MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-04 18:33:14+00:00
JMJ happened in the middle of the synth era, not the beginning of it, and his rise to fame definitely heralded a new acceptance of synthesisers as instruments, its true, but there were dark days in the beginning when synths were not considered cool, one bit, and regarded as not real instruments because they were artificially attempting to recreate other instruments .. in the early days.

(Disclaimer: I've been in the MI business for decades, I've seen some things..)
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-12-04 18:33:17+00:00
I think that's partially true. The point is to have the freedom to pursue higher-level goals. And one thing tech doesn't do - and education in general doesn't do either - is give experience of that kind of goal setting.

I'm completely happy to hand over menial side-quest programming goals to an AI. Things like stupid little automation scripts that require a lot of learning from poor docs.

But there's a much bigger issue with tech products - like Facebook, Spotify, and AirBnB - that promise lower friction and more freedom but actually destroy collective and cultural value.

AI is a massive danger to that. It's not just about forgetting how to think, but how to desire - to make original plans and have original ideas that aren't pre-scripted and unconsciously enforced by algorithmic control over motivation, belief systems, and general conformity.

Tech has been immensely destructive to that impulse. Which is why we're in a kind of creative rut where too much of the culture is nostalgic and backward-looking, and there isn't that sense of a fresh and unimagined but inspiring future to work towards.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-04 18:33:18+00:00
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Asthma_prevalence.pn... looks relatively steady over the last ~50 years or so.

> Asthma was recognized in ancient Egypt and was treated by drinking an incense mixture known as kyphi. It was officially named as a specific respiratory problem by Hippocrates circa 450 BC, with the Greek word for "panting" forming the basis of our modern name. In 200 BC, it was believed to be at least partly related to the emotions.

Theodore Roosevelt had asthma.
by bvisness | 2025-12-04 18:33:41+00:00
The Reason article leaves out some helpful context from the original Atlantic article:

> In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.

So it's dramatically easier to get said doctor's note these days.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-04 18:34:04+00:00
You're identifying the right problem (school and housing costs are completely out of hand) but then resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down.

The easy way to realize this is to notice that the median wage has increased by proportionally less than the federal minimum wage has. The people in the middle can't afford school or housing either. And what happens if you increase the minimum wage faster than overall wages? Costs go up even more, and so does unemployment when small businesses who are also paying those high real estate costs now also have to pay a higher minimum wage. You're basically requesting the annihilation of the middle class.

Whereas you make housing cost less and that helps the people at the bottom and the people in the middle.
by smj-edison | 2025-12-04 18:34:24+00:00
My brother is studying economics right now, and he said everyone could use some basic economics knowledge, because getting an intuition for how markets work really helps you as you're looking for jobs and navigating around companies. Maybe business knowledge is better, but I'm personally biased towards the empiricism of economics :) You're onto something though about the need for awareness of how companies think and work.
by chubot | 2025-12-04 18:34:30+00:00
I wasn't really familiar with this term, but as another comment here said, the only language I use that doesn't have such late binding/dynamic dispatch is C

i.e. it seems natural in Python and C++ (and Java and Rust …)

But I did notice the term "open recursion" in Siek's Essentials of Compilation - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048248/essentials-of-compila...

To make our interpreters extensible we need something called "open recursion", in which the tying of the recursive knot is delayed until the functions are composed. Objected-oriented languages provide open recursion via method overriding

---

I mentioned that here too, on a thread about a type checker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45151620

To me the open recursion style clearly seems like a better default than VISITORS?

You can still REUSE traversal logic, and you don't "lose the stack", as I pointed out in the comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45160402

Am I missing something? I noticed there is a significant disagreement about style, which seems to not have a clear rationale: MyPy uses visitors all over, while TypeScript uses switch statements

This is a big difference! It affects nearly every line of code, and these projects have a ton of code ...
by ecshafer | 2025-12-04 18:34:31+00:00
I don't think I could agree with you more. I think that more in tech and business should think about and read about philosophy, the mind, social interactions, and society.

ED Tech for example I think really seems to neglect the kind of bonds that people form when they go through difficult things together, and the pushing through difficulties is how we improve. Asking a robot xyz does not improve ourselves. AI and LLMs do not know how to teach, they are not Socratic pushing and prodding at our weaknesses and assessing us to improve. The just say how smart we are.
by indrora | 2025-12-04 18:34:56+00:00
On a lot of prepaid devices such as those from Kyocera for companies like Boost, the limitations are almost all in software configuration, because that's cheap and easy to do rather than rolling your own baseband configuration.

For years, carrier lock on iOS devices was simply a software switch. In a lot of devices, still, if you have an unlocked boot loader you can run patched baseband firmware that doesn't care that it hasn't been told the magic numbers to unlock itself.
by 9rx | 2025-12-04 18:35:10+00:00
> Its type system is actually really powerful which is what matters when it comes to avoiding bugs

It is really powerful as compared to Javascript. It is even really powerful as compared to most other languages people normally use. But not very powerful as compared to languages that have 'proper' type systems. Typescript still relies on you writing tests for everything.

The type system is a huge boon for the developer experience, of course. It enables things like automatic refactoring that make development much more pleasant (although LLMs are getting better at filling that void in dynamically typed languages). But it doesn't save you from bugs in a way that the tests you have to write anyway won't also save you from. And those same tests would also catch the same bugs in Javascript, so you're in the same place either way with respect to that.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-04 18:35:25+00:00
In the US, USA Hockey (by far the biggest youth hockey organization) groups players by birth year. So if you are born late in the year, you are among the youngest players on your team. You tend to be smaller, and less experienced, and unless you are exceptional you tend to play less. This impacts you from your first youth teams up until high-school.
by reducesuffering | 2025-12-04 18:35:30+00:00
Incentives. Did you know that mental health specialists like therapists as a field are entirely in lock-step in giving an immediate diagnosis of anything, because otherwise most insurance won't reimburse?

Any functioning individual can go to a therapist and get an immediate diagnosis of an affliction, simply because therapists won't get clients if they don't provide the avenue for being funded by health insurance.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-12-04 18:35:31+00:00
This is highly accurate. Presently its a whole set of entirely different diagnosis make up "the spectrum".

They even eliminated "Asperger" and then just folded that into the spectrum as well.

I sometimes think about two women sitting on down on a bench. Once says a bit uneasily "my son, well he is on the spectrum" The other responds with "Oh I know what you are going through my daughter is also on the spectrum"

At this point neither has any idea whatsoever about what the others experience is like.

One may be highly functional, socially awkward and doesn't think like normal people and processes sight and sounds the same. I find myself moderately down this path.

The other may be non verbal and violent.
by chaosprint | 2025-12-04 18:35:40+00:00
Some simple thoughts:

I feel that one challenge of programming languages is how to remember these rules, formats, and keywords. Even if you're using familiar formats like YAML or JSON, how do you match keywords?

When developing Glicol (http://glicol.org/), I found that if it's based on an audio graph, all node inputs and outputs are all signals, which at least reduces the matching problems. The remaining challenge is ensuring that reference documentation is available at the minimal cost.
by skywhopper | 2025-12-04 18:35:43+00:00
Most students going to Stanford have all the resources in the world necessary to get probably-mostly-correct diagnoses of conditions that the university chooses to label as a disability. Not all of those disabilities mean extra time on tests or whatever you think is so bad. Most of the students probably don’t need or use those accommodations.

But the question here is, why are these articles being written? This isn’t a crisis. These minor accommodations (which again, most eligible students do not actually pursue) are not crippling the youth of this nation. Reactionary attention-seekers who are looking for clicks write this trash to rile people up for no reason. They don’t explain what’s really going on, it instead they dig up some number that will SHOCK you, and pretend that it means something.

There’s lots to complain about US higher ed. Disagreements over what accommodations to offer to students with ADHD or whatever should not make anyone’s top ten list.
by autoexec | 2025-12-04 18:36:16+00:00
> A teenager in his/her first job at McDonald's doesn't need a "living wage." As a result of forcing the issue, now the job doesn't exist at all in many instances

The majority of minimum wage workers are adults, not teenagers. This is also true for McDonald's employees. The idea that these jobs are staffed by children working summer jobs is simply not reality.

Anyone working for someone else, doing literally anything for 40 hours a week, should be entitled to enough compensation to support themselves at a minimum. Any employer offering less than that is either a failed business that should die off and make room for one that's better managed or a corporation that is just using public taxpayer money to subsidize their private labor expenses.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-04 18:36:25+00:00
I am not criticizing the author or his opinion in any way. But what he didn’t emphasize enough that yes he might ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer. But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.

When I was working at a startup from 2018-2020, I was hired as the second technical hire by then new CTO who was tasked to bring tech leadership into the company from an outside consulting agency where all of the long term developers were in India.

They were constantly seeking the spotlight to insure they kept their jobs. I could afford to not seek the spotlight. I already had the trust of the owners, CTO etc. I had no fear of being made redundant because the right people didn’t know what I contributed.

I wasn’t trying to get a promotion, I was already leading all of the big technical cross functional initiatives as the company grew.

On the other hand, when I got into BigTech in 2020 as an L5 (Professional Services consulting not SDE), I saw for the first time how much politics played in getting ahead. I personally didn’t care. My goal from day 1 was to make money and leave after 4 years. I was already 46 and knew I didn’t want to stay long term.

But I did see how hard it was for a damn good intern I mentored their senior year and when they came back to get noticed. I had to create opportunities for them to get noticed because they were ignored by their manager [1]. They still had to change departments to just get a chance to get on a promotion track.

I see it again on the other side. I would hate to have to play the games and go through the gauntlet to get promoted at the company I work at now and where I was brought in at the staff level.

But I would be chasing after the spotlight with the best of them to get ahead.

I do have the luxury to not chase recognition - everyone who is important already knows me and what I do. My projects automatically give me visibility without my chasing them.

[1] all of the early career people reported to a separate manager and were loaned out to teams.
by jfindper | 2025-12-04 18:36:31+00:00
>resorting to an ineffective solution (minimum wage) when what you actually need is to get those costs back down.

I'm not really resorting to any solution.

My comment is pointing out that when you only do one side of the equation (income) without considering the other side (expenses), it's worthless. Especially when you are trying to make a comparison across years.

How we go about fixing the problem, if we ever do, is another conversation. But my original comment doesn't attempt to suggest any solution, especially not one that "requests the annihilation of the middle class". It's solely to point out that adventured's comment is a bunch of meaningless numbers.
by dogleash | 2025-12-04 18:37:16+00:00
Whether I care depends on the accommodation they're seeking.

When I was in school, the department that dealt with accessibility could chop the spine off a book, scan it and give you a high quality ebook. I also knew someone who was flagrantly cheating with some test-taking accommodation.

That ebook service was just a nice thing that more people should have taken advantage of. One or two of the professors even subtly encouraged using it to pirate textbooks.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-04 18:37:30+00:00
> Tech optimizes for revealed preference in the moment.

I appreciate the way you distinguish this from actual revealed preference, which I think is key to understanding why what tech is doing is so wrong (and, bluntly, evil) despite it being what "people want". I like the term "revealed impulse" for this distinction.

It's the difference between choosing not to buy a bag of chips at the store or a box of cookies, because you know it'll be a problem and your actual preference is not to eat those things, and having someone leave chips and cookies at your house without your asking, and giving in to the impulse to eat too many of them when you did not want them in the first place.

Example from social media: My "revealed preference" is that I sometimes look at and read comments from shit on my Instagram algo feed. My actual preference is that I have no algo feed, just posts on my "following" tab, or at least that I could default my view to that. But IG's gone out of their way (going so far as disabling deep link shortcuts to the following tab, which used to work) to make sure I don't get any version of my preference.

So I "revealed" that my preference is to look at those algo posts sometimes, but if you gave me the option to use the app to follow the few accounts I care about (local businesses, largely) but never see algo posts at all, ever, I'd hit that toggle and never turn it off. That's my actual preference, despite whatever was "revealed". That other preference isn't "revealed" because it's not even an option.
by swatcoder | 2025-12-04 18:37:58+00:00
That's exactly the dilemma.

Offering accommodations to people with disabilities is good. So you do that.

Then you recognize that not all disabilities that deserve accommodations are obvious so you establish some bureaucratic process that can certify people with these unobvious disabilities so they can receive the accommodations you meant for them to.

But the people you delegate to issue those certificates are... well, they're people. Some of them are not so discerning, some of them are not so bright, some of take pleasure in gaming the system or playing Robin Hood, some of them accept bribes and trade favors, some of them are averse to conflict.

Next thing you know, you've got a lot of people with certificates saying that they have unobvious disabilities that grant them accommodations. Like, way more than you would have expected and some whose certified disabilities are really unobvious.

Might the genuinely good system you put in place have been abused? How can you know? What can you do? And if it's not been gamed, then what the heck is going on that sooooo many people are disabled? That seems like it would reflect some kind of social crisis itself.
Show HN: Letters From the Earth – daily climate data turned into narrative
by manishg2022 | 2025-12-04 18:38:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m sharing a small experiment called Letters From The Earth. The idea is simple: instead of presenting climate and environmental data as charts or stats, the system converts daily signals into expressive, first-person prose — “letters” from regions on Earth describing how they feel.

What it does

- There is an interactive globe covering 103 locations worldwide.

- Every day the engine collects signals like temperature, humidity/moisture, wind, air clarity, and anomaly deviations.

- These raw values are normalized, compressed into a feature vector, then passed through a biome-specific, emotionally aware translation layer. Based on that it produces a “letter” written in the voice of the biome (forest, tundra, desert, mangrove, etc). No jargon, no statistics — just sensory, atmospheric narrative.

- On the site you pick a location, read that day’s letter, and if you want compare with the raw data. There are filters by biome type, severity (anomaly), region and date so you can browse previous days and regions.

Why I built it

I believe data does not have to be understood only by analysts. Data has expressive potential. By translating environmental signals into narrative I am exploring whether “data as empathy” can help more people connect with places, climate, and environmental change.

This isn’t a product or a dashboard. It is an experiment in new forms of data expression — emotional, narrative, sensory. And letters are only the first output. The same core could produce poems, ambient soundscapes, symbolic visuals or other formats.

What I would love feedback on

- Does the mapping from raw signal → narrative “mood” feel meaningful or evocative?

- Thoughts on biome modeling, signal normalization, and region-specific voice.

- Ideas for other output modalities beyond prose — audio, ambient sound, visual.

If you’re curious, the link above goes to a live demo. I’d appreciate any comments, questions, or ideas.

Thanks for reading. I’m happy to dive into technical or design-level details if anyone is interested.
by eliotbrown | 2025-12-04 18:39:52+00:00
Every day, around 5,000 new scientific papers are published. How many do you hear about? Maybe five.

Most of us depend on newsletters, social feeds, or group chats to surface “the best” papers. But it is always the same handful, shown to millions of people with wildly different interests. Nothing is tuned to your research, your questions, or the problems you are actually trying to solve.
Ask HN: Physically and dynamically connect self-driving cars to save energy?
by amichail | 2025-12-04 18:39:53+00:00
I’ve been thinking about an idea for improving energy efficiency with autonomous vehicles. Imagine if self-driving cars could temporarily form a physical connection while in motion, almost like a train, with only the front car powering its wheels. The trailing cars would roll along, conserving energy by not using their own engines.

To make this safe and practical, the cars would be in constant communication. They could share braking signals, coordinate acceleration, and even disconnect quickly if needed, all without leaving any vehicle “confused.” The system could also dynamically optimize which car provides propulsion, reducing mechanical strain and improving overall efficiency.

It’s essentially turning multiple vehicles into a single, coordinated system on the road. The potential benefits could include significant energy savings, smoother traffic flow, and improved safety through coordinated movement.

Would you trust your self-driving car to connect in this way with the cars of strangers so everyone involved would save money on energy in the long run?
by kotaKat | 2025-12-04 18:39:57+00:00
If you can unlock the bootloader you can generally also reflash the firmware at will on the baseband, so you can replace it or modify it to remove any subsidy/carrier locking on the baseband side.

Unlocking the bootloader will also of course let you eliminate the carrier’s bloatware that they get paid to install and load onto it, including the things that they shoved all the way into the Android “non-disableable” list.

Tracfone called this “cellphone trafficking” all the way since the 90s when people would buy their loss leaders, flash ‘em, and flip ‘em to third world markets for top dollar.

https://stopcellphonetrafficking.com/
by skywhopper | 2025-12-04 18:40:28+00:00
I hope you realize that the students don’t think of themselves as “disabled” in the disparaging way you mean it. I have ADHD and I’m color blind. Both conditions make me “disabled” in some sense, and yet I went to college and have managed to have a job my whole adult life. Being “disabled” doesn’t mean “useless” or “incapable of doing anything” as you seem to imply.
by toast0 | 2025-12-04 18:40:29+00:00
DSM-V [1] describes criteria / symptoms in two groups (caps from document, sorry):

> A. PERSISTENT DEFICITS IN SOCIAL COMMUNICATION AND SOCIAL INTERACTION ACROSS CONTEXTS, NOT ACCOUNTED FOR BY GENERAL DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS

> B. RESTRICTED, REPETITIVE PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR, INTERESTS, OR ACTIVITIES

For criteria A, severity is more or less measured by how much social impairment is observed --- that's a measure of social acceptability in some fashion.

For criteria B, the severity criteria is about "interference with functioning in contexts" as well as observed distress of the patient. Interference with functioning can be related to the patient resisting the desired function, but it can also be because the patient is socially excluded due to their behavior.

Although, I should point out clinical criteria in general and the DSM in specific are a formalization of arbitrary judgements that describe observable characteristics grouped into a diagnostic category; this can be useful, but it's not really an understanding of the underlying condition(s), it's a handbook of things to look for when a patient comes asking for help and what things to try to help them. If someone has the same underlying conditions but manages to pass as socially acceptable, they may not come in for help, and that's fine too. When multiple underlying conditions result in similar observable criteria, the DSM gets pretty confused; there's not much in the way of attaching traces and getting debug logs for mental processes though, especially out in the world, so this is the best society has, I guess.

[1] https://depts.washington.edu/dbpeds/Screening%20Tools/DSM-5(...