MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdjon | 2025-12-04 17:18:05+00:00
I will admit that I stopped reading the article because I think the article is completely mixing things up and honestly just did not feel like reading anymore of it.

I think very few people actually consider it a single condition. To the point that most people that I know, including myself, say that we are "somewhere on the spectrum" or some variant of that.

This isn't a post diagnoses understanding either, it is well understood by anyone I have talked to about this in the last 10ish years? (maybe less, I cant really pinpoint that).

While I feel like there is value for professionals to be more specific about it, from an everyday person prospective I feel like "Autism" is well enough understood to be not just a single thing. Enough so that some phrasing along the lines of "my tism is..." is somewhat commonplace.

The real problem is anti-science people joining the conversation, but splitting up Autism is not going to change that.

Edit: To be very clear here I am not trying to say that most people in general are saying "I am somewhere on the spectrum". I am saying that most people I know which a larger portion of the people I regularly talk to are also diagnosed.
by derekcheng08 | 2025-12-04 17:18:32+00:00
Super interesting how this arc has played out for Microsoft. They went from having this massive advantage in being an early OpenAI partner with early access to their models to largely losing the consumer AI space: Copilot is almost never mentioned in the same breath as Claude and ChatGPT. Though I guess their huge stake in OpenAI will still pay out massively from a valuation perspective.
by avidiax | 2025-12-04 17:18:38+00:00
I suspect that AI is in an "uncanny valley" where it is definitely good enough for some demos, but will fail pretty badly when deployed.

If it works 99% of the time, then a demo of 10 runs is 90% likely to succeed. Even if it fails, as long as it's not spectacular, you can just say "yeah, but it's getting better every day!", and "you'll still have the best 10% of your human workers in the loop".

When you go to deploy it, 99% is just not good enough. The actual users will be much more noisy than the demo executives and internal testers.

When you have a call center with 100 people taking 100 calls per day, replacing those 10,000 calls with 99% accurate AI means you have to clean up after 100 bad calls per day. Some percentage of those are going to be really terrible, like the AI did reputational damage or made expensive legally binding promises. Humans will make mistakes, but they aren't going to give away the farm or say that InsuranceCo believes it's cheaper if you die. And your 99% accurate-in-a-lab AI isn't 99% accurate in the field with someone with a heavy accent on a bad connection.

So I think that the parties all "want to believe", and to an untrained eye, AI seems "good enough" or especially "good enough for the first tier".
by Lammy | 2025-12-04 17:19:07+00:00
It's one of those things that may be technically possible but that doesn't matter unless a large enough percentage of other people are doing it too. Now that everything is geared to be realtime, anything most people will want to do on a computer will have those kind of traffic patterns. Even our popular application platforms are set up to encourage this pattern. Electron being a browser engine is geared around making network connections first and foremost.
by stickfigure | 2025-12-04 17:19:14+00:00
Microsoft is forcing the company to dogfood their own tools. They do this because they need the feedback so they can improve their tools, and they think these tools are a critical part of their future.

Presumably your new company isn't building AI tools, so they don't care what you use.

Imagine a developer in 1990s Microsoft saying "I want to use Borland C++ because it's better than the Microsoft IDE". Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but that's not the point.
by jklinger410 | 2025-12-04 17:19:42+00:00
> I think very few people actually consider it a single condition. To the point that most people that I know, including myself, say that we are "somewhere on the spectrum" or some variant of that.

Couldn't disagree more. The "autism is my super power" movement is borderline offensive to people dealing with severe or low functioning autism.

Dismissive, uninformed comment.
by botanrice | 2025-12-04 17:19:42+00:00
My personal POV is that I've been coding from scratch when coding for creativity. It has been wildly refreshing to go back to handwriting some cool little HTML/CSS/jQuery(sometimes) static websites.

From a professional & learning standpoint? Some good points in this thread:

- Realizing I still need to code from scratch when setting up initial architecture/directory stuff like kryptoyagi said. GitHub Copilot fails at this constantly (or I suck with it)

- cpach is right... I'd guess that a >50% majority of software devs worldwide are barely using AI lol. I graduated CS not even 10 years ago and like 7 out of 8 of my friends dont want to use it (or are working on old-ass repos/govt repos)

- aslansahn is spot on, I feel like this has been the most efficient approach. Plan everything out, have it go one-by-one for you, step in manually once in awhile to course correct if necessary
by timcobb | 2025-12-04 17:19:48+00:00
> it "culls" a whole load of otherwise working software

It doesn't cull it, you can still run Windows 3.11 or 98SE as well under emulation as on contemporary original hardware.

If anything, breaking backwards compatibility forces you to run your old software in an "authentic" environment, versus say, on some hardware/software combination tens of generations removed. Like, why would you want to run SkiFree in Windows 11, it feels like an abomination to me, almost disrespectful to the game. I don't want to see my old programs in Windows 11...
by RickJWagner | 2025-12-04 17:19:51+00:00
I just sold my 2005 CRV with the same 4. At 170,000 miles, the engine burned no oil, started first crank every time, moved the car adequately, and got 25 mpg in an suv.

I replaced it with a Corolla hybrid. It gets 60 mpg. I have expectations of longevity for this one, too.
by skrebbel | 2025-12-04 17:19:56+00:00
Fwiw I'm with you here. It's perfectly possible to stay excited about new stuff. Just.. take it for a spin! Find the good parts even when they re-make mistakes from the last time someone tried sth like this 2 decades ago.

Like, when React was new I had total Delphi deja vu. And then they went about reinventing MVC (not the Rails MVC, real MVC) and calling it "unidirectional data flow" instead of just MVC, and feeling all smart about themselves and doing proud conference talks, and I was like "this is just MVC but with worse naming".

But React also made it so that every component is designed to be reusable. Like, in Delphi you had a "Form" on which you dropped "Controls" and then you could also create your own controls if you were really advanced. But most people didn't feel like they were advanced enough, so code reuse was a mess. React made it so that every control (cough component) is reusable, because using components is the same as making components. That's a good idea! Purely functional UI, that's also a good idea! Then they threw OO out instead of fixing it, that was a terrible idea, but bottom line it's still great! Plus, Delphi didn't have to deal with the horrible mess that is HTML and CSS so it had it easy.

But yeah lots of people my age saw the same, saw how it was just Delphi all over again but with different mistakes, and focused on the mistakes. It really is purely an attitude thing.

I'm having a lot of fun with signals and SolidJS and observables now and it baffles me that something so elegant and fast took this long to be discovered (or more like, to get ergonomic and mainstream enough).
by mh2266 | 2025-12-04 17:20:09+00:00
This completely matches my experience as an infra principal engineer in a coding archetype at another big company. I do impactful and good technical work and always try to defer credit to those “under” me even if it was my idea they are implementing. As long as my manager knows it was my idea everything works out fine.

That being said you do kind of end up in the spotlight anyways but it feels very different to do it through reputation of knowledge and technical competence rather than through PR-like selling.
by bluGill | 2025-12-04 17:20:24+00:00
Read any old book (like from the 1800s), or look into anyone's family history. There is always some version of "Larry never leaves the farm". Nobody every diagnosed "Larry" so we don't know what he had and often we only have a small fraction of the symptoms recorded, but what we have sounds suspiciously like Autism (and one of a dozen other things we now have names for)
by vladvasiliu | 2025-12-04 17:20:51+00:00
I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory.

But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that.

But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright.

Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room.

---

[0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.
by chongli | 2025-12-04 17:21:03+00:00
I think you’ll find that won’t actually work in practice. Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but actually employees of a different company who contracts the work out as a whole.

For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
by derekcheng08 | 2025-12-04 17:21:04+00:00
That was an insane time. The pace was unreal. I remember Netscape 2.0 had at least 6-7 beta releases prior to the full release. And each one just dropped something massive and fundamental to the Internet - JavaScript (then called LiveScript IIRC) being one of those things. Just casually dropping what would dominate the entire industry in a browser beta.

The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-04 17:21:05+00:00
Yup. Or if they were rich, "eccentric".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bentinck,_5th_Duke_of_Por...

> The tunnels under the estate were reputed to have totalled 15 mi (24 km), connecting various underground chambers and above-ground buildings. They included a 1,000 yd (910 m) long tunnel between the house and the riding house, wide enough for several people to walk side by side. A more roughly constructed tunnel ran parallel to this for the use of his workmen.

> The duke was highly introverted and well known for his eccentricity; he did not want to meet people and never invited anyone to his home. He employed hundreds through his various construction projects, and though well paid, the employees were not allowed to speak to him or acknowledge him.

> He ventured outside mainly by night, when he was preceded by a lady servant carrying a lantern 40 yards (37 m) ahead of him. If he did walk out by day, the duke wore two overcoats, an extremely tall hat, an extremely high collar, and carried a very large umbrella behind which he tried to hide if someone addressed him.

> He insisted on a chicken roasting at all hours of the day and the servants brought him his food on heated trucks that ran on rails through the tunnels.
by bgwalter | 2025-12-04 17:21:29+00:00
That is not true. The libertarian free-speech FSF(E) was way more effective in 2000 than it is now.

All these organizations have been infiltrated by career bureaucrats who have their pet political wedge issues and bite away everyone else. Of course they are silent on the really big issues. They would ban Stallman but not go after Epstein's real friends.

And that is in a nutshell how these political pseudo movements differ from the real political movements at the end of the sixties. At that time they were not afraid of going after the big guys.
by dboreham | 2025-12-04 17:22:08+00:00
What's going on with the brain of any particular person is a point in a very high dimension space. What doctors call conditions are regions in that space. The definition of those regions has something to do with understanding and helping the humans and their families, but also something to do with the doctors making money. In the US Healthcare system nothing can be paid for unless it is in service of treating a "condition". Slightly odd that an article in The Economist doesn't mention this.
by nerdjon | 2025-12-04 17:22:20+00:00
I have never in my life used "autism is my super power" so please don't put words in my mouth. I will agree that it is offensive but that is very different from saying "somewhere on the spectrum" when I don't feel like having a more in dept conversation.

And again my point is that contrary to what the article seems to be trying to make, no one really considers Autism a single thing.
by Barrin92 | 2025-12-04 17:22:39+00:00
>and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.

Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.

If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
by tgbugs | 2025-12-04 17:23:03+00:00
This points to a potential answer to a long standing question I've had about why some hairs stop growing at certain lengths. If the force is being generated by cellular migration then control over when to stop growing can be mediated by a signal that tells the cells to stop migrating, and that could be based on time or vibration amplitude or something else that correlates with hair length. For hair that grows continually you just ... never turn off cell migration.
by azangru | 2025-12-04 17:24:05+00:00
> Google throws products under the bus, but not so much OSS projects.

It abandoned the Material Design web components project, which, I think, attracted some Polymer people.

Speaking of Polymer, it has evolved into Lit; but I understand there is no more support for that project from Google. Lit has joined the OpenJS foundation to stay afloat. The Googlers that used to work on Lit, and on Material Design web components have mostly left.

Also, remember the Workbox project? A simple setup for service workers? It's barely alive.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-04 17:24:08+00:00
> we had a lot of trouble getting the construction loan mostly because of 1-2 bad comps in our area

Yup. The broadest categorization is are you first minimizing cost or chasing approval. If the latter, you’re better off with someone intensely local. If the former, you want economies of scale. (Of course, one should still shop around even if focusing on approval first.)
Ask HN: How does one get involved in FPGA development?
by meifun | 2025-12-04 17:24:49+00:00
How does one get started with FPGA development in 2025? I have code that runs on my MacBook and I met a trader who suggested I get my code running on FPGA hardware. He didn't know how exactly to get started.

What is a viable path in very late 2025 for a hobbyist to get started?
by alaithea | 2025-12-04 17:24:58+00:00
It could be, but the Wikipedia article notes that she may have also suffered a birth injury from hypoxia.

Rosemary's story is so tragic and heartbreaking. Her life was filled with what would today be considered multiple instances of medical malpractice, and heartless, unethical behavior on the part of the Kennedy family. Her father didn't even tell her mother about the lobotomy until after it was done.

Incredible that she lived to the age of 86. The nuns taking care of her might have actually cared, which could hardly be said of the Kennedy family.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-04 17:25:11+00:00
As a hobbyist, I'm playing with analog computer circuits right now. If you can match your curve with a similar voltage profile, a simple analog integrator (an op-amp with a capacitor connected in feedback) will also give you the area under the curve (also as a voltage of course).

Analog circuits (and op-amps just generally) are surprising cool. I know, kind of off on a tangent here but I have integration on the brain lately. You say "4 lines of Python", and I say "1 op-amp".)
by timcobb | 2025-12-04 17:25:12+00:00
I don't know, you could do something totally wild like re-imagining the filesystem... I, for one, would love a flat blob store organized in some other way than folders or filenames. I think there's tons of interesting things that could and would be explored without backwards compatibility holding us back. That's how the original OS X came to be.

But what I really don't get, is why we need backwards compat when computers can run computers, and old operating systems hardly demand resources on a modern computer.
by potato3732842 | 2025-12-04 17:25:31+00:00
>This customer is looking for a lender who can and will eat costs for the relationship. That’s probably a mortgage specialist with a wealth management arm. The ones who require 25 to 35% down, but undercut the rates e.g. a credit union can charge.

>If you’re buying within your means, you shouldn’t be on the ragged edge of anything. You should be getting a cheap, plain mortgage from a lender competing for your business. Ideally conforming, and where the originator eats origination and closing costs.

I can't put my finger quite on why, but your comment has a really not nice tone to it.

This customer is an otherwise normal-ish buyer who wants a fix and flip (like real fix, more than just cosmetic or "updating" or something like that) and they outnumber people who have any relevance to a "mortgage specialist with a wealth management arm" 100 if not 1000 to 1.
by apparent | 2025-12-04 17:25:41+00:00
> With that in mind, Kevin O’Reilly, the executive director of the FULU Foundation (it’s an acronym for Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users), a nonprofit that fights for consumer ownership of devices, runs a bounty program that involves awarding money to people who can restore functionality to devices that have been bricked by manufacturers.

This sounds awesome. Would be amazing if someone could do this for the Google Nest Protect system, which was bricked last year.
by mystraline | 2025-12-04 17:25:48+00:00
> Couldn't disagree more. The "autism is my super power" movement is borderline offensive to people dealing with severe or low functioning autism.

I doubt those types are saying much of anything. Its more likely their caregivers.

Again the old name for those of us who think its more a super power used to be called Aspergers syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome . And we got folded in to Autism Spectrum Disorder, as did a whole host of other diagnostics.

And we have been found to be more truthful, better at focusing, can hyperfocus, notice more details than NT's, and plenty more. We're only a disease cause we're the minority.
by r0m4n0 | 2025-12-04 17:25:50+00:00
Yea I do think you make a lot of valid points about the tradeoffs of the advances. I think anything we do to progress humanity technologically will have negative outcomes on everything else. I think as humans make things better for ourselves it will almost always rely on destroying something in nature in return. The capitalistic world we live in will almost always drive that to the extreme quickly.

As for the other points, are the LLMs wrong sometimes, yes. But so are humans so it's not really a novel thing to point out. The question is, are they more correct than humans? I have seen they can be more accurate, less biased, etc... and we are driving toward higher accuracy and other ways to make them right.

And the fix later attitude is not great toward everything and I was referring to the accuracy issues that people often point out as why AI is hype. The things you mention are side effects and those should be controlled because the cat is out of the bag. You can spend your time yelling at the clouds or try to do something to make it better. I assure you, capitalism is a tough enemy. This is no different than another type of combustable engine that was created that has negative consequences on the environment in different ways.

I'm not disagreeing with you... mostly just saying: the hype is warranted
Show HN: Cross-platform network monitoring system
by mohyware | 2025-12-04 17:26:26+00:00
In my country, there are harsh limits on internet quotas, so I wanted a system that shows exactly where my bandwidth goes. That’s why I built Packet Meter a system that tracks network traffic usage across all connected devices. It’s lightweight, easy to self-host (uses SQLite for example).

I was also planning to add more features, such as device-level firewall controls, quota limits, a cloud service so you don’t have to self-host and more, but I’ll see if people are interested and where it goes from there. Since Packet Meter connects to all devices on the network, I can use this to achieve even more things.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-04 17:26:34+00:00
That's the benefit of a broad diagnosis. Narrow diagnoses make it hard to get specific treatments for problems.

That's my main concern about trying to split up autism. It's all well and good for study purposes, but for "can I get my insurance to pay for my kid's occupational therapy" purposes I'm really skittish about such a breakup. All the sudden my kid might have "omegaism" or whatever and boom, it's uncommon for them to need OT so insurance won't cover it.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-12-04 17:26:39+00:00
>and any devil's adovocate must be the devil.

No not the devil, but years ago I stopped finding it funny or useful when people "played" the part of devil's advocate because we all know that the vast majority of the time it's just a convenient way to be contrarian without ever being held accountable for the opinions espoused in the process. It also tends to distract people from the actual discussion at hand.
by swupel | 2025-12-04 17:26:59+00:00
Hey everyone, you might wonder how we managed to get to $0 MRR without even doing much marketing:

It's easy; always prioritize product development over getting feedback and launching early.

This being said, do not forget to expect random users to come out of nowhere to support your new project.

After realizing no one is signing up… it's important that you do this AFTER launching: start promoting your project on social media.

Bonus tip: Make sure your SEO sucks, because without social media presence it usually does!

And that's how we managed to reach this iconic milestone, within just a few months after launching