Hacker News: sparsely

New comment by sparsely in "Trump directs nuclear weapons testing to resume for first time in over 30 years"

sparsely — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 11:04:51 +0000

This is likely a pretty big win for China/Russia if he follows through with it - USA has advanced nuclear weapon simulation capabilities which almost certainly outstrip theirs, so has a reduced need to conduct non sub-critical tests.

New comment by sparsely in "Use Bayes rule to mechanically solve probability riddles"

sparsely — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:00:17 +0000

For the last one, why does the "born on a Tuesday" information change the result? I don't see how it isn't equivalent to "born on a day", since the day of the week has no connection to the rest of the scenario. I understand why "at least one boy" does matter.

New comment by sparsely in "Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act"

sparsely — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 13:43:42 +0000

Quite. Sites that have resources and influence will be fine - they can either comply with the rules or will be given soft exemptions. It's small and new communities that will suffer.

New comment by sparsely in "At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says"

sparsely — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 13:20:34 +0000

Indeed. The goal of the British legal system is to appear serious. Justice is an occasional byproduct.

New comment by sparsely in "Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough"

sparsely — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:53:25 +0000

Current energy sources are ~all either from solar radiation (indirectly for fossil fuels) or nuclear fission. Tidal energy is cool because it is to a rough approximation from neither of them!

New comment by sparsely in "OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser"

sparsely — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 08:48:41 +0000

I can't work out what the best ratio of soldiers/workers in. It seems that for the first 30 seconds or so you need almost all soldiers to expand fast, but after that?

There's a lot of luck involved too, sometimes you'll just get dogpiled by two neighbours and there's not much you can do, but at least it's fast.

New comment by sparsely in "Why are there no good dinosaur films?"

sparsely — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 14:51:51 +0000

It loses it at some key points to aid visual clarity (and I guess cut the CGI costs), like Minas Tirith being on a featureless plain rather than surrounded by farmland.

New comment by sparsely in "“Don’t mock what you don't own” in 5 minutes (2022)"

sparsely — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:13:18 +0000

Fakes are better than mocks if only for the 100x superior debugging experience.

New comment by sparsely in "The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets"

sparsely — Mon, 26 May 2025 12:40:38 +0000

The energy produced from burning it would come from somewhere else, which on average won't be 0 CO2 either.

New comment by sparsely in "The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets"

sparsely — Mon, 26 May 2025 12:39:22 +0000

Yeah, this seems fine to me. I believe my general waste is also incinerated though so I wish they'd encourage adding the soft plastics to that to simplify recycling - it might lead to more hard plastics being recycled!

New comment by sparsely in "I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt"

sparsely — Tue, 06 May 2025 09:30:00 +0000

If you don't provide lunches for the children then their parents need to pay for them anyway. Just tax more if you don't already have a budget, this isn't a case where there would be radically different spending patterns without government intervention.

New comment by sparsely in "Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why"

sparsely — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:16:40 +0000

Which maintenance tasks, why does it require us to be unconscious, why can't we apply constant energy towards them? Lots of interesting questions to answer

New comment by sparsely in "English Multinyms"

sparsely — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 10:21:24 +0000

Some of these have different pronunciation (depending on accent?), e.g. parish vs perish

New comment by sparsely in "Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?"

sparsely — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:16:11 +0000

Lots of countries don't wash their commercially grown eggs (and have a much lower % from factory farms), which greatly improves shelf life in shops etc.

New comment by sparsely in "Disney+ Loses 700k Subscribers Following Price Increase"

sparsely — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 14:39:13 +0000

For example subtitles are terrible on most major streaming services, either don't exist, or are only available in one language. Sometimes they don't even have the original audio track, only a dubbed one! Piracy ensures that multi-language families can happily watch a movie together.

New comment by sparsely in "Mercator: Extreme"

sparsely — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 10:44:16 +0000

Would be interesting to see comparisons between this and very old historical maps, I bet some are not far off.

New comment by sparsely in "Francis Crick's "Central Dogma" was misunderstood"

sparsely — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 08:57:40 +0000

I think this is a much clearer expression of the claim than the commonly given one.

New comment by sparsely in "Francis Crick's "Central Dogma" was misunderstood"

sparsely — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 08:57:06 +0000

Folding is clearly a form of information transfer though (and proteins are deeply involved in folding other proteins, even outside of the prion case). As stated in the screenshot it is fine "information here means the sequence of amino acid residues..." but that's a much narrower definition than is commonly communicated.

Proteins also do change the amino acid sequences of other proteins - they cleave them! The results of the cleavage are then important for cell biology, and although it seems plausible that the the results could have traditional "protein" style functions, e.g. as an enzyme, I not sure this is ever actually the case. But the end result is still that the rule has to be understood very narrowly.

New comment by sparsely in "Is English a “creole Language”?"

sparsely — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:24:54 +0000

There's a good comment on the blog:

"This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."

New comment by sparsely in "NIST Interoperable Randomness Beacons"

sparsely — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 09:21:26 +0000

I think you are meant to commit to using the value of the beacon at a future point in time, e.g. when you're preregistering your trial methodology.