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

https://openciv3.org/
487•klaussilveira•7h ago•130 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
828•xnx•13h ago•495 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
48•matheusalmeida•1d ago•5 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
163•isitcontent•8h ago•18 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/
104•jnord•4d ago•15 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
159•dmpetrov•8h ago•74 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
57•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
267•vecti•10h ago•127 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
334•aktau•14h ago•161 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
216•eljojo•10h ago•136 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
329•ostacke•13h ago•87 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
31•kmm•4d ago•1 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
418•todsacerdoti•15h ago•220 comments

Show HN: ARM64 Android Dev Kit

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

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

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

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
349•lstoll•14h ago•245 comments

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

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
55•phreda4•7h ago•9 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
205•i5heu•10h ago•150 comments

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

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
117•vmatsiiako•12h ago•43 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
155•limoce•3d ago•79 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
30•gfortaine•5h ago•4 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...
12•gmays•3h ago•2 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
254•surprisetalk•3d ago•32 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/
1008•cdrnsf•17h ago•421 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
50•rescrv•15h 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
83•ray__•4h ago•40 comments

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

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

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

https://docs.smooth.sh/cli/overview
78•antves•1d ago•59 comments

How virtual textures work

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/how-virtual-textures-really-work/
32•betamark•15h ago•28 comments

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

https://github.com/stablyai/agent-slack
41•nwparker•1d ago•11 comments
Open in hackernews

Evidence of a 12,800-year-old shallow airburst depression in Louisiana

https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/ACI.2025.0004
105•keepamovin•7mo ago

Comments

readthenotes1•7mo ago
Buried the lede:

"Son claims Dad was right all along"

tigereyeTO•7mo ago
Interesting. There’s a hypothesis that Earth was struck by an impact 12,800 years ago in North America but the impact site wasn’t identified

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothe...

Could these be related?

qualeed•7mo ago
I hadn't heard of this, but it says:

>The hypothesis is widely rejected by relevant experts.[2][1][3][4] It is influenced by creationism [...] It is an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation that the Younger Dryas was caused by a significant reduction in, or shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America. [...] Authors have not yet responded to requests for clarification and have never made their raw data available

Is there a reason why the widely accepted explanation isn't satisfactory?

tigereyeTO•7mo ago
The publication of this research.

One possibility discussed in the publication is that the sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz was caused by the Perkins Louisiana impact.

cluckindan•7mo ago
It happened at the end of an ice age, when mile-thick glaciers were melting away. That’s a lot of fresh water going to the oceans.
adastra22•7mo ago
The argument is that the impact event(s) are WHY the ice age ended.
dr_dshiv•7mo ago
Ohhh… cool!
cluckindan•7mo ago
… and widely criticized as a creationist theory.
adastra22•7mo ago
Which has nothing to do with the legitimate scientific question of whether an impact triggered the interglacial warming period we're currently in.
cluckindan•7mo ago
The point is that it is not a legitimate scientific question, as those posing it are disregarding all evidence for geological and cosmological causes for rapid deglaciation.

The YD impact hypothesis is motivated by creationist thinking (hyperbolically ”god threw a stone at us to relieve mankind of ice”) and the idea has been thoroughly refuted.

Clinging to beliefs when there is ample evidence to the contrary is the very opposite of the scientific method.

adastra22•7mo ago
The original paper proposing a YD impact was serious science put forward by serious academics, AFAIK: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1994902/

That it was later a cause taken up by creationists is annoying, but it has no bearing on the scientific question (which is as yet unsettled).

cluckindan•7mo ago
Too bad Dr. Firestone seems to have been the lead author in many articles which have been based on data that could not be reproduced by later authors.

E.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908874106

deepdarkforest•7mo ago
If you actually click on the link, it mentions this both in the abstract, and a detailed comparison of evidence in a whole table.
8bitsrule•7mo ago
The evidence for multiple strikes around 12,800BP has been piling up for quite a few years now. There are other theories of course. A few papers :

Alaska - https://dx.doi.org/10.1086/695703

South Carolina - www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51552-8 (plus Article: https://theconversation.com/new-evidence-that-an-extraterres... )

Chile - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38089-y

South Africa - https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.06.017

Syria - https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-60867-w

California, Channel Islands - https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2008.09.006

jonathaneunice•7mo ago
Zero expertise in any of the related disciplines to interpret or judge any of this, but I can say with confidence that the related Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesi... is a wild read and outright flamethrower at everything about Younger Dryas and seemingly, everyone involved.
farceSpherule•7mo ago
The Younger Dryas debate spans climatology, archaeology, geology, and astrophysics, creating tension across multiple disciplines.

There is scientific evidence that the Younger Dryas event occurred, however, no universally accepted scientific study that conclusively proves WHAT caused it.

cluckindan•7mo ago
The Younger Dryas was not an ”event”, it was a period in Earth's geologic history that occurred circa 12,900 to 11,700 years Before Present (BP).
xeromal•7mo ago
Is the 0 point for Before Present a different year than the Jesus year? I've never heard it used before.
Neekerer•7mo ago
It's actually 1950 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present?hl=en-US
xeromal•7mo ago
Thank you!
AlotOfReading•7mo ago
Ish. It's technically correct for BP and radioisotope dating specifically, but other dating methods don't use the same scale like TL. You'll commonly see kiloanni (ka) used instead and that may or may not be referenced to 1950 depending on the whims of the author.
IncreasePosts•7mo ago
That's right around the time the "modern" era ended and "post-modern" began. Funny we've been making these errors since basically the beginning of time. Looking at you, New Bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris!
Shadowmist•7mo ago
It’s approximately 370 to 408 billion seconds before the Unix epoch.
FrustratedMonky•7mo ago
Kind of pedantic?

I think everyone knows the debate is around the 'event', which caused a 'period' of geologic history which is referred to as "Younger Dryas". I guess once the 'event' is known, it can be named something, like "The Younger Dryas Event".

What I'd like to know, is why just one event. There is this paper, and also the crater found in Greenland a couple years ago. Maybe there was a more general bombardment, not just a one-off smoking gone.

protocolture•7mo ago
There doesnt have to be an event.

The current accepted theory is (from the gps wiki article)

"is an alternative to the long-standing and widely accepted explanation that the Younger Dryas was caused by a significant reduction in, or shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor due to a sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America."

adastra22•7mo ago
I'm not sure what definition of "event" you are using. What you quoted is an event. Really anything that shows up as a spike in a chart on ANY timescale, is an "event." The word has broad meaning in the sciences.
protocolture•7mo ago
The person I am replying to is using event in the terms of "Something that caused" not "Thing that happened" and then goes on to further assume more airbursting asteroids.

Yes a thing happened. But theres no need for a smoking space gun.

FrustratedMonky•7mo ago
I literally said "why just one event".

I don't know if it was asteroid or not, that is why there is controversy.

How is "sudden influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz and deglaciation in North America" not an event?

As to the derision on asteroids, not sure why, considering we find evidence of them everywhere. Why not consider it as an option.

Sorry if my memory is like everyone else's. When the Greenland Crater was found, there were 100's of articles linking it to Younger Dryas. It was dated later and discounted as being too old, that did NOT get 100's of articles, so was not widely known. I didn't realize it till this exchange.

cluckindan•7mo ago
The ”event” you mention might sound like it happened instantly or at least within a day or two, but it likely took many hundreds of years. So, not an ”event” in the sense an asteroid impact is an ”event”.

”Process” or ”period” would make more sense when things are happening at those time scales.

FrustratedMonky•7mo ago
100 years out of 10,000, is it an event?

I understand the point.

Just have had enough conversations with engineers about "is a micro second fast enough", "nothing is really happening, a whole second is plenty".

Time scales can make a lot of things look long or instant.

cluckindan•7mo ago
Everything depends on context, yes. But in the geohistorical context, ”events” are commonly understood as asteroid impacts, such as the Tunguska event and the Triassic–Jurassic extinction event, so the choice of word carries a heavy implication in this context.
FrustratedMonky•7mo ago
Isn't part of the issue in this discussion, and maybe the controversy. Is that the knock on effects can take decades/100s of years to develop. An asteroid is 1 day, but the fallout and seasons changing can take years.

  So by the time you look in geologic record, it is 10-100 of years of 'evidence'.  And finding a single point event is difficult.
adastra22•7mo ago
Yes, it can take hundreds to thousands of years or more for the impulse of cosmic event to reach a new steady state in global climate. The KT extinction wasn’t “fast” either.
cluckindan•7mo ago
”In the geologic record, the K–Pg event is marked by a thin layer of sediment called the K–Pg boundary or K–T boundary, which can be found throughout the world in marine and terrestrial rocks. The boundary clay shows unusually high levels of the metal iridium”

A similar layer is suspiciously missing for the purported YD impact.

salynchnew•7mo ago
There are several papers arguing that there is no "one event" a la https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001282522... and others.
MangoToupe•7mo ago
The crater in Greenland has been dated to about 60 million years ago
an0malous•7mo ago
There’s a lot more dogma on Wikipedia than academics would like you to believe
shiftpgdn•7mo ago
There is a lot of dogma in academia too!!
alberth•7mo ago
For those that don't have the context ...

The Younger Dryas theory supporters is controversial across multiple disciplines because it challenges the idea that human progress has always been linear (gets better over time).

Some believe that ~13,000 years ago, humans were highly advanced, but a massive flood (Younger Dryas) wiped out & reset civilization.

Supporters of this theory often point to two things: nearly all major religions reference a great flood, and there’s a current lack of understanding how ancient megalithic sites were built with tools thought to be available at the time (primitive bronze tools, etc).

---

Unfortunately, it seems like folks from both sides of the topic talk-past each other ... and at least I haven't seen a balanced debate on the subject. If someone has seen a balanced assessment, please share.

tbrownaw•7mo ago
> Some believe that ~13,000 years ago, humans were highly advanced, but a massive flood (Younger Dryas) wiped out & reset civilization.

What kind of "highly advanced"? Iron-age equivalent, industrial revolution, sci-fi with antigravity, ...?

goku12•7mo ago
Depending on who you ask, it can be anything on your list. You can expect such claims (of an advanced ancient civilization) to be highly speculative and probably supporting their version of the history. And it's proposed by everyone from young earth creationists to alien colonization theorists.
goku12•7mo ago
I can't speak anything about the scientific validity of the theories. But it's true that many modern religions have similar stories about a flood catastrophe. But has anybody considered that this may be because many of the biggest religions today originated at the same place?
cedilla•7mo ago
Flood myths are much more common than that. But the easy reason is that floods are extremely common, and flood plains are among the best places to build a city.
andrewflnr•7mo ago
A flood? I thought it was at least an impact winter or something. The linked wiki article agrees. A global flood is truly unfeasible.
MichaelZuo•7mo ago
Is it plausible for such a large airburst as hypothesized to leave behind such a small crater?
btilly•7mo ago
Yes. If it exploded in the air, then there is no crater.
gattr•7mo ago
Indeed, cf. Tunguska event ([1]) from 1908.

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

MichaelZuo•7mo ago
Huh? There’s definitely a visible impact structure: https://www.google.com/maps/@60.9045428,101.9279614,14z/data...
ceejayoz•7mo ago
Zoom out a bit and it looks pretty unremarkable for the area.

One has to be careful interpreting craters in areas with permafrost. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201130-climate-change-t...

cheaprentalyeti•7mo ago
I'm guessing that like everything south of a certain point in Louisiana, it'll start out as a larger landscape feature and then gets filled in by sediment.
cheaprentalyeti•7mo ago
Oh, and before I forget: the kudzu will probably eat what's left of the crater.
protocolture•7mo ago
Look a lot of this passes the sniff test but anything Younger Dryas related I have to assume based on past performance is all buillshit designed to prop up religious fundamentalists and bodgy history.
esseph•7mo ago
???

There's no link to anything religion wise with the Younger Dryas AFAIK.

My only experience studying it has come from the geological / astrophysics sides though.

adastra22•7mo ago
It has apparently been taken up as a cause by creationists.
K0balt•7mo ago
Yeah. It’s conflation of coincidence (as in coincide) with causality, as usual. That there was a widespread major flooding event doesn’t support the existence of a God, though (unsurprisingly) most human cultures have a distant memory of such an event. It’s a similar assertion to saying that the existence of humanity is proof of a creator.
protocolture•7mo ago
Comet Research Group is funded by fundies. They sort of angle towards science when making claims, but those claims are sort of designed to support a scientific creationism angle if they ever get upheld.
andrewflnr•7mo ago
I don't know about the sniff test. The paper here does a little bit of the amateur scientist thing where they belabor details that real experts tend to take for granted. That doesn't make it wrong, but it increases the skepticism warranted.

I do agree the religious link is weird. The mere presence of a 12800 year timeline contradicts YEC. Then again, that kind of logic doesn't always stop pseudoscience people, especially the more conspiracy-flavored ones.

salynchnew•7mo ago
Also, the narrative of the paper references the lead author's dad telling him a story as a child based on not-uncommon geological features, alone. Either this is some amazing coincidence or self-confirmation bias on the part of the authors.
protocolture•7mo ago
I would have liked to see 10 digs in a similar geological region thats not being claimed to have been airbursted as a control.
andrewflnr•7mo ago
Not sure that's necessary. Shocked quartz is distinctive, and strongly diagnostic of either cosmic impact or nuclear detonation; I think you can safely think of this as the required control digs having been done decades ago. It's either there or not. If it's there, that place had an impact. We just need some unbiased people to go check the physical facts.
protocolture•7mo ago
>The mere presence of a 12800 year timeline contradicts YEC

There are other creationists working on the timescale issue, attacking dating methods etc.

TBH if someone provided evidence of a flood, they would probably just publish bs suggesting the timescale is wrong and push out a bunch of YEC textbooks stating it as evidence of the biblical flood.

cheaprentalyeti•7mo ago
So you're going to ignore the possibility of events that happened thousands of years before the young earth creationists say the Earth was even formed because of a possibility of association with young earth creationists?
protocolture•7mo ago
I am going to be even more skeptical in places where people being intentionally misleading often post their falsehoods yes.
blueflow•7mo ago
How is this supposed to work with the sedimentation? The glass spherules under the lake are maxxing out 5-6 meters below the surface. Where does the material on top of that come from, and why didn't it fill in the lake, but leave it intact & with ridges?

Second, if you think of an impact at an angle, the crater and its ridges form an ellipse. If its coming very flat, the structures might look rather parabolic, but still bent inwards. In the article, the north ridge is bent outwards. How? Questions over questions.

slackfan•7mo ago
Sounds like we finally have some proper dates for the Finno-Korean hyperwar.