Hacker News: syllablehq

New comment by syllablehq in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

syllablehq — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:10:52 +0000

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

New comment by syllablehq in "Mitochondria Are Alive"

syllablehq — Sat, 09 Nov 2024 16:25:13 +0000

"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.

New comment by syllablehq in "C-Motive's electrostatic motors use printed circuit boards instead of magnets"

syllablehq — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 17:19:37 +0000

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/

New comment by syllablehq in "Automorphic Numbers"

syllablehq — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:41:22 +0000

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

New comment by syllablehq in "Automorphic Numbers"

syllablehq — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:01:40 +0000

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.

Automorphic Numbers

syllablehq — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 23:59:34 +0000

Article URL: https://pballew.blogspot.com/2022/06/automorphic-numbers-and-some-history.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41642267

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by syllablehq in "US Government funds pilot project for heated sand energy storage"

syllablehq — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:20:27 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "Part of Highway 1 to Big Sur crumbles in landslide"

syllablehq — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 15:59:06 +0000

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?

Part of Highway 1 to Big Sur crumbles in landslide

syllablehq — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 15:54:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-31/landslide-erodes-part-of-highway-1-near-big-sur-closing-roadway

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39885354

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by syllablehq in "Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don't believe it"

syllablehq — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:50:25 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem"

syllablehq — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 03:43:45 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem"

syllablehq — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 22:50:48 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem"

syllablehq — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 21:09:27 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "A new solution for the "reverse sprinkler" problem"

syllablehq — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 20:42:18 +0000

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).

New comment by syllablehq in "Gödel, Escher, Bach is the most influential book in my life (2022)"

syllablehq — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 20:30:30 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (2022)"

syllablehq — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 02:06:34 +0000

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

New comment by syllablehq in "Can Earthquakes Be Predicted? (2022)"

syllablehq — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 02:04:20 +0000

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...

New comment by syllablehq in "Deep beneath earth's surface, clues to life's origins"

syllablehq — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 17:26:09 +0000

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.

New comment by syllablehq in "Deep beneath earth's surface, clues to life's origins"

syllablehq — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 17:20:15 +0000

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...

New comment by syllablehq in "Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row"

syllablehq — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 05:04:05 +0000

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.