Hacker News: buntsai

New comment by buntsai in "Japanese Death Poems"

buntsai — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:05:38 +0000

In which case the "crimson carpet" appears to be the loose invention of the translator. The original just says "brocade" or I guess, "quilt", implying some sort of silk bed cover?

New comment by buntsai in "Japanese Death Poems"

buntsai — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:55:38 +0000

Agree 10,000 fold. English and Japanese are so different and have such different standards of aesthetics and literary form that good translations are like independent creations inspired by the original. I would like to know that the original form was. Even a word by word ungrammatical transliteration would be helpful. But not to have the Japanese available means I cannot even look it up...

New comment by buntsai in "Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri"

buntsai — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:20:38 +0000

The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology. After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).

New comment by buntsai in "On The Meaning of Ritual"

buntsai — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 18:27:30 +0000

I agree with the author on the centrality of ritual in 荀子. But I find the author's suggestion that we should invent new rituals hubristic and naive.

We Chinese have lost the ritualistic practices that undergirded society 2500 years ago. Let us therefore just come up with a new set?

Who have been the most successful at inventing new rituals for our age? The Axis Powers starting with the 1936 Olympics. Hmm.

The author needs to read the first few pages of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

New comment by buntsai in "Why Tolkien Hated Dune"

buntsai — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 14:44:44 +0000

I am not sure that Tolkien was a supporter of "Deontology" (ethical systems like Kant's). He was more probably a fan of virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. There is a large gulf between them. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarising the differences. We can not lump together into one category everyone who disagrees for many different reasons why we can sum up future consequences almost mathematically to come up with an "optimal" ethical choice. I am not sure that Tolkien is particularly interested in "greatness" either.

New comment by buntsai in "Terry Tao's generals (2012)"

buntsai — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 15:28:56 +0000

Some of your points are very curious. Biologists did not reject horizontal gene transfer. Or at any rate it has been part of the canon for pretty much the last 60 years which is essentially forever in biology. (The mechanisms for heredity, i.e. DNA were only discovered in the early 1950s). Besides, scientists are always "tweaking" theories as you put it. More precisely, a fruitful and productive scientific program leads to more and more discovers and elaborations that have to be accomodated. Look at the changes in the Standard Model in particle physics. The current controversy is whether and why the Standard Model is no longer being "tweaked". In other words, some physicist wonder whether current research is no longer yielding discoveries that allow advances and hences changes or elaborations to the Standard Model.

New comment by buntsai in "Peru's Great Urban Experiment"

buntsai — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 11:52:09 +0000

I find the efforts of the archeologists not to apply cultural norms particularly interesting:

In other circumstances, a caste system might be seen in a less favourable light:

> I like the egg myth because it suggests that the Chimú understood that social and political inequality is ‘baked in’ to humanity from the beginning,” says anthropologist Robyn Cutright of Centre College.

Similarly the discussion of preferring other people's children for child sacrifices. This is ascribed to their support desire for cultural diversity and laying new cultural roots. > “The Chimú had the ability to draw on a large terrain, and I think they were reaching out to diverse regions to find children for the sacrifices” > By sacrificing the children and burying them, they were, in a way, planting new ancestors.”

I hope the original archeologists have not been quoted out of context or that I have not misinterpreted them.

Either way it is quite amusing. I do not think I would regard child sacrifices in entirely the same positive light or even neutrally ...

New comment by buntsai in "AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe"

buntsai — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 15:00:01 +0000

Often the ribbons (alpha-helices and beta=sheets) form "protein domains". Canonically, these are stable, folded structures with conserved shapes and functions that serve as the building blocks of proteins, like lego pieces. These protein domains can be assembled in different ways to form proteins of different function. Different protein domains that have the same evolutionary origin have conserved structure even when the underlying amino acid sequence, or DNA sequence has changed beyond recognition over millions of years of evolution. In other words, molecular biologists use structure as a proxy for function. Looking at how the same protein domains works in different proteins in different species can give us clues as to how a protein might work in human biology or disease.

New comment by buntsai in "Land-use changes across Europe linked to mortality during the Black Death"

buntsai — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:06:36 +0000

Numbers in the UK suggest higher death rates. There seem to have been something in the order of 150,000 excess deaths with fewer than 20 million positives (with a free and extensive testing programme). Both estimates come with caveats but this still suggest that pre Omicron strains had higher mortality rates. The key is using excess deaths statistics which seem much less subjective.

New comment by buntsai in "The Demise of Scientific American"

buntsai — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 10:21:12 +0000

Have you actually looked up whether Gauss called this distribution "normal" because the other (parts?) of the distribution were "abnormal"?

Surely it is worth at least have a quick read of wikipedia or doing a Google search before saying something that may sound preposterous...

New comment by buntsai in "String Lengths in Unicode"

buntsai — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 23:34:19 +0000

You don't really need to only break on punctuation. There is no convention to do so and so long as you so not break any logograms in half, the resulting text reads perfectly fine. In fact, the convention is to have left and right justified text with equal numbers of monospaced logograms, including punctuation, on each line (on the equivalent for vertical text). Classical Chinese before the 20 th century was seldom punctuated.

New comment by buntsai in "Evolutionary gene loss may explain why only humans are prone to heart attack"

buntsai — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 09:26:40 +0000

Nah. Primate studies are too expensive, impractical and ethically difficult to justify. Think about the number of subjects you would need for statistical significance ...