Hacker News: contingencies

New comment by contingencies in "Earliest evidence of cannabis use found in ancient Siberian tomb"

contingencies — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 16:55:41 +0000

My late professor was a world expert on some of the nomadic cultures on the northern Chinese periphery. He told me about historically attested 'make fire in tent then throw on cannabis then dance around' rituals documented in early literature. This finding pushes to prehistory and is probably most of a millennia earlier, but the cultural pattern in this geography is known.

New comment by contingencies in "Sailing Solo Around Britain"

contingencies — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 07:00:50 +0000

Every time I read darkstar I think of Slackware 3.0 default hostname...

New comment by contingencies in "Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier"

contingencies — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 01:52:44 +0000

At the time of my reply they wrote Firefox. Now it says Finder. Snarky edit!

New comment by contingencies in "Blender's UI and Runtime: Much Faster Than GPUI"

contingencies — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 21:59:07 +0000

I converted a realtime robotics simulation platform I've recently vibecoded in this thread's honor and it worked great first build. Didn't run faster than JS original until I converted to rust, though ;)

New comment by contingencies in "Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier"

contingencies — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 18:57:33 +0000

Giving a browser full disk access is definitely not a good idea: I think it is you who has misconfigured.

New comment by contingencies in "A barbarian tribe's mythic origin story is true, ancient DNA reveals"

contingencies — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 07:36:07 +0000

If you sail south (toward the sun) it's pretty hard to miss Poland, and you'd know it's there long earlier due to observing migratory seabirds.

New comment by contingencies in "Sodium-ion batteries approach cost parity with LFP"

contingencies — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 00:05:50 +0000

In a very concrete way China has basically been running it. It's given us EVs, a massive PV cost reduction, cheap hydropower, cheap wind power, lots of battery cost reductions, and perhaps even enhanced competitiveness in the nuclear market. Also modern high speed rail which is readily fueled by non-ICE methods.

New comment by contingencies in "Blender's UI and Runtime: Much Faster Than GPUI"

contingencies — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 22:53:31 +0000

re. "macOS written and waiting for its first real Mac" ... Apple give this man some hardware. SGI/IRIX vibes.

New comment by contingencies in "As the Japanese countryside empties out, wildlife is disappearing"

contingencies — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 20:13:51 +0000

I'm skeptical. Having been to some areas of rural Japan, I'd suggest that the macro cycle established by humans was irrigation related and the removal of the same causes deep challenges to former human-presence-biome members. A novel and restored biome, more suited to the natural hydrosphere of the area, will likely take decades to a century to re-emerge assuming its species survive and its preconditions haven't been ruined by concrete.

Note also in my limited experience there is typically a severe and sudden difference between flat land and mountains, the former being human managed with extreme prejudice and the latter being typically degraded/unnatural/replanted ("Japan's forests are ~44% dense post-war cedar/hinoki plantations with barren understories"). This is one of the most striking features of the Japanese landscape relative to other nearby countries. I would assume the current study focused only on flatland, as the forests are not going to empty out when proximal humans desist: quite the opposite.

The unstated truth here is that Japan apparently raped its physical environment for its war machine.

https://japansociety.org/news/japans-forests-good-days-and-b...

New comment by contingencies in "Blender's UI and Runtime: Much Faster Than GPUI"

contingencies — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:37:14 +0000

BlenderOS

New comment by contingencies in "Blender's UI and Runtime: Much Faster Than GPUI"

contingencies — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 11:10:01 +0000

OK who's gonna burn the tokens rewriting a whole Linux system with BUI? You know you want to...

New comment by contingencies in "Tesla and SpaceX lose over $420B in combined market cap in the two days"

contingencies — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 04:18:25 +0000

Space lasers :) Pass the spliff.

New comment by contingencies in "Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?"

contingencies — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 02:49:54 +0000

I mostly work on problems at the intersection of manufacturing, mechatronic design, electronics, software and physics. So I'm not really building software per-se which likely accounts for the probably slightly weird choices here.

1. Claude Max (upsold me as of today); generally Sonnet 5.5 with the occasional Fable 5.1 when it gets stuck or I am executing a high value step; and Perplexity Pro (legacy).

2. Mostly local voice-to-text w/Parakeet Unified EN 0.6B via Handy[0] (awesome; use it!). Not for coding, but for note taking, AI interfacing, and general typing reduction and RSI avoidance.

3. None. I tried Pi and after much kerfuffle I don't like any of the harness interfaces. I find the type of work I do they are not very useful, because I often switch between variant approaches, planning, data, and don't want unrestrained context bloat.

4. No.

5. No.

I would add that I am very interested in obtaining good enough hardware to run this level of model locally at any pace, believe Qwen is basically there but too slow locally to use as a daily driver on my current rig, and can see myself making that investment in single digit years. Not right now, the hardware is overpriced for what it is versus venture funded cloud AI subsidies.

[0] https://handy.computer/

New comment by contingencies in "Show HN: I built a tool that prices a pre-built PC part by part"

contingencies — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 01:03:39 +0000

Perfect is the enemy of done!

New comment by contingencies in "Show HN: I built a tool that prices a prebuilt PC part by part"

contingencies — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 22:21:08 +0000

Rather than just purchase cost you could project total lifetime value based on average lifespan plus replace-ability per component.

New comment by contingencies in "Show HN: I built a tool that prices a prebuilt PC part by part"

contingencies — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 18:04:09 +0000

Laptop support would be nice, even if it's just a desktop comparison. Australia support too please! I would like to send this to a school who are about to waste a lot of money buying garbage.

New comment by contingencies in "US midterm elections 2026: live results from Senate, House and governor races"

contingencies — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 08:42:56 +0000

Yes, this was the reason I submitted. It's a good visual summary.

US midterm elections 2026: live results from Senate, House and governor races

contingencies — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 07:03:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/nov/03/midterm-elections-full-results-senate-house-governor-races

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50362285

Points: 36

# Comments: 10

New comment by contingencies in "Antimony: CAD Software Evolved from Lisp Machines and Not Drafting Tables (2015)"

contingencies — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 19:42:36 +0000

I thought early KiCad was non or only partially S-expressions, but new KiCad is all S-expressions? Anyway haven't had parsing issues in years and exports to MCAD work very well.

New comment by contingencies in "Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise"

contingencies — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 18:40:49 +0000

Much respect for actual innovation. I hope you get filthy rich.

From your comments it seems to reach this point you tried at least open source lip reading software, IMUs, variant antenna mounting strategies, various frequencies, and then gathered training data. You articulated strongly why the product is desirable and why the failed modes were dead-ends. I hope you can deliver on your pre-orders and are able to scale and/or sell the IP for a strong exit.