asphodele
Re:Proton's AI manifesto for software engineering
on Monday November 02, 2026 @06:47AM (#50335601)
It seems nothing is safe from enshittification.
Re:Ask HN: What do you believe or not believe about AI?
on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @01:18PM (#50277110)
It's a way bigger leap to go from "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness" to "and we'll see that it's possible for machines too" than it is to go from "humans are conscious" to "non-human animals have degrees of consciousness".
The latter is a comparison of biological organism : biological organism, both of which are the outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; the former is biological organism : inanimate object.
Re:Birdwatching rewires the brain and slows cognitive decline
on Monday October 26, 2026 @09:19AM (#50243139)
There's the "always on" type of birdwatching as well, that allows you to recognize the birds you see and hear in the course of ordinary life. No patience required, just practising staying aware of peripheral vision and sounds, but equally rewarding when you are lucky enough to have a chance encounter.
Re:Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs
on Sunday October 25, 2026 @06:38PM (#50236734)
Classic joke at university was to sprinkle cress seeds on the carpet of someone's room and water it with a fine mist from a plant sprayer. In the morning the inhabitant would wake up to a neat lawn that had appeared overnight by magic.
Re:New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused...
on Friday October 23, 2026 @05:14PM (#50215423)
Can you provide a link to the forums you referenced?
Re:How is music possible
on Friday October 23, 2026 @02:16PM (#50213221)
Trying to explain why music is magical risks killing it with words. A lot of things are best left unspoken.
Re:DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS "Cinnamon Teal"
on Thursday October 22, 2026 @01:20PM (#50198320)
For anyone using the DuckDB PHP plugin and looking to upgrade to v2.0, this is the PR to watch: [1]
Re:What Is the Karakoram Anomaly?
on Thursday October 22, 2026 @10:34AM (#50195980)
There's a documentary, "The Last Mountain", about the sister and father of Tom Ballard, who died on Nanga Parbat, going out there to see where he did his final climb. It gives an idea of what it is like to visit.
Incidentally, Tom Ballard was the son of Alison Hargreaves, who died on K2.
Re:New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused...
on Thursday October 22, 2026 @07:25AM (#50193898)
From the linked article:
"The oyster mushroom is capable of decomposing plastic while still creating an edible mushroom. This opens up doors for its use as an at-home recycling system."
Re:New plastic pollution discovered: 'Plasticorals' coral rubble fused...
on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @05:58PM (#50188226)
Bacteria and fungi are like, "Hold my beer...":
Bacteria: https://microbenotes.com/ideonella-sakaiensis-plastic-eating...
Fungi: https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/11/04/plastic-eating-m...
Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @06:02AM (#50178352)
It's difficult for humans to comprehend the scale of what it would take to stop the planet from heating up. There are 100+ years of extraction of massive quantities of sequestered carbon from the Earth's crust and burning it now baked into the system, with an approximate 15-year lag on observed atmospheric and ocean temperature increases i.e. the temperatures we are currently seeing are those caused by emissions up to around 2011. Since then, carbon emissions have increased, not decreased, so we have a minimum of 15 more years of temperature rises to come.
As a though experiment, ask people if it would be possible for humans to prevent the tides coming in and out each day. Mostly you will be laughed at. Yet the same people usually think that preventing the Earth from heating up, which is a problem on a similar scale, can be achieved with a bit of recycling, eating less meat and cycling to work.
This single graph [1] is enough to demonstrate that 'solving' climate change is beyond the scale of human capabilities.
[1] https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/?dm_id=world2
Re:How Corruption Got This Bad
on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @02:31PM (#50170614)
Obligatory H.L. Mencken quote, from 1956:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/27042-as-democracy-is-perfe...
Re:Why do we have so many meetings?
on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:09PM (#50168520)
> Why do we have so many meetings?
They help people with email jobs to feel important and show everyone else that they're doing something, while simultaneously reducing time available to the people with real work to do, which can then be used by the former group to apply pressure on them.
Re:Gold is now the top U.S. export
on Saturday October 17, 2026 @05:23PM (#50135278)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestake_Mine_(South_Dakota)
"The Homestake Mine was a deep underground gold mine (8,000 feet or 2,438 m) located in Lead, South Dakota. Until it closed in 2002, it was the largest and deepest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. The mine produced more than forty million troy ounces (43,900,000 oz; 1,240,000 kg) of gold during its lifetime. This is about 2,500 cubic feet (71 m3) or a volume of gold roughly equal to 18,677 US gallons.
...
In 1876, settlers Fred and Moses Manuel, Alex Engh, and Hank Harney discovered the Homestake deposit during the Black Hills Gold Rush. The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Lakota Nation by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the land was stolen for its gold."
When the illegal miners moved in on the Black Hills, Crazy Horse would on occasion raid them to sieze their gold, after which he would re-bury it.
Re:I'm sorry, but you still have to think
on Sunday October 11, 2026 @05:46PM (#50048153)
Socrates was put to death for such.
Re:No Man Is an Island
on Friday October 09, 2026 @05:59PM (#50027105)
Contributing to the community posthumously still counts as contributing.
Re:No Man Is an Island
on Friday October 09, 2026 @05:48PM (#50026996)
Kafka did publish some of his work during his lifetime, including The Metamorphosis.
Re:Questions for Believers in AI Consciousness
on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:43PM (#49969602)
Thomas Nagel covers explores the subjectivity of consciousness extensively in What is it like to be a bat?, featured on HN previously [1].
Re:Questions for Believers in AI Consciousness
on Monday October 05, 2026 @03:34PM (#49969438)
If they can do that, they are doing better than 2500+ years of human endeavours in the field of philosophy to date.
Re:Singapore Govt Dating App Uses Gale-Shapley Stable Marriage Algorithm
on Thursday October 01, 2026 @02:05AM (#49918224)
It's difficult to get animals in captivity to mate, as environmental stressors affect them physiologically or they instictively know that conditions aren't right for raising offspring.
Applies to people as well in many developed societies.
Re:Ask HN: What're You Reading?
on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @06:10PM (#49901440)
The Outsider (L'Étranger) will give you something to think about. Camus' idea with this novel was to see what would happen to a character who went through life only telling the truth.
Re:My Weird New Hobby: Wandering Around Tokyo on Google Maps
on Thursday September 24, 2026 @06:46PM (#49837821)
If you like going through the historical back catalogue of original satellite images for a place you can try Lucky Satellite Pic [1]. There are often clouds but sometimes you will hit upon a gem. Apropos of another post in this thread that mentioned Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct here is an example [2]
Re:Small Programming Tricks
on Thursday September 17, 2026 @12:23AM (#49736371)
A few tidbits I wish I had known about sooner:
bash: Ctrl-L to clear the screen
VSCodium: Shift+Alt+[arrows|mouse click] to select a rectangular block
scp for moving files (instead of ftp)
Re:Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization
on Friday September 11, 2026 @05:51PM (#49665903)
if alcohol can damage your short term memory,
Imagine what effect alcohol has
Re:Exit the Cave
on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @05:55PM (#49543114)
Another word for 'going outside the cave' is 'seeking external validation'. If you need other people to tell you if what you believe is true or not, do you actually believe anything?
Re:Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice
on Friday August 28, 2026 @02:45PM (#49482748)
At last! My blargs have been in disarray for ages.
Re:Oceans hit highest temperature on record
on Monday August 24, 2026 @05:09PM (#49425883)
With less ice around than there used to be, the same incident energy can do a lot more ocean heating. It takes 80 calories to convert 1 gram of ice at 0C to 1 gram of water at 0C. Once the ice is melted, a further 80 calories can raise the temperature of the gram of water at 0C to 80C
Re:Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells
on Saturday August 22, 2026 @02:12AM (#49397050)
Sitting Bull killed his first buffalo with bow and arrow from horseback at the age of 10.
Re:Show HN: PHP-fts – Full-text search engine in pure PHP, no extensions
on Monday May 18, 2026 @12:32PM (#48181985)
An alternative for PHP full text search is the PHP DuckDB client [1], and using DuckDB with the Full-Text Search extension [2]. It also stores everything on the local file system and can scale to millions of records.
[1] https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/clients/php [2] https://duckdb.org/docs/current/core_extensions/full_text_se...