MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cricalix | 2025-12-06 14:10:14+00:00
On the note of Jupyter notebooks and version control - there was a talk at this year's Pycon Ireland about using a built in cleaner for notebooks when committing the JSON (discard the cell results), and then dropping the whole lot into a CI system utilising remote execution (and Bazel or similar) to run and cache the outputs. Was a talk from CodeThink. No video up yet though. Scenario was reproducible notebooks for processing data from a system under test.
by vanschelven | 2025-12-06 14:10:32+00:00
Reminds me of this:

"""On the first day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.

Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo."""

from https://www.thehuntingphotographer.com/blog/qualityvsquantit...
by senfiaj | 2025-12-06 14:11:24+00:00
I think what definitely has improved, is the survival. We are less likely to starve, die in infancy / childhood, have longer life expectancy, etc. In the past there were also stresses. But I think the stresses were different then. They were less chronic and were more occasional instead (although probably more intense). However, after an acute stress you had a lot of time to recover. Evolutionary speaking, our brains have been adapted for that. It was necessary for our survival.

However, nowadays the stresses are different, they are more chronic / frequent. You have less time to recover from them. This is partially the result of our more complex and fast paced society / economy. Our brains are not well adapted for the modern work / educational environments and to the stresses associated with them, despite they are usually milder in intensity. Today's stress is more like to death by a thousand small cuts. Nowadays people have more anxiety, depression and suicidality. Here is a good video that talks about the modern stress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1A45ShcMo .
by Noaidi | 2025-12-06 14:11:44+00:00
> BTW, there's research that shows that schizotypy (schizotypal/schizophrenia) is sort of the opposite of autism.

And I disagree with that. There is a wide overlap of symptoms in all mood disorders. People with ASD show many traits of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper might change your mind:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8931527/
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-06 14:11:55+00:00
"I made a camera from an optical mouse. 30x30 pixels in 64 glorious shades of gray!"

I wonder why so many shades of grey? Fancy!

(Yeah, the U.K. spelling of "grey" looks more "gray" to these American eyes.)

Hilarious too that this article is on Petapixel. (Centipixel?)
by l-albertovich | 2025-12-06 14:11:59+00:00
Something I hadn't thought about is, could it be that electric cars are not perceived as a threat due to the lack / different of noise, vibration and heat when compared to a combustion car?

I know animals nap under cars all the time but at least with "regular" cars they seemed to be more aware of the danger.

I'm not talking about waymo, self driving, human in the loop or any of that here, I'm just curious because I wonder if the same thing would've happened with a combustion engine and if there are any "easy wins" in terms of deterrence.
by visarga | 2025-12-06 14:13:13+00:00
Yesterday I stumbled onto a well written comment on reddit, it was a bit contrarian, but good. Then I was curious and looked at their comment history and found it was a one month old account with many comments of similar length and structure. I put a LLM to read that feed and they spotted LLM writing, and the argument? it was displaying too broad a knowledge across topics. Yes, it gave itself up by being too smart. Does that count as Turing test fail?
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-12-06 14:13:51+00:00
In my family it's been difficult for some to accept my sister's autism diagnosis because Rain Man is the prototype of autism they have in their heads. Younger family members who have been exposed to classmates who are on the Autism spectrum have been accepting of the diagnosis as their image of autism is very different than the one older family members have. Good thing is despite some not believing in the accuracy of the label, they're still supportive of her.
by coldtea | 2025-12-06 14:14:11+00:00
>However, I think we should be cautious in saying 'over-weigh' and 'under-weigh' because I really do think that there may be a real normative undertone when we say 'over-weigh'. I think it needlessly elevates what the typical individual experiences into what we should consider to be the norm and, by implicit extension, the 'correct way' of doing cognition.

No biggie, there's a real normative undertone to the world in general too.

Norm itself means "what the majority does" or the socially (i.e. majority) accepted yardstick ("norma" in latin was a literal yardstick-like tool).

It's not about the typical person _always_ doing things in a better way, or the autistic person always doing things differently. It's about the distribution of typical vs atypical behavior. So, it's not very useful to characterize such atypical behavior better or worse based on absolute moral or technical judgement. Morality changes over time, cultures, and even social groups, to a bigger or smaller degree.

If, however, we use "degree of comformity with majority behaviors/expectations" as the measurement, autistics do perform worse on that.
by elbear | 2025-12-06 14:14:12+00:00
I never said Rust makes guarantees that code is panic-free. I said that Rust provides more safety guarantees than C. The Result type is one of them because you have to handle the error case explicitly. If you don't use unwrap.

Also, when I say safety guarantees, I'm not talking about safe rust. I'm talking about Rust features that prevent bugs, like the borrow checker, types like Result and many others.
by jt2190 | 2025-12-06 14:14:16+00:00
This is the wrong framing: We all have degrees of “diagnosable” traits, it’s only when those traits become problematic do we need to seek help. For example, obsessive tendencies can help you stick with a tough problem or they can become an unhealthy fixation.

Also, if someone is mean they are mean: Diagnosis is not a “get out of jail free” card for bad behavior.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-06 14:14:22+00:00
> it's very difficult to correctly estimate what it will actually cost to change something once you decided it's required - based on current reality where it is not. Mass production and clever cost reductions resulting from the normal commercial pressures tend to drive down costs

Difficult, but not impossible.

What are calculable and do NOT scale down is cost for compliance documentation and processes. Changing from 1 form of documentation to 4 forms of documentation has measurable cost, that will be imposed forever.

> It's also difficult to anticipate all benefits from a good change without trying it.

That's not a great argument, because it can be counterbalanced by the equally true opposite: it's difficult to anticipate all downsides to a change without trying it.

> Remember when you were allowed to smoke cigarettes on aeroplanes?

Remember when you could walk up to a gate 5 minutes before a flight, buy a ticket, and fly?

The current TSA security theater has had some benefits, but it's also made using airports far worse as a traveler.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-06 14:14:34+00:00
Great to see a discussion of Greg Kuperburg’s games. I love playing PC-MAN for 3 minutes or so with my oldest son. Perfect amount of time and attention.

I’m currently busy disassembling PC-MAN and trying to cram it into 16kB so it could be run on an original PC loaded from cassette. The game was distributed as a DOS booter and boo floppies required 32k, but PC-MAN is about 17k in size.
by spectralfriend | 2025-12-06 14:15:08+00:00
Do you think neurotypical people often go, "I would like to spend significant time and money to get an autism diagnosis"?

I don't think it's particularly common. When I went through my dx, I was really hoping for adhd because then I could get meds, but my doc and all my screenings were like, "definitely not adhd, definitely autism".

So, maybe you are seeing rising diagnosis rates and considering that too easy? If encourage you to think about why you feel this way.
by carlmr | 2025-12-06 14:15:42+00:00
>enjoy and appreciate something on a daily basis is beneficial to overall satisfaction with life.

I'll couch this in a warning that you need to have the money for it, but for me an espresso machine and good grinder was such a great investment.

It's this thing I appreciate a lot every day.

If you're a drip coffee person I guess this won't apply and you can save a few thousand. Although I'd still recommend getting a grinder (not necessarily an expensive espresso worthy one) and good beans then.
by Yoric | 2025-12-06 14:15:43+00:00
Yeah, there's a mismatch in vocabulary between Go and Rust developers.

In Go, `if err != nil { return nil, fmt.Errorf(...) }` is considered handling an error.

In Rust, the equivalent `.context(...)?` is considered passing an error. Handling it is about finding out what happened and doing something about it.
by fuzzy2 | 2025-12-06 14:16:02+00:00
To all of these I can only say: in the hands of a domain-expert user, AI tools really shine.

For example, artists can create incredible art, and so can AI artists. But me, I just can't do it. Whatever art I have generated will never have the creative spark. It will always be slop.

The goalposts haven't moved at all. However, the narrative would rather not deal with that.
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-06 14:16:12+00:00
And my question to you is “why is that substantially different than writing the correct algorithm to do it”? Im arguing its a myopic view of what we are going to call “intelligence”. And it ignores how human thought works in the same way by using abstractions to move to the next level of reasoning.

In my opinion, being able to write the code to do the thing is effectively the same exact thing as doing the thing in terms of judging if its “able to do” that thing. Its functionality equivalent for evaluating what the “state of the art” is, and honestly is naive to what these models even are. If the model hid the tool calling in the background instead, and only showed you its answer would we say its more intelligent? Because that’s essentially how a lot of these things work already. Because again, the actual “model” is just a text autocomplete engine and it generates from left to right.
by Thorrez | 2025-12-06 14:16:54+00:00
It depends on your definition of "charity". If you're talking about Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Wikipedia says:

>The organization states that it is the official U.S. charity authorized to collect donations for IDF soldiers.

>Charity evaluators have generally rated the organization favorably.[9]

>The organization is recognized as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity in the United States and has been tax-exempt since July 1983.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_the_Israel_Defense_...
by visarga | 2025-12-06 14:17:25+00:00
Not always, you can improve the loop by putting something real inside, like, a code execution tool, a search engine, a human, other AIs or an API. As long as the model can make use of that external environment its data can improve. By the same logic a human isolated from other humans for a long time might also be in a situation of going crazy.

Practical example - using LLMs to create deep research reports. It pulls over 500 sources into a complex analysis, and after all that compiling and contrasting it generates an article with references, like a wiki page. That text is probably superior to most of its sources in quality. It does not trust any one source completely, it does not even pretend to present the truth, it only summarizes the distribution of information it found on the topic. Imagine scaling wikipedia 1000x by deep-reporting every conceivable topic.
by Lambdanaut | 2025-12-06 14:17:26+00:00
As a schizotypal person, I'm unsure how more people aren't exhibiting paranoid schizophrenic symptoms in this wildly untrustworthy digital age.

Yesterday a good friend reached out to me on a new phone number to wish me happy holidays, she shortly afterwards asked me to donate to a fund to help her sick cat.

Even though this person had a similar typing style, the unrecognized phone number made me feel paranoid that it may be an LLM attempting to get money from me in an automated scam, so I made the choice to call my friend to get more evidence via voice.

It turned out to be my friend(or an even more elaborate ruse using voice capture and mass data-mining tech, but that seemed extremely unlikely, at least for another couple years).

My brother had full on shizpphrenia, and would often call family members asking them to provide evidence that they are who they say they are and not government robots. It was an obvious delusion when he was alive, but now that we're in a world where that sort of evidence-gathering is no longer extreme, paranoia is the new normal.

Our usual safeguards of identity are breaking down, and you can bet that large corporations with an eye on the coin are going to swoop in to establish new, more secure methods of identification.
by resoluteteeth | 2025-12-06 14:18:22+00:00
Even if you don't think it has validity as a single disorder, autism is at least diagnosed in a way that's fairly consistent between clinicians using ADOS.

I'm more dubious of clinicians who like to pick random dubious rare disorders that people can't even agree about the basic description of like schizoid out of the DSM like the author of this article.
Show HN: WhispaQA, the intent-driven QA tool
by j_mao | 2025-12-06 14:18:40+00:00
Hi HN,

QA engineering keep facing several hurdles when it comes to quality and time. From Reddit subgroup to ycombinator blogs, QA pain-points are yet to be solved as I navigate through several pages. While big players like SmartBear, BrowserStack are building innovative test solutions, a larger part of QA workflow remain unsolved. https://peterblanco.com/startup/quiet-crisis-in-qa-more-code...

QA engineers hate: - typing reproduction steps - taking screenshots - explaining what happened - capturing network logs manually - writing clean bug reports - forgetting to write down something important

WhispaQA records interactions, intents not content, understands flow, interprets them in natural language, allow user to select mode of capture, write clean reports based on what it learns from a session, that automates 50-60% of manual tasks in QA. QA engineers don't have to write down steps, flow, manually log network activities, take screenshots, etc., when they can launch an assistant for that

Your thoughts?
by close04 | 2025-12-06 14:18:49+00:00
But that’s a very long way to say that yes, BMW is to blame for making something that’s hard to repair and doesn’t do anything about it because it makes them money. Other companies got it far better so your explanation is superficial.

When a system “malfunctions” only to the benefit of one side it’s not “an issue” as much as design.

Why don’t you run the same careful reasoning against any hostile action from any big tech company and see how it sounds? All the actions of Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon are just the result of unfortunate misalignment between teams.

If a flipped coin always lands how the person flipping wants it to land, it’s loaded, not misalignment between hand and coin.

I’ve seen how the sausage is made in corporations with more money and higher stakes than BMW. Once you get off the ground and see more of the bigger picture, you can’t unsee the hostile decisions that are compartmentalized from the people who just see the tiny bit in front of them and it’s easier to sell them that they aren’t doing anything wrong and it’s not a problem.
by scythe | 2025-12-06 14:19:12+00:00
My last two televisions both came from the "Sceptre" line at Walmart which seemed to be the last holdout of non-smart TVs. I don't know if they're still holding the line; the model I checked just now says it has "V-chip" but doesn't say anything about a "smart TV" operating system or any of that nonsense. It's not very well-advertised but it's still around. I don't know of any way to find a normal TV that isn't from Walmart or a thrift store, though.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-06 14:19:23+00:00
Related? Blondihacks [1] has been working through machining a live-steam powered scale locomotive.

Has it been three years now? She easily has another year of work ahead of her before she has live, rolling stock. Wild dedication to a project that could perhaps consume half a decade of your life.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@Blondihacks
Why "all-in-one" productivity tools confuse new users
by suffei771 | 2025-12-06 14:19:28+00:00
I’ve been working on an all-in-one productivity model for a while — the idea is simple: instead of switching between email, calendar, tasks, and notes, everything happens in one unified action layer.

What surprised me wasn’t the technical challenge, but the user reactions.

Power users absolutely love it.

They immediately get the concept. They think in workflows, not apps. To them, “summarize this and turn it into an event” feels obvious and natural.

But new users often freeze.

Even though the interface is technically simpler, they ask things like:

“What category is this tool?”

“Where’s the starting point?”

“Is this replacing my email or my notes?”

“Why doesn’t it look like a normal productivity app?”

It made me realize something uncomfortable: the more integrated a tool becomes, the harder it is for people to form a mental model. And without a clear mental model, onboarding becomes a wall.

A few patterns keep repeating:

People rely heavily on familiar UI metaphors (tabs, inboxes, folders).

Removing those reduces complexity for some users but increases cognitive load for others.

New users want “features”; power users want “flows”.

Integration increases value but decreases clarity.

I’m curious if others have run into this: Have you built or used something that people love after trying it, but struggle to understand before trying it?

How did you communicate the value? Did metaphors help? Onboarding flows? Videos? Something else?

Happy to share more from my experiments — I’d love to hear your experiences too.
by michaelmrose | 2025-12-06 14:19:35+00:00
Does the ability to verbally detect gotchas in short conversations dealing only with text on a screen or white board really map to stronger candidates?

In actual situations you have documentation, editor, tooling, tests, and are a tad less distracted than when dealing with a job interview and all the attendant stress. Isn't the fact that he actually produces quality code in real life a stronger signal of quality?
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-06 14:20:42+00:00
It's not disparaging to point out a fact. The whole delete comment content but keep the comment and then add a reply comment with wordy reason for deletion of comment content is a shambles. And irrespective of whether it's on every subreddit or not, doesn't make it less so. It's basically just spam at this point.

My solution would be to simply delete the comment and PM the OP. If another user had already replied, replace the original content with a *short* reason for deletion, and PM the OP, leaving the replies in place unless they needed deleting.
by Noaidi | 2025-12-06 14:21:08+00:00
I would say people who are not as disabled as I am should not get a diagnosis. My condition is obvious. I was hospitalized several times and now I cannot work, I have one friend, and I am homeless living in a minivan.

I had one good PDoc who helped me, with my genetics, not to diagnose me, but to help me find what helped me and my specific symptoms. Diagnosis is not as helpful as looking at your own symptoms and own history and using that to find what helps you.
by chrisweekly | 2025-12-06 14:21:12+00:00
Related tangent: Platformatic's NodeJS "Watt" server^1 supports parallelization with kernel-level load balancing across CPU cores. It looks like a game-changer for Node performance and efficiency in production. Apparently the new AWS "Lambda Managed Instances" do something similar (tho I'm short on details).

1. https://www.platformatichq.com/watt
by Sophira | 2025-12-06 14:21:16+00:00
Just because most advertising is abusive doesn't mean that all of it is. The popups that Steam shows when you open it are definitely still advertising, as are the recommendations for other games and things like that.

Ironically, this is exactly the reason why most other ad networks go to such lengths to track you, because they think they want to show you ads you'd find relevant and thus worthwhile to click on.

Unfortunately, the way the ad networks go about doing this means that they're actually incentivising making money by any means necessary over actually showing relevant ads, so you get ads that are psychologically abusive, full-screen ads that pop up in the middle of a game, ad networks selling off the data they have on you, etc.

That is why I will permanently have an adblocker - since this is how things work now - but why I don't care nearly as strongly about the Steam ads.
by conartist6 | 2025-12-06 14:21:57+00:00
If anything this just kinda suggests to me that the diagnostic categories are almost completely random/useless. It's just a set of pigeonholes made by people whose goal is to have a pigeonhole for every kind of thing so that the world doesn't seem messy and complicated anymore.

But the one thing we know for sure it's that the world is more complex than even this set of 10 pigeonholes. These are more like good insults for people. Haha, a loner, that guy's a schizo! The clinical coldness is almost a perfect mirror for the way we express personal cruelty to others. To reduce them to a factoid, an epithet. It's no wonder people want to reclaim these words as terms of identity, of pride, of nuanced meaning.