averagewall

Cycling isn't that great. Humans are about 10% efficient at converting food energy to power. Plants are about 10% efficient at converting sunlight to food energy. So that's 1% efficiency from solar to pedals. Once you count the fossil fuels used in farming, which I forget the numbers for, I think a motorbike works out better for greenhouse gas emissions than cycling. Electric bike is probably the best.

That's assuming you don't reduce other workouts to make up for it. So riding your e-bike to the gym defeats the purpose.

Because it's not about protecting people from being hurt by seeing what they don't want. It's about protecting people's minds from being exposed to ideas that Facebook or the government thinks they shouldn't think.

They absolutely are. Just as soldiers invading another country are breaking the law in that country - they don't even apply for a visa! America imprisons foreign spies and so do other countries. Warfare, government hacking and spying are weird crimes that people everywhere support when their own country does it but not when an enemy does. They don't even care if they're right or wrong, just root for their home team.

There's not a lot of value talking about free speech on HN because it itself is subject to even stricter censorship of unpopular ideas. It's really a bubble of agreement and almost-agreement.

Yes. People seem to be fixated on the perceived evils of the day and forget about how all of history is full of competing political groups and ideas, most of them promoting or using violence to gain power. If it was obvious how to pick goodies and baddies, hardly anyone would join the baddies.

Nazis and jihadists aren't that bad. They're just people promoting their political ideology. That's everywhere. Look at gangsterism - it's a major cause of murders in the US but it's glorified and promoted by rap music. Communism is arguably worse than Naziism but it's not treated with the same horror.

Surely no vulnerabilities should be disclosed to the US government earlier than the public because it does abuse them to hack people's computers, and it doesn't make its own systems that would need protecting any more than private companies do. It's like giving a hacker group advanced notification.

Imagine the roles being reversed. Would we care if a Chinese chip maker notified Google before the Chinese government? I'm sure nobody on HN would be complaining. That makes it look like naive American-centrism.

The UK caught a Scotland airport attempted bomber using number plate recognition as he tried to flee on the motorway. So it can do some use.

Don't public places like shops have to have a sign saying there's CCTV? So customers know they're watched just like in the street.

How is more skilled jobs a plus? Doesn't the US have an excess of skilled job vacancies and and excess of unskilled people? I would think more unskilled jobs would balance the market out better.

Of course any kind of job is also a cost to the company running the plant, which means more of an obstacle to the adoption of more nuclear power. If we could do it without any jobs, I'm sure it'd be much cheaper and more prevalent!

Are you saying it's better to keep underdeveloped countries technologically disadvantaged in case your own country worries they're becoming too powerful and so starts a war with them to keep them underdeveloped?

Another way to stop wars is to accept that somebody else is more economically productive and let the whole world benefit from that instead of trying to destroy it.

No sub-saharan African country except South Africa has really stood on its own feet and been long term successful by modern standards. It's hard to say they would have done any better without colonialism or in the future without Chinese infrastructure. These might all be good things, despite the dependence they create.

It was more acceptable to be homophobic back then so you have to cut him a little slack. They wouldn't publish a new article like that today. There isn't some fundamental truth about good and bad things to write - it depends on how people judge you, which depends on the arbitrary changes in culture.

You'd have to scrape slowly to mimic a real slow user. Maybe at that point you'd be cheaper to get Mechanical Turk to do it. That should solve IP rate limiting, captchas, and just about everything except the endless arms race. Why are so many people going directly to these same-formatted internal URLs without clicking through from random other places? So the site can change the internal URLs and break it all over again.

Nobody who will ever talk to you knows the future price of any cryptocurrency. All advice you get is a complete stab in the dark and you'd do just as well to ask a monkey. The market is liquid enough that any public knowledge is already incorporated into the price before you hear about it.

I hear this "no real use" a lot, but I don't think it's valid. You can put 90% of your money in bitcoin and 10% in stocks. Then you have a hybrid investment where 10% of it has real use, and the other 90% is fun investment money with almost the same returns as being 100% bitcoin. Just like with gold, if Fort Knox/etc. were all sold off and used to make computer parts and jewelry, the value of gold would collapse to some fraction of what it is now.

Why not gold? It's doing fine. When do you expect that bubble will burst?

The blockchain is only growing linearly isn't it? I just downloaded almost the entire blockchain the other day. It was a struggle, but it was also a struggle years ago. It hasn't become impossibly difficult or started to require fancy computers or internet connections.

Where does the privacy advantage come from? Once you resolve a hostname privately, don't you still need to use its IP address publicly for your traffic to be routed there?

Huh? That's a very normal looking swimsuit. It just has the word "sexy" in the description. Sometimes children even swim naked! I think you're being too puritanical. It's not child abuse to sell children's clothes.

I should add that peadophilia is a sexuality, not a crime. Not all peadophiles abuse children and we should stop painting them all with the same broad brush as child abusers.

Isn't that the fallacy that car salesmen use to sell overpriced extras. "If you're already spending $20,000 on a car, what difference does a $500 stereo make?" The complicated mixture of wireless networks might be cheaper than fiber. Looking at it another way, why would anyone use wireless for a fixed installation when they could "just" lay wires around their house or up their street. They're already built an expensive house or street.

Important downside explained half way through: "if we were to convert every vehicle, or even just a significant number, to wood gas, all the trees in the world would be gone and we would die of hunger because all agricultural land would be sacrificed for energy crops."

They probably make their money from people who don't use all the flights they booked. Personally, I find that business model horrible and it's what you get with race-to-the-bottom markets like cellphone plans, electricity and credit cards. It screws over people who misjudge their own future usage but give hope that you'll save money if you get it right.

I suppose it's still a good option to have since customers are effectively being paid to do the work of planning their use in advance which no doubt reduces costs for the airline.

It seems like the least competent people to be designing and analysing psychology studies are psychology researchers. Statistics should be the number one skill required. The psychology part of these high-profile studies is usually trivial so that anyone with no psychology background could have thought of it, or at least easily understand it. I don't really see the need for a specialist psychology researcher to do this kind of work. Maybe we need a new field - "studies of interesting everyday phenomena" that's mostly about doing statistics right.

What about private cameras, dashcams, cellphones? I can imagine a possibility for a popular app to link them all together and generate a huge private database of images of everyone. What would you smash then?

It would be a surprise to find any toilet paper in a public toilet, so someone who needs it will already have their own. Remember, the alternative to this is not unlimited toilet paper but no toilet paper, so it's an improvement for everyone.

Transistors in TTL logic use mA of input current because they're bipolar, not FET transistors.

When I was shopping for a lock recently, the store had electronic locks you could control with your phone! There's no way a lock maker could possibly do IoT security right. Who in their right mind would get that lock? The burglar just has to see its distinctive panel and google some crack when it's eventually cracked.

Manually overlaying all the frames seems tedious. I wonder if it somehow helps make the edges and background more natural. I once made a simple motion detecting video recorder with OpenCV which generated the same type of images automatically. Overlaying only the moving objects on the static background.

I think hate speech is a bit like drink driving. Perfectly harmless itself but can cause follow-on real world problems that do impact people's lives - ie discrimination in hiring/etc.