MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by webnrrd2k | 2025-10-28 12:05:37+00:00
Taking melatonin has been mentioned several times in different threads here, and I just wanted to add my experience...

I find that taking the minimal amount make a big difference here, and it's about 3 micro-grams (not milli-grams) for me. The trick is to get some liquid melatonin drops. There is a brand that has 3 milligrams per 30 drops as a recommended dosage, so I just take 3 or so drops and let them dissolve on my tongue. Using liquid drops this way, there is less of a sleep hangover, and It workes faster that way, too.

I think I read about 3 micrograms as more appropriate for most people on lesswrong, but it might have been somewhere else. It's working really well for me, with frequent breaks from it, for five or more years.
by kace91 | 2025-10-28 12:05:40+00:00
>If it cannot be used safely by a vulnerable class of people, and identifying that class of person sufficiently to block use by them

Should we stop selling kitchen knives, packs of cards or beer as well?

This is not a new problem in society.

>and its primary purpose is simply to bring OpenAI more profit

This is true for any product, unless you mean that it has no other purpose, which is trivially contradicted by the amount of people who decide to pay for it.
by jghn | 2025-10-28 12:05:45+00:00
My mom always told me to do this as a child. I’ve never understood this nor any other visualization technique. I have never found this to be possible. At best I actively think about not thinking which is counterproductive but even then within about 10 seconds my mind has already wandered. And if I’m not actively trying I’ll always have some other thoughts popping in no matter what
by motorest | 2025-10-28 12:05:49+00:00
> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings". They aren't unfortunate accidents of external origin that happened to them, they are conscious internal decisions to let people go.

This. They also make it their point to send the message this particlar firing round is completely arbitrary and based on a vague hope that they somehow can automate their way out of the expected productivity hit, and that they enforce this cut in spite of stronger sales.
by stoneman24 | 2025-10-28 12:05:56+00:00
From the article, Amazon has 1.5 million employees across offices and warehouses. With about 350,000 corporate employees in executive, managerial and sales.

So that’s about 4% of the non-warehouse staff. What’s their normal staff turnover rate per year?

I wonder if it’s another staff reduction (cos we over hired and want to remove people who didn’t impress) under the cover of improving business productivity using AI

Hat tip to raziel2p who was going down the same in thier comment
by codedokode | 2025-10-28 12:06:48+00:00
I usually use ChatGPT for such microbenchmarks (of course I design it myself and use LLM only as dumb code generator, so I don't need to remember how to measure time with nanosecond precision. I still have to add workarounds to prevent compiler over-optimizing the code). It's amazing, that when you get curious (for example, what is the fastest way to find an int in a small sorted array: using linear, binary search or branchless full scan?) you can get the answer in a couple minutes instead of spending 20-30 minutes writing the code manually.

By the way, the fastest way was branchless linear scan up to 32-64 elements, as far as I remember.
by basisword | 2025-10-28 12:06:55+00:00
Knowing the theory is a small part of it. Dealing with irrational patients is the main part. For example, you could go to therapy and be successful. Five years later something could happen and you face a reoccurrence of the issue. It is very difficult to just apply the theory that you already know again. You're probably irrational. A therapist prodding you in the right direction and encouraging you in the right way is just as important as the theory.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-28 12:06:58+00:00
> And it's worth pointing out that Arizona has gone without DST for the last 50 years and seems to be doing fine.

Arizona observes year-round Standard Time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona

Most legislation seems to be proposing year-round Daylight Saving Time, e.g.,

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Protection_Act
by lazide | 2025-10-28 12:07:24+00:00
Yeah, if we know they’re suicidal, it’s legitimately grippy socks time I guess?

But there is zero actually effective way to do that as an online platform. And plenty of ways that would cause more harm (statistically).

My comment was more ‘how the hell would you know in a way anyone could actually do anything reasonable, anyway?’.

People spam ‘Reddit cares’ as a harassment technique, claiming people are suicidal all the time. How much should the LLM try to guess? If they use all ‘depressed’ words? What does that even mean?

What happens if someone reports a user is suicidal, and we don’t do anything? Are we now on the hook if they succeed - or fail and sue us?

Do we just make a button that says ‘I’m intending to self harm’ that locks them out of the system?
by BoxOfRain | 2025-10-28 12:07:41+00:00
Interestingly part of the UK approach then was to make street lighting more efficient, around that time a lot of low-pressure sodium lamps were installed. They used so little energy they were only beaten for efficiency by LEDs in this decade, but the monochromatic yellow light was seen as unacceptable by some countries which continued to use inefficient high-pressure mercury then later high-pressure sodium.

I miss the humble SOX lamp to be honest, they made night look like night rather than a poor approximation of day. They also had benefits for wildlife, much of which is insensitive to the 589 nm wavelength as well as astronomy where the light is easily filtered out.
by madeofpalk | 2025-10-28 12:08:23+00:00
> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures, external that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.

I’m fairly ignorant to these things, but why does Amazon need 350k corporate employees?

People losing jobs always sucks, but I can’t help but think that a company of this size inevitably has bloat that they do not need.

At this point it really does feel like a corporate welfare program.
by latexr | 2025-10-28 12:09:32+00:00
I was just thinking the same, this is quite the weasel wording. Not only the “losses” but the passive voice. As if Amazon is a person who walked to work one day and realise it has a hole in its pocket from which thousands of jobs fell off. “Oh well, these things happen, not my fault and nothing I can do about it”, Amazon says as it shrugs its shoulders and whistles down the factory floor with a skip in its step.
by josephg | 2025-10-28 12:09:47+00:00
I think a well trained LLM could be amazing at being a therapist. But general purpose LLMs like ChatGPT have a problem: They’re trained to be far too user led. They don’t challenge you enough. Or steer conversations appropriately.

I think there’s a huge opportunity if someone could get hold of really top tier therapy conversations and trained a specialised LLM using them. No idea how you’d get those transcripts but that would be a wonderfully valuable thing to make if you could pull it off.
by dspillett | 2025-10-28 12:09:47+00:00
I used that very method to rescue a machine after the contents of /boot were damaged. Booting from a live CD and building a UML kernel (on another drive, there wasn't enough RAM to do it there & I didn't want to mount any of the main partitions just-in-case) allowed me to boot from the main root and rebuild initrd & friends easily. I felt proper clever!
by goplayoutside | 2025-10-28 12:09:50+00:00
https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1982222641345057263

>The paper shows how an LLM can hide a full message inside another text of equal length.

>It runs in seconds on a laptop with 8B open models.

>First, pass the secret through an LLM and record, for each token, the rank of the actual next token.

>Then prompt the model to write on a chosen topic, and force it to pick tokens at those ranks.

>The result reads normally on that topic and has the same token count as the secret.

>With the same model and prompt, anyone can reverse the steps and recover the exact original.

>These covers look natural to people, but models usually rate them less likely than the originals.

>Quality is best when the model predicts the hidden text well, and worse for unusual domains or weaker models.

>Security comes from the secret prompt and the exact model, and it gives the sender believable deniability.

>One risk is hiding harmful answers inside safe replies for later extraction by a local model.
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-10-28 12:10:43+00:00
Well, it may be - hidden, at least in the US, by the "AI"-Bubble. But also an interesting point is that these layoffs do not happen in struggling companies -they all have increasing profits.

It is most likely a way to squeeze out some easy penny and pump up share prices - remember the "shareholder value". Shareholders today are all looking for pump & dump schemes.
by bjourne | 2025-10-28 12:10:51+00:00
A spectrogram is lossy and not a one-to-one mapping of the waveform. Riffusion is, afaik, limited to five-second-clips. For these, structure and coherence over time isn't important and the data is strongly spatially correlated. E.g., adjacent to a blue pixel is another blue pixel. To the best of my knowledge no models synthesize whole songs from spectrograms.
by ckdarby | 2025-10-28 12:11:51+00:00
Was going to reply the same thing.

I buy 1 mg tablets and even that is too much for me. I use a razor blade to cut them into 1/6th pieces.

Takes less than 30 minutes to kick in.

A lot of other comments here about poor sleep I believe are the result of drinking caffeinated products past 1 PM.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-28 12:12:35+00:00
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening.

In 2019, the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) wrote a joint statement to the European Commission advocating for permanent establishment of a more natural time.

* https://esrs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To_the_EU_Commiss...

This would mean France and Spain being in UTC/GMT, and (most of) Portugal being in UTC-1.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-28 12:13:01+00:00
Interesting UI --- wants a full-screen mode and 2-up view and a way to remove all the chrome/UI....

An earlier example of this sort of thing was Bill Gates' purchase of the Codex Leceister https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester which was then digitized and released on a CD-ROM by Corbis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(video_game)

which was quite engaging, but sadly trapped in the technology of the time --- anyone know of an updated version of it?
by muxl | 2025-10-28 12:13:53+00:00
It seems that in practice no it's not possible based on what I've read from people much closer to programming language design and compiler work.

"In practice, the challenge of programming language design is not one of expanding a well-defined frontier, it is grappling with a neverending list of fundamental tradeoffs between mutually incompatible features.

Subtyping is tantalizingly useful but makes complete type inference incredibly difficult (and in general, provably impossible). Structural typing drastically reduces the burden of assigning a name to every uninteresting intermediate form but more or less precludes taking advantage of Haskell-style typeclasses or Rust-style traits. Dynamic dispatch substantially assists decoupling of software components but can come with a significant performance cost without a JIT. Just-in-time compilation can use runtime information to optimize code in ways that permit more flexible coding patterns, but JIT performance can be unpredictable, and the overhead of an optimizing JIT is substantial. Sophisticated metaprogramming systems can radically cut down on boilerplate and improve program concision and even readability, but they can have substantial runtime or compile-time overhead and tend to thwart automated tooling. The list goes on and on."

From https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2025/05/29/a-break-from-p...
by xtiansimon | 2025-10-28 12:14:01+00:00
Slightly off-topic. A client uses Stripe for a small business website. We got an automated email saying a transaction was flagged as potentially fraudulent. We should investigate and possibly refund before a chargeback occurs. What? Is this a stolen card or what?

So I inquired with the chatbot and they list possible causes of a flagged transaction could be stolen card, as well as a few other examples which amount to a mix of service issues which are customer-determined. But the bot says it’s definitely not a chargeback. What?

So now I contact support. They say it’s a flag from the credit card issuing bank. Wait. What? Is this a fraudulent stolen card or not? Still no. It’s just a warning based on pattern usage. Why you passing this slop to my client? If there is a pattern problem, the flag should go to the customer who authorizes the charge. Otherwise it’s a chargeback or known stolen card.

They say, well, you can contact the customer. What? If the pattern is actually a stolen card, which is listed as a possible cause of the flag while not saying it is or isn’t, then they can just lie!

Which is a lot to say this pattern matching for fraud or negative patterns suffers from idiocy, even in the simplest of contexts.
by sbarre | 2025-10-28 12:14:42+00:00
I've taken pay cuts twice in my career, but both times it was at unfunded startups and it was more of a "we'll get you back for this later" (one did, one did not).

I worry that normalizing the idea that a company can make you an offer (that you can't refuse) of lower pay, with the alternative being that you get fired, would set some really bad precedents.

Companies would start to min/max this process and would use it as a way to meet targets (perhaps unrealistic ones) at the expense of take-home pay for employees, even in situations where they don't actually need to make cuts.
by reorder9695 | 2025-10-28 12:14:44+00:00
Just vision is a very reductive way of describing how we drive. We use sound to hear if something else is coming and where from, or if we're losing traction on the road, or if the road surface has changed. We can judge acceleration and deceleration in all directions using our inner ears. We can feel if the car's performing differently to usual indicating an issue with the car or different conditions. In addition when we are using our vision, if it gets obscured (i.e. snow covers the windscreen) we know how to get it off with wipers, and most importantly we're very adaptable to new conditions in a way that computers aren't, if we experience something completely new to us, chances are we'll make a reasonable in the moment decision.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-28 12:15:23+00:00
> Baffling? Is just the HN way of calling someone a fucking idiot without violating the rules and pretending to be polite. Just say it to my face.

Maybe that has been your experience with other users in which case I am sorry people have been so rude to you, but in my case it’s just a word I personally use a lot. If it’s too severe a term than my and and reading back I am coming in a it hot so I am sorry for the tone. I do not think you’re an idiot and I am absolutely not personally attacking you. I tend to have a dramatic way of speaking, I can admit that. But again, this is not a personal attack.

The point I am trying to communicate is that it’s (to me) a very surprising and difficult to square take. Comparing a tool failing to do its job correctly to appreciating a work of written fiction just seems bizarre to me. That’s the truth. The people building LLMs do not want that result. I do not want that result. Nobody wants it to spit out inaccurate information disguised as correct information. I don’t want my calculator to spit out fiction literally ever - the same goes for LLM’s outside of deliberately prompting it to do so. If I want fiction as you describe (art and such), I seek it out deliberately. I will grab a book off my shelf or watch a show (or prompt the LLM with intent).

Put another way: The difference between the fiction in a novel and what an LLM spits out is that I am seeking it out in the former, not the latter. When an LLM gives me incorrect information disguised as correct information (undesired fiction), it is failing to do its job correctly. It is a tool that is not functioning properly. I absolutely 100% never want fiction emerging in key instructions when I am cooking or am fixing my car. It is always an undesired result.

So to circle back to why I find this “baffling,” or another word if you find that too severe, it’s that I don’t understand how something that is so concretely undesirable can be described as a positive thing comparable to creating works of literature for us to appreciate. You’re telling me it’s good that something does not function properly/as expected and gives me results I absolutely do not want. To get away from “baffling”: That is a very bold and unexpected take that I struggle to find any agreement with.
by martin-t | 2025-10-28 12:16:07+00:00
It's wild that you can legally work for a company, spend your limited life's time to build a part of it while not owning even a tiny bit of it (getting paid for unit of time - a finite resource) and then just get fired once you are not longer useful and that's the end of your income from the thing you built for you.

All the while people who own it don't have to perform any kind of work and keep getting paid in perpetuity as long as the company exists, even if the amount of time they spent is less than one millionth of the total man-days spent building it.

And they can use that money to buy more properties which generate them more passive income, getting ahead further and further.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-28 12:16:07+00:00
> In fact, as some have suggested, we should also give up time zones and just use UTC for everything.

Obligatory link to 2015's "So You Want To Abolish Time Zones":

* https://qntm.org/abolish

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39692011

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416337

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765
by like_any_other | 2025-10-28 12:16:49+00:00
Why not? First, the safety reason: random mutations (and selective breeding) are to genetic engineering as a pedestrian is to a 747 jet. The range of possibilities and the speed at which they can be realized is far greater with genetic engineering.

But, supposing there are rigorous tests and only well understood, small alterations are permitted, there is the second reason: economics. E.g. what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts taking over farms?

Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms have a competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so it could happen they slowly take over all farming. And even independent farms would be in the precarious position of depending on a small handful of global companies for their seeds. If they don't comply with the demands of these seed companies, they'd go out of business, unable to compete. Yes there are seed companies already, but the barrier to entry, degree of consolidation, and advantage gained by doing business with them, is less than when you need genetic engineering to stay in the race, so the risk of such sovereignty-wrecking monopolies is much greater with GM seeds.

And third, the health reason (distinct from safety). When companies are allowed to engineer food as they want, we get Snickers bars and Coca Cola. Do we want to unleash these same corporate practices on plants themselves? Why do we believe business pressures will get us only things like drought-resistant and vitamin-enriched rice, and not some rice variant that sacrifices nutrients to increase yield or taste? Currently, the healthiest foods are those with the least corporate engineering. What reason is there to believe this will change with GMOs?
by user____name | 2025-10-28 12:18:11+00:00
You can also run a high pass filter on a white noise image and get something roughly blue-noise like. By varying the width of the filter you can control the frequency of the noise. You can use this property to get constant a physical size to the noise, like DPI awareness.

A lot of blue noise references: https://gist.github.com/pixelmager/5d25fa32987273b9608a2d2c6...

There also exist pseudo blue noise generators, e.g.: https://observablehq.com/@fil/pseudoblue https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3tB3z3
by SeeManDo | 2025-10-28 12:18:24+00:00
Bash Screensavers v0.0.27 (Mystic Shine)

./screensaver.sh: line 79: mapfile: command not found 1 .

(Press ^C to exit)

Choose your screensaver: 1 404 Screensaver Not Found:

Oh no! Screensaver had trouble! Error code: 1
by stego-tech | 2025-10-28 12:18:41+00:00
This. Companies will always min/max a system so they retain as much money as possible for as few hands as they can manage, always funneled upwards to executives and shareholders.

Rather than trying to “negotiate” with these entities, regulations should be wielded to stop min-maxing beyond a certain point or in bad faith, and firing people while turning a profit is 100% bad faith that should be regulated or barred.
by kakacik | 2025-10-28 12:19:15+00:00
Not sure where you are based, but in general GPs shouldn't be doing psychological evaluation, period. I am in Europe, and this is the default. If you live in utter shithole (even if only health-care wise), move elsewhere if its important for you - it has never been easier, Europe is facing many issues and massive improvement of healthcare is not in the work pipeline, more like the opposite.

You also don't expect butcher to fix your car, those are as close as above (my wife is a GP so I have a good perspective from the other side, including tons of hypochondriac and low-intensity psychiatric persons who are an absolute nightmare to deal with and routinely overwhelm the system so that there isn't enough resources to deal with more serious cases).

You get what you pay for at the end, 'free' healthcare typical for Europe is anyway still paid for one way or another. And if the market forces are so severely distorted (or bureaucracy so ridiculous/corrupt) that they push such specialists away or into another profession, you get healthcare wastelands you describe.

Vote, and vote with your feet if you want to see change, not ideal state but thats reality.
by warp | 2025-10-28 12:19:16+00:00
My understanding is that melatonin helps you fall asleep, but doesn't help you stay asleep.

In general, I have no trouble falling asleep, but I typically wake up once or twice at night and am usually unable to sleep more than 5.5 hours. I've tried 3mg Melatonin tablets in Ecuador, and I've tried a couple of different brands of 10mg time-release Melatonin gummies from the US. None of them had any noticeable effect on me.

The only thing that has worked so far, is physical activity. We just moved to Europe, and the first two weeks was a lot of buying and building furniture, slept great those two weeks. Now that I'm back to my normal office worker life, my sleep has also gone back to not being great.

(I track my sleep using the AutoSleep app on iOS, wearing an Apple Watch at night)
by rfl890 | 2025-10-28 12:19:16+00:00
It's in no way supported by Microsoft (and is flagged by most anti-viruses), it was just to demonstrate that kernel32.dll is available for "free" in all programs. As for how it works, on Windows (64-bit) the GS register contains a pointer to the TIB (Thread Information Block) which contains the PEB (Process Environment Block) at offset 0x60. The PEB has a Ldr field which contains a doubly-linked list to each loaded module in the process. From here I obtain the requested module's base address (here kernel32.dll), parse the PE headers to find the function's address and return it.