Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
A music producer is working on a synth engine in Python and C++ that creates sound from math expressions. The project is inspired by the Desmos graphing calculator and has a unique sound. The producer is seeking advice on whether to open source the project or pitch it to big names in the industry.
- ▪The synth engine is capable of producing a wide range of sounds, from musical to experimental.
- ▪The project is currently running on an M4 Mac mini with 256 voices of polyphony.
- ▪The synth engine has a high level of expressivity, mainly via half-pedaling and macro knobs.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 1,316 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49233423 |
| Publication time | Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:23:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-09T17:50:47.802Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-09T17:50:48.338Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YDSpFU4usUHU · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
iI am working on a synth engine (music synthesizer) in Python and C++ not a developer; music producer, classical pianist, and occasional NI Reaktor programmer.It creates sound from math expressions which were inspired by the Desmos graphing calculator.The sounds are mainly of the FM/DX7 taste.i can't decide whether to show my progress on video by hiding or showing the expressions LLM(s) and myself "discovered".It sometimes sounds extremely musical and sometimes very dirty and experimental, what's normal for frequency modulation.Please help me decide: show all and open source or continue working on it and pitch it to some big names. ;-) I have the feeling it has strong potential for prototyping, as well as taking the role of a keyboard engine.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.