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Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
39•thelok•2h ago•3 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
101•AlexeyBrin•6h ago•18 comments

First Proof

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05192
52•samasblack•3h ago•39 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
789•klaussilveira•20h ago•243 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
39•vinhnx•3h ago•5 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
63•onurkanbkrc•5h ago•5 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1040•xnx•1d ago•587 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
462•theblazehen•2d ago•165 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
509•nar001•4h ago•235 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
184•jesperordrup•10h ago•65 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
63•1vuio0pswjnm7•7h ago•60 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
189•alainrk•5h ago•280 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
50•mellosouls•3h ago•51 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
27•rbanffy•4d ago•5 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
19•marklit•5d ago•0 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
108•videotopia•4d ago•27 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
59•speckx•4d ago•62 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
268•isitcontent•21h ago•34 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
197•limoce•4d ago•107 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
281•dmpetrov•21h ago•150 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
169•bookofjoe•2h ago•153 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
152•matheusalmeida•2d ago•47 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
549•todsacerdoti•1d ago•266 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
422•ostacke•1d ago•110 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
39•matt_d•4d ago•14 comments

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

https://vecti.com
365•vecti•23h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
465•lstoll•1d ago•305 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
341•eljojo•23h ago•210 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
66•helloplanets•4d ago•70 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
18•sandGorgon•2d ago•8 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.)