Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub

github.com

284 pointsvolleygman180129 comments

Wait, no one remembers now? He once released a mobile app to stream Weezer songs, all written by himself. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weezify/id1598140531 I'm glad he's still writing code so hard.

It’s so great that musicians can have a backup plan that works lol. :)

My parents-in-law had an old friend who with her folk-singer husband ran a club in Montreal in the early 60s. Bob Dylan came through town before he changed his name. They were sitting around after the show and Annette said to him: "Kid. You better go back to college. You need something to fall back on." Dylan told her: "If I don't, you'll eat my hat."

She had other great stories. Lenny Cohen played "Suzanne" for her and said "what do you think?" Annette: "it stinks. who wrote it?" Lenny: "I did."

She’s not wrong

Aw come on. It's Suzanne by Lenny Cohen.

I don’t know how exactly we got on this topic, but there’s also an excellent Weezer song called “Suzanne.”

Edit: I guess it’s actually spelled “Susanne.”

Later on, Michael Stipe of REM wrote a song that shamelessly ripped off Suzanne, except it was about merging a human's DNA with a crocodile. He asked Peter Buck what he thought, and Buck said "it's great, but it was great when it was Suzanne too".

Annette sounds like a straight shooter.

Cheers from Montréal!

I'd like to add the caution that songs might change a lot during their author's life, and the "suzanne" she heard might be different from the one we know.

"I mean, you just never know if this rock and roll thing is going to work out, son."

TBH, teachning music is the general backup plan for all musicians, so there was another one.

I wonder what Brian May's parents thought... "It's tough to make a living as a musician... if that doesn't work out... uh-oh, astrophysics is his backup plan?"

This is still being actively updated, just wow. Growing up on alt rock, it's so good to see most of these bands still kicking it. (RIP Chris and Chester)

RIP indeed. It still bums me out, especially Chester.

Interesting, he seems to primarily work on a Discord Bot.

This is at heavy risk for confirmation bias, but I believe that writing chat bots is one of the best ways for people to get into and enjoy coding, because it's fun and rewarding, and simple enough (with an existing framework to use) that just uses strings. For a large generation it was MySpace and the ability to customize your page heavily with HTML. I know a number of people who learned HTML for that reason.

Chat bots seem like the closest modern day equivalent (despite the main platforms making it harder with stuff like difficult to connect to the real time websocket and force use of webhooks). 10 years ago or so when Slack was new and had a gloriously simple API, I even wrote a framework that made it as easy as implementing one function, and you could receive messages (among other metadata like the username of the sender) as strings and send replies easily as strings. It served as an entry point for a few friends who had some fun with it and learned some ruby in the process.

Anyway, if you're looking to get into coding but want to do a "real" project (or something very rewarding), start by writing simple chat bots! If you need some ideas, these are simple:

1. Start with writing a simple echo bot that just replies to every message with the same message that it received.

1. Write a bot that responds to every message with a random number between 1 and 100. For a slight increased challenge, have it do fizzbuzz where the nth message received is the counter.

2. Write a bot that that will reverse the message of whatever it receives, so it echoes replies but backwards.

3. Write a bot that will lookup a word when the message sent is "define <word>" and reply with the definition from one of the many dictionary APIs out there.

Go from there!

I mean, entire generations of programmers started out writing terminal programs, a chat bot is basically a multiplayer CLI program

Definitely agree—Discord bots got me into JavaScript! (For better or worse, lol.)

To anyone who wants to build and host a hobby bot, I've had a good experience with using fly.io to host mine. They don't charge you for any monthly billing periods whose total cost would be less than five dollars (USD), so for small projects that would never get close to meeting that threshold, it's free ninety nine. Hard to beat that!

I didn't realize they had a (effectively) scale-to-zero option! Is it possible to store a bit of state, or is the bot entirely for ephemeral responses? I wasn't clear on what storage would be available from their pricing page.

Both bots I run are just for ephemeral responses, so unfortunately I'm not sure. I tend to be well under the $5 threshold, though, even at 2x bots, so it seems like there's plenty of wiggle room for more storage without incurring totally nutso costs.

(And even if you do exceed the $5 threshold, it's still waaaaaay cheaper than other options I've seen. RIP to Heroku's free hobby tier.)

This would be a good dbrand style marketing point; "Round down pricing: You're a rounding error, so why would we bother charging you!" :-)

Their end of the month email is

Good news from Fly.io! We don’t collect bills smaller than $5.00.

This month, your bill of $2.01 falls below that threshold, so we’re discounting it by 100%.

There was a fad for chatbots during the MySpace era (or at least the early-mid-00s AIM era?) too, I remember messing around with trying to build them. They were a lot less accessible and less documented than the APIs available today though!

Eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmarterChild

I teach software engineering to grad students. Discord bots specifically have been fantastic:

1) auth/identity is built in

2) the UX is highly constrained (having students lose a month to CSS issues is perhaps good prep for the real world but feels awful)

3) all of the tooling is free*

*With the restrictions on free Heroku and the removal of free orgs on fly (it seems) I’ve had to retool a bit but codespaces cover a lot of what students need.

How is that different from writing command-line apps?

Most computer users don't use command-line apps day in and day out. Most computer users nowadays use chat apps (Discord, Slack, Whatsapp) and have probably encountered bots on those platforms before. There is an inherent familiarity that makes it feel more accessible.

1. Networking, multiplayer and multimedia are built in.

2. The social component is fun. Students can easily show their work to each other. Don't underestimate the power of memes.

3. The Discord server provides shared history/some persistance without the students needing to implement their own servers.

The two pieces of software I'm most proud of having written in college were a simple NFS driver and a simple GET-only HTTP server. There's just something magical about seeing your software not only working, but also integrating with something else that's "real". (In this case, being able to mount a network drive in the OS and opening a page in a real browser)

It is more engaging to do something related to the software students (might) be using daily or at least have some experience. It's easier to show of the final result to (non programming) friends, or get some ideas for potentially useful tools or at least fun toys.

Sure for experienced developers command line tools are used daily (at least for some developers), but for many students it can be alien world that they don't use outside the lessons.

Also overall usefulness. Simple terminal program that responds with a fixed message, is just an exerciser but otherwise useless. You need to get a lot more complicated to make useful tool. But a chatbot which responds with fixed messages (usually FAQ type stuff) is a commonly used tool for the purpose of community management.

"Normal" people don't use command-line apps. Making 'real' things that other people use can be a huge motivator for early learners.

It’s much easier to share a link to a Discord server than it is to convince your friends/family to install an app. Packaging and distribution alone would take up most of your development time - a semester is only 15 weeks. (This is why I used to do web-based projects.)

Discord also supports some simple UI elements - images, buttons, form fields, and dropdowns - so it’s a nice step above a CLI for teaching UX, which is part of the course.

I once heard that there are a couple types of projects that every software dev must go through at least once as a rite of passage. For me and those around me those definitely were IRC bots and bulletin board systems. Everyone created their own.

You have a good point. For me it was IRC bots.

It's a quick and easy return on investment. You see results and you can share results with friends, and the APIs aren't too hard.

There's a whole generation of us who started coding on mIRC-scripting exactly for that reason.

Whippersnapper, in my day real IRC bots were coded in Tcl [0]! ;)

0: https://docs.eggheads.org/tutorials/firstscript.html

What kind of person acknowledges there might be confirmation bias?

Eggdrop represent

Still going strong, it seems!

https://github.com/eggheads/eggdrop

> Interesting, he seems to primarily work on a Discord Bot.

No, that's just his only public repo. It only has 95 commits but he makes on average 1,000 commits per year on private repos (including Weezify, presumably). So it's really a very small fraction of his activity.

This is wild - looks like he's messing around with OpenAI to create setlists for a show:

> base_prompt = """ I want you to act as a show designer for Weezer's upcoming summer tour. The show is divided into four segments of contrasting moods. 1. The Pop Party section will feature upbeat, cheerful songs with a more light-hearted message about love and relationships. It will be high energy and encourage the audience to participate in singing along and dancing. 2. The Emotional Ballads section will feature slower-paced songs with poignant lyrics about love and relationships. The instrumentals provide a reflective atmosphere that may be heavy at times, but ultimately brings comfort. 3. The Dark and Heavy section will focus on heavier topics such as mental health/anxiety struggles or social commentary/satire. These songs will have intense instrumentals to match the mood of the lyrical content, allowing for an honest exploration of these issues in a safe space. 4. the Fun and Uplifting segment will have a similar vibe but with deeper lyrics that speak to mental health/anxiety struggles or spiritual enlightenment. The instrumentals may be slightly slower paced than in the Pop Party section, however they are still uplifting as they celebrate hope for brighter days ahead. You are going to analyze 2 pieces of data: the song's spotify audio feature "energy" and the song's lyrics and then return 1 of these 4 strings, corresponding to the type of song you think it is. Make sure you only return one of these 4 strings with no other test around it. Here are the 4 strings in a list: ["1. Pop Party", "2. Emotional Ballads", "3. Dark and Heavy", "4 . Fun and Uplifting"]. Now here are the song lyrics: """

https://github.com/riverscuomo/apps/blob/master/songdata.py#...

As a large language model, I must advise you to play every song off Pinkerton, in order, since that is by far the pinnacle of Weezer’s musical achievement. Some early demos and similar deep cuts would also be acceptable.

> with no other test around it

A neat thing about LLMs is unlike code typos, prompt typos work just fine.

This is AMAZING thank you for surfacing it!!

Over twenty years ago I discovered Jens Johannson's* site, where he revealed he was into programming.

He hacked on someone's Phase Vocoder code:

https://www.panix.com/~jens/pvoc.par

I built Jens' version and used it for cleanly slowing down some audio tracks.

* Keyboard player of Stratovarious, formerly with Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Johansson

> formerly with Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force

Which made me remember that Cuomo is also a pretty good guitar shredder, not long ago there was an interview with him shredding along his favorite lines from Malmsteen

Cuomo can play

I say this as a guy who’s been playing electric guitar for over 25 years - Rivers is certainly competent on guitar. He’s not some virtuoso and he’s definitely no Yngwie. His real superpower, however, is songwriting. He’s one the best who has ever lived.

The Blue Album is epically good.

Yeah you're right, who can forget such classics as:

"Goddamn, you half-Japanese girls/Do it to me every time"

"Everyone’s a little queer/why can’t she be a little straight?"

"When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf."

"I wonder what clothes you wear to school/I wonder how you decorate your room/I wonder how you touch yourself and curse myself for being across the sea" (sung about a 14 year old when Rivers was certainly an adult)

Yeah that's some real National Archive level creepy content, I'll give you that.

I think he was referring more to the notes than the lyrics.

But - there's definitely a type of fan who admires the "creepy stalker" bent of the lyrics. I have a friend who is in that camp for sure.

Yeah sure, he has a knack for melodies, I won't argue that.

> sung about a 14 year old when Rivers was certainly an adult

18 year old girl, according to the first line of the song. I still think the song has a creepy/desperate tone, but not because she's legally a child.

> "When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf."

For what it's worth, No One Else and The World Has Turned (the following song on the album) are usually taken to be related songs, including by Cuomo himself. The first song is about the jealousy that pushes the girl away, and the second is about life after she leaves.

In the context of Cuomo being into meditation his whole life, I've always taken it as a personification and exaggeration of his actual jealousy, kind of like Mara in the Buddhist tradition. I'd like to hope those lyrics aren't a literal representation of his thinking at the time. At any rate, the two songs together make it clear that the jealousy is a problem rather than something to be celebrated.

As for the half-Japanese stuff... I don't know. I think that's likely accurate to what he was going through in college. Cuomo is in my opinion very likely to be autistic, and for whatever reason lots of people on the spectrum are into Japanese culture and lots of men on the spectrum are attracted to Japanese women.

The context for the whole second album is he feels conflicted about sleeping with groupies (Tired of Sex) and becomes celibate until marriage. So he's at Harvard and unable to have sex until he meets someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with. So yeah the album is dripping with sexual frustration and I don't fault anyone for finding it creepy.

But I do kind of feel like how many of us would go to Harvard as a rock star and refuse to have sex until marriage? The vast majority of men in that situation would be hooking up regularly, and I guess he felt like he couldn't respect himself or the women in his life if he was doing that.

Sorry I'm not really interested in psychoanalyzing this guy. There are a enough talented(?) songwriters around so that I don't have to put up with these sorts of things.... you know, abject misogyny. I feel like HN community has a very low tolerance for this sort of thing, why is this guy immune? Because he's relatable? Gross.

Look, if you're still an adult listening to this stuff and it's not just a "once a year because of nostalgia" deal... I have serious questions.

Is this satire?

> Because he's relatable?

Just to be clear, the point I was making was the opposite. He seems to struggle relating to other people, and other people struggle to relate to him.

Personally, my take is that it's worth developing empathy in general and I think that responding to people with disgust is an anti-pattern. As the cliche goes, be hard on the problem, soft on the person.

He has said, although i can't recall where, that "far beyond the sun" is his favorite piece to play

Guessing you're talking about this interview? https://youtu.be/1UES4gQZH6o?si=X_zP2AKmvVrkpVi4&t=1069

I just saw it a couple of weeks ago, it's great. I linked to him trying to remember one of those lines, but the whole interview is worth listening to

I like the symmetry of Weezer's "Buddy Holly" being one of the first PC videos people ever saw by virtue of it being included on the Windows 95 installation CD, and 30 years later, Cuomo quietly carving out a little piece of the coding universe for themselves. Rock on!

You might be interested in this bit https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/18gtc7v/til_...

Oh man I forgot that video was on the Win95 CD!

Along with one of the low-key greatest white folk-soul ballads ever written -- "Good Times" by Edie Brickell.

And some amazing Bill Plympton animations!

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32853

I remember the Buddy Holly video but I think I may never have found the Plympton videos. I missed out—was a huge Plymptoons fan back then.

I do remember discovering the video for GWAR’s Saddam A-Go-Go inside the Beavis & Butthead adventure game that came out that same year. Weird what sticks in our heads. Good times.

I was sure I remembered there was more than one, but likely I misremembered:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ob7EEr3t8k

It's very short, too. I'm surprised by that. But it definitely stuck in my head.

He was also on an episode [0] of the Song Exploder podcast where he talked about how he uses a spreadsheet to catalog all his song ideas, with columns for key, tempo, mood, etc. So when he has an idea for a song, he can search for riffs and phrases that might work together.

0: https://songexploder.net/weezer

[insert mild grumbling about his post-Pinkerton artistic risk aversion]

Haha, I’m definitely more of an early Weezer lover, but I find it sad how unappreciated the Green Album is. Might be their best melodies, but the overall vibe is not as good as Pinkerton (especially without Matt Sharp).

Which reminds me of this legendary SNL skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab5WvwfLuLM

I forget where I read it, but I think he has evolved since then to a bespoke desktop app with a database backend.

I was a musician that has tracks on most of the popular music stuff, was a successful professional dj, worked with other semi-successful musicians, authors, and others successful in other careers, heck even I have a musical effects company. it shouldn't be shocking that some of us have more successful careers than me - music leads to ideas and invention, why should that not include software?

(says someone who writes postgres extensions for a living)

He was on Michael Kennedy's Talk Python podcast a couple of years ago:

https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to...

Todd Runtgren was/is an Apple developer. We used to see him at DubDub.

Had a software shop, called “Utopia Softworks.” I don’t think much came from it.

I think a lot of early electronic musicians were quite engineering-savvy, as their equipment was pretty intense.

There's pretty good amount of programmer that are musician I think. _Correct me if I'm wrong_ but I think there's an interview with Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead that says he obsessed with computers and played around with BASIC when he was younger.

There are a lot of programmers that dabble as musicians, and vice versa. Licklidder was a pretty good guitarist, I am told.

There are also a lot of visual artists who dabble in programming, and vice versa. Programming is an incredibly creative activity so I can see why there is overlap.

Jordan Rudess of Dream Theater published a couple apps to the App Store. I'm not sure whether he actually wrote them or served as a product manager and had a contract programmer implement them, but they're pretty cool.

Even more old-school, there's Tom Scholz of Boston, who was an MIT-trained engineer who built his own amplifiers and founded a company to market them. A bunch of his inventions are probably familiar to most guitarists: all Rockman branded pedals and other equipment, the Power Soak and Yellow Jackets to get saturated tube amp sound at low volumes, etc.

Lots of folks are on this list!

Todd Rundgren said “If it weren't for my musical career, I probably would have ended up attending college to become a computer programmer.”

This was me - made websites for my band, friends bands, made ticketing website for promoter friend, made websites for custom gear companies, ended up in a events startup then to the moon. Yes CS degree happened in the middle of all that too.

To think that (relatively?) small things like that could jumpstart a career... I'll be honest, I'm still young and I wonder what kind of journey is ahead of me

My only advice is, just play around, and try different things. Freelance for a while and charge terribly low amounts of money. Partner up with different types of people on ventures - yea this requires trust and you will get grifted from time to time.

But through it all, you're learning and building skills. Hell you're having fun.

Maximize for "f**ing around and finding out"

I bet he made all of his commits in his garage.

It's where he feels safe,

And no one cares I commit on main

Would be nice if Autechre open sourced all the crazy max/map stuff they worked on.

Typo, max/msp

According to his `new-albums` repo [1]:

> I've been learning programming since 2015

So something he’s picked up fairly recently.

[1] https://github.com/riverscuomo/new-albums

I know time is relative but I realized 2015 is 9 years ago ? Made me feel old.

It only gets worse. Soon a “recent” year will have been decades ago

Not entirely surprised. This is the same guy who took time off from being a famous rock star to finish his undergrad at Harvard "just for fun". He probably codes for fun too.

Travis Morrison from The Dismemberment Plan also ended up as a programmer.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and...

Love me some D-Plan, that's pretty wild. The Ice of Boston is muddy...

It's fascinating to see how a prominent musician uses coding and custom software in their daily and professional life

The headline is bad. No idea who that is and it sounds like they work there.

Maybe:

The lead singer of Weezer has an active Github account.

tbf, if you don't recognize his name, you likely wouldn't recognize the band either.

Seeing that activity chart reminds me of TJ Holowaychuk (a.k.a., visionmedia). He was such a prolific and inspirational guy. I remember going through college over a decade ago and looking up to him. He accomplished so much, but still made it a point to enjoy hobbies outside of programming. Dude was a great role model.

What's going up with him? Looks like he shut down his own company Apex (logs aggregator) and stopped doing open source work. His twitter is also somewhat inactive.

He's taking a "break", he's doing photography now, posts a lot on Instagram under @tjholowaychuk

From Mexican Fender, by Weezer:

  She got a bachelor's degree in physics and a job in computer programming
  That's pretty cool for a singer in a band so I knew we would end up jamming

He was studying CS while touring. Here is a project demo he worked on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kf4-zMNqq8

About a year ago, he played at a super intimate (and random) spot in LA. He pitched his GitHub during the show and I had a cool conversation with him about his code afterwards. Not a huge Weezer fan or anything (a friend invited me to the thing since she didn't want to go alone), but he seemed like a neat dude.

Liking Rivers Cuomo for his code and not for Weezer is the most Weezer thing I've ever heard

No one hates Weezer more than Weezer fans.

Never been a big Weezer fan either, but I saw them at the Adobe Max conference party in LA in 2011 (literally a day or two before Steve Jobs passed; I learned of it at the airport going home). No idea if his/their tech interests had anything to do with it, or if it was just another gig.

For whatever it's worth, there was a recent submission on Marlon Brando being a crypto-techie too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213150 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/marlon-brando-was-a-secr...

He’s been at it for a while. He was a guest on this kind of buried 2021 episode of Talk Python to Me.

https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to...

IIRC, he had not started using source code management at the time. When he says this, the other guests describe why he might want to start using git.

I do videos on YouTube where I take an improvised look at open source code bases. I've had it on my list to do one of the Rivers Cuomo repos, but I haven't figured out which one I want to look at.

I used to play his Weezer wordle game. It was pretty good. I believe it was written in Flutter. The game seems to be defunct now.

He has been featured on the Talk Python podcast, https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to.... A great episode!

One of the main two guys working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrecord is a French rapper.

His code was a lot better when he was pairing with Matt Sharp.

Presumably the private repos are for this website: https://riverscuomo.com/home

I like the way he comments on what he repos are. He types them as if he is standing over your shoulder, pointing at the screen and explaining them to you excitedly.

Now we need Taylor SWIFT to develop iOS apps....

Who dat?

Let me Google that for you?

As I'm not really a Weezer fan, I didn't recognize the name, but just looking at his profile tells you right away who he his. His employer is literally listed as Weezer.

Yes, and who is Weezer? This says nothing.

A famous rock band

Who is anyone? Tons of conversations on HN come with an implied understanding of the subject being discussed.

Whaaa... I mean I sort of knew he was a "nerd", but not to this extent... at all!

I guess some people are good at multiple things and others (me) aren't good at any.

He's an extremely smart guy, so I'm not that surprised.

Somehow this isn't surprising given their music.

Wow, he has a better commit graph than me. Very impressive, especially considering that Weezer is still active. Time to step up my game.

If you've paid any attention to the lyrics from the past 12 or 14 Weezer albums you'd not be surprised that he's quite adept at Markov chains.

Can you enlighten those of us who haven't? Or is it just the repetition and pattern-nature of the songs?

Sure:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-weezer...

Wow, that read made me feel a little sad. It works for them obviously, but sounds a bit like everyone besides Rivers may as well be a session musician that he happen to be predictable enough for him to work with.

Brave New World

The drummer seems cool enough; I guess he likes the paychecks,

This is an example of what “software will eat the world” means to me.

Say it ain’t so..

Related interview from a few years ago:

Rockstar programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25217819

Reply on news.ycombinator.com