MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by IshKebab | 2025-09-10 20:40:06+00:00
Probably a combination of factors:

* Fewer adults interested in science than children. Children are learning new things. Magnets! Pulleys! Not many adults (outside HN) are going to get excited about a pulley.

* The people making the museums don't have sufficient scientific knowledge to do science for grown ups.

* Exhibits for children are much easier to make robust, and probably cheaper to make.

That said I do think it would be really cool if there was a science museum for adults. There's all sorts of things you could show.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-10 20:40:08+00:00
In my personal life, it has had a rather significant effect; although still trivial compared to those in the region.

I'm Jewish, and opinions in my extended family about Israel have always been in tension; but this war has brought it to an untenable level. I've stopped going what had previously been the normal Shabbat and holiday dinners, in favor of smaller ones with family that is less pro Israel (and very staunchly anti Netenyahu). Even there we more or less avoid the topic. Our less Passover sedar involved a very thinly veiled discussion about the war, which did not go particularly well.

Professionally, there has been much less of an effect. I work for a US defense contractor. For the most part, we avoid talking about it. From the little conversation, I have had, there seems to be a general morale drop; but that might be a selection effect with who I am willing to talk to about it.

The only time Israel became an open topic of discussion was after the pager bombs. Even then, it was pretty much a professional "and this is why we have so much red tape around supply chain management".
by vessenes | 2025-09-10 20:40:18+00:00
Meh. Well, at least, possibly “meh”.

Upshot: Gaussian sampling along the parameters of nodes rather than a fixed number. This might offer one of the following:

* Better inference time accuracy on average

* Faster convergence during training

It probably costs additional inference and training compute.

The paper demonstrates worse results on MNIST, and shows the architecture is more than capable of dealing with the Iris test (which I hadn’t heard of; categorizing types of irises, I presume the flower, but maybe the eye?)

The paper claims to keep the number of parameters and depth the same, but it doesn’t report as to

* training time/flops (probably more I’d guess?)

* inference time/flops (almost certainly more)

Intuitively if you’ve got a mean, variance and mix coefficient, then you have triple the data space per parameter — no word as to whether the networks were normalized as to total data taken by the NN or just the number of “parameters”.

Upshot - I don’t think this paper demonstrates any sort of benefit here or elucidates the tradeoffs.

Quick reminder, negative results are good, too. I’d almost rather see the paper framed that way.
by jawarner | 2025-09-10 20:40:20+00:00
Take a look at the next sentence from your linked article.

“I am pro-life personaly [sic] but it wasn’t those,” he said, using the jail’s internal messaging system. “I will just say there is a lot of information that will come out in future that people will look at and judge for themselves that goes back 24 months before the 14th. If the gov ever let’s [sic] it get out.”
by Ethee | 2025-09-10 20:40:22+00:00
Products like these make me realize we're solving for the wrong problems with a lot of these AI solutions. I don't want you to take this as a hit to you or your product, I actually think it's extremely cool and will likely find a use. But from my perspective if this is a product you think you need, then you likely have a bigger organizational issue, as PRs are probably the last thing that I would want an AI 'intern' to organize for me.
by tropdrop | 2025-09-10 20:40:28+00:00
I know of one that "doesn't explain" the exhibits (except through an app/website where you match things hanging on walls with diagrams) – the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston; this is specifically due to the wishes of Isabella Gardner herself, who was opposed to plaques.

There is one room that breaks this rule – I'm guessing it got damaged and then at that point they didn't have to follow her will.

Still worth a visit for the garden, the Titian, lots besides.
by JustExAWS | 2025-09-10 20:40:39+00:00
The average software dev working in a tier 2 city in the US with 5-7 years of experience is making twice the median household wage in the US and is probably making twice the local median wage.

When you move over to BigTech, you come out of school making over twice the median household wage and can easily make well over a quarter million a year in total comp within 3-5 years.

I get it. I have been working in cloud consulting for a little over 5 years now with three of those working (full time) at BigTech. Now I’m a staff architect at a 3rd party consulting company working very closely with sales as part of my job.

But to say that you can’t make money as a software dev in the US is not supported by facts.

And then let’s also not glamorize independent consultants. Most don’t make the eye popping salaries and working for a consulting company, money appears in my account whether I have a project or not on vacation or sick. I have a whole sales organization, legal, accounting, a large collection of people that the resourcing department that can pull in for larger projects to work under me etc behind me even though I’m the tip of spear.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-10 20:40:40+00:00
It isn't a justification, it is an acknowledgement of the reality that most people do not have self-control. In politics, this is part of a theme where certain political viewpoints deny that humans have any innate negative nature and that they only behave that way because of structural factors.

Laws exist for this purpose, certainly true. But this fails to go far enough because there is a greater context of norms that govern behaviour in many ways. Not only in situations before the law is required but that govern how lawyers and judges behave.

This is a far more complex problem than people think. To be clear, the decline in law and order is bad, the decline in ethical behaviour from lawgivers is worse but there is a far broader failure in values that will require a generation of turmoil to erase.

I am not one for internet censorship but you look on here, on Twitter, on Reddit, and you read pages and pages of stuff that you would rarely see anywhere online twenty years ago...and this is accompanied not by the outrage that you see everywhere but by a celebration of the intense moral purification that many think we are undergoing. Human nature does not change (i live in the UK so it is obviously particularly jarring to experience people joyfully celebrating murder and also see people go to jail for calling the police muppets...weird world).
by baby_souffle | 2025-09-10 20:40:58+00:00
There are a few pretty notable assassinations around people that helped or collaborated with the Nazis. Argibly those assassinations prevented further worse outcomes.

But in _recent_ memory, the one that comes to mind immediately is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi not too long after 9/11. His death disrupted Al Qaeda in Iraq which almost certainly was a net benefit.

Bin laden himself also comes to mind but it's unclear how much more potential he had to inflict terror on the world at the time in his life when he was assassinated.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-10 20:41:01+00:00
> there are many examples where this is not true

Genuinely curious for an example of domestic assassination working out well for anyone.

If they survive, they’re forgiven and quasi-deified. If they die, they’re martyred and replaced.

The only cases where this has worked is when it’s a state wholesale wiping out the other side’s political leadership, e.g. Roman proscriptions.
by drewp | 2025-09-10 20:41:31+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr figured out some parts of this. Notably, you picked your own total monthly donation, and then clicked a button on participating sites to allocate a fraction of your total to them. AFAICT it worked as advertised, but raised new issues with donation behavior. E.g. I obviously like curl every month, so should I click its button monthly? Twice monthly? If I am a developer of some other useful OSS software, should I click curl's button and the curl devs click my button? Does the money just slosh around between merchant-customers? Is that good?
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-10 20:42:05+00:00
https://www.fox9.com/news/minnesota-lawmaker-bca-shooting-su...

> Federal prosecutors confirmed 45 Democrats were listed, including dozens of Minnesota lawmakers and members of Congress such as Rep. Angie Craig, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and Sen. Tina Smith. It also included members of Planned Parenthood, philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the organization, and several healthcare centers across the Midwest.

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5433748/minnesota-shoot...

> Authorities in Minnesota said Monday that the man arrested in a Saturday attack that killed one state lawmaker and left another wounded had a "hit list" of 45 elected officials — all Democrats.
by RandomBacon | 2025-09-10 20:42:12+00:00
Supposedly the shot was taken from 200 yards away.

In my nonprofessional opinion, that is crappy aim. I can hit an apple from 100 yards away, with a black powder rifle, with an unriffled bore, with iron sights, standing up, repeatedly. I would expect a modern rifle with a riffled bore and a scope and a larger target to be much more accurate from a prone position.
by Certified | 2025-09-10 20:42:26+00:00
Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day.

They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.
by qhwudbebd | 2025-09-10 20:42:53+00:00
I'm really surprised to hear that the slow restore times from tarsnap are still as big a problem now as they were a decade ago when I last used it. I absolutely loved the interface and the security model, and I was willing to pay at the (very) premium price point, but it was just too impractical trying to restore anything from it at the speeds I could achieve. (If I remember right, there was some problem with the design which meant normal latency between the client and the server tanked throughput to crazily low levels.)
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-10 20:43:26+00:00
Please outline how you would go about changing policy and removing the approximately 400 million firearms in civilian hands within the US. Ignore any political complications like financial cost, or uncooperative media.

There are people willing to go on murder sprees, and they number in the tens of thousands (or more) if anyone attempts this. Many of them are waiting, nearly holding their breath, hoping that the government tries such a thing. Quite possibly, a few of the mass shootings you've heard of were just those who "jumped the gun" (forgive the expression).
by pcthrowaway | 2025-09-10 20:44:14+00:00
The shooter here was a police officer firing on a civilian operating within the confines of the law. The shooter ended up missing and killing someone else.

Note, that to shoot this man, the police officer also held his gun in his hand. I hope you're at least consistent, and would also say "it doesn't make the sense" to put blame "entirely" on someone if that someone goes around shooting police officers as soon as their hands touch their guns.
by gangtao | 2025-09-10 20:44:47+00:00
That's a great observation about Chrome DevTools. The performance impact happens because DevTools adds significant overhead - it's instrumenting every network request, DOM change, and JavaScript execution for debugging purposes. The jump to 100% CPU is likely the profiler trying to capture all the WebSocket/SSE events in real-time.

It's one of those cases where the act of measuring changes the system being measured - similar to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, where you can't simultaneously measure both the exact position and momentum of a particle because the observation itself affects the system. Here, we can't get truly accurate performance measurements while DevTools is actively monitoring, because the monitoring process fundamentally alters the runtime characteristics we're trying to observe. The more granular the measurement (like real-time WebSocket message logging), the more we disturb the original system behavior.
by lemming | 2025-09-10 20:45:11+00:00
No, we just have the one daughter. But I was a boy, and I loved reading too. I don't remember needing books to mirror my experience, in fact I probably preferred books which didn't since I mostly found my own experience fairly boring!

Some recent-ish off-the-beaten track suggestions that our daughter really liked that might be appealing to boys:

1. The Unknown Adventurer books (https://www.theunknownadventurer.com): beautifully illustrated, Journey to the Last River is wonderful. We have the Lost Book of Adventure too, but our daughter didn't enjoy that one as much, I think that one would appeal more to boys. Looking at the page I see they have a third, I'll have to pick that up.

2. Almost anything by David Almond, although his young adult stuff tends to blend into his adult work and not all of it is appropriate/interesting depending on reading/maturity level. Plenty of male protagonists, mostly universal themes, some quite strange. I'd recommend reading them first to get an idea if they'd be good for your kid, I loved them. His first book Skellig is probably a good place to start just to see if you like the style or not, although they're all quite different from each other.

3. We really liked A Wish in the Dark, by Christina Soontornvat. Some social commentary but also a great story in an interesting world: https://soontornvat.com/books/a-wish-in-the-dark/. I also highly highly recommend All Thirteen, the non-fiction story of the Thai cave rescue, absolutely amazing story: https://soontornvat.com/books/all-thirteen/.

4. The Orphans of the Tide series by Struan Murray are great adventure/fantasy stories, if occasionally a little dark for younger kids. We got distracted before getting to the last one in the series, but the first two were good.

I can't help so much with stories specifically for boys, but generally I find that just focusing on high-quality, well written books of any stripe are a good bet. If you have a good bookshop nearby, go and find the helpful person - they can help steer you. And buy books from them so they stick around :-)
by ryanobjc | 2025-09-10 20:45:32+00:00
regarding #2: "Automate the dumb/boring stuff", I always think of the big short when Michael Burry said "yes I read all the boring spreadsheets, and I now have a contrary position". And ended up being RIGHT.

For example, I believe writing unit tests is way too important to be fully relegated to the most junior devs, or even LLM generation! In other fields, "test engineer" is an incredibly prestigious position to have, for example "lead test engineer, Space X/ Nasa/etc" -- that ain't a slouch job, you are literally responsible for some of the most important validation and engineering work done at the company.

So I do question the notion that we can offload the "simple" stuff and just move on with life. It hasn't really fully worked well in all fields, for example have we really outsourced the boring stuff like manufacturing and made things way better? The best companies making the best things do typically vertically integrate.
by Sparkle-san | 2025-09-10 20:45:38+00:00
It's when the minority functionally has more rights/say in things than the majority. Take the electoral college for instance, I consider the fact that you could win an election with only 23% of the population voting for you makes it fundamentally flawed and should be removed.

The same can be said for how we distribute seats in the senate and house. The difference in population between the largest and smallest state when the constitution was ratified was around 12x. It's now 70x and I consider that to be unacceptable in terms of weight of power wielded by those smaller states.
by worik | 2025-09-10 20:45:42+00:00
This makes me so mad. 5he excuses from Microsoft are quite pathetic

Their ubiquitous systems have been notoriously insecure for decades.

They are one of the highest revenue firms on the planet.

It is going to take strict liability for software developers before we all pull up oursocks and put an end to this nonsense. When it is a marketing advantage to produce insecure software, what else can fix our industry?

I despair
by rdtsc | 2025-09-10 20:45:52+00:00
> How many can name them? How long did their deaths stay in the headlines? How much coverage were they given, and how much coverage will Kirk be given?

I couldn't have named Kirk if I saw him or heard about him before he shot and it entered the news. Not sure what that tells us -- we should know more who our representatives are, or know about various "influencers" in politics and such?

EDIT: I saw you initially mentioned two representatives who were murdered but now it looks like there is only one. So even though you criticize others for not knowing who these murdered representatives were, it seems you don't even know who they were or if they were even murdered.

> Don't want to talk in bad taste by going to this so early, but...

Well this is how usually talking in bad taste early starts ;-). It's kind of like saying "No offense, but ... $insert_offense_here".
by necovek | 2025-09-10 20:46:28+00:00
Wouldn't putting a single word per line minimize reformatting and changes in line-diffs further?

From an opposite angle, I imagine you do not use semantic line breaks in ASCII art or code that shouldn't be word-wrapped, so I imagine why not push for that too?

Mostly to point out that this is a micro-optimization for little demonstrable benefit.
by noosphr | 2025-09-10 20:46:59+00:00
If you haven't noticed a difference between his first and second terms may I suggest you go for a vacation outside the US and try coming back in? For bonus points make a mistake on your forms.

US customs are now _worse_ than they were a month after 9/11 and this time it's not just the ones at airports.

I know plenty of people who will be giving NeurIPS a miss _on the advice of their governments_. This _did not_ happen during his first term.
by Kon5ole | 2025-09-10 20:47:01+00:00
>They are so safe that nobody has ever attempted a terrorist attack against them since the first fission reactor (1941)

Attempts are made regularly, and nuclear plants all over the world implemented additional security measures after 9/11.

"A foiled Chechen rebel assault on the Russian city of Nalchik in October 2005 would have involved an attempt to hijack and fly one of five aircraft into a nuclear power station. Papers released in the UK in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) revealed there were more than 40 cases of potential security breaches at UK civil nuclear sites from 2004 to 2005."

https://www.rusi.org/publication/countering-threats-nuclear-...

>why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours

It's complex but a simplified answer is that Italy pays what it actually costs, while the French leaves a lot of the cost to their children.

The children (of the people who built the french nuclear plants) recently had to pay over 50 bn euros to cover the debts of EDF, and will likely have to pay another ?? bn to cover lack of maintenance on the aging reactors. (Google it). For 50+ years, france sold nuclear electricity at a loss, mostly unknowingly.

Once they have paid the sins of the parents, the remaining costs to maintain the plants for another 20+ years again will likely be postponed to the next generation, since covering the cost today would make the electricity too expensive to sell.

Note that France is running their economy at a much larger deficit than Italy for the past few years. Nuclear power that is not paid by electricity consumers now, but instead by the government, is of course not the entire explanation but it's part of it.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-10 20:47:06+00:00
>That doesn’t sound like a bad thing

Of course it doesn't sound bad but what do you do when you run out of money to pay for it?

Do we decide policies based on what sounds good or what we can actually afford? Because getting paid to do nothing but our hobbies would sound even better.

But hey, if you wanna give boomers luxury retirement while immolating the economic prospects of future generations of workers in order to pay for it, go for it.
by tropdrop | 2025-09-10 20:47:08+00:00
Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight.

Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-09-10 20:47:12+00:00
The US is a relatively permissive societies. Justice is frequently seen not to be done. Law and order is, mostly, non-existent with courts used as a last resort (and even then, very loosely).

I am always puzzled that people think other people believe the purpose of law and order is "deterrent"...have you ever met anyone who says this? It is simple: some people are criminals, if they are in jail then they are unable to continue committing crimes, if you let them out they will commit crimes...this has been seen in the US, in many European countries, over and over. Further, the purpose of stiff punishment is also so that victims and the public see justice being done. If you live in a society where you see people abuse others without consequence, you will leave that society. That is it. Simple. Basic logic that was understood four thousand years ago but which continues to be impenetrable to people with all the advantages of modern life.
by bayindirh | 2025-09-10 20:47:25+00:00
We, as in developers, need to understand that permissive licenses are about "developer" freedom, and copyleft licenses are about "user" freedom.

If someone doesn't want their code to be grabbed and ran away with it, they shall use (A)GPL.

Then, nobody can add a "secret sauce" and sit on top of your work and act like they have written all of it and make it proprietary.

Moreover, do not do copyright reassignments and with every new contributor, the license becomes more entrenched in your codebase.

We should stop demonizing copyleft licenses and romanticize permissive licenses. Every inconsiderately permissive licensed code butters corporations and is destined to be closed and their developers got exploited.

We should increase license literacy in Free Software.