Hacker News Reader

montagon Chiptune.app

You can do this by right-clicking the currently playing song title in the footer and copying the link. Dang, I wish this was more discoverable.

montagon Chiptune.app

Very interesting, had no idea when I bought the domain. Cool project, too.

montagon Chiptune.app

I had a rationale for this redirect behavior, but not sure it matches user expectations. The URL will reflect the browse location, but not the playing track...otherwise the URL gets too clunky. You can always copy the playing track from the link icon.

montagon Chiptune.app

Check out Modizer by yoyofr. (Hope it's still on the App Store)

montagon Chiptune.app

GMGSx Plus is basically a Roland SC-55 sound-alike, except with the Piano patch swapped with a nicer one from GeneralUser GS. Good tradeoff of size and sound quality.

There's a huge variance in Soundfont quality, and the craft put in by Soundfont authors to program all the modulators properly makes a huge difference. GeneralUser is one of the best. https://schristiancollins.com/generaluser.php

montagon Chiptune.app

You are not blind! This is my personal bias showing, I should really add SID modules to the catalog.

montagon Chiptune.app

Also check out the Soundfont conversion - not perfectly accurate, but sounds nice https://chiptune.app/?play=Nintendo%2064%20(SoundFont%20MIDI...

(I spent entirely too much time on these conversions...)

montagon The internet is unusable now

I started to read, but the cookie dialog popped up, covering the entire screen, and I gave up due to an overwhelming sense of irony.

montagon Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer

It's not just that the edges of the screen are too far, it's that they're at an oblique viewing angle instead of perpendicular to the eye.

montagon How to Finetune GPT-Like Large Language Models on a Custom Dataset

Right. You feed the text chunks (from the matched embeddings) to a generative LLM to do the extractive/summarization part.

montagon Turn ideas into music with MusicLM

My hot take is that music is vastly underdetermined by text prompts, leaving too much control up to the model, so it's kind of doomed to produce Muzak.

montagon One Day You'll Find Yourself

Yeah, some of them are too snarky. One day you’ll find yourself writing etiquette advice…

montagon Deluge – sequencer, synthesizer and sampler – goes open source

Super cool. I wish Novation would do this with the Peak and Summit. Their firmware development slowed when Chris Huggett passed, and maybe the community could help out.

montagon Vaonis Hyperia: $45k digital telescope

According to the website, you can at least upgrade the image sensor. But let's be real, this thing ain't really for the hacker/DIY scene.

montagon Show HN: I've built a spectrogram analyzer web app

Looks like it says “mime type is not supported” on mobile Safari.

montagon Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

A website for playing sequenced music (video games, chiptunes, and MIDI files). macOS lost native MIDI playback a long time ago. And I like to listen "interactively," adjusting tempo, soloing instruments, stuff like that.

I have gone deep on a few problems, like converting Nintendo 64 to MIDI+soundfonts (there are tools for this, but nothing turn-key) or enabling support for Farbrausch V2 (a powerful but tiny synth engine). There's really no point other than to solve puzzles with a very salient musical reward at the end. https://github.com/mmontag/chip-player-js

montagon My product is my garden (2020)

Checks out. Bear Blog is based in South Africa (from the article).

montagon The Effects of Noise on Health (2022)

I used to live on Decatur street in SF, at near eye-level with the I80 overpass. I could not get out of there fast enough and don’t quite understand all the residential construction right next to highways. The tire dust is a serious problem too.

montagon Twitter's Recommendation Algorithm

Elon is addressing this in the Twitter Space right now. "It definitely shouldn't be dividing people into Republican and Democrats; that makes no sense[...] you've identified something we should be getting rid of right away."

montagon Show HN: RoboPianist, a piano playing robot simulation in the browser

It's not quite that simple; everyone has different dexterity and innervation (how strong is the wiring between your pinky and ring finger?)

montagon Show HN: Public transportation signage based on bloom filters (rough mockup)

I would love to understand this, but the readme seems to get ahead of itself. Can you frame the problem for 5 year olds who have never seen a bus stop (and who need to be reminded of what a bloom filter is)?

montagon Who is still inside the metaverse?

Same. Then I tried Overload VR (Descent remake) with the Oculus and lasted about 50 seconds...

montagon TinyVG – an alternative binary encoded vector graphics format

Yes, but the text version is "not required to be implemented by conforming implementations". The wrong tradeoff, in my opinion.

montagon Glaze: Protecting artists from style mimicry

Great link, in any case.

montagon Epic Games, others accuse Sundar Pichai of violating retention obligations

Yea, interesting, this is where we are.

But pushing this absurdity a bit further, what exactly makes it a voice call instead of a text chat? Either way, there are bits moving over wires.

Let's make a new "voice codec" that can trivially encode and decode to text (like Speak'n'spell phonemes) so that the bits on the wire technically represent some "audio data", but with much less overhead than the usual TTS.

montagon We can't all use AI. Someone has to generate the training data

Haha, great rebuttal.

The reward was mere internet points and the hardwired gratification that comes from social interaction.

People sometimes go to great lengths for non-monetary rewards.

montagon Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad

I wish we could let go of the idea that Google or Microsoft is liable - directly culpable - for the output of these incomprehensibly complex language models. This notion will impede progress.

montagon Play Counter Strike 1.6, with full multiplayer, in the browser

I, too, created a 3D model of my high school... a little "I am Spartacus" moment on Hacker News.

montagon Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers

Spotify has a much bigger library than YouTube Music? Hmm... Much as I love Spotify, it's always been at a disadvantage. The way I see it: on YouTube, content is "available by default" due to Content ID and the DMCA safe harbor, whereas on Spotify, content is "unavailable by default."