Hacker News: titaniumtown

New comment by titaniumtown in "This Cell Feeds, Grows and Reproduces. and It's Manmade"

titaniumtown — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:06:58 +0000

> Human Genome: About 20,000 protein coding genes.

> E. Coli: A lab strain of the E. Coli bacterium use for research has 4,460 genes.

> SpudCell: This new synthetic cell only has 36 genes.

Wow, so little genes even compared to E. Coli! Things like this make me wonder what the minimum number of genes is required to maintain functionality for cells in species we have all around us. There isn't much evolutionary pressure to do the genetic equivalent of dead code removal (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equisetum_arvense) besides the ability to copy the genes.

My other first impression is the potential similarities to alien contact. What if these cells, once given the ability to reproduce autonomously, become widespread around the globe, with no way for our, and other species', immune systems to prevent their consumption of biomatter, or whatever is made to be their "food".

New comment by titaniumtown in "Why is Europe the fastest warming continent?"

titaniumtown — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:18:03 +0000

If the AMOC collapses, they will soon be the fastest cooling continent as most of their heat is brought up from the equator.

New comment by titaniumtown in "A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide"

titaniumtown — Fri, 22 May 2026 03:21:56 +0000

The fact that there are cameras is fine. But the issue is who owns the data, what is done with it, and what the end goal is. And with Flock cameras, DHS gets backend access and shares that infomation with ICE, for example: https://komonews.com/news/local/redmond-pd-completely-suspen...

I am in favor of traditional traffic cameras, I just don't think analytics and facial recognition systems should be hooked up to them. They should be used for archival purposes, scrubbing back to a date of a crime to get the full picture.

New comment by titaniumtown in "A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide"

titaniumtown — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:15:15 +0000

As Ben Franklin said:

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

You are giving up your right to privacy for some modicum of security that they train AI on and gets added to a national database.

New comment by titaniumtown in "Anna's Archive hit with $19.5M default judgment and global domain takedown order"

titaniumtown — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:08:51 +0000

> Have control over somebody else's organism

What does that even mean? Are you an InfoWars fan? lol

New comment by titaniumtown in "Chernobyl wildlife forty years on"

titaniumtown — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:58:35 +0000

What does that project have to do with the above comment?

New comment by titaniumtown in "Claude Opus 4.7 costs 20–30% more per session"

titaniumtown — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:47:24 +0000

I had it hallucinate a tool that didn't exist, it was very frustrating!

Apple-like QoS for processes proposed for Linux

titaniumtown — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:22:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Sched-QoS-v0.1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47785411

Points: 9

# Comments: 0

New comment by titaniumtown in "A Chinese official’s use of ChatGPT revealed an intimidation operation"

titaniumtown — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:34:07 +0000

> After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China.

Was this on your personal device? I'm just wondering how it activated your camera. I would love more details!

New comment by titaniumtown in "Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid"

titaniumtown — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:04:08 +0000

That made me very weary about this service. But I like the connections they have with other trusted organizations like the EFF and GrapheneOS. Still sketchy though.

New comment by titaniumtown in "Show HN: Hacker Smacker – Spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance"

titaniumtown — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:10:37 +0000

Installed! Lets see how this goes. I'm going through previous interactions I've had with people.

New comment by titaniumtown in "Pebble Production: February Update"

titaniumtown — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 06:22:24 +0000

I use your service every day. Thank you so much

New comment by titaniumtown in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

titaniumtown — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:14:54 +0000

> Does it mean that even people who reside outside jurisdictions touched by the age verification craze will have to deal with all this?

Yes, it's global

New comment by titaniumtown in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

titaniumtown — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:13:30 +0000

Every 90 days? Wow. Can you elaborate on how that logically works? Like what about for doctors offices having your number on file and other similar situations.

New comment by titaniumtown in "IEA: Declining coal demand in China set to outweigh Trump's pro-coal policies"

titaniumtown — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:03:51 +0000

I like the progress China is making on clean energy.

I don't know how to put it, but the narrative around "cancelling out" (in the article, not the title) carbon makes me uncomfortable. Language such like this makes the problem of global co2 emissions seem less dire than it really is. I mean it's good work (not in the US) is being done on the problem, but nature doesn't care about "cancelling out" co2. It's just so frustrating seeing such a dirty source of energy being continued to be used.

New comment by titaniumtown in "Show HN: Why many AI-generated websites don't show up on Google"

titaniumtown — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 13:51:12 +0000

This sounds like an awful idea. Shouldn't it be good AI generated pages don't show up? That question is rhetorical.

New comment by titaniumtown in "X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents"

titaniumtown — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 02:03:23 +0000

bot

What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)

titaniumtown — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 07:18:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.straightdope.com/21341789/what-happened-to-all-the-gold-spain-got-from-the-new-world

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352016

Points: 125

# Comments: 150

New comment by titaniumtown in "Getting bitten by Intel's poor naming schemes"

titaniumtown — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:31:35 +0000

Yea, old server hardware can be super cheap! In my opinion though, the core counts are misleading. Those 24 cores are not compareable to the cores of today. Plus IPC+power usage are wildly different. YMMV on if those tradeoffs are worth it.

New comment by titaniumtown in "Git 3.0 Defaults to "main" Branch Instead of "master"

titaniumtown — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:08:54 +0000

I like "main" just because it's a cleaner word than "master", I never really had an attachment to the word "master" in itself.