January 14, 2026
Eggs, redirects & hot takes
Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
Parrot baby watch to phone-call tricks: HN’s delightfully chaotic day
TLDR: A proud bird parent shared a conure’s egg-laying saga, and the thread exploded into phone-call web tricks, state-vs-federal debates, therapy history, war-drone ethics, and local AI tinkering. The big reactions mixed cute joy with privacy worries and moral unease, showing how everyday discoveries spark real-world questions.
Ask HN started with a wholesome shock: a crimson-bellied conure going full tiny bird mom with a towel nest, apple slices, and a dramatic unfertilized egg. The community cooed—and then detonated a chaos bomb of discoveries. One commenter learned you can make a website redirect (when a page sends you somewhere else) use a special “tel:+” link so your phone politely asks if you want to call a number. Half the crowd cheered “neat,” the other half clutched pearls over “creepy” prank potential. Meanwhile, someone wandered into Constitution corner, dusting off the 10th Amendment—power reserved to the states—tying it to National Guard and immigration agency news, which sparked predictable state-vs-federal armchair lawyering.
Others veered into brain therapy lore, claiming psychoanalysis got spicier after Freud, and one dev pushed a tutorial on fine-tuning tiny local AI, complete with link. The heaviest vibes came from war-tech talk: drones in the Russia–Ukraine conflict turned into a sober thread about whether pure software feels “crueler than usual” when it meets reality. Jokes flew—“HN became BirdTok,” “press F for towel nest”—but the mood swung between awe, ethics, and “please don’t auto-dial me, bro.” It’s the internet’s favorite combo: cute pet, weird hack, legal flame, brain candy, and DIY robots, all in one day.
Key Points
- •A crimson-bellied conure is in the process of laying an infertile egg.
- •The owner provides extra warmth and increased food to support the bird, noting a heightened appetite (apple slices, fruit pellets, safflower seeds).
- •The bird’s nesting behavior includes arranging a folded towel and resting between its layers at the bottom of the cage.
- •The conure remains active, continuing to fly and move during the day despite egg-laying.
- •The bird nibbles a stone perch during egg-laying, possibly related to calcium intake or stress relief.