MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lerc | 2025-10-28 11:43:55+00:00
>3) LLMs do not have a mechanism for sampling from given probability distributions. E.g. if you ask LLM to sample a random number from 1 to 10, it will likely give you 3 or 7, as those are overrepresented in the training data.

I am not sure that is true. Yes it will likely give a 3 or 7 but that is because it is trying to represent that distribution from the training data. It's not trying for a random digit there, it's trying for what the data set does.

It would certainly be possible to give an AI the notion of a random digit, and rather than training on fixed output examples give it additional training to make it to produce an embedding that was exactly equidistant from the tokens 0..9 when it wanted a random digit.

You could then fine tune it to use that ability to generate sequences of random digits to provide samples in reasoning steps.
by PanoptesYC | 2025-10-28 11:44:42+00:00
Techy people enjoy stats and metrics you can review. It's fun to pull up my sleep data and compare averages between last 7 days/31 days/12 months. It's interesting to see my heart rate at different points during exercise or other activities. Sometimes I can recall what I was doing on a particular day just looking at the amount of steps.
by Thorrez | 2025-10-28 11:44:58+00:00
Check out Google's diversity report[1], pages 63-110. It contains a lot of data. E.g. for US tech hiring, in 2015 2.2% of hires were Black+, in 2024, it was 10.0%. For global tech hiring, in 2015 19.6% of hires were women, in 2024, it was 30.2%.

Disclosure: I work at Google.

[1] https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/819bcce604bf5ff7...
by rs186 | 2025-10-28 11:45:26+00:00
Assuming teammates are all experts at linux commands. Fact: not everyone knows what "sort | uniq -c" does or can type it out on demand. Actually I'll be surprised if more than 25% of all software engineers can do that . If you don't believe me, ask random people inside and outside your company.

> It costs me more effort to read and understand ...

You don't need to. LLMs are meant for that. You probably will roll your own script anyway and none of this matters.

You are worrying about things that, in my experience, do not make any noticeable impact on overall productivity.
by vdm | 2025-10-28 11:45:48+00:00
$ zdump -Vc 2025,2026 America/New_York America/New_York Sun Mar 9 06:59:59 2025 UT = Sun Mar 9 01:59:59 2025 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000 America/New_York Sun Mar 9 07:00:00 2025 UT = Sun Mar 9 03:00:00 2025 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400 America/New_York Sun Nov 2 05:59:59 2025 UT = Sun Nov 2 01:59:59 2025 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400 America/New_York Sun Nov 2 06:00:00 2025 UT = Sun Nov 2 01:00:00 2025 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000 $ zdump -Vc 2025,2026 Europe/London Europe/London Sun Mar 30 00:59:59 2025 UT = Sun Mar 30 00:59:59 2025 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0 Europe/London Sun Mar 30 01:00:00 2025 UT = Sun Mar 30 02:00:00 2025 BST isdst=1 gmtoff=3600 Europe/London Sun Oct 26 00:59:59 2025 UT = Sun Oct 26 01:59:59 2025 BST isdst=1 gmtoff=3600 Europe/London Sun Oct 26 01:00:00 2025 UT = Sun Oct 26 01:00:00 2025 GMT isdst=0 gmtoff=0
by willis936 | 2025-10-28 11:46:31+00:00
It's a matter of trust and incentives. How can you trust a program curated by an entity with no accountability? A therapist has a personal stake in helping patients. An LLM provider does not.

Seeking help should not be so taboo as people are resorting to doing it alone at night while no one is looking. That is society loudly saying "if you slip off the golden path even a little your life is over". So many people resorting to LLMs for therapy is a symptom of a cultural problem, it's not a solution to a root issue.
by cckeh | 2025-10-28 11:46:43+00:00
Hi!

A while ago, I built CS Sprint — a free site for computer-science notes, interview questions, and cheatsheets, made to help students and developers prepare faster for interviews.

I’ve now rebuilt and relaunched it as CrackSheet

What’s new:

Migrated from React to Next.js + TypeScript

Better performance, SEO, and structure

Expanded educational content (notes, interview Qs, cheatsheets, and more coming soon)

The goal remains the same — to make tech learning and interview prep accessible and free for everyone.

I’d really appreciate your feedback on the design, performance, and overall usability. You can check it out here https://www.cracksheet.com

Happy to answer any questions or suggestions!
by OnACoffeeBreak | 2025-10-28 11:47:02+00:00
I pick a category, like fruits and vegetables or cars, and then try to come up with a word in that category that starts with every letter of the alphabet in order. To keep it relaxing I synchronize it with my breath. On the breath in, I note the letter I am on: "C" for example. On the breath out I note the word: "Cantaloupe". If I don't have a word for that letter by the time I breath out, no big deal, I conceptualize whatever was in my mind at that point and then repeat the letter on the next breath in.

Another thing I do that works well for me is just counting breaths. On the breath in I think "in-n-n-n-n" and on the breath out I count. When I lose count, and I am still awake, I start again from 0, as any sane programmer would ;-).

ETA: For a couple of months I have been doing a short gratitude routine as I am getting into bed. I acknowledge the good and positive things that happened during the day, and I tell myself that I did a good job (if I did) or that I did as well as I could today and that's good enough for today. Then I think, "And now it's time for rest. I've been looking forward to this." If any part of me starts thinking about the day again or thinks about tomorrow, I gently reassure it that I will attend to all of this tomorrow morning and that now it's quiet time and time to rest.

All of this plus 250 mg of magnesium an hour before bed has made falling asleep super consistent and easy.
by probably_wrong | 2025-10-28 11:47:09+00:00
I think you're being too generous to the idea that it could help without any evidence.

If we assume that there's therapeutic value to bringing your problems out then a diary is a better tool. And if we believe that it's the feedback what's helping, well, we have cases of ChatGPT encouraging people's psychosis.

We know that a layman often doesn't know the difference between what's helpful and what isn't - that's why loving relatives end up often enabling people's addictions thinking they're helping. But I'd argue that a system that confidently gives mediocre feedback at best and actively psychotic at worst is not a system that should be encouraged simply because it's cheap.

I also wanted to snarkily write "even a dog would be better", but the more I thought about it the more I realized that yes, a dog would probably be a solid alternative.
by reuel | 2025-10-28 11:47:12+00:00
When searching for 'mydisney account' OR 'disney account' on Google, there is a link in the sponsored results showing what looks like the official Disney site advertising 'Black hat SEO Packages'. I haven't been able to find any news stories about this other than social media posts.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQU_3JcCW2a/ Instagram post describing what may have happened to cause this ie. anchor text poisoning

Screenshots https://ibb.co/Gqk821z https://ibb.co/ymRw8sBz

Try it yourself to see if its fixed yet - https://www.google.com/search?q=mydisney+account

I have tested and verified this is still happening in Firefox, Microsoft Edge 141.0.and Chrome The link just redirects to a member account page on Disney.com now.
by cubefox | 2025-10-28 11:47:20+00:00
Seems to be a pretty even split: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

"Gulf of North America" would make more sense, because most people regard (just) "America" as synonymous with "USA". Though that name would perhaps be more appropriate for the Hudson Bay, which is farther north.
by mpavlov | 2025-10-28 11:49:24+00:00
(author of PokerBattle here)

That’s true. The original goal was to see which model performs statistically better than the others, but I quickly realized that would be neither practical nor particularly entertaining.

A proper benchmark would require things like: - Tens of thousands of hands played - Strict heads-up format (only two models compared at a time) - Each hand played twice with positions swapped

The current setup is mainly useful for observing common reasoning failure modes and how often they occur.
by wonger_ | 2025-10-28 11:49:25+00:00
For font size that increases with screen size, you can use some clamp() math, like:

--step-0: clamp(1.125rem, 1.0739rem + 0.2273vw, 1.25rem);

Taken from https://utopia.fyi/type/calculator?c=360,18,1.2,1240,20,1.25...
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 11:49:55+00:00
>Countries vary, but in the US and many places there's a shortage of quality therapists.

Worse in my EU country. There's even a shortage of shitty therapists and doctors, let alone quality ones. It takes 6+ months to get an appointment for a 5 minute checkup at a poorly reviewed state funded therapist, while the good ones are either private or don't accept any new patients if they're on the public system. And ADHD diagnosticians/therapists are only in the private sector because I guess the government doesn't recognize ADHD as being a "real" mental issue worthy of your tax Euros.

A friend of mine got a more accurate diagnosis for his breathing issue by putting his symptoms in ChatGPT than he got from his general practitioner, later confirmed by a good specialist. I also wasted a lot of money on bad private therapists that were basically just phoning in their job, so to me, the bar seems pretty low, since as long as they pass their med-school exams and don't kill too many people through malpractice, nobody checks up on how good or bad their are at their job (maybe some need more training, or maybe some don't belong in medicine at all but managed to slipped through the cracks).

Not saying all doctors are bad (I've met few amazing ones), but it definitely seems like the healthcare systems are failing a lot of people everywhere if they resort to LLMs for diagnosis and therapy and getting better results from it.
by radicalbyte | 2025-10-28 11:50:55+00:00
The problem is that we have a culture of accepting mangled requests on the web. This happens in application code too - because web developers are sloppy it's common to either disable or not use strict input validation.

In a pure .Net world it's the norm to use strict input validation and tell clients to fix their bad requests and this looks like one of those cultural blindspots. "We" wouldn't naturally consider a case where a server accepted a request which has not been strictly validated. With the move to .Net Core and a broadening of the scope to not only target enterprises and we'll find issues like this....
by M95D | 2025-10-28 11:51:05+00:00
It all happens because of people's greed.

The companies that make stuff could easily be beaten in the market by a non-profit competitor. With no worries about stock market prices and dividends, a non-profit could direct all it's money into making better products.

But the problems are that 1) nobody wants to work for a non-profit and 2) greed redirects the money away from better products into the founder's (or top management's) pockets. Firefox is an example.
by fabian2k | 2025-10-28 11:52:36+00:00
> And as a final reminder, even though request smuggling is typically described and demonstrated using a proxy in front of your server, just not using a proxy does not mean you're automatically safe. If you're reading, manipulating, or forwarding request streams directly in ASP.NET Core, as opposed to just relying on the built-in model binding, then you might be at risk to request smuggling attacks.

I'm probably missing something, but I still don't get how this would work without a proxy unless my own code manually parses the request from scratch. Or maybe that is what the author means.

The vulnerability, as far as I understand it, relies on two components interpreting these chunks differently. So one of them has to read \r or \n as valid markers for the chunk end, and the other one must only allow \r\n as specified.

Kestrel used to allow \r and \n (and the fix is to not do that anymore). So only if my own code parses these chunks and uses \r\n would I be vulnerable, or?

The proxy version of the vulnerability seems quite clear to me, and pretty dangerous as .NET parses non-compliant and would thereby be vulnerable behind any compliant proxy (if the proxy is relevant for security aspects).

But the single application version of the vulnerability seems to me to be very unlikely and to require essentially having a separate full HTTP parser in my own application code. Am I missing something here?
by fainpul | 2025-10-28 11:53:25+00:00
This is helpful for estimating how much higher display resolutions are still perceivable and when we enter the territory of "marketing bullshit".

For example:

- 40 cm view distance (e.g. smartphone): 300 ppi is roughly the maximum that's useful

- 100 cm (e.g. desktop monitor): about 200 ppi

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64679-2/figures/2
by exasperaited | 2025-10-28 11:53:32+00:00
> But that's not the issue.

It is the issue at least in the sense that it's the one I was personally responding to, thanks. And there are many issues, not just the one you are choosing to focus on.

"Deeper societal problems" is a typical get-out clause for all harmful technology.

It's not good enough. Like, in the USA they say "deeper societal problems" about guns; other countries ban them and have radically fewer gun deaths while they are also addressing those problems.

It's not an either-we-ban-guns-or-we-help-mentally-ill-people. Por qué no los dos? Deeper societal problems are not represented by a neat dividing line between cause and symptom; they are cyclical.

The current push towards LLMs and other technologies is one of the deepest societal problems humans have ever had to consider.

ChatGPT engaged in an entire line of discussion that no human counsellor would engage in, leading to an outcome that no human intervention (except that of a psychopath) would cause. Because it was sycophantic.

Just saying "but humans also" is wholly irrational in this context.
by sharts | 2025-10-28 11:54:53+00:00
Something is indeed NOT better than nothing. However, for those with mental and emotional issues (likely stemming from social / societal failures in the first place) anything would be better nothing because they need interaction and patience —two things these AI tools have in abundance.

Sadly there is no alternative. This is happening and there’s no going back. Many will be affected in detrimental ways (if not worse). We all go on with our lives because that which does not directly affect us is not our problem —is someone else’s problem/responsibility.
by jeswin | 2025-10-28 11:55:24+00:00
> Yeah this isn’t how any of this works and you’re deluding yourself.

I am not offended (at all). But you're dismissing my (continued) positive experience with "You're deluding yourself". How do you know? It'd be a lot more unfair to people who benefit more than I do, and I can totally imagine that being not a small set of people.

> Also incredible how you framed improving your mental health as a consequence of a (pseudo) technical skill set.

It's not incredible at all. If you're lost in a jungle with predators, a marksman might reach for their gun. A runner might just rely on running. I am just using skills I'm good at.
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-28 11:58:12+00:00
Realistically, the whole 'DEI is anti-merit discrimination' argument falls incredibly flat in the year of the current admin, where they openly and brazenly admit to both racially discriminating against individuals and casually committing sexism. Said argument should simply just be tossed away in the garbage where it belongs. Notably none of the people that act like they give a shit ever show up when the Supreme Court says it's completely okay to racially profile people or when the US government attempts to kick out otherwise fit members of the military. They're arguing like it's 2022, not 2025.

The PSF not taking the deal is the right play because as we've seen repeatedly over the past few months the current admin has zero issue using these things as leverage for harassment and politically motivated gain, which never ends no matter how much you try and appease them.
by fragmede | 2025-10-28 11:58:48+00:00
Real life trolly problem!

If you pull the lever, some people on this track will die (by sucide). If you don't pull the lever, some people will still die from suicide. By not pulling the lever, and simply banning discussion of suicide entirely, your company gets to avoid a huge PR disaster, and you get more money because line go up. If you pull the lever and let people talk about suicide on your platform, you may avoid prevent some suicides, but you can never discuss that with the press, your company gets bad PR, and everyone will believe you're a murderer. Plus, line go down and you make less money while other companies make money off of selling AI therapy apps.

What do you chose to do?
by kobenni | 2025-10-28 11:59:36+00:00
I think what you're saying is both besides the point and incorrect.

Firstly, not studying, ignoring safety rules, or half-assing a task at work are behaviors, they don't necessarily reflect understanding or intelligence. Sometimes I get up late and have to rush in the morning, that doesn't mean I lack the intelligence to understand that time passes when I sleep.

Secondly, I don't think that most people fail to see the connection between not studying and failing a test. They might give other excuses for emotional or practical reasons, but I think you'll have a hard time finding anyone who genuinely claims that studying doesn't usually lead to better test scores. Same for ignoring safety rules or half-assing work.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-10-28 12:00:17+00:00
1. Write test that generates an artefact (e.g. picture) where you can check look and feel (red).

2. Write code that makes it look right, running the test and checking that picture periodically. When it looks right, lock in the artefact which should now be checked against the actual picture (green, if it matches).

3. Refactor.

The only criticism ive heard of this is that it doesnt fit some people's conceptions of what they think TDD "ought to be" (i.e. some bullshit with a low level unit test).
by tarwich | 2025-10-28 12:01:49+00:00
I would assume not. Consider ARC vs GC. With ARC the programmer manages memory and with GC the compiler manages it. People choose one or the other because of the style they're going after. Could you set a flag for it. Maybe if all libraries you download were pre-compiled perhaps.

Personally, I just prefer to know that the team that supports the tool I'm using is dedicated to "that one thing" I'm after.
by dspillett | 2025-10-28 12:02:14+00:00
> Do you know why people stopped?

They didn't entirely. It is still maintained, developed even.

> It would seem to be a potentially useful middle ground between docker containers and KVM VMs

Back in the day I actually used it that way for running “VM”s and some firms even sold VPS accounts based on UML. Back then other virtualisation options were not nearly as mature as they soon became, or cost proper money (IIRC VMWare was good by that point but there were no free or reliable OSS options yet), and UML offered better isolation (a full environment including its own root) than simply chrooting a process tree (fuller containers were not a thing back then either, so all users fully existed on the host and you couldn't give out root access net.).

These days things like KVM and more advanced containerisation solve the problems most people want UML for and do so much more efficiently (UML performs badly, compared to other options, where there is a lot of kernel interaction, including any filesystem or network access).

UML is still very useful for its original intent though: testing and debugging certain kernel level items like filesystems (FUSE is competition here in many, but not all, cases), network drivers & filters, and so forth. When things go wrong you can trace into it in ways you can not (as easily) with VMS and containers.
by ben_w | 2025-10-28 12:02:31+00:00
Possibly the same episode, but some creep was trying to get a holodeck session with her likeness, and when Quark managed to get her likeness, the revenge was to corrupt the holodeck program to put Quark's head on the body: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrekgifs/comments/i8hilq/cant_d...
by discoinverno | 2025-10-28 12:03:02+00:00
My family is from Sicily, and I remember taking this train every year when I was a kid. After several years, I took it again last summer and was bufflled at how inefficient the whole ordeal was... Basically you have to wait for the train wagons to be detached and reassembled on the other side, you easily waste a couple hours.

Now, I don't really mind this, it's a bit of a tradition if you want, but I asked a relative of mine who used to work for the Italian national train company, and he told me that this train works like this cause in the past all the Sicilian migrants would travel with a lot of luggage, and it would be very impractical for them to transfer all of that twice. Nowadays this is not really the case anymore.
by raziel2p | 2025-10-28 12:03:56+00:00
> The company has more than 1.5 million employees across its warehouses and offices worldwide.

> This includes around 350,000 corporate workers, which include those in executive, managerial and sales roles, according to figures that Amazon submitted to the US government last year.

So roughly 4% of jobs in Amazon's corporate division disappeared. Not to downplay that the world/economy is in a bad state, but I don't think this is very catastrophic.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-10-28 12:04:03+00:00
From the CNN report [1]:

---

Al won’t just effect change at Amazon, Jassy said. AI "will change how we all work and live," including "billions" of AI agents “across every company and in every imaginable field." However, much of this remains speculative.

"Many of these agents have yet to be built, but make no mistake, they’re coming, and coming fast," Jassy said.

---

[1] _ https://lite.cnn.com/2025/10/28/business/amazon-layoffs
by K0balt | 2025-10-28 12:04:23+00:00
Depends on the length of the key vs the message, but if the pad is 100 percent and has something approaching a random distribution, and the message length is suitably padded, and the results roll over in a modulo that is close to the information distribution, then all valid results become close to equally probable, so, while you may decode a message, it is very unlikely to be the message that was sent.

Still lots of ways to crack a poorly executed OTP.
by gjm11 | 2025-10-28 12:04:54+00:00
"At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn)."

The stock-owning class is in a boom. The working class is in a recession.

(People who have stock-market investments and need to work for a living are somewhere in between.)

The average of one billionaire gaining £10M and a hundred middle-class folks losing £100k is solidly positive, so this looks like a "growing economy" to many of the usual metrics.

I am not sure whether the people who are benefiting from all this have noticed how often this sort of dynamic in the past has led to torches and pitchforks and the like.