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Comment by wickerman | Hacker News Reader

I used to live in a slaughterhouse district where the damn things would crawl out of sink, bidet and shower plugs, making every single trip to the bathroom a very anxiety ridden experience. Plus they were of the flying variety, and occasionally, of the albino variety. I personally hate them and I relish on the fact I live somewhere where they're not that prominent, but I do recognize they're as essential as any other insect and a potential food source.

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They are all 'of the albino variety' at certain times. A white/albino cockroach is just one that has freshly molted. Shell will harden up and darken in a day or so.

The more you know! I am ashamed to say I barely know anything about them despite them being persistent pests in my life.

I would know much less if I didn't raise roaches as a food source for my reptiles. They have won me over, in part, and I consider them to be pets, though only me and my two year old appreciate them...

Pets? That triggered a memory of the movie Joe's Apartment... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116707/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116707/reviews?ref_=tt_sa_3

I used to have crickets for my bearded dragons and after a while I also took a liking to them. I feel that if you watch almost any animal closely for a while you see interesting traits and behaviors that make them likeable.

Honestly cockroaches are way better feeders than crickets. Crickets are so annoying, smelly, and if you don't take the uneaten ones out of your dragon's cage they can blind them!

I don’t have dragons anymore but this is an interesting point. When I had them I only read about mealworms and crickets for feeding them. Nobody talked about cockroaches as an option.

> if you watch almost any animal closely for a while you see interesting traits and behaviors that make them likeable.

I used to burn leaves with a magnifying glass in the sun as a kid. Once, I hovered the infernal dot over an ant and watched his abdomen pop. I then observed, in zoomed-in horror, as the poor thing kept trying to feel its missing abdomen and then clean its own juices off its antennae. Other ants would come and inspect the dying ant and their antennae would tap each other's. The fallen ant was then carried back to the hive, and I felt so bad that I spent the afternoon clearing a path for the highway of ants.

To this day, I feel bad killing ants and will try to avoid it, like blowing them off my patio table before scrubbing it. It gets a brow-crinkle from my friends, though.

You have empathy for something mostly despised as a pest. Hackers are thought to have little, but sometimes I suspect we have more, so much more that is really the lack of reciprocation for our empathy others show for us that is the problem.

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