Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?

I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.

Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.

She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.

I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.

She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)

So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)

Make your own. Your mental health loves you when you come up with stuff. Humanity has generated so much content and none of us have the lifetime to consume it all, but that shouldn't stop you from making your own any chance you get.

Make music - you don't need an instrument if you can whistle. Make stories - just say them to a recorder or your kids or write them down. Make food experiments - nothing will please your taste-buds more than listening to them and iterating on ways to get better. Make your own apps or experiences - with AI or by hand, your ideas may be surprising and worthwhile. Knit or make your own clothes, toys, wearable tech. Design your own 3D objects and maybe print them or animate them.

We know that workouts lead to endorphins for the body, but the brain version of that is not only enjoyable but also can be scaled to be enjoyed by other humans too sometimes. Don't go through life without trying your own things.

I got a handheld emulator console as a Christmas gift. Configuring shaders that emulate crt TVs, I realized I had no mental model of how those TVs worked at all.

I’m used to “pixels are three little lights combining rgb colors”, which doesn’t work here, so I went on a rabbit hole and let me tell you, analog TVs are extremely impressive tech.

Getting an electron beam to hit a glass, making the chemicals on it spark, covering it in a “reading motion” for hundreds of lines, and doing that 60 times a second! And the beam is oriented by just careful usage of magnets. It sounds super sci-fi for an already dead, 130 years old technology.

I also learned that my childhood was a lie. Turns out that the logic in consoles of the time was tied to the speed of the beam, which in turn used alternating current’s frequency as a clock. This means that since European current changes 50 times per second rather than 60, our games played in slowmo (about 0.8x). American sonic was so much faster! And the music was so much more upbeat!

I went on a tour of a miso factory today and learned about how it's made!

What surprised me the most was that shiro (white) miso and aka (red) miso are both the same mix of soybeans, salt, and rice malt but fermented for different periods of time. As the miso ferments for longer, its color becomes darker while its flavor becomes milder and more complex. Beyond 3 years of fermentation, you get diminishing returns as its flavor becomes too acidic.

After the tour, we got to sample some of the naturally fermented 3 years old miso, and it was easily the best I've ever had. Most miso you can buy in a grocery store is created through forced fermentation over a few months, so if you ever get a chance to try naturally aged miso I would highly recommend!

I live in a condo complex in Florida where the onsite staff at the front desk know me well and they are mostly bilingual and know I’m learning Spanish.

I went up to ask then something and jokingly said “no hablo inglés, ¿Hablas español?” and I was able to carry on a more or less complete conversation with them in Spanish and ask for what I needed without pre rehearsing lines for the first time.

So I found out within the past 24 hours that I can carry on a simple conversation in “survival Spanish”

I have started exploring Seneca/stoicism again. Prompted partly by a recent submission here, partly by personal reasons. Instead of consuming other peoples interpretation of stoicism I decided to go as close to the source as feasible for me. I have read Letters from a stoic a number of times before and my copy is filled with highlights, but this time I think I will try to limit myself to one or two letters a day and then really think about them properly.

The first one really hit me hard and prompted me to write out my own thoughts (https://jesperreiche.com/seneca-letter-2/) whether I will keep doing that I am a little unsure. It feels on the border of how personal I want to be/share on my blog.

P.S. I can see the irony in writing about me going to the source instead of consuming other peoples interpretation and then sharing a link to my own interpretation :)

My home office gets up to about 1500ppm of CO2 by the end of the workday, which explains a lot about why I often feel exhausted after the end of a long, uninterrupted session in there (especially when I’m on back to back zoom calls).

I now have several plants in there that are supposed to be especially good at sucking up CO2, and my sensor reports that the current level is slightly below atmospheric ambient CO2 levels.

I also wrote up a blog post about the structure of the Washington state legislature, which began its sixty day session for 2026 earlier this week. https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2026/01/how-the-washington...

I read the Wiki page for Thurgood Marshall: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thurgood_Marshall

This part surprised me:

    > Marshall retired from the Supreme Court in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas.

On a recent trip to Costa Rica, I discovered "Rice and Beans," which is not Gallo Pinto, but a Caribbean-influenced dish made principally of white rice, red kidney beans, coconut milk, and thyme. The dish name is in quotes because it's really the English words "Rice and Beans."

Anyway, it's marvelous, and I couldn't wait to try making it myself at home. Unfortunately, so far, it's been a mushy flavorless mess. I'll try a third go tomorrow. What I have so far:

- soften diced yellow onion and green bell pepper in 1 tbsp coconut oil

- toss in 3 minced garlic cloves

- toast 1.5 cups dry rinsed white rice in the mix

- pour in 1 can coconut milk

- add 1 can black beans (still looking for red beans)

- add lots of fresh thyme

- put in 1 whole habanero (still looking for Panamanian pepper)

- add 1 tsp salt

- add 1 can chicken broth

- if you have it, add a tbsp of Linzo sauce

Then simmer until the rice is cooked.

Next time I'm going to try with fresh coconut milk straight from a real coconut. That's what I explored today: how to make coconut milk.

Would appreciate advice on improving the recipe.

I've learned that being truthful in your resume as a SWE doesn't work anymore. I've had nearly 0 response rate to my applications, even if I was nearly a perfect match. Dude that we fired a while ago for being abysmally bad and non-productive gets interviews, raises and just got into ycombinator backed company by making up 75% of his resume(which I saw). We need a reset, this is getting ridiculous.

Surströmming, the Swedish can of fermented fish, is strongly recommended to be punctured while submerged in tap water. It is not pasteurized and is actively fermenting in storage, and the content will spray around if opened under atmospheric conditions.

When transported on cargo flights, they are double packed as cans in a barrel in a crate, and considered UN classified "miscellaneous dangerous goods" with identification number UN3334 "Aviation regulated liquid, n.o.s." with accompanying scary(albeit monochromatic) warning stickers, if at all accepted. When transported on ocean going vessels, they are often required to be in its own shipping container, again double packaged and correctly labeled.

The origins of Port and Starboard on ships.

Chosen to be independent of a mariners orientation.

Starboard - most sailors were right handed and the steering oar was placed on the right. Star = steer. Board = side of boat.

Port - as steering oars got bigger, boats tended to dock on the left hand side. This became to be known as “lardboard” which sounded too much like starboard, so it was changed to “Port” (as in the side typically facing the port side.

I learned about this book / concept: Tools for Conviviality [0]:

> Illich proposes the idea of a 'convivial tool', one which allows its user to exercise their human autonomy and creativity.

This came up as I was reading about UX / UI design and trying to understand the fundamentals of how to increase human autonomy. Although my key takeaway is a bit shallow at the moment, mostly focused on applying this map towards existing tools in order to try to identify ways in which they can be modified and improved to maximize autonomy.

The Wikipedia article also references this concept of radical monopoly:

> Tools for Conviviality also introduced Illich's idea of a 'radical monopoly', which describes a technology or service which becomes so exceptionally dominant that even with multiple providers, its users are excluded from society without access to the product.

Which has extended to me wondering about what the world will look like as people are increasingly pushed to use LLMs or other AI tools in more and more interactions. And in particular, what actions can or should be taken to maximize human well-being.

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

I found 2 super cool blogs today, and spent most of my time digging into it

For understanding how internet works https://how-did-i-get-here.net/

How a computer runs our code (or anything in genral) https://cpu.land/

Also spent some time on reading about E2EE encryption because of some blog on HN I think :)

I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.

I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.

It wasn't literally today, but about 2 days ago I discovered the -H (and --host) arguments to systemctl. These allow you to pass a hostname of a remote server, so you can use systemctl to manage systemd services on remote machines. It layers over ssh, so the cleanest way to do it is to have passwordless ssh with certificates set up to the remote host. If you do, running systemctl commands remotely is totally seamless.

https://www.tecmint.com/control-systemd-services-on-remote-l...

I'm doing PHP for the first time in years. I needed a function that returns the date of last week's Monday. Turns out PHP has a funky date querying language. I can just do: $today->modify('monday last week'). Makes me happy.

The first thing your agent needs to know every time it wakes up is where it is.

“This codebase is health care SaaS. Compliance is mandatory at all times.”

Easy. Makes a huge difference.

Also, the collective noun for a group of agents is a bungle of agents.

I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it.

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.

https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please google whatever source you find reliable about the topic)

I've been exploring making a camera trap to put out in my woods, to see if I can get a good photo of the very illusive bobcats we've got around here. I went out to California last month on a photo tour to get some nice shots of less skittish cats, and it gave me the motivation to continue my build of the camera trap. I just today received the custom little PCB I designed to read an IR sensor and have an STM32G convert it to focus and shutter release signals for the camera. I built the board up this morning and am getting ready to fire it up with my J-Link debugger probe attached and start the work on the firmware.

I found out today that the location header of an HTTP redirect can be a tel:+ URI and phone's will actually ask you whether you want to call that number.

Today I learned about the difference betweeen "preconnect" and "dns-prefetch": https://web.dev/articles/preconnect-and-dns-prefetch

I have thought that they were the same...

Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.

We've recently been without water in the UK for 5 days (water company failings). I've come to appreciate mains water and how its utility is hard felt by omission for toilets, washing & cleaning. Immensely grateful to have it back now.

My day just started but I found out that when I type a message in a MS Teams chat open in Chrome in Mac OS there are three separate independent spell checkers fighting to twist my meaning.

Sorry, no positive news yet. But it's only noon.

I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.

I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.

I used RfP (Request for Payment) today for the first time. It was ~11k USD between IBKR and Chase and the transfer was instant with verification on both sides. It's interesting to see the evolution of payments in the US moving so quickly over the past few years (FedNOW, etc...)

The company I work for is rather slow in adopting AI-based tooling. Recently, I discovered that our Databricks instance exposes an API endpoint that provides access to a wide range of LLMs. So I built a small local Streamlit-based chat app that lets me switch models within a conversation, add or remove files from the context, and clean up dead ends. It actually works much better than the Microsoft Copilot app we’re officially supposed to use.

Found out that our (small company's) VPS was compromised by a mining script, attacker probably exploited NextJS' RCE that I forgot to patch. The scripts were using half of the threads at 100%, i deleted all of them, found the watchdogs that kept recreating them and updated NextJS, luckily there was nothing to steal, now everything seems alright, but I'm thinking that I should format/rebuild everything just in case that I missed something.

I'm a junior dev with very little experience, I would appreciate any suggestion/advice

I'm exploring adding a firewall to my home network to detect if apps are using my network as residential proxy.

My daughter likes to install random games on iOS that have been advertised to her on other apps, and I wonder if some of those work as residential proxy behind the scenes.

Tangentially related: if I do this frequently how can I frame it as a hobby normies can understand?

Knowledge explorer sounds too esoteric.

I’ve been slowing crunching through Math for Deep Learning, so spent a fair amount of time looking at Hessian matrices + second order optimisation. I’ve been slowly reading this book for a year, so stopping to do most of the math by hand each time. One chapter to go!

Then I was sick all last week, so ended up down a rabbit hole about the current card collecting bubble (right word?). Super interesting.

That someone created a new country recently called Verdis, with a population of about 400.

I was planning a hostile takeover, figuring how hard could it be with these guys, until I found out Croatia already did that.

Learned some turn around licks from Freddie King's side tracked, and played them over and over on a blues backing track.

I've been playing guitar for a long time, but rhythm wise, it took time to click. I'm much better at feeling the pulse, and starting and ending licks at the right time in the bar.

Finished "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Hemmingway

Wow, so powerful. So real. I can see why it won the accolades at the time and why it stays. The ending. You could see it a mile away, but it was so hurtful still.

Would love to see another adaptation made of it, especially nowadays. Maybe a really long movie, 2 parts?

I've been exploring the origins of the 'relational turn' in psychoanalysis that began after WWII and ramped up in the 1970s. Psychoanalysis got vastly more interesting after Freud and I had no idea!

Today, I am revising Portuguese grammar and so I've mostly been exploring the things I can remember well and those that I can't. Portuguese has a lot of verb forms that I need to get right. But it also has really interesting constructions like "ir ter com" which literally means "to go to have with" but is an idiomatic way of saying "to meet up" (with someone) and I keep remembering and forgetting it.

I found just now that my telecom operator - Airtel - randomly subscribed me for OTT services and charged me for it. But upon calling them and contesting, they just asked if I want to unsubscribe and then reverted the charges. No threats, pleading, or back-and-forth involved from either side. Mildly surreal.

I wonder that's a new corporate strategy - charge randomly till someone goes through the pain of IVR and spends 15 mins with support. Must generate quite an upside for them if it is indeed a strategy.

I was looking at the llms.txt files of some sites today and saw how straight to the point they are and started thinking I'd love to have a browser that only loads these txt files and the markdown files they link to. It reminds me of the Gemini protocol tried to do. I think I'll try to make a PoC this weekend.

A search engine for llms.txt would be great too.

I had some eye strain and think it is because my eye muscles are overused. A doctor told me the muscles in the eye are flat, like tapes, and that I would not feel a muscle ache. I noticed the strain when I focus on different points quickly. I started to pay attention to how I move my eyes and realized I read a lot of text while scrolling, for example reading X posts on mobile while scanning the text at the same time.

Yesterday I was reminded of “Rapid Serial Visual Presentation” for speed reading, where the words are presented so you do not have to move your eyes. I am currently trying it out with a Chrome extension called SwiftRead. I set the text size so it fits into my fovea area. I used a fovea detector website I saw on HN a while ago: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM (make the pattern full screen, then you can see the size of your fovea).

I also learned that I can reduce some of the strain by moving my head more toward the things I am looking at on the screen.

I have to replicate the little shoes on the cassette mechanics of a Becker Grand Prix car stereo from 1985. The plastic shoes are brittle from age, heat, and wear. I've spent the last couple weeks finding about two dozen ways that almost work. Their tiny and need to fit on three even tinier feet that ride rails for loading the cassette. This morning, I found out that I can probably make several possible plans work - good enough. Which is to say, I found out I was delaying the project with hopes for the perfect solution when good enough was already there.

I found out that it is nearly impossible in Europe to buy a 10l enamelled bucket with a lid. I need one for my organic waste, since I found that both metal and plastic ones tend to keep the smell despite cleaning them weekly.

I had a great euphoric epiphany feeling today. Doesn't come along too often, will celebrate with a nice glass of wine :)

Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two.

E.g. you have a 1TB table and you want to add a column that, say, will take 1GB to store.

You can create a new table that is 1.1TB and then delete the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and often breaks how normal data lake orchestration works.

You can create a new wide table that is 1.1TB and keep it along side the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and expensive to store.

You can create a narrow companion table that has just a join key and 1GB of data. This is efficient to write and store, but inefficient to query when you force all users to do joins on read.

And I've come up with a cunning forth way where you write a narrow table and read a wide table so its literally best of all worlds! Kinda staggering :) Still on a high.

Might actually be a conference paper, which is new territory for me. Lets see :)

/off dancing

When you use a microscope to magnify something, the objective (magnifying lens) is literally taking the Fourier transform of the image. The optical system recovers up to a limiting frequency, determining the spatial resolution of the image.

That running and taking cold showers really do make me more focused! And that i will have to be the one that fixes my life and builds my future. Deep, i know

In 2026 I started writing letters. I mean, docs on my computer that will end up printed in physical form, then handed to someone, or shipped to someone in an envelope with a stamp.

I feel I will do more and more of this, this year, as a little experiment. I will most likely experiment with different types of papers, etc.

I learned about fan-out, and just how the average size of groups in messaging servers affects their load. It is pretty basic stuff I guess but not something you think about unless that is your jam.

I was stress testing a server I made and noticed a discrepancy between two tests. In on test 15 virtual users could send 450msg/sec (not realistic I know) for about 6750 incoming messages per second. In another, 1000 users sending a message about every two seconds was the limit, about 500msg/sec incoming.

Took me a little bit to figure out why, the outgoing messages between the tests were wildly different. In the smaller user tests the groups were about 3 on average, in the larger one they were 30. Group size is effectively a multiplier on incoming msg requests so when looking at the total traffic it was much closer between the two tests 15k and 20k.

Talking to insurance agents I realised, they don't bother to read the policy documents and have a very superficial knowledge of the policies they are selling. You can glean lot more information feeding the docs to an LLM and asking questions.

That yoga classes give me more anxiety instead of reducing it. The calm and quiet of the yoga class does not similarly make my mind calm and quite. Instead, my wandering mind always wanders to bad things.

That the FOSS bazaar broke off into megachurches while still maintaining a healthy small scale and independent bazaar [0]. That FOSS sustainability is much more complicated than just "throw money at it".

That there's "metal paste" [1].

That the zodiac killer's messages have been cracked for five years now (I didn't know they were cracked to begin with) and that it was a shift and substitution cypher [2]. The telltale clue was that the symbol frequency was uniform but under shift it become non-uniform.

How to solder those pesky connectors that come on the tiny servo motors you can get from Aliexpress [3].

That Firefox only has 2.3% market share [4].

Multiscale 3d truchet patterns are freakin complicated [5].

That prioritizing tasks by the linear combination of priority and effort remains a good strategy.

[0] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2026/01-cathedral-megachurch-b...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys-RMVJ89dk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CJsKJ0XKP4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHulZtR2Qkg

[4] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

[5] https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2018/bridges2018-39.html#...