Hacker News: Kotlopou

New comment by Kotlopou in "The Aperiodic Table"

Kotlopou — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:16:03 +0000

I'm sorry, but... this is why I'm unhappy about AI-generated projects.

The parent post asked a more-or-less specific question about how this works and offered their working hypothesis (that it works by taking the rectangular periodic table and mapping each element to its nearest Penrose tile). I would also be curious about this, because e.g. it seems non-obvious to me that the resulting table would have no holes inside. Does there have to be any extra step to ensure that?

But your reply is not informative at all. If you wrote this yourself from scratch, you would be able to answer this kind of question (and report on anything interesting that came up while creating the program), but this way the post just hangs here to be forgotten, and I haven't learned a new thing about Penrose tilings. :(

New comment by Kotlopou in "Show HN: I built a tool that watches webpages and exposes changes as RSS"

Kotlopou — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:31:57 +0000

I use RSS to get updates from a ll the stuff I read online at once, and thought this would be nice for those websites that don't already have an RSS feed, but... Perhaps I'm stupid, but I can't actually find the RSS output? And searching for RSS on https://docs.sitespy.app/docs returns no hits.

New comment by Kotlopou in "Qt45: A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself"

Kotlopou — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:15:04 +0000

Actually, the search here is chemical -- you make a bunch of random small RNA sequences, then chemically replicate those that do what you want, and after a few cycles of this you find just a few sequences dominating the population. The pools can easily reach 10^14 examples and more, because you don't need a separate container/experiment for each one, but do it all together in one batch. The keyword is SELEX, a pretty cool idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_evolution_of_ligand...

Things to change if the apocalypse comes

Kotlopou — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:17:50 +0000

Article URL: https://beatingthehydra.substack.com/p/short-post-things-to-change-if-the

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989126

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

One Funeral at a Time

Kotlopou — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 01:03:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.md-a.co/p/one-funeral-at-a-time

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46983583

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Kotlopou in "What GLP-1s Are Accidentally Teaching Us About Our Brains"

Kotlopou — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:13:21 +0000

The percentage of users quoted seems insane: are 10-20% of Americans really on GLP-1??

I found this source: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4153-1.html

The numbers across age categories do not correspond to the ones in TFA, but they're also insane, and around 10% average. Combined with 20% vomiting side effects, that would suggest 2% of Americans have been throwing up, which sounds... implausible? Can an American say whether this matches what they're seeing/hearing in their social circles?

New comment by Kotlopou in "Why can nobody build an algorithm that works like a worm?"

Kotlopou — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:34:45 +0000

Original title is The biggest mystery in neuroscience, according to me. Since the me is not me but computational neuroscientist Chenchen Li, I changed the title to the mystery itself.

Why can nobody build an algorithm that works like a worm?

Kotlopou — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:34:45 +0000

Article URL: https://ccli.substack.com/p/the-biggest-mystery-in-neuroscience

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46861922

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by Kotlopou in "The History of Light"

Kotlopou — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:16:17 +0000

Disclosure: I am the author of this piece. Happy to answer questions!

The History of Light

Kotlopou — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:16:17 +0000

Article URL: https://beatingthehydra.substack.com/p/the-history-of-light

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723831

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Claude Shannon's randomness-guessing machine

Kotlopou — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 14:03:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46588660

Points: 36

# Comments: 12

George Gabriel Stokes in love (1857)

Kotlopou — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:45:35 +0000

Article URL: https://skullsinthestars.com/2013/06/04/george-gabriel-stokes-in-love-1857/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575283

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Kotlopou in "Peano arithmetic is enough, because Peano arithmetic encodes computation"

Kotlopou — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 18:24:04 +0000

Asker of the SO question here: I edited the question to link to a few other answers on this kind of thing. Essentially, "PA is consistent" is not enough, but a "uniform reflection principle" that says "if PA proves something, it's true" is enough. I'm not 100% certain that this principle is equivalent to omega-consistency, but if I'm reading this correctly, it should be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A9-consistent_theory#Relat...

The Wikipedia article says T is omega-consistent if "T + RFN_T + the set of all true sentences is consistent", which should mean the same thing as "T + RFN_T is true".