Viewing profile — 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% effi…

From the video, they can't actually plant 100,000 trees. One drone only carries 300 seeds so you'd need a lot of them to get 100,000 in one day. Reminds me of that "1,000,000 round…

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 gover…

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 ot…

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…

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 usin…

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…

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 system…

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 mark…

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 th…

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 bet…

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 abo…

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 …

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 mark…

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 rea…

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 b…

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…

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 mixt…

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…

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 …

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 psycho…