Pandas Should Go Extinct • Hacker News Board

Re: Pandas Should Go Extinct

#101

Post by Grimblewald » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:17 AM UTC

rmunn wrote: post #80

Grimblewald wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because breeding intelligent creatures generally requires keeping them happy. When treated like a farm aniaml, many high cognition anaimals will refuse to reproduce, just look at how bad life has become for average humans, and predictably, humans are starting to refuse to reproduce.

That's more true in some locations than in others. There are places where the reported quality of life is quite a bit higher than others. I see comments like yours a lot on HN, and I'm starting to suspect that the average HN commenter is more likely to be living in some of the poorly-run big cities than in the better-run small-to-medium-sized towns. (Specifics can, and will vary. But on average I've found I'm much ha…

yes? im not sure what your point is, i sense you seem to disagree, but what youve said supports what ive said so im not sure how to engage.

Re: Pandas Should Go Extinct

#102

Post by otherme123 » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 8:31 AM UTC

Grimblewald wrote: post #75

otherme123 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously, it's seriously freakin' difficult to get pandas to reproduce in captivity It is impossible, and has been tried many times by many people, to reproduce Octopus vulgari in captivity. Their reproductive behaviour looks also quite weird for us (the mother always die). Yet they thrive in the wild unless over fished.

because breeding intelligent creatures generally requires keeping them happy. When treated like a farm aniaml, many high cognition anaimals will refuse to reproduce, just look at how bad life has become for average humans, and predictably, humans are starting to refuse to reproduce.

My point was that "captivity reproduction" should not be a key point in the viability of a specie. Octopus can live in captivity (albeit stressed!), but for some reason their larva don't survive. Do they deserve to go extinct for that? They were able to survive for 500 million years, through some massive extinctions, looks good enough to me.

Re: Pandas Should Go Extinct

#103

Post by d2ou » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

latent-person wrote: post #39

In my opinion a better argument to stop using pandas is the very unintuitive API pandas have. Additionally, a slight change in the query can force you to restructure the whole query (change all lines), while in Polars (and tidyverse in R) it's just a simple one-line change.

And for a similar dplyr-like API on duckdb I recommand the excellent https://ibis-project.org/ !

Re: Pandas Should Go Extinct

#104

Post by pseudohadamard » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 1:43 PM UTC

rmunn wrote: post #52

Cute title; I thought I was about to read a contrarian ecologist saying "a species that is so very specialized in its diet and finicky in its reproductive behavior doesn't deserve, evolutionarily speaking, to survive". (Seriously, it's seriously freakin' difficult to get pandas to reproduce in captivity). And while my knee-jerk reaction would be "maybe, but we should still preserve them because we can", I was prepare…

I was expecting a diatribe about the (UK) police: "Next week, right, I'm going to blow up a panda in Croydon".

Re: Pandas Should Go Extinct

#105

Post by thijsn » Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

viccis wrote: post #11

Polars seems nice but in my experience using it, the "lazy" APIs would still immediately materialize a ton of stuff in memory and had very spotty support on what data formats and storage integrations were possible with scan_* functions (though that was half a year ago and the support is slowly improving). It's frustrating, I mean really frustrating, to think I could solve a lot of my "scan through heinous amounts of…

That sounds like there's something going wrong, because that definitely shouldn't be the case! Although it sound like you've given up on it: if you have any example to send me in the right direction I can look into that for you. I'd love to know if there's something I can relay to the team.

Thijs, DevRel @ Polars