Hacker News: ane

New comment by ane in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

ane — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:27:19 +0000

Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.

So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.

New comment by ane in "The happiest I've ever been"

ane — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:58:43 +0000

It is a good reminder that most of us that work in software engineering will never build anything remarkable and will fade into history. Even if you do brilliant engineering work for a company, said work was commissioned by the company and the intellectual property rights belong to said company. It wasn't yours to begin with.

New comment by ane in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

ane — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:40:31 +0000

I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.

Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.

New comment by ane in "Elephant trunk whiskers exhibit material intelligence"

ane — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:23:42 +0000

Makes sense, though, doesn't it? An elephant's trunk is the fusion of its nose and upper lip, wouldn't that be the location where the mystacial vibrissae (whiskers) be located on any other mammal, making these homologous to e.g. cat's whiskers, which are highly sensitive?

New comment by ane in "Lena by qntm (2021)"

ane — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:46:49 +0000

I loved There is no Antimemetics division. I haven't read the new updated to the end but the prose and writing is greatly improved. The idea of anomalous anti-memes is scary. I mean, we do have examples of them, somewhat, see Heaven's Gate and the Jonestown massacre, though they're more like "memes" than "antimemes" (we know what the ideas were and they weren't secrets).

New comment by ane in "Microsoft's Azure Linux"

ane — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:32:55 +0000

Now it is. In the late 90s/early 00s it wasn’t. MS is quite different today from what it was back then.

New comment by ane in "Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year"

ane — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 18:43:22 +0000

Never been more scared in my life when I drove through narrow country roads in Ireland

New comment by ane in "We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness"

ane — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 17:38:08 +0000

Could you elaborate on the subject of the foundations of a curriculum (of what?) being entirely fake? That's a bold statement to make!

New comment by ane in "Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds"

ane — Thu, 01 May 2025 06:08:30 +0000

Refers to corporate personhood. You can't jail Apple Inc.

New comment by ane in "Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals"

ane — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 17:42:44 +0000

Alex, the bird mentioned in the article, is also the first animal ever to have asked a question. When shown its reflection in a mirror, it asked what color it was.

We've trained chimps and gorillas for decades and they have never asked a single question

New comment by ane in "No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation"

ane — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 17:31:12 +0000

Depends on the niche. Original physical art for trading card games or comics is a significant chunk of the income of your typical artist. Digital art in those niches does not have this source of income. But then again digital art has other niches where the actual commission rates are high enough to not make this a problem.

New comment by ane in "I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig"

ane — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 07:27:35 +0000

Indeed, as a kid of 10, I remember learning C/C++ thanks to DJGPP, a DOS port of GCC, being free software. I didn't have any money to buy a commercial compiler, though I never asked my parents. I wasn't sure how to frame the question, I guess. Well, regardless, getting your hands on a commercial compiler wasn't that difficult in the late 90s/early 00s. Soon after though small non-commercial indie games kinda died out and everyone was using DirectX using MSVC on Windows, until SDL came out.

New comment by ane in "Mysterious tablet with unknown language unearthed in Georgia"

ane — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 05:28:39 +0000

Your sentence makes it sound like Yeniseian languages are language isolates, but what is absolutely astounding is that Yeniseian languages seem to form a family with the Na-Dene languages of North America. Two language families separated by the Bering strait over 15000 years ago!

New comment by ane in "Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis"

ane — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 07:23:42 +0000

Battery cell production alone is massively expensive. The expenses in setting up a production line is counted in the billions.

So the only way to start fresh here is to raise billions in capital. Unless you're Volkswagen or something, when you could invest billions in an enterprise like this one.

New comment by ane in "My Resignation from Emacs Development"

ane — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 21:44:00 +0000

GNU Emacs is not the first Emacs, but Lucid Emacs is a fork of GNU Emacs. Lucid Emacs eventually renamed itself as XEmacs (the "X" meaning "something" because they didn't know who owns the trademark as Lucid Inc went out of business.

Here's a timeline of Emacs https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

New comment by ane in "Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more"

ane — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:23:18 +0000

I have been using Send to kindle[1] for years to upload epubs directly to Kindle. It even syncs the position in the books so that if I read it on my Kindle, it syncs the position to the Kindle app on my phone.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle

New comment by ane in "Traveling with Apple Vision Pro"

ane — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 18:34:48 +0000

And birds!

https://www.uvbirds.com/

New comment by ane in "Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++"

ane — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 12:24:24 +0000

Is the third movie supposed to be Elysium?

New comment by ane in "Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin"

ane — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 18:26:47 +0000

They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable

New comment by ane in "Genes protective during Black Death may now be increasing autoimmune disorders (2022)"

ane — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 05:37:17 +0000

It's also curious how a variation of the CCR5 gene, CCR5-Δ32, which gives increased immunity to HIV, is thought to have been selected for by smallpox in Northern Europe. While giving increased immunity to HIV and smallpox, it makes the carriers more suspectible to serious versions of flavivirus infections (tick-borne encephalitis, West Nile virus). This might be a pretty bad thing in the age of climate change!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#CCR5-%CE%9432