Hacker News: hspeiser

New comment by hspeiser in "I built a tool that matches songs to driving speed"

hspeiser — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:08:06 +0000

Have you ever walked or run to the beat of a song, or tapped along without even thinking about it?

This morning I was driving on the highway listening to Paranoid by Black Sabbath, cruising around 75 mph, and I noticed the beat of the song lined up perfectly with the lane markings passing by my car.

I started wondering if I could do that intentionally, so I skipped through a bunch of songs trying to match the beat to the lines (I learned pretty quickly that I couldn’t).

Then I wondered if this would work on any highway, and sure enough, there’s actually a standard for the length and spacing of lane markings in the US.

Anyway, I wanted to cheat, so I built this.

You type in a song, and it tells you what speed to drive so the beat lines up with the lane markings.

It uses the Deezer API to get a song’s BPM. If there’s no BPM available, it takes a sample from the audio preview and tries to estimate the BPM using PercivalBpmEstimator. I tried my best to minimize errors, but every once in a while the BPM of a song is still a little off.

Enjoy cruising to the beat, everyone!

I built a tool that matches songs to driving speed

hspeiser — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:08:06 +0000

Article URL: https://dashbeat.vercel.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480299

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by hspeiser in "Life saving / first aid posters"

hspeiser — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:19:44 +0000

These are so funny I love the style

New comment by hspeiser in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

hspeiser — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:04:41 +0000

Pretty ironic that these kids are failing a non major requirement called "the beauty and joy of computer science"

Driftwm: What if your window manager worked like a whiteboard?

hspeiser — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:57:30 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/malbiruk/driftwm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352768

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by hspeiser in "Hacker News front page as a site"

hspeiser — Tue, 26 May 2026 01:10:19 +0000

The inception effect here is hilarious. Watching this get its own front page while the subtitle lags behind with the previous top posts is weirdly funny.

New comment by hspeiser in "GenCAD"

hspeiser — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:46:00 +0000

Took isometric screenshots of drawings from very simple parts I made in onshape and imported them. They were black and white and very clear.

New comment by hspeiser in "Click (2016)"

hspeiser — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:43:45 +0000

thats pretty creepy. I find it unnerving that they know exactly where my cursor is.

New comment by hspeiser in "GenCAD"

hspeiser — Mon, 18 May 2026 06:27:37 +0000

I spent a few hours trying to get this to work, and I couldn’t get it to produce usable results on anything except the training data, even with very simple drawings.

I noticed in the GitHub that they mention it is only around 60% reliable even on their own training data, but the image shown on the front page feels pretty misleading. I made 10 images that were very similar in complexity to the examples shown, and even after running it around 50 times on each image, not a single one worked correctly. In the rare cases where it produced something, the output was completely wrong.

This seems pretty misleading in its current state and definitely needs more work.

New comment by hspeiser in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

hspeiser — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:16:15 +0000

What about french toast? I feel like there is a lot of egg in it, might place it near the bottom of the abyss.

We Need to Talk: The AI Voice Game

hspeiser — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 07:28:47 +0000

Article URL: https://civai.org/talk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792152

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: Ayar Labs, how big a deal are optical chiplets?

hspeiser — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 08:46:06 +0000

Ayar Labs (optical I/O between chiplets / plug in photonics) keeps popping up in my feed and I’m trying to get an intuition for how disruptive this actually is for datacenters, GPU fabrics, and the whole “scale-out vs scale-up” thing.

My naive take: optics can massively cut latency and power for long links and make remote GPU pooling/aggregation more practical than copper/NVLink over short board traces. That sounds huge for multi-GPU training clusters and server-to-server connectivity. But the devil’s obviously in packaging, protocol compatibility (PCIe/NVLink replacement?), yield, cost, and whether system software + accelerator vendors actually adopt it.

A few specific questions I’d love to hear opinions on:

If Ayar style optical I/O works at scale, who wins/loses? (hypothesis: Nvidia + hyperscalers win big; PCIe vendors and legacy board vendors get squeezed)

Is this mostly a server-to-server play (long links) or will it meaningfully replace short-range NVLink like fabrics on the same board/slot?

Biggest practical blockers right now, is it photonics fab/yield, thermal/packaging, managing protocol semantics, or the ecosystem inertia?

Any counterintuitive downsides people see (e.g., reliability, debugability, supply chain pain, or unexpected latency/cost traps)?

tl;dr: optics are obviously attractive, but is this a niche performance optimization or a foundational shift in how compute is networked?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45832942

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Microsoft discovers new state of matter for quantum computing

hspeiser — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 19:24:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/microsoft-quantum-breakthrough-promises-to-usher-in-the-next-era-of-computing-in-years-not-decades/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43106283

Points: 1

# Comments: 0