Hacker News Reader

syllablehqon Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland

And yet it did work, with positive results shown over a year, right? It seems that the reasons why this "could never work" like cracks, dust, and vibrations might have perfectly reasonable solutions. Solar panels have gotten so cheap that it might not be as important to install them in perfect conditions, and other factors like real estate, ease of maintenance, access to the grid come into play in interesting ways. I suppose long term results are yet to be seen, but it doesn't seem ridiculous to me.

syllablehqon Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

https://www.astrologercat.com/

Because everyone loves astrology and cute cats. (A toy project just for kicks)

Current features:

- AI Chat with Petunia the cat Astrologer

- Daily personalized astrology email

Coming soon:

- Ephemeris calculations

- Stories of historic events from past dates which share today's astrological conditions

- Whatever else Petunia dweams up from her sweepy nap on the bookshewf

syllablehqon Mitochondria Are Alive

"Molecular biologists tend to focus on characteristics like metabolism, growth and development, response to stimuli, reproduction, and the ability to process information or evolve."

Even if you stretch the others real hard, I don't see how you'd argue that the Earth "reproduces." Especially not the more rigorous definition of reproduces fertile copies of itself which can evolve.

syllablehqon C-Motive's electrostatic motors use printed circuit boards instead of magnets

I see quite a lot of technical data. Check their whole site including the documents page and youtube videos. (Also, I know them, they're very legit.) https://www.c-motive.com/about/documents/

syllablehqon Automorphic Numbers

Thinking about this more... and just thinking out loud here. So this pattern essentially happens when: In whatever base you're in a number x^n gives an end of "0" plus a remainder of the number x. So a number would be automorphic if ((x^n - 1) * n) always ends in "0" (to whatever length that matches the number).

E.g. ((6^n - 1) * 6) or ((376^n - 1) * 376) Cool

syllablehqon Automorphic Numbers

It just occurred to me that it was weird how 6^n always ends in 6. And that it never occured to me before that that was weird. 5s of course do that too. And I wondered what numbers do it in other bases and why. And I found this nice blog post talking about it. And was surprised to find that very large numbers also have this property.

syllablehqon US Government funds pilot project for heated sand energy storage

Terrament is working on a modular gravity storage solution that uses deep mine shafts to gain 20x more height than stacking blocks above ground. So you don’t need water or mountains. And since gravity storage uses ballast that is really just dumb weight, it could even be economical to make that ballast a secondary storage like thermal storage.

syllablehqon Part of Highway 1 to Big Sur crumbles in landslide

With climate weirding accelerating, I'm getting concerned that it's only a matter of time before this road continues to collapse in new sections and it will no longer be feasible to keep repairing it as we are now. I'm also worried that sections on both sides of big sur could collapse leaving thousands stranded.

Anyone have knowledge about any studies on these scenarios?

syllablehqon Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don't believe it

Or, the media is gaslighting people to think violent crime is up even if it’s not. Which is a rational possibility since reporting crime has political motivations.

syllablehqon A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem

From stories I’ve read, I think people generally, and including Feynman, concluded that the sprinkler would not rotate. Because conservation of angular momentum. Which is almost true. So what’s fun is that this experiment shows it’s not entirely true, if you have a sensitive enough experiment that takes into account more nuance of the fluid dynamics.

syllablehqon A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem

Yes that is the experiment. I think when you do that it doesn’t move at all because the effect is tiny so will normally be nullified by friction? And I think the research used very low friction so they could observe the small effect.

syllablehqon A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem

I'll add that this could become particularly important in the 4d case once the sprinkler starts moving. Cause when it's still, the pressure gradient will create a partial-torus like shape around opening, but once it starts rotating, the outer side (rotating around the sprinkler's axis) of the 4D version of this shape has a larger diameter than the inside. So the inner side will be more affected by the environmental water's momentum state than the outside which has more water mass in it's scope rotating around the sprinkler axis.

syllablehqon A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem

Hmm, is it possible that this could be partly caused because the water gets sucked not just directly down the pipe, but around the lip of the pipe opening... and one edge of the pipe opening is further away from the center axis of rotation (of the whole sprinkler) than the other end of the pipe opening. I'd think that whether or not this would have an effect could be easily tested by varying sizes of the pipe opening or how far away the opening was from the center to see if it made a difference -- even if the bends in the pipe were the same (the authors seem to attribute the whole effect to the bends in the arms).

syllablehqon Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)

This book played an important role in pushing me into a career in software. During the recession in 2009, I lost my industrial design job. And GEB started me down a rabbit hole learning more and more about software and learning to code. That turned into a great software career. I've also read hacker news just about every day since.

syllablehqon Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (2022)

My notes on earthquakes from that doc:

Hydrogen is associated with Earthquakes and can maybe even predict them!

In areas with recent tectonic activity: “Higher hydrogen concentrations were observed,” and “hydrogen gas was observed in ground water.” [pg 20]

“[Correlated with earthquakes,] hydrogen concentrations measured at continuous monitoring sites show abrupt changes in concentration over several orders of magnitude, up to 10 times, in a short period of time.” [pg 40]

“Indeed, at epicenters of large earthquakes a reduction in the ozone layer above them has been observed.” [pg 40]

“A systematic study of hydrogen in aquifers shows that H2 concentrations are in- versely correlated with the age of the area's last tectonic activity.” [pg 41]

“Another study shows that hydrogen concentrations in earthquake-associated faults are usually much higher than concentrations in non-earthquake faults.” [pg 41]

‘During earthquakes hydrogen concentrations in fault zones have been shown to increase by several orders of magnitude.” [pg 41]

“Numerous articles discuss hydrogen as a good earthquake indicator and the possibility of monitoring hydrogen for the prediction of seismic events.” [pg 41] More detail below

syllablehqon Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (2022)

I've read that there is a strong correlation between the timing of earthquakes and the volume of gasses like hydrogen and methane leaking out of the earth. The volume of gas can change very significantly before and after an earthquake. There is newfound attention on this topic because there is a race to discover and harvest natural geologic hydrogen (look up latest news about "natural hydrogen").

I found this research pretty mind blowing and took these notes to highlight this topic.

Underground “Natural Hydrogen”: Notes on Research Review Paper by Viacheslav Zgonnik - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ucnE0B_WQA4zo8tTTsZyBu0i...

syllablehqon Deep beneath earth's surface, clues to life's origins

I posted another comment above about recent discoveries that the Earth has enormous quantities of hydrogen deep underground which is constantly bubbling to the surface - and in fact, flowing all the way up to the upper atmosphere and even escaping into space (!). So this would indeed seem to provide a flux even deep underground. Understanding this geologic hydrogen cycle is a fascinating new field.

syllablehqon Deep beneath earth's surface, clues to life's origins

Very cool research. On the topic of hydrogen deep underground: I'm not an expert, just a fascinated amateur, but I've been fascinated by the recent discovery that there is enormous amounts of hydrogen below the earth. In fact, this article mentions hydrogen forming by serpentinization, and says that the researchers were shocked to find so much hydrogen. Recent research indicates that hydrogen may exist deep in the earth from processes other than serpentinization as well. There are now a handful of companies working to extract this natural hydrogen to use as a source of green energy. Exciting stuff.

This is an excellent research overview on the topic of "natural" geologic hydrogen https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

I've also compiled some of my own notes on that paper here which provide some summaries on the multiple fascinating sub-topics. (E.G. hydrogen may be a driver of earthquakes! And we may be able to use hydrogen samples to predict earthquakes! Some predict that there may be even more biomass under the earth driven by sources like hydrogen and methane than there is above ground!) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnW4HRq6E2up0DhIoxjCyGS6...

syllablehqon Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

There's lots of exciting progress happening with underground mechanical storage like this. It's so interesting that the U.S. DOE has been studying underground pumped hydro since at least the 1980.(https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6517343)

Today: - Hydrostor just signed a near $1 Billion contract to build their first underground facility in California using advanced compressed air with water to help efficiency. See also: Green Gravity, Gravitricity, Terrament, Renewell, RheEnergise, and more.

syllablehqon Show HN: Restaurants in Peace – leave a remembrance for a closed restaurant

Didn't see a way to add new ones...

RIP Snacky. Oh how I loved my weekly pilgrimage to you. The spice in the air, the steam rising off the Bibim Bop, and the warm glow of anime playing on the television behind the bar. You're fondly missed.

syllablehqon Electroculture Gardening

If they're trying to experiment for real, it seems like there are some pretty obvious experimental controls that should be used which I don't see discussed.

The control plants should have a non-electrical-conducting wire planted in a similar manner. And in fact, another control should use a copper wire that is cut in various places to interrupt the circuit (and reconnected to be rigid with a non-conducting material)

Without those controls, the effect could be simply a chemical interaction with metal as others here are suggesting. Or even just an effect from how the plant is potted with a wire placed in the pot. Maybe the wire just adds air or makes it easier for the roots to grow or something who knows. Interesting.

syllablehqon X plans to collect biometric data, job and school history

“X” can go F right off

syllablehqon Neutrons prove ‘Bond villain’ did not cause Arecibo telescope collapse

Interesting - you might be on to something. Hmm, maybe it's not quite drones (because the limitations you mentioned like electronic noise, etc) maybe it's some other autonomous swarming unit. Maybe they are drones, but you use some kind of floatation like helium or hydrogen to reduce power needed and therefore noise. Maybe you physically connect each of them in some way in a compression/tension webbing that can be adjusted to control swam unit positions instead of using drone propellers. Fun idea :)

syllablehqon Show HN: The Uncolouring Book

haha, yeah, agreed. I get it, cause you're like, not coloring in the lines, right? But you're coloring with color and there's no way to uncolor, so, maybe the name isn't the right fit? Not sure about an alternative. Cool little project though :)

syllablehqon Write your passwords down (2010)

Interesting, I hadn't followed this in a while, and it does sound like this is getting closer to an open standard...

But it sounds like the discussion of it gets mixed up with other muck including biometric, 2-factor, proprietary tools, TOTP auth etc.

Seems we need a first step that ONLY focuses on abstracting the password away and still letting email be a natural reset.

Seems to me that the standard should simply allow someone to delegate their "passkey keeper" of choice to be the authentication engine that tracks tokens. It can be up to the user (up to their passkey tool) to decide everything else. But set up a system that let's us log in without a password, and without a proprietary auth system like google or facebook etc.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/05/how-a...

syllablehqon Write your passwords down (2010)

I understand where you're coming from, and if you really want to have a username and password - yes, you should be let in. You should always be able to manually authenticate if you really want to. But I'm arguing that's it's time to automate and hide that process from the user experience. (multi-factor auth is another topic... let's put that aside for now..)

But the reality is that memorizable passwords simply does not scale in any world where we have to authenticate with so many services. It's time to shift paradigms. When you take a step back, it's clear that we're trying to shim a new password keeper system into an old password input field paradigm, and it makes no sense and it's holding us back.

Agreed that no one should be forcing a proprietary authenticator service on anyone. On the contrary, to avoid that, we need an open standard that is cross-compatible between proprietary services.

The open standard should make it easy for any browser, password keeper, multi-factor auth system etc to speak the same language and "just work" instead of hacking around with auto-filling password input fields for no reason. We're so stuck in an old way of thinking that we can't see that the password input field is vestigial and is only making everyone's experience worse.

syllablehqon Write your passwords down (2010)

It makes me so sad that it's 2023 and we haven't fixed passwords. There's no need for any of this. Your email account (+ multi-factor as desired) will always be the weak link, so just reduce everything to that. Get rid of passwords.

Create a new standard that falls back to passwords to work with legacy systems, but going forward will enable a password keepers to just authenticate you with a generated random password saved encrypted to your cookies that the user never even has to see. Then reset it as needed through your email (+ multi-factor as desired) as needed.

User-visible passwords should die. Technologists should to get un-stuck from living in the current password paradigm. I've been wanting to make this rant a blog post but haven't gotten around to it - esp because I know it's been written about a million times already.

syllablehqon The problem with federated web apps

I've had the opinion for years that any federated social media platform should fallback to email as a default. This helps solve the problem of bootstrapping an audience. You should be able to "tweet" at your friends by using their emails. It should show up on the public record as an unclaimed account.

That account could authenticate at any time through their email to claim it. You could send a "tweet" by just sending an email to post@this-new-platform.com. [follow-up verification link can be sent to approve with one click to prove email.]

I don't understand how this idea isn't more obvious to all these new platforms. We need to lower barriers to entry to decentralization.

syllablehqon Tracking pulsar arrays for decades is modeling a gravitational wave background

And this is an especially exciting time, because NANOGrav and their international colleagues are going to make an announcement on June 29th. Seems that twitter is abuzz on what it might be :).

Announcement will be made here. https://nanograv.org/news/2023Announcement

syllablehqon The grid isn’t ready for 300M EVs by 2030

Sure, we can try to change people's behavior, which of course will only work with smart incentives. And/or we need a lot more grid-scale energy storage. Changing people's behavior is really hard. And before it's even possible to implement "surge pricing" in a way that's exposed to individuals, we need a ton of infrastructure changes. Those are good goals, but it might be simpler to incentivize behavior at a larger scale than consumers and cover the gap with storage. For example, add storage to car charging stations instead of telling consumers when to charge. The charge station would then charge up at low demand so it won't pull from the grid during peak demand. Maybe we need all of the above, we'll see.