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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
499•klaussilveira•8h ago•138 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
837•xnx•13h ago•503 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
53•matheusalmeida•1d ago•10 comments

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/a-century-of-hair-samples-proves-leaded-gas-ban-worked/
110•jnord•4d ago•18 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
164•dmpetrov•8h ago•76 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
166•isitcontent•8h ago•18 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
59•quibono•4d ago•10 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
280•vecti•10h ago•127 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
339•aktau•14h ago•163 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
222•eljojo•11h ago•139 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
332•ostacke•14h ago•89 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
421•todsacerdoti•16h ago•221 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
34•kmm•4d ago•2 comments

Show HN: ARM64 Android Dev Kit

https://github.com/denuoweb/ARM64-ADK
11•denuoweb•1d ago•0 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
360•lstoll•14h ago•248 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
15•gmays•3h ago•2 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
9•romes•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
58•phreda4•8h ago•9 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
209•i5heu•11h ago•156 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
33•gfortaine•6h ago•8 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
121•vmatsiiako•13h ago•51 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
159•limoce•3d ago•80 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
257•surprisetalk•3d ago•33 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1013•cdrnsf•17h ago•422 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
51•rescrv•16h ago•17 comments

I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor

https://andrewjrod.substack.com/p/im-going-to-cure-my-girlfriends-brain
93•ray__•5h ago•43 comments

Evaluating and mitigating the growing risk of LLM-discovered 0-days

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
44•lebovic•1d ago•12 comments

WebView performance significantly slower than PWA

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40817676
10•denysonique•5h ago•0 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
35•betamark•15h ago•29 comments

Show HN: Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agents

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
81•antves•1d ago•59 comments
Open in hackernews

I'm 16 and Trying to Save Coral Reefs with Open-Source Symbiotic Biotech

35•sovushka0290•7mo ago
Hi HN! I'm a 16-year-old student from Kazakhstan and I recently dove deep into a problem that shook me: coral reefs are dying faster than we're reacting.

Most existing solutions focus on reducing CO₂ or replanting corals — but what if we could go deeper? What if we could rethink coral biology from the ground up?

---

## The Problem

Corals are not just pretty rocks. They are complex *symbiotic ecosystems*, especially with tiny algae called *zooxanthellae*. These algae live inside coral tissue and provide nutrients through photosynthesis. When oceans overheat or acidify, these algae die or flee — and the coral "bleaches" and dies.

Despite billions spent on reef conservation, *we haven’t solved the root issue*: the symbiotic breakdown under stress.

---

## The Idea

What if we could engineer a synthetic symbiosis?

- I explored *marine fungi and mycelium* as potential scaffolds. - Then I imagined embedding engineered *photosynthetic bacteria* that mimic zooxanthellae. - These microbes could be protected inside mycelial structures, allowing *enhanced heat resistance*, *nutrient sharing*, and potentially *reef recolonization* even in hostile waters.

---

## What I Built

This is not just an idea. I: - Wrote [an open-source article on Medium](https://medium.com/@riskulovakorpus/the-heart-of-the-planet-bc8a504bca85) - Designed a [GitHub repo with visual diagrams, hypotheses, and implementation scenarios](https://github.com/riskulovakorpus/TheHeartOfThePlanet) - Posted in /r/SyntheticBiology and got feedback about ecological risks, saltwater challenges, gene containment — and I’m working on those in version 2.

---

## I Know It's Not Simple

Releasing GMOs into the ocean is risky. Mycelium may not behave in water like in soil. There are biocontainment issues and unknowns.

But what I want to do is *spark conversations* and *connect with experts* who could shape, redirect or improve this idea.

---

## My Goal

I want this to become: - A real citizen-science research initiative - A collaborative open-source biotech concept - Maybe something bigger — because if not us, who?

---

## Want to Join or Give Feedback?

All the links are here: - Medium article: https://medium.com/@riskulovakorpus/the-heart-of-the-planet-bc8a504bca85 - GitHub project: https://github.com/riskulovakorpus/TheHeartOfThePlanet - Cover Image: [download](https://chat.openai.com/share/file/0000000020b061fbaded398f5f5802d7)

If you're a synthetic biologist, coral researcher, or just someone who cares — I'd love your thoughts. Tear it apart, remix it, or help build the next draft.

Thanks for reading this far

Comments

ViktorRay•7mo ago
Good luck to you! Coral Reefs are beautiful and I hope they remain with us for many years to come.
notachatbot123•7mo ago
https://github.com/riskulovakorpus/TheHeartOfThePlanet is 404

Everything else is ChatGPT slop.

aaviator42•7mo ago
The medium article is also 404
voidUpdate•7mo ago
The article link works, but it is nothing of substance, just a lot of very very short sentences talking about coral being good
Jordan-117•7mo ago
I'm not surprised some schoolkid is using AI for their science project (?), but it's very weird that so many comments on a tech-focused site like this are engaging with this extremely obvious ChatGPTese at face value. Is the underlying idea even biologically plausible? The whole thing seems like a hallucination produced by an inferior model.
aaviator42•7mo ago
Hey, it's cool that you care so much about coral reefs and climate change — that kind of awareness is really important.

A lot of us care about climate change and coral reefs and the planet. The problem is that the biggest damage is often caused by large systems — like industries and governments — that prioritize profit over the planet. Even when regular people try to make eco-friendly choices, it’s really hard to make a big difference alone when the rules and incentives still let pollution and destruction keep happening on a huge scale. That’s why we also need collective action, policy changes, and accountability at the top.

Your voice matters though, and speaking up like you are is part of how change starts. Keep going. But keep in mind that people problems cannot be solved by technology alone. Even if you are able to develop technology to help coral reefs survive, you need massive funding and buy-in from various people and orgs with power to implement it in practice. That's way harder than coming up with the tech.

Also, food for thought: should we really be trying to genetically modify other organisms to be compatible with pollution or should we be reducing pollution in the first place?

diwank•7mo ago
I'd recommend considering applying to the Thiel Fellowship.

https://thielfellowship.org/faq

morphle•7mo ago
Peter Thiel is dangerous [1].

[1]How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk...

morphle•7mo ago
>Releasing GMOs into the ocean is risky.

You are dangerous [3] (to the coral and the ocean).

Don't mess with the planet until you are qualified and have the consent of the mayority of the planet.

Start with learning ethics. And become a scientist, at 16 years old you have not yet learned to think properly [1,2].

You are from Kazakhstan, not know for its rigorous science process for the last 100 years.

> connect with experts

Only science is the expert. Individual scientists are not.

>who could shape, redirect or improve this idea.

Publish your scientific results in a paper and have them reproduced, peer reviewed and debated

[1] Alan Kay Sustainable Thinking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0R0tAOf7KI

[2] The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Create It. But Is It Already Too Late? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTPI6wh-Lr0

[3] Geoengineering carries ‘large risks’ for the natural world, studies show https://www.carbonbrief.org/geoengineering-carries-large-ris...

voidUpdate•7mo ago
It might help to share the reddit posts (https://www.reddit.com/r/SyntheticBiology/comments/1lecz5c/f..., https://www.reddit.com/r/SyntheticBiology/comments/1led9zw/e...), and use a working link for the github (https://github.com/sovushka0290/Alihan). I'm still trying to find any technical details though, all the posts seem to be restating the same thing. Your "Full writeup" on medium is shorter than your reddit posts and has less information, so you might want to expand it a bit with something more concrete
njb311•7mo ago
I’d echo some of the other comments that the first priority should be to find ways to stop further damage rather than adding another human impact that attempts to mitigate previous ones.

As you have pointed out, this proposal carries significant risks. Ignoring the GMO aspect, introducing foreign species into the coral ecosystem could superficially appear to be successful in that some of the corals on the reefs might be revived. But what exactly is the measure of success here? Reefs are richly biodiverse so which corals will be affected and what other species might be affected? This might be impossible to predict until the experiment is released into nature and in a marine environment I doubt containment is possible. Humans have some form when it comes to translocating species and the costs incurred trying to revert can be significant.

There are lots of potential unintended consequences some of which might be foreseeable and others which are not. For example, what if the causes of bleaching in a locality do reverse? Will the GMO species out-compete the natural ones and prevent re-establishing the ecosystem?

Plus, of course, the worst aspect of layering more human interference into ecosystems is that it supports (and is often financially supported by) those who want to continue with all the damaging processes that have got us to this point – hey, we don’t have to worry about fertiliser run-off/ocean acidification/ocean warming because look, we ‘fixed’ the coral reef!

I’m not saying that we can’t do both things – reduce future impacts and try to fix past ones – but history has shown that solutions for a genuinely more sustainable future (for humans and the ecosystem that supports us) are harder so they get watered down or kicked down the road, when we actually need them to work even better than originally envisaged and be implemented faster.

You should not lose your passion for nature but perhaps direct it at solving problematic human activities, replacing current systems, processes and products with better ones. People are convinced we can’t do without all the things/choices we have today, so if consumers don’t want to change then we have to focus on transforming products and production. And we have to do it in a world where population has doubled in the last 50 years and is still growing, and if we expect per capita GDP also to grow – apparently our principal measure of success as a species – then overall human consumption will have to grow even faster.

Plenty to get yours and the best minds of your generation working on!

solardev•7mo ago
Have you actually tested this process in a lab, or run it by any practicing scientists or science teachers yet?
metalman•7mo ago
rather than synthetic symbionts, looking for survivers that exist now and breed those, I believe that there are a number of successfull.... yes found some, https://www.thecoralfarm.com/reefkeeping-tips-tricks/nurturi...

https://www.mantasystems.net/a/blog/post/CoralPropagation

looking over the worst, hottest, most poluted and damaged reef areas for survivors might be the short cut to finding what you are looking for underwater drones can do the searching,harvesting, and re planting, with aquaculture operations wherever space is cheap, propagation and cloning is useualy low tech, and routine work , after getting the basic tecniques masterd, and costs for genetic scans are falling so this is not cost prohibative when going looking for funding, but dont aim too low, there is money out there, and many many people share your concern for corrals and ocean health

here is one of many organisations involved in similar work....Canadian, so not tropical corrals, but there are deep water northern corrals.....so

https://hakai.org/