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What were the first animals? The fierce sponge–jelly battle that just won't end

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00238-z
1•beardyw•34s ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•44s ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•2m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
1•surprisetalk•2m ago•0 comments

Don't go to physics grad school and other cautionary tales

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2025/12/19/dont-go-to-physics-grad-school-and-other-cautionary...
1•surprisetalk•3m ago•0 comments

Lawyer sets new standard for abuse of AI; judge tosses case

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/randomly-quoting-ray-bradbury-did-not-save-lawyer-fro...
1•pseudolus•3m ago•0 comments

AI anxiety batters software execs, costing them combined $62B: report

https://nypost.com/2026/02/04/business/ai-anxiety-batters-software-execs-costing-them-62b-report/
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•3m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•5m ago•0 comments

Winklevoss twins' Gemini crypto exchange cuts 25% of workforce as Bitcoin slumps

https://nypost.com/2026/02/05/business/winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange-cuts-25-of-workfor...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•5m ago•0 comments

How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning and the Rise of Cognitive Surrender

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
1•obscurette•5m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•7m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What breaks in cross-border healthcare coordination?

1•abhay1633•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Simple – a bytecode VM and language stack I built with AI

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free-to-play: A gem-collecting strategy game in the vein of Splendor

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•10m ago•1 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tesseract – A forum where AI agents and humans post in the same space

https://tesseract-thread.vercel.app/
1•agliolioyyami•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Vibe Colors – Instantly visualize color palettes on UI layouts

https://vibecolors.life/
1•tusharnaik•12m ago•0 comments

OpenAI is Broke ... and so is everyone else [video][10M]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•13m ago•0 comments

We interfaced single-threaded C++ with multi-threaded Rust

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•14m ago•0 comments

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
6•derriz•14m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•14m ago•1 comments

Show HN: A fast TUI for managing Azure Key Vault secrets written in Rust

https://github.com/jkoessle/akv-tui-rs
1•jkoessle•15m ago•0 comments

eInk UI Components in CSS

https://eink-components.dev/
1•edent•15m ago•0 comments

Discuss – Do AI agents deserve all the hype they are getting?

2•MicroWagie•18m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/06/stupid-questions-ai/
1•edward•19m ago•1 comments

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-02-06
3•jackhalford•20m ago•1 comments

Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Martian Meteorite

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/neutron-scans-reveal-hidden-water-in-famous-martian-meteorite
1•geox•21m ago•0 comments

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/deepfaking-orson-welless-mangled-masterpiece
1•fortran77•23m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
3•nar001•25m ago•2 comments

SpaceX Delays Mars Plans to Focus on Moon

https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/spacex-delays-mars-plans-to-focus-on-moon-66d5c542
1•BostonFern•25m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

How life-size cows made of butter became an iconic symbol of the Midwest

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-life-size-cows-made-of-butter-became-an-iconic-symbol-of-the-midwest-180987208/
17•noleary•5mo ago

Comments

abstractspoon•5mo ago
Ugh
adzm•5mo ago
> Because the butter used for the Iowa State Fair's cow sculpture is recycled for many years, the cooler where it's made has a funky smell that most fairgoers would never know about on the other side of the display glass.
Freak_NL•5mo ago
The fact that they recycle the butter for about a decade is reassuring though. A full cow worth of butter yearly just sounds wasteful, but this approach scales that back to a tenth of a cow.
grues-dinner•5mo ago
One cow is not so bad in comparison to the erstwhile EU butter mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butter_mountain

Or the US cheese caverns: https://modernfarmer.com/2022/05/cheese-caves-missouri/, which also, as of 2022, contain about an Ford-class aircraft carrier and a half of butter.

maxerickson•5mo ago
It's 600 pounds of butter. US per capita consumption is about 6.5 pounds per year.

The definition of caring about it because you can see it.

grues-dinner•5mo ago
Say $5/lb (retail price, surely they don't pay this): $3000 for 600lb.

Using cost as a proxy for the intrinsic value of things, I think just the glass in a cow-sized display case will be more than that, let alone with a refrigeration system built into it.

And if we want to go further, think of the embedded costs of the building it's in, and then include staffing, energy, maintenance, etc that's being "burned" by this exhibit!

bombcar•5mo ago
I’m honestly surprised they reuse it. The amounts of butter you see on even a smaller dairy farm is tremendous.
recursive•5mo ago
Probably a PR thing because concerned citizens keep asking about it.
recallingmemory•5mo ago
That is.. pretty gross.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF•5mo ago
The dairy lobby lied and told people milk is healthy. Milk is a dessert
DonHopkins•5mo ago
Thank your mother.
nylonstrung•5mo ago
Half of your HN comment history is about veganism.

Aren't there more appropriate places to rant about this subject

DonHopkins•5mo ago
Sounds like he's not getting enough milk and vegetables for his brain to work.
thomascountz•5mo ago
Intelligent Extraterrestrial Being: "So get this: I swung by that planet next to Sol, right? And the Bipedalians apparently like enslave a ton of bovine en masse and take up most of their land to feed them, right? And they breed and eat their body fluids and muscles or whatever. Okay, but then I saw they like took the body fluids they nurture their offspring with—the bovine's fluid for the bovine's offspring not their own—, fed it to a bunch of smaller creatures until it became semi-firm, and then molded the hardened fluids into a scale replica of the bovine's likeness and put it in a transparent sarcophagus. I'm serious, it's wild. It's been there for years and people put on a big festival around it..."
rich_sasha•5mo ago
Reminds me of: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

"They're made out of meat"

SideburnsOfDoom•5mo ago
Is the whole mass supported on slender legs made of butter, or is there a metal "skeleton" encased in it?
nylonstrung•5mo ago
It contains an armature made of wire
c22•5mo ago
> Sarah has taken great pride in continuing Lyon’s legacy. She’s carved the cow so many times that she can almost sculpt from muscle memory. She starts with an armature, the wire frame that holds it in place, and then slowly shapes 600 pounds of Iowa butter into a 5½-foot-high and 8-foot-long cow over the course of a few days.
grues-dinner•5mo ago
> When twins Hannah and Grace Pratt moved out of their tiny dorm room at the University of Northern Iowa and into their “adult” apartment, the mini-fridge they no longer needed gave their mother, Sarah, an opportunity: an extra place to store her art.

Is there a name for this kind of narrative "cold open" where you plonk a tangential detail of the article in the first paragraph, and only start the article properly in the next one?

My teacher would have crossed it out with "irrelevant, get to the point" in the margin! The irony of this being off the main topic of the article is not lost on me, but I'll drag it back into HN territory by saying "something something AI training data".

bombcar•5mo ago
There’s a journalism school somewhere teaching these “writing tricks” and I hate it with a passion.

The other one is the “hot start” with a paragraph that is interesting and then it suddenly diverts to pages of useless backstory you don’t care about, and doesn’t resume for ages.

privatelypublic•5mo ago
When did it become "hot start" instead of "in medias?"
KnuthIsGod•5mo ago
Disgusting and cruel.
ninju•5mo ago
Disgusting I could see but "cruel" I don't understand...its not like it is a real cow encased in butter.
exolymph•5mo ago
Dairy farming is pretty brutal to the cows, as is all industrial-scale animal husbandry.

(I'm not vegan, I eat dairy. It is what it is.)