Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

dynomight.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 349 posts

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#61

Post by butwhywhyoh »

elil17 wrote: post #49

I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one m…

I'm thankful for oxygen because we can breathe it! And it can be found pretty much everywhere in the atmosphere of planet Earth. And I'm thankful for all the other elements that I'm composed of. They can even be used to do other miraculous things. Wonderful!

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#62

Post by scubakid »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #46
scubakid wrote: post #30

Not about to start being grateful for aspartame, sorry ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why, what has it done to you?

Nothing concrete I can point to of course, I'm just wary of being actively grateful for it... it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood, and there could also be better alternative sweeteners that didn't make this list.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#63

Post by dclowd9901 »

dheera wrote: post #51

> That the Earth hasn’t recently been hit by a solar flare as powerful as the 1859 Carrington event Is anyone thinking about what to do? It's only a matter of time before we have another flare 2X or 3X the magnitude of the Carrington event.

If it really would set power lines alight, there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do aside from going off the grid and having a small warehouse full of electrical wiring.

Emergency and catastrophe planning has to happen at the national level. I would like to see more leaders (especially these days) come into office with ideas about how to recover from catastrophic events quickly.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#64

Post by butwhywhyoh »

I can't tell if this article is tongue-in-cheek or not. These are all just excruciatingly detailed versions of "I'm thankful the human species came out on the positive side of a lot of dice rolls".

Just say you're happy to be alive and move on.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#66

Post by borepop »

krisrm wrote: post #35

Realized after reading this that it's American Thanksgiving today. Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends. I'm thankful for a lovely forum where we can read and share articles like this one.

Agreed. The tone of the HN comments section is occasionally somewhat more contentious now than a few years ago, but it has not generally devolved into the sort of partisan pissing match/bad-faith clusterfuck seen elsewhere in the interwebs. To some extent I attribute that to the fact that valuing science and reason can be a helpful quality in moderating the tone of interaction, even among anons. Which is really a lucky thing.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#67

Post by SubjectToChange »

elil17 wrote: post #49

I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one m…

Yeast is a type of fungus.

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#68

Post by okl »

> Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”

Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful

#69

Post by jaclaz »

riazrizvi wrote: post #45

Thank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started invest…

To be picky, the timescale/locations of #23 is way off:

Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC

Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC

Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC

Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC

Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC

Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC

Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC

Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC

Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC

Aesop (?) 620-564 BC

Solon (Athens) 630-570 BC

Pericles (Athens) 495–429 BC

Aristophanes (Athens) 446-386 BC

Sophocles (Athens) 497-406

the:

>That some unknown miracle blend of circumstances happened to arrive in Athens in 500 BC leading a tiny city of 250k people to produce Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aesop, Solon, Pericles, Aristophanes, and Sophocles, and that it might be possible to intentionally recreate such conditions today around the world and spur incredible human flourishing, and why aren’t we working on this?

is more accurately something like:

In the course of several centuries over a vast territory comprising almost all inhabited mediterranean countries some 10-15 people excelled in their fields and many of them happened to live in the main city (and cultural capital) of the area.

Sounds a lot less a miracle, between 630 and 300 BC is three centuries.

Post reply on HN