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

https://openciv3.org/
472•klaussilveira•7h ago•116 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
811•xnx•12h ago•487 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
157•isitcontent•7h ago•17 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
155•dmpetrov•7h ago•67 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
31•matheusalmeida•1d ago•1 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/
91•jnord•3d ago•12 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
50•quibono•4d ago•6 comments

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

https://vecti.com
260•vecti•9h ago•122 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
206•eljojo•10h ago•134 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
328•aktau•13h ago•158 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
327•ostacke•13h ago•86 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
411•todsacerdoti•15h ago•219 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

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

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
337•lstoll•13h ago•241 comments

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

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
52•phreda4•6h ago•9 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
4•romes•4d ago•0 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
195•i5heu•10h ago•144 comments

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

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
115•vmatsiiako•12h ago•38 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

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

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
244•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/
996•cdrnsf•16h ago•420 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
25•gfortaine•5h ago•3 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
45•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
67•ray__•3h ago•28 comments

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

https://red.anthropic.com/2026/zero-days/
38•lebovic•1d ago•11 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/
30•betamark•14h ago•28 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...
6•gmays•2h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Slack CLI for Agents

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

The Oklahoma Architect Who Turned Kitsch into Art

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-31/oklahoma-architect-bruce-goff-s-wild-home-desi...
21•MarlonPro•3d ago•4 comments
Open in hackernews

How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)

https://james-simon.github.io/blog/chicken-cooking/
190•jxmorris12•3mo ago

Comments

refactor_master•3mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
kstrauser•3mo ago
This is exactly why I like hanging out with math & physics types. It has big "assuming a spherical, frictionless horse" energy.
flowerthoughts•3mo ago
"Mom, where are the hitters in the oven?"

"We call them heaters in that one case."

nielsbot•3mo ago
See also: https://www.sportslingo.com/sports-glossary/h/heater
B1FF_PSUVM•3mo ago
> To keep an object at a given temperature, you have to continuously give it the same energy it’s radiating away.

Or put it in mirror chamber - a bit less trouble than windmilling baseball bats ...

flowerthoughts•3mo ago
You're advocating hitting it hard quickly and then insulating it for a while? That makes a lot of sense, as long as you hit it hard enough to handle the losses and still be over cooking temp.

Of course, overheating might have negative effects on the eating satisfaction test.

whycome•3mo ago
Chicken Gun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun

I’m pretty sure NASA used a version of this to test the resiliency of the space shuttle tiles. Not fast enough to cook tho.

thebruce87m•3mo ago
Could aim it at the space station. Would be nice to receive a fresh cooked chicken in orbit I imagine.
olelele•3mo ago
Wait. Orbital chicken coops w drop delivery..
bregma•3mo ago
The actual NASA chicken cannon just used gelatin blobs because at muzzle velocity the effects were the same but there was a lot less bones and feathers to clean up.
whycome•3mo ago
Nah. Those just cook on reentry ;)
robocat•3mo ago
I first heard the Australian version of the urban legend: a chicken fired into a jet engine to test for bird strikes

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/catapoultry/

oofbey•3mo ago
I don’t think I agree with the assertion that instantly bringing the chicken up to temp wouldn’t result in it being cooked. Especially since the classic solution got the chicken up to 400F. I don’t care how fast it cools off, if we assume magic uniform heat distribution from the slap, starting at 400 F, all the proteins are gonna be denatured and the diseases killed.
rendaw•3mo ago
The post doesn't really answer it either - it changes the premise to N people hitting it repeatedly, and it doesn't even say how many minutes it would take. With the stuff about vacuum chambers and pressure suits it's just muddled nonsense...
codeflo•3mo ago
I was going to post the same thing, so I'll upvote your post instead. I think there's a misunderstanding here that for meat to be done, it needs to stay above temperature X for Y minutes. In reality, the chemical reactions occur in milliseconds once you reach the required temperature.
Ekaros•3mo ago
Chicken sized 74C object radiates at 2kW? Probably cools rather fast, but still feels like high number...

Energy in general really feels weird, when you look at the numbers. Like potential energy or kinetic on relatively low speeds... And then compared to chemical energy...

Edit: Also how do you get it there? Wouldn't you need to hit it with higher frequency to start with to get to temp?

hakken306•3mo ago
Your intuition is right in this case. A 2kW oven is more than enough to heat small chicken up to temperature. The author lazily took the 165F temperature and put it into a blackbody calculator without converting the units. Anything but the metric system...

Assuming the chicken has a surface area A=1m^2 (corresponding to a perfectly spherical chicken of radius=25cm/diameter=50cm, a little bigger than usual) and is a perfect blackbody (just going to handwave this one).

with the incorrect temperature: A blackbody with T=165°C (438 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=2090 W.

with the correct temperature: A blackbody with T=74°C (347 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=824 W.

Also neglected is the incoming radiation from the ambient environment. Without this, the "power loss" is closer to measuring the chicken in deep interstellar space. from a room temperature environment: T=20°C (293 K) and A=1m^2 radiates P=419 W onto the chicken.

The net power loss of the cooling chicken on the kitchen counter is therefore something like 824-419 = 405W, rapidly decreasing as the temperature drops towards room temperature. e.g. at 50°C it's around 200W.

petters•3mo ago
"a little bigger": it would weigh 65 kg.
bregma•3mo ago
But ideally you could stuff it with a dozen thanksgiving turkeys themselves stuffed with ducks stuffed with regular chickens stuffed with sausages. Be prepared: there will probably be leftovers.
dunham•3mo ago
Or birds all the way down:

> In his 1807 Almanach des Gourmands, gastronomist Grimod de La Reynière presents his rôti sans pareil ("roast without equal")—a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler—although he states that, since similar roasts were produced by ancient Romans, the rôti sans pareil was not entirely novel.

fifticon•3mo ago
points for'a perfectly spherical chicken'.
lelandfe•3mo ago
For the uninitiated https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow
willis936•3mo ago
My personal favorite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/3j96p1/a...

ptero•3mo ago
And later put it in an interstellar space, no less!
nandomrumber•3mo ago
How many interstellar spaces are there?
pansa2•3mo ago
> The author lazily took the 165F temperature and…

Where did they even get 165F from in the first place? The “classic solution” article uses 400F, a much more appropriate oven temperature.

CitrusFruits•3mo ago
165F is the safe eating temperature recommended for most meats here in the U.S.
adhamsalama•3mo ago
Someone made a Youtube video about this. He created a machine to slap the chicken and measured its heat.
xattt•3mo ago
The cooking-by-force does seem unintuitive, but kitchen gadgets like cooking blenders for soups do exactly this by pushing blades through high-viscosity mixtures in order to achieve the desired effect.
userbinator•3mo ago
Assuming an infinitely malleable chicken...

This reminds me of the old blacksmithing trick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I68Cik7ywg

p0w3n3d•3mo ago
one must be strong to hit 2kg hammer this fast
spookie•3mo ago
It helps having a good anvil, as it bounces back most of the way
slowhadoken•3mo ago
You don’t have to hit a chicken hard to cook it you just shoot it at a wall.
foofoo12•3mo ago
I think it would negatively affect the visual appearance and texture of said chicken.
actionfromafar•3mo ago
Indeed. It would turn into McNuggets :-/
rkomorn•3mo ago
But McNuggets are delicious. And the only non-self-made nuggets worth eating...
bregma•3mo ago
Purely a matter of personal taste. Chicken pate on toast is popular in many regions.
foofoo12•3mo ago
Ladies and gents, please help yourself to breakfast. Bread is by the toaster, butter and jam is on the table. The chicken pâte will be on the large wall once the chef finishes loading up the howitzer.
nomel•3mo ago
That would be difficult to serve. Maybe shoot it into something like a bucket with a rim that’s curved inward, to direct the meals momentum back into the bucket.

And, since the volume is more confined, it should have the benefit of slightly reducing the required kinetic cooking energy.

cwillu•3mo ago
So, shoot it at the plate instead.
rkomorn•3mo ago
I don't know what plates you're using but I'm pretty mine would shatter upon chicken impact.
nomel•3mo ago
Ok, now I feel silly. Cooking the serving individually makes so much more sense. The lower forces will significantly reduce all required material thicknesses, especially in the serving area blast shield!
5xpB7n8tdbtoP•3mo ago
Does anyone know why does the footer of the page have a “ssn”?
PokeyCat•3mo ago
It's just the digits of pi, likely not their real SSN.
handfuloflight•3mo ago
Sora, show me this.
dvh•3mo ago
Are we assuming perfectly spherical chickens in vacuum?
majkinetor•3mo ago
Yeah, lets go with that

https://showcase.nano-banana.ai/ai-generated/fal_nano-banana...

rossant•3mo ago
It's not perfectly spherical though.
xg15•3mo ago
OT, but the site of that author looks very interesting in general: https://james-simon.github.io
alphan0n•3mo ago
Interestingly, the author includes their social security number with their contact info at the bottom of the page.
vulcan01•3mo ago
Those are the first digits of π.
mrweasel•3mo ago
I still need to know how fast I need to ride my bike to not freeze my hands, when biking during the winter without mittens. There has to be some sweet spot where my hands a warm, but not burning.
foofoo12•3mo ago
Close to mach Jesus I think. At which time you might have other more pressing problems than cold hands. Remember to maintain the brakes on your bicycle.
sphars•3mo ago
I knew there was an What If? from xkcd about this. It's the fifth question in this short answer collection:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/23/

mrexroad•3mo ago
> quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if your body were doing that much work, your core temperature would reach fatal levels in a matter of seconds.

Disappointed they didn’t factor in other inputs to the propulsion (e.g. battery assist, etc).

andrewflnr•3mo ago
In all seriousness: handlebar muffs. They're a game changer.
AngryData•3mo ago
Its an unusual solution but you can train cold acclimation to your hands. Ice climbers do it to prevent their hands from freezing up during a climb. It essentially boils down to sticking your hands in ice cold water for long enough periods of time, like 30-45 minutes once or twice each day is what I remember reading for a week or two before a climb/cold weather. And after you do it enough times your body learns to increase blood flow to your hands along with increasing your base rate of metabolism as a response to cold hands, versus the default unacclimated response of slowing blood flow to your hands to preserve core temperature. And the effect will get stronger the more often and longer you do it.

The effect will diminish over time if you don't use it, but not completely until over a year or more of not using it, and you can do it before cold weather hits. It probably happens somewhat to you already if you are experiencing it enough, however you might not really get the effects naturally until we are already nearing spring, or if you only ever experience it for 15 minutes at a time and then go roast your hands on a heater, versus training it in the fall so when deep winter hits you are already very well acclimated to it.

Its the same effect that lets people wear shorts or kilts or whatever in the winter and snow. They aren't unusual or weird or got warm blood, they just exposed their legs often enough to cold for the body to learn and adapt until it no longer bothered them. It can even go pretty extreme to people being barefoot in the snow for hours at a time, when someone unused to it would have frost bite in 20 minutes.

neilwilson•3mo ago
And the experimental evidence…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI

foofoo12•3mo ago
Someone did build himself a chicken slapper to he could slap himself some chicken dinner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
bobson381•3mo ago
Used to joke in the kitchen that I worked in that if we were pressed for time, instead of baking something for an hour at 300°, we can just bake it for 6 minutes at 3,000°. It's such a fun concept and always makes me giggle
walthamstow•3mo ago
This is used in software engineering too, people will say things like "you can't make a baby in a month with 9 women"
mgilroy•3mo ago
Are we making a joke about software developers chance of getting any of the nine to sleep with them?

You can't give birth to a baby in one month using 9 women.

gus_massa•3mo ago
It's somewhat used for milk pasteurization. You can heat it to 61°C (145°F) for 30 minutes or to 72°C (162°F) for 15 seconds (yes, 0.25 minutes). More info https://www.idfa.org/pasteurization and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteurization
burnished•3mo ago
Incredible. Was not expecting an answer that felt reachable.
emmelaich•3mo ago
It was an epiphany for me watching a blacksmith at work. After the piece of metal is pulled from the furnace, it can be kept red hot if hit hard and often enough.

If I had bothered to think I would have known this theoretically = being a physics and mecheng guy.

Nevermark•3mo ago
I assumed the question was how to achieve the proper preconditions for cooking a chicken while avoiding any animal cruelty charges.

Clearly, we could simply knock its head off with a bat, since today I learned you can physically cook chickens with bats and professional batters, via a method well suited to humanity's eminent migration to outer space.

But I expect with some years of strength training and finesse, a very hard flick to the back of the chicken's lower noggin could dislodge the first cervical vertebrate from the skull, severing the spinal cord's integration with the brain stem.

Whether actually dead, or merely in a persistent vegetative state, the chicken may now be cooked.

However, if the chicken is merely headless [0], but in good health, one should not cook it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

schwartzworld•3mo ago
When has anybody ever been charged for cooking a chicken?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF•3mo ago
> The charges were filed in April [2023] after police received reports that Prince Ssenteza-Woodson cooked a baby chicken in an air fryer while streaming it live on social media.

https://www.wdrb.com/news/crime-reports/uofl-student-sentenc...

BriggyDwiggs42•3mo ago
Yeah that’s fucked up.
notaurus•3mo ago
Honestly par for the course for human treatment of chickens. See chick culling [1]. Billions of baby chicks are macerated live because they are not commercially useful.

> Worldwide: As of 2015, approximately 7 billion male chicks were culled annually around the world

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

AngryData•3mo ago
Hard disagree. Burning something alive in a slow and agonizing death for zero purpose other than cruelty is nowhere near the same thing as near instantaneously killing an animal for animal husbandry purposes.

Could we do better or have better practices? Sure. Is there an argument for not eating meat at all? Sure.

But if you were going to die you would have a lot bigger problem being slowly roasted alive versus instant brain destruction.

BriggyDwiggs42•3mo ago
The life they give the chickens they don’t cull is almost certainly worse than death, at least in the typical factory farm.
userbinator•3mo ago
That tells me the police have nothing better to do.
BriggyDwiggs42•3mo ago
First off, good. I’m glad crime is down. Second, let’s say we ignore the ethical part of what they did to the chicken. Their behavior still demonstrates serious mental issues that should get treatment before they negatively impact a person, right? Also, don’t ignore the ethical issues with fucking torturing a baby animal for no reason whatsoever.
zakki•3mo ago
is it cooked or vaporized?
hkt•3mo ago
Conspicuously, this is from June 2020
nullzzz•3mo ago
This is really disgusting. Chickens are feeling animals as well.
decimalenough•3mo ago
To better control environmental variables, you'll probably want to kill the chicken before you start whacking it with baseball bats.
childintime•3mo ago
How hard do you have to hit a human, to cook it, the chicken asks?
KadenWildauer•3mo ago
Spiritual successor of this is how many slap's it take's to cook a chicken. There was a viral video on this a few year's ago rather funny https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHFhnnTWMgI
gcanyon•3mo ago
I should have checked the comments first: I currently have the URL for this video on my clipboard, ready to paste into a comment, but you beat me :-)
p0w3n3d•3mo ago
I raise the bar higher - how hard and how long do you need to hit the chicken to make it sous vide
rkomorn•3mo ago
Sometimes I wish the anglophone cooking world hadn't forgotten that "sous-vide" actually refers to the vacuum sealing.
walthamstow•3mo ago
Thank you, francophone, I will now be that one annoying guy who uses it correctly in English
rkomorn•3mo ago
To be fair, I'm not hugely annoyed about saying "sous-vide it" as short for "vacuum-seal it and cook it in a water circulator (or steam oven)" since it is, after all, a very common use case for vacuum sealing beyond just storage.

But in OPs context, I don't even know what it was supposed to mean. Like... just cooked? Are we including a final sear after the circulator?

Edit: and actually, "sous-vide" means "vacuum sealed" (or even more literally "in a vacuum"), so you technically "cook it sous-vide", you don't "sous-vide it", because it's not a verb. But also yes: language is how people use it.

sph•3mo ago
I thought this was xkcd's What If? series from the title.

By the way, it's got a Youtube channel now and it's as good as ever: https://www.youtube.com/@xkcd_whatif

kylecazar•3mo ago
"if you slap a chicken at 3726 mph, it will be cooked."

Certainly holds true for the Gen Z sense of the word.

bn-l•3mo ago
Because if something “slaps” then it’s “cooked”? I thought slaps was good.
serial_dev•3mo ago
I guess the “slap” in regular English, “cooked” in Gen Z English.
jaakl•3mo ago
And “chicken” in which one?
HarHarVeryFunny•3mo ago
If we're considering unconventional cooking methods, what about orbital re-entry cooking, or atmospheric friction cooking in general? What speed/altitude would a plane need to be travelling at to lob a chicken out the window and have it perfectly cooked when it hit land?

SR-71 external temp reached 600F or so at Mach-3, so that might result in a charred chicken.

mikkupikku•3mo ago
Joe Barnard of BPS.Space cooked a piece of meat in the nosecone of a high power model rocket he built for this purpose.
trenchpilgrim•3mo ago
XKCD did a piece on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/
margalabargala•3mo ago
An amateur rocket enthusiast did this on YouTube, also going at mach 3.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9UX7NJLYyb4

HarHarVeryFunny•3mo ago
I like that these guys did it in style, wearing chef's hats!

I guess even cooking a rare steak (beyond just searing the outside) takes a couple of minutes, so maybe it'd need some Mach-3 horizontal flying time.

wpasc•3mo ago
I thought the FDA guideline was once the internal temperature reaches 160 or 165 or something it didn't need to sustain that temperature? it was only the lower temperatures that required some duration to achieve the same log reduction as reaching 160/165?
dunham•3mo ago
Yeah, table 3 (path 37) here: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...

That gets you your log7 reduction of salmonella, so it is safe to eat, but I don't know if it would be "cooked" (changing to an acceptable texture) if you could instantaneously bring it to 165 F.

I have no idea what that cooking process is like. In a water bath, I run chicken breast at 62C instead of 60C because the texture is better for dicing and putting in kid's lunches or wraps. I might try 60C if I was searing and serving whole. I haven't done dark meat this way, but I suspect it'd need a higher temperature or time to break down connective tissue. And I know that for lower temperatures (58C? - I haven't made that in years), you need to hold short ribs for a couple of days.

thatguy0900•3mo ago
I can say I've cooked chicken sous vide incorrectly before that had cooked long and hot enough to be safe, but the texture and feel of the meat could only be described as a meat gusher, if you've ever had those candies. Every bite exploded with liquid and the meat itself was squishy, it was very disgusting
amelius•3mo ago
Sounds more like a recipe for chicken soup ...
burnt-resistor•3mo ago
Motion is relative, so firing a chicken at a static target is also a possibility.

The trouble would be imparting and spreading enough energy through the entire mass uniformly enough to have something remain.

It likely wouldn't work in the real world because the result would obliterate bones resulting in something worse than Chicken McNuggets, and not cook it sufficiently long to be safe from bacterial contamination.

If attempting such a feat, it would generate visible light. There's a good chance of generating some long-wave UV at the energies involved (several MJ, which would be a chicken flying at about 2 km/s. It would instantly disintegrate.)

aubanel•3mo ago
I love that when I opened this article i already knew some elements, from having read it months ago on HN

So now I will remember it a bit better and for longer

Hackernews is actually like Anki cards for nerd (and in this case useless) Internet stuff

klipt•3mo ago
Anyone here play the RPG Dink Smallwood as a kid? There was a side quest where you hit (holy) ducks with your sword so hard that they cook: https://youtu.be/zWxXWG-U0Uo
viksit•3mo ago
Yes! thanks for the memory haha.
knowitnone3•3mo ago
The question posed is not "how hard" but "how many times and how hard". You can't cook a chicken in one hit because that amount of heat requires a large amount of force which then obliterates the chicken. There's a video on youtube that tries to answer this question.
xivzgrev•3mo ago
That chicken would be obliterated long before cooking
TheOtherHobbes•3mo ago
"Assume a spherical chicken..."
anigbrowl•3mo ago
Ahab had his whale, and James Simon apparently has his chicken.
DonHopkins•3mo ago
It takes a tough man to hit a tender chicken.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z789aLNfXo

cadamsdotcom•3mo ago
Cannot believe they did all the math..

Then made it impenetrable to non-Americans by using imperial.