse-foi...
5•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments

No 10 blocks report on impact of rainforest collapse on food prices

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/no-10-blocks-report-on-impact-of-rainforest-colla...
3•pabs3•1h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Conway's Game of Life, but musical

https://www.hudsong.dev/digital-darwin
209•hudsongr•4mo ago

Comments

ge96•4mo ago
is broken or down rather
SanjayMehta•4mo ago
The play buttons appear in the top right corner of each panel.
ge96•4mo ago
I was seeing a "Site can't be reached" message but now it's up again

Side note, it's the Black Mirror episode Thronglets

kcaseg•4mo ago
I had very high hopes, because I have initially read: "Conway's Game of Life, but A Musical". Still pretty cool!
whycome•4mo ago
Conway Twitty biopic?
vunderba•4mo ago
Nice job. I thought about building something like this many years ago, but ended up experimenting with music generated from abelian sand pile algorithms instead. I've seen a number of attempts at using genetic algorithms to recombine previous musical patterns.

What's obviously missing is a "fitness function" that can approximate the equivalent of human taste, so the final evolved forms just end up being widely random in terms of quality.

AlgoMotion also did a video explanation for a music based version of Conway's Game of Life last year. Highly recommend their videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2SjVwYNr54

Incidentally if you like musical toys like this - Electroplankton [1] was a fun little game that had a series of almost organic musical instruments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplankton

AlecSchueler•4mo ago
> What's obviously missing is a "fitness function" that can approximate the equivalent of human taste, so the final evolved forms just end up being widely random in terms of quality.

Honestly for me this is a feature not a bug. If I want to hear music that matches my personal taste exactly I can just go to my instrument and play it. These tools are a way to taste more exotic forms and see if there's anything worth carrying over.

vunderba•4mo ago
And that's perfectly fine.

But when we conceptualize something like music in the form of evolutionary computation then it is important to be able to define a good metric for the fitness function otherwise you might as well just take X pieces of music, normalize them to the same key signature/tempo/etc., and then randomly mash them together.

If you're just in the mood for something more exotic, I'm happy to go repeatedly sit on my piano for a few hours and send you the final samples.

AlecSchueler•4mo ago
> then it is important to be able to define a good metric for the fitness function

This product seems to have shipped successfully without one.

> If you're just in the mood for something more exotic, I'm happy to go repeatedly sit on my piano for a few hours and send you the final samples.

This feels needlessly condescending.

chipsrafferty•4mo ago
I've been toying with ideas like this for a long time now. I think the fitness function is critical, but the problem is that taste is subjective, and you need to listen to many riffs/melodies to evolve to a "good" state. Also, you either start with specific melodies, in which case you would skew the results, or start with random noise, in which case it would take a very long time to evolve to anything good. So it seems like you must constrain i tsomehow, such as "only use 12 tones, with full/half/quarter/third notes".

But anyways, my idea for a way to resolve the problem of fitness taking forever would be to livestream it on Twitch, in the same vein as the "Twitch plays Pokemon" where viewers can input commands to vote for an action, they could vote on the fitness of musical tracks.

BenoitEssiambre•4mo ago
I love this stuff. This 256 byte video clip is a great example using similar principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8
skulk•4mo ago
Wolfram Tones uses 1-d cellular automata to generate music. I had a lot of fun playing with this many years ago.

https://tones.wolfram.com/ (not sure if it's still up, doesn't load for me)

SanjayMehta•4mo ago
It’s working for me.
kevinwang•4mo ago
Darn, I can't hear the music on iphone safari :(
hudsongr•4mo ago
If you try turning your phone off silent it should work!
abemiller•4mo ago
musical space with 12 notes per octave may be better mapped onto a hexagon grid rather than a square one

https://www.whatistoday.net/2019/09/jammer.html

gobdovan•4mo ago
Pretty cool! How do you decide what tone to play on birth/death? Is it based on the position in the grid or do you just pick from a simple scale at random?
renewiltord•4mo ago
There was a cellular automata music sequencer once that I enjoyed. https://earslap.com/page/otomata.html

Needs flash or iOS. Simple mechanics but lots of fun music. Good design.

WhitneyLand•4mo ago
Very cool Hudson.

“each cell birth plays a harmonic note and each death plays a complementary tone”

How are you deciding which notes to play?

Is it a function that somehow depends on generations or position?

hudsongr•4mo ago
Yes it's based on the position. The column determines the note and the row determines the octave.
sodaplayer•4mo ago
Oh this is cool. I did something similar with a modded Launchpad by programming GOL on it and converting the positions by column and row to octave and degree and then outputting MIDI to a synth.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/os4nF1RoPJCwNiLt6

casty•4mo ago
The demo sounds lovely. Thought I’d mention that for the Eurorack synthesizer format there is a 16 cell sequencer by NLC: https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/p/cellular-automat...
jMyles•4mo ago
Super interesting. Is there a dedicated place where I can just play with Melody Breeder?
kdfjgbdfkjgb•4mo ago
so can we interact with it please?
nutate•4mo ago
gonna have a panic attack at the twinkle twinkle "star" not being a half-note.
recursive•4mo ago
Beethoven "5" similarly affected.
anjel•4mo ago
30 years later, I still miss double muffled dolphin cellular automata ambient synth... https://www.muffled.dk/map.php
rbongers•4mo ago
All of this guy's software and music seems so cool, and there's so little information on it. Can you share anything else?
anjel•4mo ago
Its been broken for 30 years, and yet its everlasting.
rbongers•4mo ago
Sounds lovely, I'd love to hear what it's like when the number of living cells on screen controls the length of the note so it's not just a constant rhythm, even though it is hypnotizing.
import•4mo ago
There is a MIDI sequencer called ZOA (for Apple devices) that does a very similar job. I had a lot of fun with it, combining it with synthesisers (I have bunch of them but my fave is Moog's) inside AUM.

https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/zoa-living-midi-sequencer/id15...

gbertasius•4mo ago
Reaktor vst has a drum synthesizer that generates midi patterns from a small grid that simulates Conway's Game of Life. It's pretty fun to play with.
mbil•4mo ago
I made a musical game of life not long ago if you want something to play with https://matthewbilyeu.com/tone-of-life
testaccount28•4mo ago
interesting! a sort of digital windchimes.

do you expect that in a blind trial it could be distinguished from playing a statistically similar number of tones chosen randomly from the available cells?

tetris11•4mo ago
The soundtrack for Conway's Game of Life that I've always had in my head is John Carpenters' Wraith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21NIxhWQrIU