frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs

https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-flies-keep-landing-on-north-sea-oil-rigs-then-taking-off-a-few-hours-later-heres-why-265622
87•speckx•5d ago

Comments

bcraven•4d ago
Just like birds, some species of hoverfly migrate with the seasons. They move to southern Spain in the early autumn and then as far north as Norway in spring (the northern leg is less well understood, and seems to take place over several generations, since each fly only actually lives for a few weeks).

_This paragraph becomes more astonishing as it goes on_

jcattle•2h ago
Same, that was the first time I've heard of this. I mean, it kind of makes sense. "Just" go where flowers bloom. But still, this seems like madness.
flave•3h ago
Oil Rigs seem to be, counterintuitively, very good for a bunch of species.

In the Gulf of Texas there’s been ongoing fights between environmentalists (helping species who live under and around the rigs) and environmentalists (protecting the landscape from ugly metal towers).

whazor•2h ago
Can we use raw oil 100% without burning/wasting it?

How much percent recyclable plastic could we extract out of raw oil? Like real recyclable plastic, where it is worth money to do so.

Maybe making more bitumen/asphalt for roads/roofs, or graphite for batteries?

lmm•2h ago
> Can we use raw oil 100% without burning/wasting it?

Burning it isn't wasting it, we get a lot of value out of that.

> How much percent recyclable plastic could we extract out of raw oil? Like real recyclable plastic, where it is worth money to do so.

0. There's no such thing as real recyclable plastic, unless you count burning it for heat/power generation.

> Maybe making more bitumen/asphalt for roads/roofs, or graphite for batteries?

Every fraction of oil has some use. But you're unlikely to get perfectly balanced demand for every single thing you can pull out of it.

Ferret7446•2h ago
> Every fraction of oil has some use. But you're unlikely to get perfectly balanced demand for every single thing you can pull out of it.

Oh God not Factorio again

pjc50•1h ago
Instead of saying "wasting", OP should have said "emitting CO2 to the atmosphere", which is the real problem here. Including from refinery flare stacks, and emissions of non-CO2 GHGs like methane from leaks.

Unbalanced fractions aren't so much of a problem as they can be cracked.

wodenokoto•2h ago
Oil is not part of the dispute parent is talking about. Abandoned rigs provides shelter for a multitude of species and helps marine diversity. On the other hand, they are manmade structures and essentially ocean trash.
defrost•2h ago
On the third hand, coral reefs are polypmade structues and essentially ocean poop and excreta.

It's not so much the manmade structures that are problematic, more the associated toxic sludges still residual within structures.

kingkawn•56m ago
Are there residual devastating toxic sludges in any non-human structures in the ocean
defrost•15m ago
Yes. (Black smokers, white smokers, other discharge points for hydrocarbons .. like tar pits on land, only underwater)

There are also human structures in the ocean that lack toxic sludges.

flave•1h ago
My comment wasn't clear - I'm talking about abandoned rigs. So the well is sealed.

Some of the more extreme "environmentalist" (in my opinion extreme) also demand that the ocean floor near the well is scrubbed clean to 'leave no trade' which is good in theory but in practice will wipe out the fish and plant life which has grown up around it.

teekert•55m ago
If it helps species cross oceans where previously they could not, it is also going to be bad for a bunch of species (those that see their niches invaded at the other side of the ocean, or whatever barrier the rigs help cross).

If so, I'd say that overall, this is bad.

myrmidon•2h ago
I never knew that insects are capable of crossing oceans...

Seeing close-up pictures of them is always a very humbling experience to me, because it is very obvious how "huge" and complex they are in terms of individual cells. A very visceral experience of Feynmans "there is plenty of room at the bottom" notion.

rwky•1h ago
Here's a paper on the painted lady migration described in the article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49079-2
meindnoch•2h ago
I can't imagine the efficiency that makes such long flights possible in such a tiny form factor. Compared to our drones, it must be multiple orders of magnitude more efficient.
danparsonson•57m ago
It helps to be extremely lightweight and small - the smaller you get, the less effort you need to put into just staying aloft.
vintermann•55m ago
What happens when we start making drones that small, I wonder.
easygenes•41m ago
“Flies Aren’t Real”
Terr_•50m ago
They go high too.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/06/01/128389587/l...

slightwinder•42m ago
Not sure whether is a matter of efficiency. Efficiency is more about the desired outcome. Insects are small and very low weight. So I would assume wind will give them more push and can carry them for much longer distances even without doing anything on their own. But the price is a lack of control; they have probably little to no influence where they will end up.
ljf•20m ago
Indeed - and let's not forget that these are the ones that successfully landed somewhere - many many others will have landed in the sea, or otherwise died before they could reach a suitable spot.

The ones that landed here hadn't aimed for or planned to find the rig, they were just in the same physical location and found a space to land.

grumpy-de-sre•4m ago
I'm kind of keen to see if large electric cargo motor gliders might one day become a thing. Traversing great distances via ambient energy harvesting. Maybe even self landing at certain designated airfields to top up on energy and avoid bad weather.

A migration of the machines so to say.

dvh•2h ago
What is the benefit of crossing the ocean? The lands on both sides are comparable.
pjc50•1h ago
Following the seasons, suggests the article. Insects are pretty temperature sensitive.
olalonde•35m ago
Seasons change primarily North–South, not East–West, right? I think the question is why don't they just go from North American to South America instead of crossing the ocean?
doingtheiroming•1h ago
An oily Stephen Maturin.
christophilus•49m ago
I read the title as “Files keep landing…”

And then the top comment made me think they must be sending paper documents to these rigs via some light weight flight mechanism. And then I realized I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.

jpfromlondon•39m ago
what are the longterm implications of easing the journey of a swarm of insects, does it reduce the attrition, and if so will that have an impact on pollination and predator success at the terminus?

in what less obvious ways does it ease the journey such as energy stowage (in hover flies I presume they depend on their pollen panniers?)

Liquibase continues to advertise itself as "open source" despite license switch

https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase/issues/7374
121•LaSombra•3h ago•58 comments

Upcoming Rust language features for kernel development

https://lwn.net/Articles/1039073/
84•pykello•4h ago•34 comments

New coding models and integrations

https://ollama.com/blog/coding-models
104•meetpateltech•5h ago•44 comments

Steve Jobs and Cray-1 to be featured on 2026 American Innovations $1 coin

https://www.usmint.gov/news/press-releases/united-states-mint-releases-2026-american-innovation-o...
108•maguay•4h ago•84 comments

Claude Haiku 4.5

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-haiku-4-5
626•adocomplete•18h ago•231 comments

JustSketchMe – Digital Posing Tool

https://justsketch.me
42•surprisetalk•5d ago•14 comments

TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing taxes for free (2019)

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-th...
245•lelandfe•5h ago•79 comments

Flies keep landing on North Sea oil rigs

https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-flies-keep-landing-on-north-sea-oil-rigs-then-taking-off...
88•speckx•5d ago•29 comments

Zed is now available on Windows

https://zed.dev/blog/zed-for-windows-is-here
426•meetpateltech•18h ago•255 comments

The Hidden Math of Ocean Waves Crashes Into View

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-math-of-ocean-waves-crashes-into-view-20251015/
12•pykello•4h ago•0 comments

Silver Snoopy Award

https://www.nasa.gov/space-flight-awareness/silver-snoopy-award/
55•LorenDB•3d ago•12 comments

Free applicatives, the handle pattern, and remote systems

https://exploring-better-ways.bellroy.com/free-applicatives-the-handle-pattern-and-remote-systems...
61•_jackdk_•7h ago•10 comments

Build a Superscalar 8-Bit CPU (YouTube Playlist) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwjMLyBU4RU&list=PLyR4neQXqQo5nPdEiMbaEJxWiy_UuyNN4&index=1
79•lrsjng•5d ago•10 comments

Apple M5 chip

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-the-next-big-leap-in-ai-performance-for...
1141•mihau•22h ago•1218 comments

Leaving serverless led to performance improvement and a simplified architecture

https://www.unkey.com/blog/serverless-exit
409•vednig•23h ago•215 comments

Are hard drives getting better?

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/are-hard-drives-getting-better-lets-revisit-the-bathtub-curve/
217•HieronymusBosch•17h ago•104 comments

Credential Stuffing

https://ciamweekly.substack.com/p/credential-stuffing
4•mooreds•2d ago•0 comments

What is going on with all this radioactive shrimp?

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/radioactive-shrimp-explained-a5493175857/
72•riffraff•5d ago•18 comments

TaxCalcBench: Evaluating Frontier Models on the Tax Calculation Task

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16126
45•handfuloflight•7h ago•9 comments

A Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway

https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemma-ai-cancer-therapy-discovery/
139•alexcos•16h ago•37 comments

Waymo is bringing autonomous, driverless ride-hailing to London in 2026

https://9to5google.com/2025/10/15/waymo-london-2026/
27•pykello•2h ago•22 comments

Show HN: Halloy – Modern IRC client

https://github.com/squidowl/halloy
329•culinary-robot•23h ago•90 comments

Who's Submitting AI-Tainted Filings in Court?

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/whos-submitting-ai-tainted-filings-in-court/
61•cratermoon•10h ago•35 comments

Writing an LLM from scratch, part 22 – training our LLM

https://www.gilesthomas.com/2025/10/llm-from-scratch-22-finally-training-our-llm
188•gpjt•11h ago•6 comments

F5 says hackers stole undisclosed BIG-IP flaws, source code

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/f5-says-hackers-stole-undisclosed-big-ip-flaws-sou...
182•WalterSobchak•21h ago•86 comments

Looking at kmalloc() and the SLUB Memory Allocator (2019)

https://ruffell.nz/programming/writeups/2019/02/15/looking-at-kmalloc-and-the-slub-memory-allocat...
25•signa11•4d ago•0 comments

Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agreeing new rules

https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-press-access-hegseth-trump-restrictions-5d9c2a63e4e03b91fc154...
350•pjmlp•4h ago•264 comments

Pica Numbers

https://home.octetfont.com/blog/pica-number.html
11•colinprince•3d ago•2 comments

Next Steps for the Caddy Project Maintainership

https://caddy.community/t/next-steps-for-the-caddy-project-maintainership/33076
183•francislavoie•13h ago•84 comments

ImapGoose

https://whynothugo.nl/journal/2025/10/15/introducing-imapgoose/
84•xarvatium•12h ago•10 comments