MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robmccoll | 2025-11-25 11:09:00+00:00
What's the reason for moving from ASCII CHAR to UTF16 WCHAR rather than UTF8 CHAR? I wouldn't think any parts of the codebase that don't need to render the string or worry about character counts would need to be modified.

Edit: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20190830-00/?p=10... seems the justification was that UTF-8 didn't exist yet? Not totally accurate, but it wasn't fully standardized. Also that other article seems to imply Windows 95 used UTF16 (or UCS2, but either way 16-bit chars) so I'm confused about porting code being a problem. Was it that the APIs in 95 were still kind of a halfway point?
by DanielVZ | 2025-11-25 11:09:23+00:00
I do think we need to be hyper focused on this. We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide. This is a huge misalignment of objectives and we do not know what other misalignment issues are already more silently happening or may appear in the future as AI capabilities evolve.

Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek guidance from you and committed suicide was because a chatbot convinced her of so must be gut wrenching. So far I’ve seen two instances of attempted suicide driven by AI in my small social circle. And it has made me support banning general AI usage at times.

Nowadays I’m not sure if it should or even could be banned, but we DO have to invest significant resources to improve alignment, otherwise we risk that in the future AI does more harm than good.
by anuramat | 2025-11-25 11:09:59+00:00
for me, medication was closer to therapy than what I imagined (magic chemical that makes depression disappear) -- a drug changing my thought process (long term and on a deep level, unlike recreational drugs) helped me see myself as something malleable, instead of the idea of somewhat rigid "true self" I had before; from there it was much easier to start doing the DIY equivalent of CBT, as I stopped considering some of the feelings/ideas to be somehow inherent to my personality
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-25 11:10:19+00:00
Ah ok, here they were all windows in the shops after the first one.

I can imagine also because Asus' distro was pretty terrible, it probably gave some backlash against Linux. I think the only reason they made it was to make it work on that tiny screen.

I spent ages at the time trying to make macOS work. I had it booting but due to the CPU being below 1 Ghz the timing screwed up and timing related actions happened in slow motion (this was a timing divider issue not sure to the slowness itself). I even messed with the kernel code trying to get it to work.

On a later Acer netbook I got it running perfectly though.
by bluenose69 | 2025-11-25 11:11:47+00:00
The oral discussion does not scale well in large classes. The solution is to stop using essays for evaluation, relying on (supervised) examinations instead.

Of course, there will be complaints from many students. However, as a prof for decades, I can say that some will prefer an exam-based solution. This includes the students who are working their way through university and don't have much time for busy-work, along with students who write their essays themselves and get lower grades than those who do not.
by lxgr | 2025-11-25 11:12:28+00:00
> There's a lot of potential for errors when the storage controller processes and turns the data into analog magic to transmit it.

That's a physical layer, and as such should obviously have end-to-end ECC appropriate to the task. But the error distribution shape is probably very different from that of bytes in NAND data at rest, which is different from that of DRAM and PCI again.

For the same reason, IP does not do error correction, but rather relies on lower layers to present error-free datagram semantics to it: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and (managed-spectrum) 5G all have dramatically different properties that higher layers have no business worrying about. And sticking with that example, once it becomes TCP's job to handle packet loss due to transmission errors (instead of just congestion), things go south pretty quickly.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-25 11:12:32+00:00
That video is clearly not encoded correctly. If it were the levels would match the background, given there is no actual HDR content visible in that video frame.

Anyway, even if the video was of a lovely nature scene in proper HDR, you might still find it jarring compared to the surrounding non-HDR desktop elements. I might too, depending on the specifics.

However, like I said, it's up to the browser to handle this.

One suggestion I saw mentioned by some browser devs was to make the default to tone map HDR if the page is not viewed in fullscreen mode, and switch to full HDR range if it is fullscreen.

Even if that doesn't become the default, it could be a behavior the browser could let the user select.
by bjabrboe1984 | 2025-11-25 11:12:40+00:00
I wrote about building production LLM workflows in JavaScript and created a complete working example.

The example demonstrates: - Multi-step workflow state management - OpenAI API integration with automatic retries and exponential backoff - Caching to reduce costs - GitHub webhook integration with signature verification - Serverless deployment (no infrastructure to manage)

This sits between lightweight prompt libraries (LangChain) and heavyweight orchestrators (Airflow). It's for developers who need state persistence, retries, and scheduling without spinning up new infrastructure.

Live example code: https://github.com/RestDB/codehooks-io-examples/tree/main/ll...

Blog post with details: https://codehooks.io/blog/building-llm-workflows-javascript

The example is fully functional - you can deploy it in 5 minutes with `npm install` and `coho deploy`.
by ekidd | 2025-11-25 11:12:52+00:00
> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born.

A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations.

But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.

The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended.

I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner.

CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.
by fmjrey | 2025-11-25 11:12:53+00:00
Here is an example of a 2006 rant that qualifies: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

OO conflates many different aspects that are often orthogonal but have been conflated together opportunistically rather than by sound rigor. Clearly most languages allow for functions outside classes. It's clearly the case today especially with FP gaining momentum, but it's also clear back then when Java and the JVM were created. I think smalltalk was the only other language that had this limitation.

Like others in this thread, I can only recommend the big OOPS video: https://youtu.be/wo84LFzx5nI
by lazide | 2025-11-25 11:13:26+00:00
Reed Solomon codes, or forward error correction is what you’re discussing. All modern drives do it at low levels anyway.

It would not be hard for a COW file system to use them, but it can easily get out of control paranoia wise. Ideally you’d need them for every bit of data, including metadata.

That said, I did have a computer that randomly bit flipped when writing to storage sometimes (eventually traced it to an iffy power supply), and PAR (a type of reed solomon coding forward error correction library) worked great for getting a working backup off the machine. Every other thing I tried would end up with at least a couple bit flip errors per GB, which make it impossible.
by whitehexagon | 2025-11-25 11:13:57+00:00
I have to investigate this further. I bought a bunch of bluray UHD documentaries that I cant watch because my 4K TV is a 'monitor'. Which I only found out was a problem after also having to buy some expensive 4K HDMI cable which was supposed to fix the problem.

Since I couldn't work out how to backup the discs, I now also just buy 2nd hand DVDs for when I need my pacifier box. Anyway, for this old man it turns out that the old movies are the best; no shaky camera and clear audible dialog. Plus some of the modern discs are now also polluted with adverts, horrible.

If we lived in a sensible world, buying the item once should give me rights to every format available. I might even consider digital purchases again if that was the case, especially since we have seen too many of these services fold and take our purchases with them.
by spragl | 2025-11-25 11:15:04+00:00
That sent me looking it up. It seems that NetBSD, as the only one, has a rump kernel, but it also looks like work on it stagnated around 10 years ago. That could be because the guy doing a thesis on them, moved on. There is quite some bitrot when following links. Do you know what happened? Were they a failure? Maybe they were surpassed by other OS architectures?
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-25 11:15:42+00:00
As another anecdote:

I've been working with systems for a long time, too. I've screwed things up.

I once somehow decided that using an a.out kernel would be a good match for a Slackware diskset that used elf binaries. (It didn't go well.)

In terms of filesystems: I've had issues with FAT, FAT32, HPFS, NTFS, EXT2, ReiserFS, EXT3, UFS, EXT4, and exFAT. Most of those filesystems are very old now, but some of of these issues have trashed parts of systems beyond comprehension and those issues are part of my background in life whether I like it or not.

I've also had issues with ZFS. I've only been using ZFS in any form at all for about 9 years so far, but in that time I've always able to wrest the system back into order even on the seemingly most-unlikely, least-resilient, garbage-tier hardware -- including after experiencing unlikely problems that I introduced myself by dicking around with stuff in unusual ways.

Can you elaborate upon the two particular unrecoverable issues you experienced?

(And yeah, Google is/was/has been poisoned for a long time as it relates to ZFS. There was a very long streak of people proffering bad mojo about ZFS under an air of presumed authority, and this hasn't been helpful to anyone. The sheer perversity of the popular myths that have popularly surrounded ZFS are profoundly bizarre, and do not help with finding actual solutions to real-world problems.

The timeline is corrupt.)
by heresie-dabord | 2025-11-25 11:16:07+00:00
In 2025, there are extremely efficient CPUs from Intel and Apple. Under 5W idle!

The old Intel CPUs were grotesquely inefficient. Every single generation of Raspberry Pi has been well under 5W idle. And just so it's clear, the author is using an old Raspberry Pi 3.

From TFA:

> The RPi 3B’s 19.2 MHz oscillator is physically located near the CPU on the Raspberry Pi board, so by actively controlling CPU temperature, we’re indirectly controlling the oscillator’s temperature.

Also note that the R.Pi can even be further optimised by switching off HDMI.

https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/raspberry-p...
by rowanG077 | 2025-11-25 11:16:27+00:00
The comment I replied to was about being "fully open". That indeed goes beyond open hardware. Precursor could go further by at least using an FPGA that has great open source tooling support. It's also not impossible to fab an open FPGA but that's also another hard(and expensive) step.

Precursor goes far, but definitely not as far as currently possible.
by rafeez | 2025-11-25 11:17:13+00:00
Hi HN,

Over the past year I quietly built Sherin — a completely different kind of agent system.

Instead of DAGs, schedulers, or YAML hell, bots talk only through tiny flag files and a shared knowledge_base.json that acts like a living, emotional memory. They feel the system’s “mood”, remember everything securely, and when something goes wrong too many times… they literally spawn new specialist bots to fix it forever.

Key ideas most people call crazy (until they try it): • Bots create other bots at runtime — the mesh evolves itself • Real shared mutable state + emotional layer (yes, actual feelings in the JSON) • Self-upgrade engine that reads audit logs and rewrites the colony • Zero infrastructure — runs anywhere, even locked-down corporate Windows • Coordination = just drop a *.flag file on disk

It’s already running in production: one 6-bot mesh has processed >$12M in finance forecasts and autonomously upgraded itself 12 times in 6 months. Zero manual deploys. Zero human in the loop.

→ https://github.com/rafeez1819/Sherin-

The 30-second demo in the README actually works right now.

I’d love your raw thoughts on: 1. Flag-file + emotional memory coordination — genius or totally insane? 2. Best path to multi-machine/distributed execution? 3. What obvious footguns am I blind to?

Thanks for looking, — Red_Shot_Eyes (rafeez)
by nicola_alessi | 2025-11-25 11:20:52+00:00
I’ve been testing a platform called Lumigo.tv, and it made me rethink how recommendation systems could work if they started from human emotion instead of metadata.

The core idea is simple: instead of browsing genres or relying on collaborative filtering, you tell the system what kind of feeling you want from a movie or series — “calm but not boring,” “dark but with humor,” “nostalgic in a warm way,” etc. The AI tries to interpret the emotional structure of the request and map it to titles in its catalog. It’s surprisingly different from typing keywords into a traditional recommender; some of the results feel uncannily aligned with the vibe rather than the category.

The platform itself is a mix of a mood-based search engine, a personal tracking tool, and a place to build curated lists. It’s not trying to be a streaming service but more like an interface layer on top of the chaos of modern content libraries. The database seems broad enough to avoid the usual “small pool” problem, and the UI encourages exploration without overwhelming you.

What caught my attention wasn’t the AI gimmick, but the design philosophy behind it. Most discovery tools assume that past behavior predicts future taste. Lumigo leans into something more fluid: people watch according to context, mood, time of day, emotional bandwidth, even weather. Traditional systems don’t capture those signals well, and mood-driven search is an interesting attempt to fill that gap.

There are areas where the cracks show. Mood parsing is not an exact science. Some prompts land perfectly, others feel like they’re interpreted too literally. The quality of recommendations clearly depends on how rich the metadata is behind the scenes, and that’s a massive ongoing effort. It also raises the question of whether mood-labeling at scale becomes noisy or inconsistent over time.

Still, as a product experiment, it’s refreshing. It feels closer to how people actually talk about movies in real life (“I want something cozy tonight”) rather than how platforms expect us to search (“Comedy → Subgenre → Runtime”). Whether systems like this become a serious alternative to more conventional recommenders is unclear, but it’s one of the first attempts I’ve seen that treats discovery as something emotional rather than purely statistical.

If nothing else, it’s an intriguing example of how a simple shift in the input paradigm can completely change the feeling of interacting with a huge content database.
by lazide | 2025-11-25 11:21:22+00:00
It wasn’t just from that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Susana_Field_Laboratory] had 4 of their 10 experimental nuclear reactors melt down (including a big one in ‘59), and was notorious for not disposing of nuclear and chemical waste correctly. Including burn pits.

They had fires in their plutonium ‘hot lab’ at least once we know about.

They regularly burned radioactive waste in open pits.

It’s right next door to Hollywood and many common film shooting locations. John Wayne regularly worked in Simi valley which is right next door.

Also, smoking like a chimney. Also, the whole nuclear bomb test/downwinder stuff too of course.

It’s not just direct exposure either - thyroid issues are common in the generation that grew up when this was happening, and many of them drank milk, ate cheese, etc. from cows grazing on grass that got this contamination on it. Including from Simi valley, where it was a big industry.

Nobody likes to talk about it because good luck quantifying it at this point - and the gov’t does a lot to avoid blowback succeeding. National Security and all.

It doesn’t help that the governments own radiation death models put the population wide cost at several hundred thousand lives lost population wide. But LNT doesn’t really work. But also, clearly there are issues.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders]

Like the 9/11 first responder funds, it’s a nightmare trying to get a pay out, and unlike 9/11 this isn’t from one single event.
by dns_snek | 2025-11-25 11:21:33+00:00
For a start there's diagnostic criteria "E" in the DSM-5:

> E. The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder and are not better explained by another mental disorder (e.g., mood disorder, anxiety disorder, dissociative disorder, personality disorder, substance intoxication or withdrawal).

Or equivalent from ICD-11:

> Symptoms are not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., an Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorder, a Neurocognitive Disorder such as Delirium).

As well as the long differential diagnosis sections in the DSM-5 and ICD-11 [1], for example:

> Boundary with Mood Disorders and Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorders: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can co-occur with Mood Disorders and Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorders, but inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity can also be features of these disorders in individuals without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. For example, symptoms such as restlessness, pacing, and impaired concentration can be features of a Depressive Episode, and should not be considered as part of the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder unless they have been present since childhood and persist after the resolution of the Depressive Episode. Inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity are typical features of Manic and Hypomanic Episodes. At the same time, mood lability and irritability may be associated features of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Late adolescent or adult onset, episodicity, and intensity of mood elevation characteristic of Bipolar Disorders are features that assist in differentiation from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Fidgeting, restlessness, and tension in the context of Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorders may resemble hyperactivity. Furthermore, anxious preoccupations or reaction to anxiety-provoking stimuli in individuals with Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorders can be associated with difficulties concentrating. To qualify for an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder diagnosis in the presence of a Mood Disorder or Anxiety or Fear-Related Disorder, inattention and/or hyperactivity should not be exclusively associated with Mood Episodes, be solely attributable to anxious preoccupations, or occur specifically in response to anxiety-provoking situations.

> Boundary with attentional symptoms due to other medical conditions: A variety of other medical conditions may influence attentional processes (e.g., hypoglycemia, hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism, exposure to toxins, Sleep-Wake Disorders), resulting in temporary or persistent symptoms that resemble or interact with those of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. As a basis for appropriate management, it is important to evaluate in such cases whether the symptoms are secondary to the medical condition or are more indicative of comorbid Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

[1] https://icd.who.int/browse/2025-01/mms/en#821852937
by watwut | 2025-11-25 11:21:39+00:00
There are hundreds minor viral news about a lot of stuff daily. I am not even trying to keep up with it all.

> Next time you watch a movie you like or even read a book you like there's a very high chance it's owned by Disney (or some other huge license holder).

And in all seriousness, very likely not, because the ones you keep mentioning are not the stuff I would read or my kids would read. My kids do watch some superheroes, I dont because I find that super boring. Like I said, you can happily ignore the Disney.

I agree that they abuse artists to the max, that artists should have more rights and corporations less of them. But, Disney is really not necessary and ignoring it is perfectly workable strategy.
by rrrobert | 2025-11-25 11:22:34+00:00
My experience with big tech has been the polar opposite - nobody has ever cared and I've never tried to hide it either. Which one was it if you don't mind me asking?

I'm a drop out (didn't finish BSc) from a no name Northern European university and I've worked at or gotten offers from:

- Meta

- Amazon

- Google

- Microsoft

- Uber

- xAI

+ some unicorns that compete with FAANG+ locally.

I didn't include some others that have reached out for interviews which I declined at the time. The lack of a degree has literally never come up for me.
by metalman | 2025-11-25 11:24:20+00:00
top pop is and has been formulaic and entirely the product of commitees for many decades, with a very significant number of "hits" never actualy performed live , and those that are, are anything but "creative", bieng 100% scripted, and micro stage managed, with lip sinking bieng rampant. I forget, and dont care to remember the widly known limits on tempo, key, and chord change's. That fully boxing and computerising it has happened now, is just an inevitability realised. The last bit is that "poularity" is very much a product, and has essentialy no basis in an organic demand.....you cant like something, you never hear, and what people get to hear is decided, for them. So "spotify" decides to push something to the top of the chart, and looky there, it happens.
by ynik | 2025-11-25 11:25:39+00:00
Windows NT started supporting unicode before UTF-8 was invented, back when Unicode was fundamentally 16-bit. As a result, in Microsoft world, WCHAR meant "supports unicode" and CHAR meant "doesn't support unicode yet".

By the way, UTF-16 also didn't exist yet: Windows started with UCS-2. Though I think the name "UCS-2" also didn't exist yet -- AFAIK that name was only introduced in Unicode 2.0 together with UCS-4/UTF-32 and UTF-16 -- in Unicode 1.0, the 16-bit encoding was just called "Unicode" as there were no other encodings of unicode.