Hacker News: alkyon

New comment by alkyon in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

alkyon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:50:10 +0000

I think I will just cross the river and find a better place somewhere in the Parque del Agua Luis Buñuel or Expo. Should be also packed but a bit less then the bridges

New comment by alkyon in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

alkyon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:42:18 +0000

I stopped taking melatonin because I had problems waking up in the morning and was getting nasty headaches even with half a dose (1 mg).

Edit: Maybe I should try reducing the dose even further (to 200 μg) as mentioned in other posts here

New comment by alkyon in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

alkyon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:31:17 +0000

At least you learned something new today

New comment by alkyon in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

alkyon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:29:49 +0000

"Zaragoza (Spanish: [θaɾaˈɣoθa]), traditionally known in English as Saragossa[7] (/ˌsærəˈɡɒsə/ SARR-ə-GOSS-ə)" according to Wikipedia, originally Caesaraugusta and later Saraqusṭah to be exact

New comment by alkyon in "Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse"

alkyon — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:25:22 +0000

In Spain it's a trio of consecutive eclipses from 2026 to 2028 (the last one annular). To view the second one I don't even need travel anywhere.

Will be in Saragossa on Wednesday and gonna use Canon binos with image stabilization, the partial phase with filter and then some precious seconds without (a scary moment, I'll rely on an alarm to prevent my eyes to get damaged when the totality is over). Some people generally advised to skip any instruments and just enjoy it with your own eyes for the first time, but I'm too curious about corona details to let this opportunity pass.

New comment by alkyon in "EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams"

alkyon — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:53:14 +0000

I'm not so sure it's just perception involved. You're going along a street and can hear a violin playing. A melody develops, you establish a sense of tonality, can predict next sounds maybe. And then you also make out a recorder. Another piece, totally unrelated harmonically. Another stream to process, I would assume a brain can handle it (at least a musical one should).

I agree that language processing is different, but some similarities do exist.

New comment by alkyon in "EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams"

alkyon — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 20:09:51 +0000

It's incorrect to reduce polyphony to just shifting harmonies. Harmony is of course the constraint but the whole point is about intertwined voices - various melodies that your brain can process simultaneously. Music is not speech, but it's not that far from the language as it seems in terms of processing. When you hear 2 melodic lines at the same time, you're brain needs to encode them separately, in a similar manner to parallel speech streams.

New comment by alkyon in "EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams"

alkyon — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:49:05 +0000

The same is true for music, otherwise canons and polyphony wouldn't work.

New comment by alkyon in "The Tower Keeps Rising"

alkyon — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:22:48 +0000

Ultimately, AI models will need to ingest the slop ziggurat they created. This means, other things being equal, that it won't be so easy as it is now to achieve incremental gains from the sheer fact of gobbling up more code.

New comment by alkyon in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

alkyon — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:45:40 +0000

I wonder if it would be possible for Starlink to use less reflective materials for their satellites so that the sky is less polluted for the astronomers.

New comment by alkyon in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

alkyon — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 10:40:00 +0000

Yes, I was taught that relativity is a significant part of quantum chemistry equations in gold atoms 25 years ago. The idea is quite old and the title is misleading.

New comment by alkyon in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

alkyon — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:02:55 +0000

Calling someone "stinky manager" is not ad hominem. It's a way of saying that he's managerial skills are very poor. Does it relate to the argument? Very much so. Changing a bread factory into a slop factory makes Jarred a stinky manager and even a "sloppy" one

New comment by alkyon in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

alkyon — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:30:31 +0000

I think you meant lossy compression and not lossless. I'm not suggesting this as a method to extract those books from the models, which by their nature are not databases. Just commenting on the somewhat surprising fact that the bigger the model the more likely it is to produce some (short) excerpts of the original training material

New comment by alkyon in "Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)"

alkyon — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 21:38:29 +0000

Gemini should be trained on those books already, so in theory it could regurgitate some verbatim fragments (as NYT lawsuit against OpenAI showed some time ago).

New comment by alkyon in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

alkyon — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:42:19 +0000

I wonder what will be the next big thing for Zuck after metaverse failure and now AI coming to nothing? Perpetual motion machines?

New comment by alkyon in "Why I Stopped Arguing with People"

alkyon — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:15:08 +0000

Nice quote from Tao Te Ching about complexity and simplicity completing each other.

The rules of go could be explained to a 4 years old. On the other hand, the superficial complexity of so many framworks/systems is just a facade and nothing more.

The same goes for NP-hard problems where complex solutions have trivial verification methods.

New comment by alkyon in "Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)"

alkyon — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:42:43 +0000

Explanation that is not intuitive at all: because physical units need to agree (kg * m^2 / s^2)

New comment by alkyon in "No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass"

alkyon — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:45:51 +0000

This is a moot point though. Before all the jobs are replaced in 2036, shouldn't we see data centres burning? Revolutions tend to succeed with only 1% of population taking part. I think it's probably that this revolution will ultimately fail for various reasons, but still it's a valid scenario, which at the very least should be mentioned.

New comment by alkyon in "22-year-old Mozart's handwritten notebook unearthed in 'major discovery'"

alkyon — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:11:04 +0000

Seven previously unknown compositions for flute and harp is not minor

New comment by alkyon in "Introduction to Making Makefiles"

alkyon — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:30:55 +0000

Nice intro. Makefile is a complex beast but here it appears simple and user friendly