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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

This is also a problem in the foraging community. Once you have the ability to identify all the mushrooms and trees while driving at highway speed, it's a very difficult to just turn it off.

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I remember reading somewhere that the behavioral circuits that attention engineers at social media companies exploit are the same ones that foraging uses.

Maybe that's why they traditionally had berries depicted on slot machines.

> Maybe that's why they traditionally had berries depicted on slot machines.

Or else they use things like gold nuggets or diamonds, which have the same intermittent reward mechanism.

Is this a real thing? I can’t tell if you are joking or not.

100% a real thing. I haven't heard of anyone actually getting into an accident due to looking for mushrooms while driving, or at least admitting to it, probably in part because it's a hobby that people don't usually take up until they're well out of their most accident prone years. But I know a lot of people who have paid extra for lane assist and automatic emergency braking.

There is even a whole subset of mushrooms called the 55-mile-per-hour-mushrooms, so called because they're especially easy to identify while driving at highway speeds. Here is an old post referencing this: http://mpb.ou.edu/ben/ben416.html

This has all got to be a joke.

It's a little eccentric, but it's not all that different from geocaching. Plus, free food!

I've also dumpster dived a little bit (decent amount of crossover between foragers and dumpster divers), grocery stores toss out tons of food that's still perfectly good.

Geo-noshing?

I prefer the term eatercising.

Makes sense, you can cover a lot of ground at 55 mph.

Note that this article mentions Agaricus augustus as an edible mushroom, even though it is now known to have carcinogenic properties

Mushroom hunters are a bit notorious for being single minded about their hobby. One of the more popular books on the subject contains a reproduction of an actual event where the author ran off during the intermission of an orchestra that he was playing in to go hunt for mushrooms.

https://m.imgur.com/6Yv41

Funny enough, the model for the cover photo was actually a professor of computer science at my university (recently retired, I believe). I'm a bit surprised that this pocket guide is well-known in the mushroom hunting community.

> foraging community

This is completely foreign to me. Do these people drive by bushes and quickly scan for berries and shrooms to pluck? In the actual real world?

They usually go for a hike or walk around their neighborhood. I discovered black raspberries in my yard last year and once I learned to identify them I see them everywhere in season. I can totally see how it would become distracting if you were more serious about foraging.

Not often purposely. It’s more like once you know how to see it, it’s hard to turn it off. E.g. the other day I saw magic mushrooms growing near my house. I can teach you how to see that, but I can’t teach you to unsee it.

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