frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
260•theblazehen•2d ago•86 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
27•AlexeyBrin•1h ago•3 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
707•klaussilveira•15h ago•206 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
969•xnx•21h ago•558 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
70•jesperordrup•6h ago•32 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
8•onurkanbkrc•50m ago•0 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
135•matheusalmeida•2d ago•35 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
46•speckx•4d ago•36 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
68•videotopia•4d ago•7 comments

Welcome to the Room – A lesson in leadership by Satya Nadella

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
39•kaonwarb•3d ago•30 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
13•matt_d•3d ago•2 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
45•helloplanets•4d ago•46 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
240•isitcontent•16h ago•26 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
238•dmpetrov•16h ago•127 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
340•vecti•18h ago•150 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
506•todsacerdoti•23h ago•248 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
390•ostacke•22h ago•99 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
306•eljojo•18h ago•189 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
361•aktau•22h ago•186 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
429•lstoll•22h ago•284 comments

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

https://medium.com/lensesio/cross-region-msk-replication-a-comprehensive-performance-comparison-o...
3•andmarios•4d ago•1 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
25•bikenaga•3d ago•11 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
71•kmm•5d ago•10 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
96•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
26•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•16 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
271•i5heu•18h ago•219 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
34•romes•4d ago•3 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1079•cdrnsf•1d ago•462 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
64•gfortaine•13h ago•30 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
306•surprisetalk•3d ago•45 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