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acarabotton Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

I'm working on a book about using WebViews for cross-platform music software GUIs. It has a particular focus on performance, which I gave a talk about at the Audio Developer Conference last year:

https://www.arthurcarabott.com/adc-2024/

As part of it I am building a code generator to generate shared type definitions in C++ and TypeScript (plus serialization, comparison and cloning).

acarabotton SuperSonic: SuperCollider in the Browser

This is a huge achievement, props to Sam!

SuperCollider is great for audio / music work, but it was always difficult to distribute work created in it.

As a prototyper I use the WebAudio API most of the time, as if you send someone a .app, they won't open it, but if you send them a link they have no excuse.

acarabotton What do you think about using a game engine for UI?

The Blockhead Digital Audio Workstation uses Godot for UI: https://www.patreon.com/colugomusic

acarabotton An Interview with Lola De La Mata about tinnitus

Sounds like these could be Otoacoustic Emissions

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK580483/#:~:text=Otoaco....

acarabotton Blackmagic Camera for iPhone

This doesn't totally solve the issue, but if you unlock your phone's orientation, rotate to landscape, then go to settings, you'll find a "lock current orientation" setting.

acarabotton Temptations of an open-source Chrome extension developer (2021)

Another extension creator here, I've been getting more and more of these emails recently. I just checked, and my extension [1] now has a "Featured" badge, which I guess explains this uptick.

No intention of "monetizing" as there is no non-shady way to monetize this feature. I perhaps don't maintain it as much as I could (sorry Windows and Linux users), but on the upside it is so little work that I'm never tempted.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-to-windowpopup...

acarabotton Why do new cars look like wet putty?

For context, this is a fashion newsletter so the writing style reflects that world

> […] the newsletter’s intense voice, which may read like a parody of a neurotically online men’s style writer

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/style/inventing-a-new-lan...

acarabotton Ask HN: What are your “scratch own itch” projects?

I created a Chrome extension to add a keyboard shortcut that moves your current tab to a new window:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-to-windowpopup...

acarabotton Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone

You might like (Extrmpore author) Andrew Sorensen’s piano live coding:

https://youtu.be/bq-260NUw5o

acarabotton Ask HN: Working in tech for climate?

Worth a read:

http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

acarabotton Ask HN: How did you increase your UX skills?

You don’t need to build a product in order to user test. You can take an existing product, watch a totally new user use it for the first time, and learn a huge amount.

I suggest doing this for a type of software that you know really well, as you’ll be more surprised by your own assumptions.

acarabotton Ask HN: Is it just me or do 99% of SWE jobs offers seem completely pointless?

I work at a music software company. I’ve been playing music my whole life, my work feels like an extension of that.

An observation: a lot of programmers get into it because they are interested in programming itself. Entering the industry can be frustrating because it is no longer about programming, it’s a means to an end.

Nothing wrong with being interested in programming (it’s what makes you good at it) but it helps to have an end you care about as well.

acarabotton Ask HN: What are some tools / libraries you built yourself?

I think you would like http://thi.ng/hdom

acarabotton Ohm – A library and language for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, etc.

I interned with the PI behind Ohm (Alex Warth) and one of his reasons for using the browser was simple:

“If I send someone an executable, they will never download it. If I send them a URL, they have no excuse.”

acarabotton Euclid – Scientific calculator for iOS/macOS

Tydlig is the calculator app that has been the most useful re-design/re-imagining of a calculator for me. Somewhere between a calculator and a spreadsheet, with a nice UX.

http://tydligapp.com/

acarabotton Principles of Data Oriented Programming

Adding a version field can be useful to avoid this. Particularly if your entire state is stored in one object.

acarabotton Music Grid

https://learningmusic.ableton.com/

acarabotton Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

Lila, the sequel to Zen... had an even bigger impact on me.

I also found some of the ideas easier to take away and hold onto.

acarabotton Show HN: Web DSP audio editor

This is great!

I especially like that you've included a share mechanism. I built an audio dsp playground before, but didn't spend enough time on it to provide that.

Are you going to add a discovery page to browse people's creations?

acarabotton Show HN: Web Audio DSP Playground

Strange, as this is accounted for: https://github.com/acarabott/audio-dsp-playground/blob/maste...

OS / Chrome version? Were you clicking the start button or using the key command?

acarabotton Show HN: Web Audio DSP Playground

Had a crack at it but it throws NotSupportedException in both Firefox and Safari. There are also some parts that don't conform to the spec and break. Filing an issue...

acarabotton Show HN: Web Audio DSP Playground

Great idea! Have implemented it, refresh and check it out.

acarabotton Get started making music

I think this is a great idea as part of a learning tool, being able to simultaneously visualise a musical idea on a score, in guitar TAB, woodwind fingering, piano roll etc.

I've got a plan on the backburner to do something like this using Ohm https://ohmlang.github.io/

acarabotton Caffe2: Open Source Cross-Platform Machine Learning Tools

Is bringing the OpenCL caffe backend[1] to Caffe2 on the roadmap?

[1] https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/tree/opencl

acarabotton It is time to unlink the “Backspace” – Browser Back shortcut (2012)

I never, ever have the problem of clicking on the wrong link, or going to a page I don't like. Why should I be punished by all of these incompetent people who need to go BACK so often?

acarabotton Take remote-control of a robot roaming Tate Britain gallery in London – live now

Looks like there's a livestream: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/9511657/events/3253169

acarabotton Show HN: Tab to Window - Chrome Extension to pop tabs with key command

Check out the options page, spent quite a bit of time tweaking the UI there.

Source code available here: https://github.com/acarabott/tabToWindow

acarabotton Introduction to Guitar

As a guitar teacher I recommend the basic Yamaha Pacifica models, 012 and 112, to students.

They are reliably well made, and fairly no-frills, you get a lot for your money.

acarabotton Show HN: Teoria.js - Music theory for JavaScript

I made a quick fork to add audio to this using the Web Audio API (webkit only, tested on Chrome and Safari).

http://acarabott.github.com/teoria/