MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mooreds | 2025-09-22 01:20:10+00:00
I love this breakdown of how MCP leverages OAuth to help provide additional security. The example flows were helpful to me.

A few nits:

- scopes are often set up at the administrative level, but approved by the user. In general, a client should only ask for the scopes they need at the time of authorization, and step up/step down over time

- other than with a bit of hand waving, the author doesn't talk about the security risks of MCP servers. I was hoping to hear more about that.

- a key part of security for MCP servers is what happens between the MCP server and the data/functionality/APIs it is protecting. I have found articles about this to be sorely lacking, probably because it is bespoke to each MCP server. I expect the provided to MCP is not passed through, but then what is? And how is that authorization managed.
by klodolph | 2025-09-22 01:20:29+00:00
I see this sentiment from time to time in the HN crowd, and I’m really interested in understanding more about it.

My first reaction to this? I think that you’re using “manipulate” to describe a process where somebody doesn’t want to do something, and make them do it anyway, but without using force. It feels like this has to be rooted in some kind of denial of other people’s free will—that they are somehow incapable of choosing to help you or agree with you, and can only be tricked. It seems like you would need to believe that other people don’t genuinely like you or value you.
by eru | 2025-09-22 01:20:43+00:00
The lack of tectonics would only be a problem if you want your terraforming to be 'one and done'.

If you admit that terraforming, even after it's 'done', will require an ongoing maintenance effort, it's simple (but not easy). Eg you can use satellites to spin up an artificial magnetic field to shield against solar wind.

However, I suspect terraforming planets is a waste. Far more bang for your buck to build habitats in space from scratch (eg out of asteroids), than to go down another gravity well. You can spin them for artificial 'gravity'. And you can situate them close to earth where logistics of resupply and communication and trade are much more favourable.

Otherwise, Mercury is the planet to colonise, not Mars.

Mercury gets extremely hot in the sun, and extremely cold at night. So if you dig a bit under the surface it all evens out. Pick the right latitude, and you can get basically any average temperature you feel like, including a comfortable 20C.

(Otherwise, even on the surface it's easy to get comfy temperatures, if you bring retractable parasols. Just don't expect to stroll around outside the base.)

Mercury has the benefit compared to Mars that solar power is extremely plentiful.
by rolph | 2025-09-22 01:20:57+00:00
you cant exactly paint it all with the same brush. there are those that subsist, those that hunt and prep, and then all the rest that live in anchorage.

if you depend on the grocer, a total disruption of supply means, about 3days and you cant get what you want. after a week you cant get much of anything.

if you dont have your own holdings, you will have to depend on others, and about 2weeks after disruption the thieving starts, usually anchorage criminals trying to take opportunity stealing from surrounding areas, selling it and buying thier substance of choice.

usually people dont talk about it much when they put a stop to the thieving.
Show HN: Educational AI that shows source reliability scores for every response
by happybust5d | 2025-09-22 01:21:11+00:00
I built CERAH AI to address the trust problem in AI-generated educational content. Unlike standard AI tools that give you answers without context, CERAH shows exactly which sources inform each response and calculates reliability scores based on source quality.

The system integrates Wikipedia for broad coverage and arXiv for STEM topics, then uses semantic similarity matching to find relevant content. Each response displays a reliability percentage calculated from source types (academic papers weighted higher than blogs) and content relevance scores.

For example, if you ask about quantum mechanics, you'll see whether the answer comes from peer-reviewed papers (high reliability) or general web content (lower reliability), with expandable source details showing similarity scores and direct links.

Current limitations: Uses a small curated knowledge base for core topics, keyword-based related topic suggestions, and mock source references in some reliability calculations. This is an MVP focused on validating whether source transparency actually changes how people evaluate AI-generated educational content.

The question I'm trying to answer: Does knowing that your AI answer is based on Wikipedia vs academic papers vs general knowledge actually influence how much you trust the information? Built with Python/Streamlit, integrates Wikipedia API and arXiv API, uses sentence-transformers for semantic search.

Live demo: https://cerahailearningassistantmvp-bj8fmubn3p3eyu4cohthto.s...

Looking for feedback on whether the reliability scoring concept resonates with the HN community and if the source transparency approach has merit for educational AI tools.
by credit_guy | 2025-09-22 01:22:04+00:00
I'm also a proponent of nuclear.

And I agree that nuclear is not competitive with solar.

But we haven't really invested in nuclear for more than 4 decades now. Nuclear is just a technology. There is no reason to think nuclear capital costs need to be forever locked at the current levels. China has at least three times lower capital costs for nuclear power plants (judging by the cost of the Karachi units 2-3 at $9.5 BN [1] vs the Vogtle units 3-4 at $36.8 BN [2]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karachi_Nuclear_Power_Complex

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
by srhtftw | 2025-09-22 01:22:14+00:00
All I want from a phone is to make and receive phone calls from people I know. I don't want texting. I don't want photos. I don't want apps. I have a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II burner phone if I need to receive an SMS.

I had high hopes for the PinePhone but the one I got can't even reliably make or receive calls so it sits in my desk drawer.

Will someone please sell me a simple phone that works without any smart crap?
by robotresearcher | 2025-09-22 01:22:17+00:00
> Well-written, long term recording software doesn’t quit or crash.

Power outages, hardware failures, and OS bugs happen to the finest application software.

I believe you from your experience that it can be useful to have recorded buffers swap out before flushing them to durable storage. But I do find it a bit surprising, since the swap system has to do the storage flush you are paying for the IO, why not do it durably?

The fine article argued that you can save engineer cycles by having the OS manage optimizing out-of-working set memory for you, but that isn’t what you’re arguing here.

I’m interested in understanding your point.
by Archit3ch | 2025-09-22 01:23:09+00:00
My use case is realtime audio processing (VST plugins).

Metal.jl can be used to write GPU kernels in Julia to target an Apple Silicon GPU. Or you can use KernelAbstractions.jl to write once in a high-level CUDA-like language to target NVIDIA/AMD/Apple/Intel GPUs. For best performance, you'll want to take advantage of vendor-specific hardware, like Tensor Cores in CUDA or Unified Memory on Mac.

You also get an ever-expanding set of Julia GPU libraries. In my experience, these are more focused on the numerical side rather than ML.

If you want to compile an executable for an end user, that functionality was added in Julia 1.12, which hasn't been released yet. Early tests with the release candidate suggest that it works, but I would advise waiting to get a better developer experience.
by dsubburam | 2025-09-22 01:24:09+00:00
Persuasion that happens in good faith is a two-way street. You explain your position, but also truly listen to theirs. If you are prepared to change your own position based on what they say, then you can hope that they might change theirs based on what you say.

If it is truly two way in this sense, including your best efforts to extract from the other party their strongest, potentially unexpected, arguments for their position and give them your due consideration, it shouldn't feel like manipulation.
by mcswell | 2025-09-22 01:24:12+00:00
"I think this sort of presentation isn't likely to convince linguists." Speaking as a linguist... you're right, it doesn't convince me. Nearly all languages have more sounds (phonemes) than the symbols shown in most of those infographics--more consonants, even (many early writing systems only represented consonants). All languages have more distinct syllables than any of those symbol systems (many early writing systems were syllabic). And obviously all languages have far more words (or morphemes) than any of those systems.

What would be more convincing? A sequence of a few dozen symbols in some particular location, and likely to have been written at the same time (rather than centuries or millennia apart), by the same person (so if there were handprints, the handprints would be the same person's hand(s)), where the number of recognizable symbols is twenty or more. I don't say that would be all that would be needed to convince linguists, but it would be a start.
by notlisted | 2025-09-22 01:24:45+00:00
$500? Ours was $2800/mo for a family of three and this was 2018 (Not FANG, big pharma)

Yes the original plan was great. No, we didn't need a plan that great. No we couldn't "downgrade". With the bigger income suddenly gone, coming up with $2800/mo in cash was a huge problem. COBRA is useless for many/most, unless your coverage is shite and the cost to the employer low.
by heelix | 2025-09-22 01:25:05+00:00
I do pack in a small med kit. Typically 3-4 Advil, a couple aspirin, tylenol, a tums, one anti-diarrhea, and one sudafed (meth grade). I also bring in a couple waterproof bandaids, a single serving antiseptic, and a small square of leukotape. Most of that never gets used, and is packed over and over. You can spot the med kit in this picture in a small pill pouch.

https://imgur.com/N5en41d

I'll pack in a second mini-bic. One that stays in my pocket, one for our group to constantly loose throughout the trip. Same for that extra TP packet. I'd rather have it with, then find myself in the woods running short. Got a whistle in there too that I don't think I've ever used on the trail.

Most of my hikes, I'll plan to be at the site before dark. I'll still bring a reasonable headlamp.
by IggleSniggle | 2025-09-22 01:26:26+00:00
Everyone is looked at as a young person when they are young. I've definitely had "junior" colleagues that "got it" better than my 50yo colleagues. It's possible I shouldn't say that outloud, because skilled youngsters have a tendency to misidentify themselves as being part of that set while the wise youngsters have a tendency to *underestimate* their own capability or insight. But I don't think you can make that same assumption about a senior thinking back to their early years.

I desperately wish, to this day, that I had been in the position to receive mentorship. I basically hang out on HN as a way to gather it where I can. Attended engineering meetups when I was younger as well. But I never had the benefit of working with engineers senior to myself. I was a junior "business employed person" but when you need to make a roof you do what you can and learn the hard way even if there's no other humans to show you how to make a proper roof. Luckily, you can receive mentorship not just online, but through books, or even just studying the craft of others...but you take what you can get.

Receiving mentorship is such a gift, and as I approach the end of my career, I am still hungry for it, and harboring some degree of wistful envy for those that receive mentorship as an engineer. I've had many great mentors, but my for the most part, engineering mentors have never seen my face, heard my voice, or known my name, and certainly not for the first decade of my professional career as a software developer, where I didn't have any other developers to work with.
by bilbo-b-baggins | 2025-09-22 01:26:55+00:00
Normally you wouldn’t contrive to use embedded struct fields in this way. And you can’t have the same kind of composition with methods - it’s a compiler error:

https://go.dev/play/p/r04tPta1xZo

So the whole article is basically about using the language in a way you normally would ever do.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-22 01:27:42+00:00
It's likely the result of being very rich, allegedly narcissistic according to Mary Trump, and never being told "no". As far as mental faculties go, it could be compounded by decompensation due to age, poor diet, poor health, and generally bad self-care habits. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised he's still ambulatory and vertical and appears to have more energy than Biden.
by tomhow | 2025-09-22 01:27:55+00:00
Please don't post lame comments like this on HN. F1 obviously requires an elite level of fitness, and exceptional physical and cognitive ability. It's fine to dislike it or to have concerns about the environmental impact, but sneering about its merits as a sport amounts to flamebait, which is against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45326345 and marked it off topic.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-22 01:28:22+00:00
I look at it as “The risk of running unmaintained code on an old interpreter version is difficult to quantify and therefore it is low cost and effort to require it run on a maintained, recent version.” Developers will argue their time is too valuable to require such code be updated to run on recent interpreter versions, and I’ll argue it’s cheaper than chasing successful exploits and any footholds established. Dev Vs Ops, a tale as old as time.

Perhaps having had to run down potential exposure across a large enterprise from the recent npm supply chain attack has made me a bit more paranoid lately around supply chain and cicd security. But, I get paid to be paranoid, so it is what it is. Run your own runners I suppose? Hard to complain when someone else is running the infrastructure for you (and you’re not paying enterprise prices). Supply chain and hosted/multi tenant execution code security is just fundamentally hard and fraught with peril. Ongoing deprecations to keep up with current state are therefore unavoidable.
by inetknght | 2025-09-22 01:28:22+00:00
> I feel like affected ISPs and hosting services should identify LaLiga office IP ranges and block them during office hours.

Not just LaLiga, but pretty much any and all busineses and politicians in Spain. Bring the problem to all of Spain and let them figure out who screwed the pooch to end up with Spain back into the dark ages.

Of course, that will only work once.
by eru | 2025-09-22 01:28:33+00:00
It depends a bit on exactly what you mean.

But eg if you want to write a new hash table (with a new hash function), you'd want to do pretty similar-ish analysis to figure out whether it's a good idea.

I used some neat math in my time to justify much simpler algorithms than what we were using before. (But not hash table related.)

https://www.keithschwarz.com/darts-dice-coins/ is also a joy to read. (As mentioned in the discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8006336 )

Have a look at eg https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/handbook2... for some more in this flavour.
by alsetmusic | 2025-09-22 01:29:04+00:00
Only two weeks ago, I was trying to save an online-only book of 24 chapters. The text is filled with images to help illustrate and contextualize the content. I individually saved each chapter as PDFs and ran a few different command line tools to try to extract the contents to plain text. They all came out badly disjointed. Even tools that were meant to do what this paper describes failed miserably at reconstructing naturally flowing text.

While this isn't something I need on a regular basis, it's timely news to hear about someone making progress on what seems like it ought to be a straightforward problem to solve. As the results of my efforts show, it must not be nearly as simple as one might expect.
by kulahan | 2025-09-22 01:29:30+00:00
It's worth mentioning that one of the more sane ways to terraform a planet is to redirect specific comets to crash into the planet. It would be "free" in the sense that redirecting an orbit is already actively being studied by NASA for planetary defense reasons. To actually terraform a planet in this method would be unreasonably affordable compared to anything else I've ever heard.

edit: Plus, it's nice to split our eggs into multiple planetary baskets. And I suspect people would feel a bit happier living on the surface of a chilly Mars than to become mole people on Mercury, even if it is easier. Maybe summer and winter homes?
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-22 01:29:51+00:00
Right-wing trauma gets misdiagnosed (as autism, moral injury eg etc) because that setting is way less gauche.

Adding to your examples, there's tiger-mom type trauma (+Jewish variants of that) which has inherited the superficial respectability of Oedipal (neo-Bronze? Neo-aetic? Neo-chalcic?) myths

Tying back to GP's fairytales, obviously
by RhysU | 2025-09-22 01:30:24+00:00
> ...unstable singularities are exceptionally elusive; they require initial conditions tuned with infinite precision, being in a state of instability whereby infinitesimal perturbations immediately divert the solution from its blow-up trajectory.

Can one "find" an unstable singularity if writing it down requires an endless computational process to produce the incremental digits as one marches towards infinite precision? It sounds like chasing a set of measure zero.

Anyone have an ELI5? I can't quite put my finger on what's happening here. It sounds like the PINNs are being used as fancy discrete basis functions to solve similarity transformed fluid equations so they can chase the unstable solutions comprising a set of measure zero. I don't know how one thinks about grid convergence in these settings. Does one need PINNs or could traditional discretization approaches accomplish the same?
by nemo1618 | 2025-09-22 01:30:27+00:00
Over the course of ~10 years of writing Go, my ratio of "embedding a struct" to "regretting embedding a struct" is nearly 1:1.

I do not embed structs anymore. It is almost always a mistake. I would confidently place it in the "you should be required to import 'unsafe' to use this feature" bin.
by godelski | 2025-09-22 01:30:37+00:00
> In her effort to excuse herself for working for Meta's leaders willingly for so long

From your description, this doesn't sound too uncommon. You're right that it doesn't make her look good, but isn't this also behavior many of us here do as well as likely the executives she's criticizing? Having a moment of reflection and reevaluation is a good sign, even if it came late. Better late than never?

Its an easy trap that I think many engineers fall for to varying degrees. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of your work and lose sight of the implications of it. As engineers we build things that have great power. When building them we concentrate on how that power can be used for good. How much we can help the world. But it's easy to ignore how the same construction can be used for great evils. That's why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Few people are truly evil and a sad truth is that evil is mostly created by good men trying to do good.

Maybe the most famous example of this is the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project. Captivated by the exciting challenges of the work and the exhilaration of solving these complex puzzles. Rushed by the war effort, blinding them to what was really being created. That sense of urgency that the bomb would be inevitable; if not them, then someone else. As they got closer to their goal more started to rethink. After Trinity more followed. After Hiroshima many became outspoken critics, including Oppenheimer himself. Many of these men ended up being disgusted with themselves, with how far they could go before they saw the consequences of their actions. Many more performed great acrobatics to justify why the construction was good and justified.

To be honest, it doesn't matter if it was the right decision to make the bomb or not. The real lesson is how easy it is to get lost in the work and blinded by a sense of urgency. It's magnitudes easier to recognize the consequences post hoc rather than a priori. But in most situations these things are even harder to see. We're not omniscient, so it's impossible to imagine all the ways a technology may be abused.

Our duty, especially as engineers, then becomes to make frequent pauses and rethink. Are we doing the right thing? Is there a better way? Is there something we've missed? This doesn't just make us more ethical, it also helps us solve the technical challenges. We're fortunate that this can align.

Since we cannot turn back time, all we can do is accept those who change. To accept that harm cannot be undone, but future harm can be prevented or lessened. The best we can do is recognize that the world is complex and we are blind to so much. I fear if we blame too much this only makes us dig our holes deeper. (Essentially) No one wants to be the harbinger of evil or harm, so we'll go to great lengths to blind ourselves to the damage in our wake. Not because we are evil, but because we want to be good.
by eru | 2025-09-22 01:31:36+00:00
Haha, historically Americans over-regulated their banking system, and got rewarded with frequent banking crises in return. (And America was the only major economy with that problem.)

Eg until a few decades ago many American states banned banks from having more than one branch.

See also the big struggles Walmart had in trying to become a bank; and conversely see how US banks are (or at least were) banned from serving their customers coffee..
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-22 01:32:13+00:00
> I in particular am not a huge fan of the infographic[0] that uses the same image asset to refer to a spiral, box, sun, dots, etc... for entire continents, for all recorded history.

That infographic has bigger problems.

>> The similarities suggest the marks are more than just random scribbles

Except here are some of "the marks":

x # |||| * 一 (hand)

OK, a hand is a complex shape. It does suggest there's more going on than random scribbles. It suggests...

...

...that the people who drew a hand had hands.

Every single one of the other marks -- and the hand mark, too -- are things you could expect to find if you gave a small child some paper and crayons.
by paulhodge | 2025-09-22 01:32:20+00:00
I think this prediction of "vibe code cleanup" is massively overblown. It's amazing how much code quality doesn't actually matter to the business. Yes we recognize symptoms and downsides of bad code, and yes it matters specifically to the engineers that have to work on it. But only in extreme cases does bad code actually cause an existential threat to the business. The world already runs on bad code.
by est31 | 2025-09-22 01:33:10+00:00
Which EU countries have those been?

The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents). Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.

EU is also ahead with security. PSD2's requirements go further than US requirements, and they are also ahead in the magnetic swipe card phaseout.

Wise and Revolut, two companies which brought a lot of innovation to international money transfer, were founded in the EU as well (since 2020 not EU companies any more).

Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.