Hacker News: adrianN

New comment by adrianN in "Humans haven't stopped evolving"

adrianN — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 05:01:35 +0000

There are a couple of species that remain essentially unchanged for the last couple million years. Why can't humans become one of them?

New comment by adrianN in "Humans haven't stopped evolving"

adrianN — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:59:48 +0000

Traditionally, harming other people and the environment has made it easier to feed your own children (or at least the children of your tribe) and have more of them.

New comment by adrianN in "Humans haven't stopped evolving"

adrianN — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:52:20 +0000

I believe the traits for humans you should look at are not physical like strength, but social. People with poor social skills are less likely to reproduce in our society. Likewise, culture (and hence memetic evolution) influences birth rates quite a bit and is passed on from parents to children.

New comment by adrianN in "Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer"

adrianN — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:00:03 +0000

Finding a way to make money by capturing CO2 will get you an IPO. The technology you use is only of secondary concern.

New comment by adrianN in "Claude Is Not a Compiler"

adrianN — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:22:23 +0000

If we restrict ourselves to programs that can be stored inside the physical universe, suddenly everything switches from undecidable to O(1) :)

New comment by adrianN in "Claude Is Not a Compiler"

adrianN — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:17:17 +0000

> all code possible to run on a computer already exists

You have to be careful; that line of thinking might get you trapped in L-space. You’d need a very skilled librarian and possibly a bag of peanuts to get back out.

New comment by adrianN in "LEDs’ potential to save our night skies"

adrianN — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:38:01 +0000

TFA claims that lights don’t reduce crime, but I‘d like to see the exact meaning of that statistic (eg dark places are less frequented hence less crime?).

New comment by adrianN in "LEDs’ potential to save our night skies"

adrianN — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:36:34 +0000

Putting astronomy on the dark side of the moon would probably work better than putting it into space because you can use some local material for construction.

New comment by adrianN in "Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?"

adrianN — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:44:18 +0000

If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.

New comment by adrianN in "Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment"

adrianN — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 11:48:58 +0000

You can buy faster bikes than what is allowed at the Tour, so the only concern would be making records incomparable.

New comment by adrianN in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

adrianN — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 07:01:31 +0000

I don’t think that it is possible to both allow the use of LLM and not mandate them in modern metric driven work places. Either you ban them or you force people to use them for game theoretic reasons: they are slower than their peers and quality of the work is harder to measure than quantity. All you achieve is shifting the blame to the employees if the LLM messes up. Come to think of it, that probably is a highly desirable outcome for the decision makers, so perhaps that will actually be the policy that becomes universally adopted.

New comment by adrianN in "Helium escaping from atmosphere of nearby rocky exoplanet in a habitable zone"

adrianN — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 01:07:36 +0000

Alpha particles are essentially Helium, so by breeding large amounts of highly active alpha emitters you can produce Helium much more effectively than by fusion.

New comment by adrianN in "Show HN: Mojibake – A low-level Unicode library written in C"

adrianN — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 01:04:33 +0000

I guess you never have to deal with text if you think that’s enough? What kind of software do you write in C?

New comment by adrianN in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

adrianN — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:43:51 +0000

Is there even a government under true capitalism or is it more like the lunar anarchy described in „the moon is a harsh mistress“?

New comment by adrianN in "Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works"

adrianN — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:18:58 +0000

From memory: The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a bad channel

New comment by adrianN in "Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity"

adrianN — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:15:32 +0000

Cycling 50kWh of batteries daily seems like a very unusual level of consumption.

New comment by adrianN in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

adrianN — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:52:49 +0000

We could have smaller transportation with combustion engines too, but the margins are lower and they cover fewer use cases, so marketing larger vehicles works really well.

New comment by adrianN in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

adrianN — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:50:53 +0000

I would read that SCP

New comment by adrianN in "How we can reduce traffic congestion"

adrianN — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:06:36 +0000

Most roads are not used for delivering goods, so if we'd just reduce private car use that would already be a great improvement. If you want to go even further, rail has a lot of potential left.

New comment by adrianN in "A graph that should be front-page news"

adrianN — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:47:39 +0000

You can look up the carbon cycle on Wikipedia, it is fairly well understood where atmospheric carbon can go. Most processes that sequester carbon long term take geological time spans. So unless you think we engineer sequestration at a rate comparable to what we emit today, atmospheric carbon is here to stay for a really long time. Personally I think we won’t be able to scale sequestration technology sufficiently in the next decades to make a dent in the carbon levels.