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Novelist Cormac McCarthy's tips on how to write a great science paper [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/science/2019-savage.pdf
60•surprisetalk•2h ago•9 comments

Living microbial cement supercapacitors with reactivatable energy storage

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(25)00409-6
45•PaulHoule•3h ago•24 comments

SCREAM CIPHER ("ǠĂȦẶAẦ ĂǍÄẴẶȦ")

https://sethmlarson.dev/scream-cipher
177•alexmolas•2d ago•75 comments

Scientists find that ice generates electricity when bent

https://phys.org/news/2025-09-scientists-ice-generates-electricity-bent.html
14•isaacfrond•3d ago•0 comments

Are Touchscreens in Cars Dangerous?

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/09/19/are-touchscreens-in-cars-dangerous
40•Brajeshwar•59m ago•22 comments

Images over DNS

https://dgl.cx/2025/09/images-over-dns
89•dgl•5h ago•26 comments

Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/20/uk_palantir_defense_pact/
93•rntn•2h ago•42 comments

Claude Can (Sometimes) Prove It

https://www.galois.com/articles/claude-can-sometimes-prove-it
137•lairv•3d ago•33 comments

Less is safer: How Obsidian reduces the risk of supply chain attacks

https://obsidian.md/blog/less-is-safer/
449•saeedesmaili•18h ago•212 comments

MapSCII – World Map in Terminal

https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii
61•_august•1d ago•10 comments

Is Zig's New Writer Unsafe?

https://www.openmymind.net/Is-Zigs-New-Io-Unsafe/
86•ibobev•2h ago•63 comments

Bezier Curve as Easing Function in C++

https://asawicki.info/news_1790_bezier_curve_as_easing_function_in_c
20•ibobev•3h ago•3 comments

Escapee pregnancy test frogs colonised Wales for 50 years

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-44886585
71•Luc•3d ago•24 comments

Show HN: Math2Tex – Convert handwritten math and complex notes to LaTeX text

14•leoyixing•3d ago•4 comments

If all the world were a monorepo

https://jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the-world-were-a-monorepo
223•sebg•4d ago•60 comments

Git: Introduce Rust and announce that it will become mandatorty

https://lore.kernel.org/git/20250904-b4-pks-rust-breaking-change-v1-0-3af1d25e0be9@pks.im/
192•WhyNotHugo•4h ago•143 comments

Show HN: FocusStream – Focused, distraction-free YouTube for learners

https://focusstream.media
65•pariharAshwin•9h ago•38 comments

The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

https://windowsread.me/p/best-youtube-downloaders
464•Leftium•1d ago•198 comments

LLM-Deflate: Extracting LLMs into Datasets

https://www.scalarlm.com/blog/llm-deflate-extracting-llms-into-datasets/
46•gdiamos•9h ago•21 comments

PyPI Blog: Token Exfiltration Campaign via GitHub Actions Workflows

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-09-16-github-actions-token-exfiltration/
49•miketheman•3d ago•16 comments

Ants that seem to defy biology – They lay eggs that hatch into another species

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-ant-queens-seem-to-defy-biology-they-lay-eggs-tha...
440•sampo•1d ago•145 comments

Show HN: Zedis – A Redis clone I'm writing in Zig

https://github.com/barddoo/zedis
140•barddoo•19h ago•87 comments

IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025

https://improbable.com/ig/winners/
105•JeremyTheo•5h ago•29 comments

Evals in 2025: benchmarks to build models people can use

https://github.com/huggingface/evaluation-guidebook/blob/main/yearly_dives/2025-evaluations-for-u...
10•jxmorris12•2d ago•2 comments

Show HN: WeUseElixir - Elixir project directory

https://weuseelixir.com/
193•taddgiles•20h ago•43 comments

What Makes System Calls Expensive: A Linux Internals Deep Dive

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/what-makes-system-calls-expensive
28•rbanffy•3h ago•3 comments

Feedmaker: URL + CSS selectors = RSS feed

https://feedmaker.fly.dev
154•mustaphah•19h ago•27 comments

Hidden risk in Notion 3.0 AI agents: Web search tool abuse for data exfiltration

https://www.codeintegrity.ai/blog/notion
165•abirag•19h ago•43 comments

Internet Archive's big battle with music publishers ends in settlement

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/09/internet-archives-big-battle-with-music-publishers-en...
344•coloneltcb•4d ago•140 comments

High-performance read-through cache for object storage

https://github.com/s2-streamstore/cachey
69•pranay01•12h ago•15 comments
Open in hackernews

Living microbial cement supercapacitors with reactivatable energy storage

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/S2666-3864(25)00409-6
45•PaulHoule•3h ago

Comments

thesebas•2h ago
"Well that Sounds Like Slavery With Extra Steps"
Telemakhos•2h ago
No more so than brewing beer with yeast or fermenting wine or growing crops.
zenmac•46m ago
Yeah that may be true, but how do we feel about using actual brain tissues to train AI like:

https://corticallabs.com

roughly•30m ago
The fact that brain organelles start spontaneously firing in synchronized patterns when they reach a certain size is enough to give me serious pause about anything trying to use brain tissue. We don’t quite know what consciousness is, but we know what it looks like from the outside.
PaulHoule•2h ago
You've got plenty of bacteria working for you (and sometimes against you) in your gut. Microbe-enhanced cement is a significant research topic. And the most plausible route to a chemical "factory factory" that space colonists would need to make middle and top-of-pyramid chemicals is a synthetic biology platform where you could make bespoke bacteria and yeasts that could make just about anything for you.
siavosh•47m ago
I’m not sure if I’m joking or not, but the difference between your two examples is one of them is a choice and the other is not. Maybe we’re going to enter a new era of microorganism ethics (or morality?).
roughly•32m ago
Microorganisms get interesting because they’re simple enough that we can see all the parts involved, but complex enough that we can see what looks like intentionality in their actions. We consider them Alive, but we also know all the mechanisms making them seem that way - there’s nowhere for the ghost to hide. They’re a fascinating case for ethics, especially since there’s effectively no way we could operate in this world without both relying on them and killing them in droves, because they’re also parts of the mechanism almost anywhere we look at biology. Hell, human cells are outnumbered 10:1 - by number, we’re outvoted.
siavosh•16m ago
Yeah I think if ethics are involved it has to be based on intentions and hence choice. Accidentally stepping on a few million microorganisms is probably ethically ok. Building your civilization in the “enslavement” of gazzilions of microorganisms might be more ethically discussion worthy. I do wonder how plants are different than microorganisms if at all since obviously we farm and eat them.
roughly•7m ago
With microorganisms it’s particularly interesting because the time and space scales are so different there’s no coherent narrative between humans and bacteria - it’d be like a species of sentient space nebulas seeding a promising planet with proto-humans so we’d eventually plant fruit trees there or something. In one sense, yes, if you were one of the eventual resulting humans, you’re the result of an alien species enslaving humans to do their bidding, but you’re living your entire life just generally doing what you’d do as a human totally unaware of your apparent enslavement and with no apparent restrictions on your movement or decision-space. I’m not an ethicist - anything that doesn’t involve the full consent of all parties gives me pause, but I’m not quite sure what the conversation there looks like.
pfdietz•1h ago
Don't anthropomorphize microbes. They hate it when you do that.
pengaru•32m ago
Wait til you learn where honey comes from
BolexNOLA•7m ago
Eek barba dirkle, someone got laid in college
bix6•2h ago
Exciting for a proof of concept. Hope to see this further developed!
VladVladikoff•1h ago
>Achieves 178.7 Wh/kg energy density and 8.3 kW/kg power density

Can someone explain this to me please. What is “energy” measuring here? How is it different from power?

lexicality•1h ago
presumably energy is how much it can store and power is how fast you can get it out?
billyjmc•1h ago
Energy is how much work you can do. Power is how fast you can do it. When you express these in terms of densities, it’s how much energy a certain quantity of material can store, and how quickly that energy can be released from a certain quantity of material.

If you short out a AA battery, it will get warm for a little while. If you short out a 14500 Li-ion battery (which is the same size and comparable energy density), you might get a small explosion as it dumps its energy very quickly.

simpsond•1h ago
W = Watt. h = hour. One kg supply one watt of power for 178.7 hours (without considering other factors). Power is how much energy can it supply at a moment. Up to 8.3 kW instantaneous.
detourdog•1h ago
Does it follow that 8.3 kW instance lasts .1787th of an hour?
Workaccount2•47m ago
No, it would last .0215th of an hour or ~77.5 seconds.
lexicality•1h ago
Always exciting to see people taking steps towards a wetware future, one of my favourite scifi horror tropes. Bring on the flesh!
johnohara•1h ago
> Our findings establish a new paradigm for bio-integrated, cement-based energy materials, paving the way for energy-autonomous infrastructure.

"You see what I did there? Paving. Get it?"

Right. Now unleash the academic peer review puns. They've given permission.

seemaze•1h ago
Modern concrete is ubiquitously reinforced with steel. I wonder what effect on oxidation (modern concrete's primary failure mode) this would have?
brotchie•17m ago
What’s the downside here? Lithium ion batteries have an energy density of 150-350 Wh/kg, so this is firmly at the bottom of that range.

Naive, back of the napkin is 446 kWh / m^3. There’s a lot of content out there!

grues-dinner•14m ago
"Sorry the power is out - the concrete got sick".

And ensuring electrode integrity is probably quite fiddly during construction and maintenance is presumably fiddly.