MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-11-23 15:06:48+00:00
> Because launching a robot is a multi billion dollar affair

They don't have to be though. Spirit and Opportunity entire project budget (including design, building, launching, and operating for 90 days) was 820M. Even with the mission extensions the total cost is < 1B. And a lot of things have changed since then. Launches are cheaper, tech has improved and some recent missions have proven that even CotS hardware can exceed expectations (see the helicopter).

I would love to see NASA do something like the CLPS but for Mars. They could pay for launch services (which are way cheaper now with F9 / NG), and help with EDL (using the same parachute + airbags thing that has worked before), and leave the rover parts to 3rd parties.

We could have universities join the competition, building the rovers, exploring CotS stuff, autonomous driving and so on. Lower stakes than the decadal big rovers (Curiosity & Perseverance), but also cool and useful to train the next generations of students. Hell, I bet even companies could enter the race, with Toyota / Tesla / whoever else supporting this effort.
by bluescrn | 2025-11-23 15:07:46+00:00
> What is the point of having a civilization if we can't afford kids?

It's not 'can't afford kids', it's 'don't prioritise having kids'. And IMHO, they've been taught to think this way. To put career and materialism above family. There's also the constant messaging about an impending climate apocalypse or the rise of new fascism/nazism - which helps justify 'I don't want to bring new life into this world' logic.

Other cultures continue to have kids even in relative poverty, they don't choose to stop having families because times are tough.
by derangedHorse | 2025-11-23 15:07:46+00:00
> I don’t view what I do as a ‘job’ > doing an actual real service industry job

I see a lot of other figures in pop culture echo this sentiment. The need to downplay the effort involved because the payoff is disproportionate to the effort/payoff ratio of most other jobs. In a job where mass public perception dictates success I can see why she would feel the need to include this, but I hope she doesn't truly believe it. A globally recognized chef who gets paid millions for their work isn't downplaying his effort because of how disproportionately valued it is, so neither should a pop star.

> patriarchal society we unfortunately live in has successfully brainwashed us all

I'm not totally subscribed to this "patriarchy" narrative. I think any "brainwashing" (or establishment of cultural norms) is from a mix of figures from both genders alike. I don't think it's a symptom of the perceived problem of higher positions mainly holding men in power. I do agree with her assessment with there being people postured to give an excessive amount of hate to women who don't fit their societal expectations vs. men who don't, so I'll give her that.

With that said, this was still a good read. I'm not too familiar with Charli XCX but I have a lot of respect for her using her free time to share her experiences. I hope to see more from her in the future.
by psychoslave | 2025-11-23 15:07:50+00:00
>Also, removing the option to have multiple jobs?

Well, not necessarily but a cap of the number of hour before you vastly exceed the poverty threshold is obviously a must have be it by law or sheer force of lore and habits. Otherwise this is in practice driving society to tolerate slavery, just tagged differently. If all that an individual is able doing all days through is serving mercantile work, this person represent a net negative to its society.
by 101011 | 2025-11-23 15:08:22+00:00
> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.

This is the first I've heard this statement (not necessarily the idea), but I found it incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity - thanks for sharing!

Are there origins to this that you're aware of? With some searching I found some adjacent thread lines to stoicism and Buddhism, but nothing quite the same.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-11-23 15:09:00+00:00
I admit that when reading the description of your relationship (I don't mean to be disrespectful, for what it's worth) I can't help but wonder how it can possibly be consistent with "a relationship between two people can be basically whatever they want it to be." It really reads like the relationship is whatever _she_ wants it to be.

If you had come into the relationship with the understanding that you'd both date/have sex with other people then great; it doesn't matter what other people think. However, when you say that it was hard for you to accept her being with other men, and that you're lucky that "she has never fallen in love and wanted to run away with one of em", damn. My first instinct is that you should take your own advice: find or design a relationship where you don't have to accept this.

I realize that some of my knee jerk reaction might just be instinct/cultural values, I mean no disrespect.
by superkuh | 2025-11-23 15:09:06+00:00
And this is why very long support windows are great. All the corporate persons and the bleeding edge devs can improve off into the sunset while a stable base for non-dev culture human people who want to get things done and have them keep being done rather than requiring remakes every $timeperiod (~3 months for rustc, ~10 years for c++xx culture target changes, etc) exists.
by Nursie | 2025-11-23 15:09:29+00:00
I honestly don’t know, perhaps find some to ask. To me that looks far too much like government overreach and interference. Not that government overreach or interference is anything but fashionable these days.

As others have said as well - people’s lives take all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. Jobs are lost, economies change and make whole sectors irrelevant. You can’t just assume everyone with more than two kids needing support has always been in that situation or always will be.
by kaoD | 2025-11-23 15:09:30+00:00
Nitpick: "raymarching" is not "raytracing done in a shader" and it's not polygon-based.

Raymarching is a raytracing technique that takes advantage of Signed Distance Functions to have a minimum bound on the ray's distance to complex surfaces, letting you march rays by discrete amounts using this distance[0]. If the distance is still large after a set number of steps the ray is assumed to have escaped the scene.

This allows tracing complex geometry cheaply because, unlike in traditional raytracing, you don't have to calculate each ray's intersection with a large number of analytical shapes (SDFs are O(1), analytical raytracing is O(n)).

There are disadvantages to raymarching. In particular, many useful operations on SDFs only produce a bounded result, actually result in a pseudo-SDF that is not differentiable everywhere, might be non-Euclidean, etc. which might introduce artifacts on the rendering.

You can do analytical raytracing in fragment shaders[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_marching#Sphere_tracing Good visualization of raymarching steps

[1] https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WlXcRM Fragment shader using Monte Carlo raytracing (aka "path tracing")
by d4rkp4ttern | 2025-11-23 15:09:53+00:00
Relatedly, I haven’t seen two issues discussed much in agent design, but repeatedly come up in real world use cases:

(1) LLM forgets to call a tool (and instead outputs plain text). Contrary to some of the comments here saying that these concerns will disappear as frontier models improve, there will always be a need for having your agent scaffolding work well with weaker LLMs (cost, privacy, etc).

(2) Determining when a task is finished. In some cases, we want the LLM to decide that (e.g search with different queries until desired info found), but in others, we want to specify deterministic task completion conditions (e.g., end the task immediately after structured info extraction, or after acting on such info, or after the LLM sees the result of that action etc).

After repeatedly running into these types of issues in production agent systems, we’ve added mechanisms for these in the Langroid[1] agent framework (I’m the lead dev), which has blackboard-like loop architecture that makes it easy to incorporate these.

For issue (1) we can configure an agent with a `handle_llm_no_tool` [2] set to a “nudge” that is sent back to the LLM when a non-tool response is detected (it could also be set as a lambda function to take other possible actions)

For issue (2) Langroid has a DSL[3] for specifying task termination conditions. It lets you specify patterns that trigger task termination, e.g.

- "T" to terminate immediately after a tool-call,

- "T[X]" to terminate after calling the specific tool X,

- "T,A" to terminate after a tool call, and agent handling (i.e. tool exec)

- "T,A,L" to terminate after tool call, agent handling, and LLM response to that

[1] Langroid https://github.com/langroid/langroid

[2] Handling non-tool LLM responses https://langroid.github.io/langroid/notes/handle-llm-no-tool...

[3] Task Termination in Langroid https://langroid.github.io/langroid/notes/task-termination/
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-11-23 15:09:58+00:00
As a democratic socialist, I find this article fails to back its claim that equity is theft. Workers at startups get equity; this is why they work so hard. Would a worker cooperative be better? Possibly, but there is little incentive for the person with the capital to risk their wealth if they don't get a stake that is commensurate to the risk they are taking. I think if anything, startups are a massive improvement over public corporations because they regularly provide a means for a talented person with no capital to become an owner. If I were to critique capitalism, I would hardly start with a startup, which is the closest thing we have to a worker cooperative. I would go after private equity, which is perhaps the most evil of all of capitalism in its various forms, the equivalent of a blood sucking creature straight out of the D&D Monster Manual.
by hysan | 2025-11-23 15:10:11+00:00
Maybe portable isn’t the right word. I read portable as meaning the format’s semantics are consistent across platforms. The way I read the author’s complaint was that once you start tacking on extensions to markdown, you run into the problem of seeing if other markdown platforms being able to support your variant of markdown. Hence the part about CommonMark vs GitHub-Flavored Markdown vs etc. Having actually run into this before when working on CMSes in the past, I get why the author sees this as a problem. I don’t think everyone will agree with the authors viewpoint, but I just happened to think that this thread is completely missing the point that the author is trying to make.
by schneems | 2025-11-23 15:10:36+00:00
> I only questioned why he would have brought kids into the "union",

They might be lead to believe "if only we got married ... if only we had kids ... that will 'fix' it." Even straight couples who aren't in love fall into this trap.

I don't know how well real life imitates art, but a lot of films involving gay historical characters have a similar enough narrative I assume it has some grain of truth: The gay person would rather not be gay (it would be easier for them), and is told by society that it's a choice. Maybe they even have some small amount of feelings for the spouse or think they can "learn to love them." See Rustin 2023 as an example of the psychology in action.

> I'll go to my grave still very sad about the could-have-beens.

Sorry for that. Loss is one of the hardest, most confusing emotions. That lack of closure and the unknown is a truly awful feeling.
by bahmboo | 2025-11-23 15:10:49+00:00
Values - I'm not judging.

Do you want to be the best rapper in Sweden? Do you want to be the best engineer at EA? 2 million a year to work at Palantir? Sign with a label and get 2 million a year to live in LA and have your music in Pepsi ads? Start an open source greenfield passion project that has only your vision as the runway? Work your own musical genre even if your audience isn't there yet?

As a talented young person (or at least you believe in yourself!) it's early in your life/career where you can sculpt and morph yourself while you are still formable.
by krupan | 2025-11-23 15:10:51+00:00
Writing, journaling, is such a good way to process thoughts and emotions and this is a great example. I'm grateful for this person sharing her very personal journal entries with us even though it is not required at all. It sets a great example of what to write about and how. It also reveals that people and the lives they live are incredibly complicated and messy. The longer I live and the more people I get to know the more I believe that nobody is as simple and "good" as they seem on the surface. If your life has been simple and relatively pain free up to this point, just wait, and try not to judge others in situations more difficult and complicated than yours too harshly. There is much you do not yet know.
by wslh | 2025-11-23 15:10:53+00:00
Capitalism or consumerism don't define human nature. Human behaviour existed long before those systems, and it will exist long after them.

What has changed, and this is where I agree with your point about difficulty, is the scale and precision of behavioural manipulation. We've never had a period where advertising, content, and emotional triggers were personalized with such speed and accuracy. Tobacco harmed the body, today's hyper-personalized content ecosystems can easily harm attention, mood regulation, and overall mental health.

So yes, it's hard to shift things at a societal level when the environment is engineered to keep people reactive.

On mindfulness: in its modern form it's often packaged as another consumer product, but its roots, like those of yoga, Zen, and other contemplative traditions, come from outside capitalist logic. The original practices were tools for resisting impulse and cultivating awareness, not selling calmness subscriptions.
by axegon_ | 2025-11-23 15:11:11+00:00
No, not yet, but People are starting to get the cold shower treatment they needed. Cloud services make sense for two groups of companies:

1. Huge multi-billion dollar corporations where the overhead of hiring 1000 hardware engineers to manage the... hardware is not worth the trouble/effort.

2. Fresh, 2.5 people-involved startups that need to ship a product asap and cannot afford to waste their time on infrastructure.

Everyone in-between however - bare-metal, be it rented, bought second hand and shoved in a collocation datacenter - it makes a lot more sense. For the money you'd spend on AWS/Azure/GCP in a year, in most cases you can get the equivalent refurbished servers you'd need, set them up and toss them in a datacenter, where you get full control over your own data and infrastructure and probably be left with cash to spare - the cold shower I was referring to.
by billy99k | 2025-11-23 15:11:50+00:00
"Before you judge the man in this story too harshly"

I will judge him harshly. Instead of getting a divorce, he emotionally abused his wide and child, which probably means therapy for the child for life. He's a selfish asshole, that doesn't think about anyone but himself.

He also could have brought diseases back home to his wife (Just hearing the stories of his selfishness, he would have kept this hidden or not even gotten tested at all).

"The alternative was to be a laughing stock and die alone in a hospital where nurses don’t dare touch you."

This is the worst case scenario. He could have gotten a divorce, and lived the life he wanted.

This guy deserves zero sympathy.
by tome | 2025-11-23 15:12:02+00:00
> > tax revenues are higher than ever, government spending is higher than ever, social programs and social spending is higher than ever

> Obviously every nominal value is going to be higher YoY

It's not just nominal. You can see on the Institute for Fiscal Studies website that, as proportion of GDP, public spending has not been notably higher than since the second world war:

https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-data-item/uk-government-spe...
by coffeefirst | 2025-11-23 15:12:35+00:00
The other major feature is anyone can learn it in 5 minutes and fit all the instructions on an index card.

Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom.

On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike MS Word/most WYSIWYG junkers, it did exactly what they told it to, without fussy formatting or invisible characters.

I've done this several times since, with all kinds of non-technical users who would never, ever tolerate something like LaTeX.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-23 15:12:58+00:00
All that is different is that you and I have had bargaining power and scarcity far far beyond the average skilled worker.

That bargaining power came from our ability to surf the crest of the wave that was over and over crashing through existing industries, turning them on their head with the promise and practice of automating via computation. In many cases deskilling the jobs of other workers.

We could play the part of magicians who knew these arcane arts and get paid accordingly.

There is precisely zero guarantee that any of this will continue. In the latest wave it seems like it is we ourselves who are being submerged beneath the wave.
by apaosjsja | 2025-11-23 15:13:11+00:00
I share this sentiment. Most in the west (especially on HN) have been conditioned to believe mercy must always be granted and justice is evil. You can’t have one without the other or society falls apart.

As a child of a mother who cheated and ruined our family, I complete agree with you. This story filled me with disgust, and I want to live in a culture where people like this feel guilt at what they did. The sibling response here is happy to tut-tut you with the weight of progressive cultural authority behind them, as only a short sighted ideologue could. Lying of this level is bad for the family and bad for society. Protecting it is akin to protesting the removal of a cancerous tumor.
by derangedHorse | 2025-11-23 15:13:28+00:00
"better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"

Is it sadder than any other individual who has to work into retirement age? Or is the fall itself what you find sad? I can imagine some artists might be happier in this latter stage of their lives where they can focus on their real fans and better fostering other personal relationships in their lives.
by Arubis | 2025-11-23 15:13:29+00:00
Lots of judgment all over this thread. I vote more of us listen to anecdotes like this one here, from someone whose long and successful relationship is based on wanting the best for someone else--who they recognize as human and fallible--even when that means change.

If you want marriage to mean that your partner will never change, or that the 100% match on the inside what you think they are looking from the outside, you're gonna have a hard time. This discussion is just further down the continuum than most.

(Exceptions made for arranged marriages and the like; the primary purpose there isn't romantic love-based companionship, so there isn't a pretense to shatter.)
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-23 15:13:36+00:00
I worked at Bell Labs Holmdel for precisely 10 days. It's a memory I am glad I have, because it was what persuaded me to never, ever work for a large corporation ever again, and very specifically, to never ever work in an interior, windowless office.

My assigned task: there was a constant in the C code that ran their telephone exchange hardware which controlled how many forwarding hops were allowed. I was taked with changing it from 32 to 64. The allotted time for this task was 1 week.

While I appreciate the committment to quality assurance/testing, the idea that I could have spent my life working in such an environment fills me with shudders.

My brief time there was ended when I rolled my then-wife's car 3 times on the way down to the Outer Banks (NC), broke my arm and could no longer commute between Phila. and Holmdel. Lessons learned, for sure, and appreciated, but not necessarily in a good way.
by delecti | 2025-11-23 15:13:47+00:00
It's interesting to me that you had such difficulty, and it makes me wonder how old you are. Growing up using instant messengers on the internet in the '90s and early '00s, it was normal to type without ever using capital letters, except for emphasis. The only thing that changes that style is when someone is typing on a phone that capitalizes for them (though one friend manually undoes those "corrections").
by IshKebab | 2025-11-23 15:13:54+00:00
I haven't read this, and I'm not a type theorist so this is kind of over my head, but my understanding is that you can have decidable dependent types if you add some constraints - see Liquid types (terrible name).

https://goto.ucsd.edu/~ucsdpl-blog/liquidtypes/2015/09/19/li...
by manifoldgeo | 2025-11-23 15:14:13+00:00
Xfinity has a massive market share and is often the only game in town or one of only two. The only alternatives are often smaller resellers of the exact same infrastructure under a different company name. Or, there's also satellite Internet, but it's an order of magnitude slower, has a low data cap, and costs at least as much as the others.

Sometimes, the situation is so bad that people start their own ISP rather than suffer the exorbitant prices and lackluster support:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...
by Avicebron | 2025-11-23 15:14:47+00:00
> my house sits on here was acquired mainly by force from its prior inhabitants two centuries ago.

This argument can be used for practically any piece of earth, it's nonsensical to fixate on it.

The issue has always been that capital (and it's quiet sibling power) can compound itself endlessly absent any checks against it. Societal unification against power and wealth consolidation should be the same as it would be against a plague or cancer in a body.
Show HN: An OKLCH-based perceptually uniform color system/theme builder
by kurainox | 2025-11-23 15:14:57+00:00
I've been using a version of this internally for a few months but decided to polish it a little to finally deploy it.

It's a color system generator that creates accessible, perceptually uniform color palettes using the OKLCH space. It takes one seed (primary) color, generates relative key colors from multiple color harmony schemes (analogous, complementary, etc) that are then used to create 26-step color ramps each. Shades from the ramps are then used to generate semantic color roles, or can be used for creating custom palettes.

All colors are gamut-mapped to the sRGB gamut with chroma reduction, essentially preserving lightness and hue values while finding the maximum in-gamut chroma for each step.

There are obvious similarities to Material Design Themes, mostly because I'm visually pretty comfortable with it. Plus, I started this project back when some of the colors generated by Material could be a little dull and I wanted to learn/build something like this from the ground up.

There are a couple of improvements I would like to make to this in the near future. The first one is a dynamic chroma curve (the chroma falloffs for the ramps are on a bell curve). At the moment, the chroma curve peaks at L ~0.55 for all hue ranges, which works good enough but isn't ideal for a few reasons. The second one would be adding seed color extraction from images. And maybe a built-in contrast checker.

If you find the tool helpful and/or have any feedback or suggestions, let me know.