MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mNovak | 2025-07-21 16:33:27+00:00
You actually don't need to actively supply current -- it just keeps going round and round, and you can't "short" it out because the path of least resistance will always be the superconducting winding.

You also can't open a switch to stop the current because it's basically a giant inductor, it really wants to keep the magnetic field (and current) constant. Meaning if you suddenly disconnected the winding, it would arc across the gap (continuously, for quite a while until the stored energy was spent).

So what they do is vent/boil off the liquid helium which is keeping the magnet cold, such that it's no longer superconducting and the current will die off. You can't reclaim the helium, hence you need a fresh refill to chill down the magnet again.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-21 16:33:50+00:00
They’re just blindly quoting what they’ve heard instead of actually studying the data and environment to form a conclusion.

Anyone under fifty in the US who has tried to buy a home since 2019 knows first-hand what the situation is right now, at least in their area. Those of us who have been “in the game” longer see these same patterns repeating elsewhere, suggesting the issue isn’t local regulations so much as a fundamentally systemic problem with how housing is treated in America.
Show HN: MCP Jetpack – The easiest way to get started with MCP in Cursor
by gsundeep | 2025-07-21 16:33:54+00:00
My friends and I built MCP Jetpack which makes it really easy to start using MCP. It’s an MCP server that automatically finds and executes the right tools needed to accomplish your task without having to manage MCP servers for each service (GitHub, Linear, Atlassian, Notion etc.). Once you add it to Cursor (or any other AI app with MCP support), Cursor instantly gets access to a growing library of remote MCP servers without any extra setup. For services that require authentication, you will be asked to login the first time you ask your AI to interact with that service.

Two problems we are trying to solve:

Friction - Normally if you want to give Cursor access to GitHub, you have to install the right MCP server and login before you can use GitHub with Cursor’s chat. With MCP Jetpack, you can ask Cursor to list your GitHub issues, and it will automatically execute the right tool behind the scenes to accomplish your task. For services that require authentication, you will be asked to login the first time you interact with the service. However, it all happens within the Cursor chat so you never have to context switch and fiddle with Cursor’s settings.

Tool Limits - Cursor warns you if you have more than 50 MCP tools installed as it says having more will degrade performance. However, just installing the GitHub MCP server itself adds 74 MCP tools. With MCP Jetpack, you get access to GitHub, Atlassian and 15 other services with just two tools: “FindTool” and “ExecTool”.

Here are the 17 services we support today: GitHub, Atlassian, Canva, Linear, Notion, Intercom, Monday.com, Neon, PayPal, Hugging Face, Sentry, Square, Webflow, Wix, Cloudflare Docs, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Cloudflare Workers Bindings.

We’ll continue to add more services as companies launch remote MCP servers. If yours isn’t listed and you’d like it to be added, please email us at team@mcpjetpack.com.

MCP Jetpack is in alpha so please let us know if you run into any problems or have any feedback - thanks!
by davidw | 2025-07-21 16:34:05+00:00
On balance, I think Strong Towns has done a lot of good, but in terms of organizing on the ground, I think the two large YIMBY organizations are better at equipping people to make change in their communities:

* https://yimbyaction.org/

* https://welcomingneighbors.us/

I happily read and share a lot of Strong Towns content - they do put out a lot of good stuff despite the occasional dud. But in terms of learning how to show up and get things done, I think that's not their strongest spot.
by cwlb | 2025-07-21 16:34:51+00:00
check out https://github.com/dagger/container-use! it uses worktrees under the hood, but hides them from the user and agent. it basically gives you containers tracked by git branches and plugs into any MCP-compatible agent. you're then free to make your own worktrees from those branches, but you can also just use them in your normal checkout.
Show HN: Extension to analyze Costco purchases and find price adjustments
by wolfteets | 2025-07-21 16:35:16+00:00
I build a chrome/firefox extension that scans your Costco purchases and tells you if prices have dropped - allowing you to request the difference refunded!

I also included a cool summary analysis, and way to search through all historical warehouse purchases.

Check it out: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/costco-price-adjust...
by mikegreenberg | 2025-07-21 16:36:10+00:00
Once upon a time, I was using postgres for OLTP and OLAP purposes combined with in-database transforms using TimescaleDB. I had a schema for optimized ingestion and then several aggregate views which produced a bunch of purpose-specific "materialized" tables for efficient analysis based on the ingestion tables.

Timescale had a nice way of abstracting away the cost of updating these views without putting too much load on ingestion (processing multiple TBs of data a time in a single instance with about 500Gb of data churn daily).
by worldsayshi | 2025-07-21 16:36:15+00:00
One db that could be interesting here is CrateDB. It's a Lucene based DB that supports the postgres wire protocol. So you can run SQL queries against it.

I've tried figuring out if it supports acting as a pg read-replica, which sounds to me like the ideal set up - but it doesn't seem to be supported.

I have no affiliation to them, just met the team at an event and thought it sounded cool.
by amlib | 2025-07-21 16:36:26+00:00
I agree, it feels like linux is on a perpetual "under construction" flow, except that lately development has been picking up speed (which is a good thing), but results in an even "bumpier" ride.

And you can't really retreat to a more stable distro (Ubuntu LTS, numbered debian release etc) because you often get stuck with "outdated" software, missing hardware support and missing features (might be essential to your use case). Chasing the bleeding edge ends up being pretty essential in desktop linux but as the name entails it ends in lots of pain for the user. Nerds, hackers, developers and maybe even some power users can definitely have fun and thrive in that environment but the casual consumer.. yikes :(
by pmarreck | 2025-07-21 16:36:34+00:00
TIL about Lehmer codes... and "poker encoding" ;)

(I just prefer poker to solitaire...)

Someone else mentioned that the orientation of the cards (up or down) and possibly even the front-back facingness of the card (facing up, facing down) would add another 2 possible bits to the available encoding space. (Of course, at that point you'd have to also encode which side of the whole deck is the "top"...)

My own thought was to add par2 to make it robust against small errors... at the cost of some transmission space!
by tenthirtyam | 2025-07-21 16:37:08+00:00
In Ireland, politicians (make appearances of) are making a lot of noise about building more houses to address the severe shortage of housing supply (and consequent runaway house price inflation). However, my take is that the root of the problem is exactly what the author here describes, to wit, the minimum housing a person can buy is (for the most part) a semi-detached two- or two-and-a-half-bedroom* house on two floors. There are precious few one-bedroom apartments or anything similar on the market, meaning that single persons entering the market are competing with couples or young families.

I don't understand the details but I'm told the origin of this is that regulations have rendered apartments of any size unprofitable to build (anyone with more insight here?). Pretty much the only housing Ireland gets are sprawling suburban housing estates. I'm reminded of this graphic, 100 houses Vs 100 apartments [1].

* By 2½ bedrooms I mean two bedrooms plus a very small "box room" barely big enough for a single bed and a small wardrobe. Frequently used as either a storage room or small home office.

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/78/f5/94/78f594ebb9216e50e396...
by CyberDildonics | 2025-07-21 16:37:16+00:00
I don't have any experience with that aspect of openmp. When you use ISPC are you using the varying and uniform keywords? You can write something that is almost C but it basically forced to vectorize.

If you both are vectorizing the same thing there might not be much difference.

If both are not vectorizing there might not be much difference, but with ISPC you can easily make sure that it does use vectorization and the best instruction set for your CPU.
by Glyptodon | 2025-07-21 16:37:20+00:00
Home builders being very short term doesn't seem related. If they won't build because they can only make mc mansions on tiny lots while land values inflate wildly, they're part of the issue and blasting land prices along with home prices to reset the cost of building should benefit them in the long run. But it does mean that they're paralyzed until land values stabilize at a lower value.
by spauldo | 2025-07-21 16:37:29+00:00
I say that hotel managers won't be in danger of health risks from brief exposure to cigarette smoke. I provided reasons why. Thus, I am not wishing their deaths.

You ask me to smoke more, hoping it will hasten my death. Insert "we are not the same" meme here.

So again, is this the person you wish to be? Do you wish death on everyone that points out flaws in your arguments, or just smokers?
by idiotsecant | 2025-07-21 16:37:43+00:00
Nuclear waste is not a substantial problem, technically. It's a NIMBY problem. It's just tradeoffs. Nuke is a wonderful power source that works today. That's better than tech that will work once we have 30 years of investment into storage and transmission networks. We do need renewables. We also need something to fill the gap in the meantime that isn't spewing carbon into an ecosystem that is already past a tipping point.
by compsciphd | 2025-07-21 16:38:31+00:00
for those who are using it for ML loads, what's the point of using it for desktop graphics (at least at the same time).

i.e. I'd argue that unless one is getting server chips (which negates the desktop graphics comment), it seems the vast majority of modern CPUs come with iGPUs that are sufficient for running a desktop environment. Unless one is planning to game on the same machine (but again, probably also not at the same time), if the above is the problem, why not use the iGPU for the desktop and use the dGPU for your ML workloads.
by madcaptenor | 2025-07-21 16:38:32+00:00
There's a nice characterization of sums of two squares in terms of their prime factorization), namely that all primes of form 4k+3 appear with even multiplicity. From a quick look through OEIS it looks like there are similar characterizations for a^2 + n*b^2 but this is where I tap out on number theory.
by to11mtm | 2025-07-21 16:38:42+00:00
> There's lots of ways we could have metal in our body. A hip replacement, a forgotten piercing, old tooth fillings, maybe you accidentally swallowed some piece of metal

One of the reasons they ask what you do for work is because if you're doing some sort of job that involves working with metal (e.x. cutting pipes, welding, etc) there are extra precautions to take.
by simion314 | 2025-07-21 16:39:25+00:00
>Which begs the question: Is it true, that there are such games? And how would one defend its availability to the public? Is w#nking off to such content considered free speech?

We are discussing blocking of legal content by the payment companies. If they do not like this games or GTA or metal music they should make laws.

But they are concerned by virtual incest while in USA cousin marriage is still legal in many states.

If i believe in this stupidity that music and games are harmful then I would use the big money to do some studies to prove this and then make laws, not force my ideology by abusing the payment monopoly this companies have to push my stupidity to the entire fucking world.
by kevmo314 | 2025-07-21 16:39:38+00:00
Isn't this "echo with more steps"? The CI/CD example [1] strikes me as not obviously better than doing

cat > .env << EOF DATABASE_URL=${{ secrets.TEST_DATABASE_URL }} STRIPE_API_KEY=${{ secrets.STRIPE_TEST_KEY }} EOF

which also addresses the trust and rotation problems. I suppose for dev secrets those are annoying, but even with secretspec you would have to rotate dev secrets when someone is offboarded.

[1] https://devenv.sh/blog/2025/07/21/announcing-secretspec-decl...
by DebtDeflation | 2025-07-21 16:39:39+00:00
If anyone is curious what pushing the button to turn off (AKA "quench) the magnet looks like, there's this video of an MRI machine being decommissioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SOUJP5dFEg

You push the button, then 15 seconds later the liquid helium is vented through a pipe on the roof of the hospital (it's quite a spectacular display), and then the superconductor starts to heat up and no longer be a superconductor so the current that's been flowing through the coils (they are energized once, when the machine is first installed, and then continue flowing forever so long as the superconductor is superconducting since there's no resistance) and the magnetic field decays to nothing.

It's not an instantaneous process.
by satvikpendem | 2025-07-21 16:39:43+00:00
> You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea

How is this not excellent advice? There are lots of stories of founders building first (sometimes for years, even), then finding out that there is no market for it (as it seems you have done). The people evaluating your product might have even just read your post and concluded that there's no market, a tarpit idea [0], from their own experiences.

I am assuming this [1] is your product, from looking at your profile and searching the name on IH. The comments are exactly as I've stated, and they apparently have visited your website too, so maybe your logs are not accurate, or they have an adblocker on.

> Hey, I checked out your website—looks great! Just wanted to share some honest feedback. I think you should hold off on going too deep into development right now. Instead, treat this as your MVP and focus first on getting real customers.

> This is a common trap many founders (myself included) fall into—building out the full product before validating if there's a real market fit. Get users, collect feedback, and then iterate. That’s the fastest and most efficient path forward.

If all you are doing is making apps, you have a hobby, but it is not guaranteed that you will have a business from it, so understand what it is you are optimizing for as the two require different actions to succeed.

[0] https://mikekarnj.com/posts/tarpit-ideas

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-build-this-iCFJ3kI9WLa...
by eamonnsullivan | 2025-07-21 16:39:57+00:00
I'm a principal software engineer with a degree in history. You don't need a science degree to understand most of these issues sufficiently to legislate them. But you need humility and a willingness to learn. That, sadly, is lacking in too many governments and civil services.

Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-21 16:39:59+00:00
I had MRI a lot of times (I have MS). Every single time as we are walking to the machines, the nurse / technician / whoever asks me a couple of questions (which I have to fill before going in as well). Then I have to take off my clothes in the changing room. They would have never missed it. And no one can just simply walk into the corridor (there is a door) that has the door to the MRI machine. Even if they do so, they would be noticed immediately.
by thekevan | 2025-07-21 16:40:04+00:00
>Ms Jones-McAllister said the visit on 16 July was not her and her husband's first time at the MRI facility. It was also not the first time that the employee had seen her husband's weight that he used for training, she said.

>She claimed an employee and her husband previously "had a conversation about it before: 'Oh that's a big chain'".
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 16:40:04+00:00
For anyone wondering why they didn’t just turn the magnet off immediately: Quenching the magnet is not instant. From what I’ve read, it can take 30 seconds to multiple minutes for the magnetic field to dissipate after pressing the button.

Also, the person wearing the 20lb chain was not the patient. There was an access control failure (someone peeking their head into the room?) combined with the extraordinary amount of metal resulting in a lot of pull.
by giantg2 | 2025-07-21 16:40:22+00:00
The 30 plants per week stuff looks like it's mostly based off one citizen science study that acknowledges that it focused on healthy adults, had underrepresented groups, and it didn't directly tie the diet to health outcomes or longevity. It looks like it was focused on the diversity of the microbiome. Other studies have looked at various microbiome related factors, but it doesn't look like any directly study the 30 plants per week part. Various sources even acknowledge that salty, sugary, and fatty processed foods can also be responsible for decreased microbiome diversity and increased levels of bacteria associated with negative health outcomes. Most also stress the whole foods point. It doesn't appear that any control for the source of the plant point related to processed foods - eg was there a cohort that ate non-fermented pickles, sun chips, potato chips, fruit wines, etc to compare with whole food plant based diets.

So based on the studies around your 30 plants topics, even they make the point about choosing whole food or minimally processed sources.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-21 16:40:39+00:00
That’s not entirely true, for a number of reasons.

* Low-density housing that’s rented instead of sold drives up rent for the tenant and property values for neighbors, resulting in increased costs for everyone but the landlord (who offsets costs by raising rent)

* Investors are predominantly buying affordable homes, not luxury ones. Cheaper prices (even when paying cash to outbuy other bidders) means higher margins.

* Construction has fundamentally changed as a result. No longer are structures being built for sustainable operations, but simply to exploit valuation growth before being shoved off to the next buyer. The goal from everyone involved is maximum margin/profit, not quality and sustainable shelter.

* There’s a glut of “luxury” apartments in higher-density units that sit vacant as a result of gaming the local marketplace for higher rent instead of maximum occupancy.

We have enough houses at present. Really, we do! The problem is that because we treat them as assets and not shelter, the goal is maximum revenue, profit, and/or valuation instead of maximum utilization.

Hence, housing crisis.
by weitendorf | 2025-07-21 16:40:46+00:00
Personally I find indiehackers unique amongst get rich quick schemes because it's very transparently a community of people trying to get rich quick by building small apps for other people trying to get rich quick building small apps. It's not necessarily that the influencers are deceiving anybody (I think some do), they really do build apps like that too, some of which are genuinely successful. They're not selling advice.

So it's like, on one hand it's not like "I'm a genius trader, buy my course for $3k and you will be too" because the people at the top actually, (mostly) demonstrably do the thing they claim is possible. And it's not like an MLM because there is not really any pyramid scheme dynamics involved. But on the other hand it's a market that only exists on the buyside because enough people believe it exists on the sellside to build for it, thus generating demand on the buyside.
by kmeisthax | 2025-07-21 16:40:47+00:00
> You can add more seats (this stadium happens to be extremely modular) but the experience for everyone becomes worse in a multitude of ways.

To keep your analogy... well, analogous, this is also a stadium where you have to buy tickets in groups of at minimum four seats, with generous buffer zones of at least two seats between each group, specifically to cater to a handful of extremely vocal Swifties who couldn't bear to sit next to a stranger in their life. We could easily double the capacity of the stadium without impacting anyone's experience.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-21 16:40:49+00:00
I'm not sure that "static" is the appropriate antonym to "dynamic" here.

If we set aside the fact that the term "dynamic" was apparently chosen here basically because it sounded cool, and for no good reason, and are trying to retroactively redefine it in a way where the word has meaning, then:

With recursion the computation order is predefined and deterministic.

With dynamic programming the computation order is more flexible since the core of the technique is just memoizing prior work. Your DP solution could be organized in recursive top-down fashion, or more optimally in bottom-up fashion if the algorithm is strictly recursive by nature, or neither of the above.

i.e. With dynamic programming in general you are just reusing results if/when they exist, else calculating them - it a more "go with the flow" dynamic approach than recursion where the order of calls is strictly prescribed.
by bitpush | 2025-07-21 16:41:02+00:00
haha, there is that word again - "taste", another way of saying design sensibility, or "good eye". "Taste" is now gaining popularity, ever since LLMs have made is accessible for anyone to create anything.

At its core, the idea is the same - some folks can produce exceptional products with same tools, but it is now packaged for the LLM era.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-07-21 16:41:16+00:00
> knew about the dangers and repeatedly chose to do literally nothing about it

The dangers of... hot coffee? Yeah, everyone knows that. That's exactly why they shouldn't have lost to the extent that they did.

It's tragic for the person involved obviously; I get why emotionally the court would feel sympathy for the victim. But objectively speaking its pretty ridiculous for the legal system to be awarding punitive damages for companies exposing people to normal, reasonable risks that everyone encounters as part of everyday life. It creates a culture where businesses have to treat grown adults like children for fear of huge fines if something goes wrong.

At worst McDonald's was probably like 10% responsible for the incident but they got treated like they were 100,000% responsible.

(The jury actually did find the woman was partially responsible, it was the judge that decided on the absurd damages amount. It later got reduced and settled out of court so all in all I think the system ultimately worked okay despite the judge's ridiculous initial decision.)

Edit: I misread, it was actually the jury that made the initial ridiculous punitive damages ruling, the judge was the one who reduced it later before it got settled out of court for an undisclosed (possibly still ridiculously high) amount.
by avmich | 2025-07-21 16:41:29+00:00
> They don't want to be in that position.

Then where are the builders which do what they're asked to? Is the problem with the banks which don't do this operation? Then it looks like a financial opportunity.

You're effectively saying "this business model doesn't work". This doesn't mean there are no other business models which work in this case. Where they are?
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 16:42:20+00:00
The cost isn’t the issue.

Quenching the magnet takes up to several minutes. There are also alarms to warn people to get away because the rapidly expanding helium could displace oxygen in the room.

It’s not about the cost. If there’s an emergency that necessitates pressing the button they’ll be pressing it as soon as someone can reach it. It still takes time for the magnetic field to dissipate.