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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
2•beardyw•7m ago•0 comments

Sidestepping Evaluation Awareness and Anticipating Misalignment

https://alignment.openai.com/prod-evals/
1•taubek•7m ago•0 comments

OldMapsOnline

https://www.oldmapsonline.org/en
1•surprisetalk•9m ago•0 comments

What It's Like to Be a Worm

https://www.asimov.press/p/sentience
2•surprisetalk•9m 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•9m 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...
2•pseudolus•10m 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•10m ago•0 comments

Bogus Pipeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_pipeline
1•doener•11m 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•12m 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
3•obscurette•12m ago•0 comments

Cycling in France

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/org/france-sheldon.html
1•jackhalford•13m ago•0 comments

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

1•abhay1633•14m ago•0 comments

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

https://github.com/JJLDonley/Simple
1•tangjiehao•16m ago•0 comments

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

https://caratria.com/
1•jonrosner•17m ago•1 comments

My Eighth Year as a Bootstrapped Founde

https://mtlynch.io/bootstrapped-founder-year-8/
1•mtlynch•18m 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•18m ago•0 comments

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

https://vibecolors.life/
1•tusharnaik•19m ago•0 comments

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3N9qlPZBc0
2•Bender•19m ago•0 comments

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

https://antithesis.com/blog/2026/rust_cpp/
1•lukastyrychtr•21m ago•0 comments

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

https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5704785
7•derriz•21m ago•1 comments

AI Skills Marketplace

https://skly.ai
1•briannezhad•21m 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•21m ago•0 comments

eInk UI Components in CSS

https://eink-components.dev/
1•edent•22m ago•0 comments

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

2•MicroWagie•25m ago•0 comments

ChatGPT is changing how we ask stupid questions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/06/stupid-questions-ai/
2•edward•26m ago•1 comments

Zig Package Manager Enhancements

https://ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2026-02-06
3•jackhalford•27m 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
2•geox•28m ago•0 comments

Deepfaking Orson Welles's Mangled Masterpiece

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/09/deepfaking-orson-welless-mangled-masterpiece
1•fortran77•30m ago•1 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
3•nar001•32m 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•32m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Spherical Cow

https://lib.rs/crates/spherical-cow
134•Natfan•1mo ago

Comments

borborigmus•1mo ago
The concept of a spherical cow was also part of Chris Morris’ comedy oeuvre. Possibly in the Brasseye episode “Animals”.
wolfi1•1mo ago
I know this joke since the 90s and one has to assume it's even going way back
spopejoy•1mo ago
- They just eat it don't they?

- But what should they do? Yeah yeah yeah yeah

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xgnuxd0tiHk

dwattttt•1mo ago
Did not over-promise
jesse__•1mo ago
I came for spherical cows. I left with spherical cows
gchamonlive•1mo ago
In a world full of deception, the spherical cow is a cup of fresh milk.
squigz•1mo ago
Is the milk spherical too?
vardump•1mo ago
Yes, if it's floating in space in a pressurized spaceship.
bell-cot•1mo ago
Cylindrical straw not included. Limited time offer. Warranty may be void if spaceship uses any reaction wheel or propulsion system. Other exclusions and limitations apply, see ...
pinkmuffinere•1mo ago
> The reason this library was initially written was to optimise the layout of inflatable space habitats which may one day be constructed on the Moon and Mars.

Wow, they even deliver on the “in a vacuum” bit

gradientsrneat•1mo ago
Mars does have an atmosphere. It's much less dense than Earth's, but its enough to have weather. Pretty good joke though.
bruce511•1mo ago
>> "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum".

I get the joke, but that's not really what modeling means. There's no "only" determination here.

So sure, the researchers devised a model, in which the cows were spherical and in a vacuum. That produced a solution, but there's nothing to show that solution would work less in an air environment with regular cows [1].

I bring this up only because elsewhere here is a discussion of computer fundamentals (and their lack in juniors / self taught folk, and AI output). The quote above is logically flawed (likely on purpose to create the joke) but understanding that it is a logical joke may not be obvious to everyone.

[1] to show that they would have to build a model with air and meat to show the solution fails, at which point the original model would be discarded.

Etheryte•1mo ago
This trail of thought is not logically sound. The whole argument is built on the notion of what modeling is and isn't, but the original quote doesn't make the assumptions you imply. Sure, they might have a model that assumes cows are spherical and etc, but it might also very well be that they have hard constraints that make it work only for spherical cows and nothing else. There isn't enough information in the quote to make the argument you're trying to make.
littlestymaar•1mo ago
> [1] to show that they would have to build a model with air and meat to show the solution fails, at which point the original model would be discarded

You only have to show that it fails for square (or any non-spherical shape) cow in vacuum or for spherical cow in air.

oh_nice_marmot•1mo ago
Why not call it SpheriCOW?
NoiseBert69•1mo ago
This will confuse all Copy-On-Write FS developers.

Moooow!

bell-cot•1mo ago
An improvement - but to get gov't funding, it has to be a straight-acronym name.

Maybe "Space Performance [something ... something] Optimization for Weightlessness"?

NBJack•1mo ago
Space Packing Heuristic for Efficient Rearrangement of Enumerated Cattle Optimized for Weightlessness
mos87•1mo ago
An ideal allegory for Rewrite Everything in Rust Syndrome^WDrive
ycombinatrix•1mo ago
Could this be made no_std/no_alloc?