averagewall

6 ms·

1.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 fo
2.
by averagewall 9y ago
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.
3.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 a
4.
by averagewall 9y ago
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.
5.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 good
6.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 mu
7.
by averagewall 9y ago
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
8.
by averagewall 9y ago
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.
9.
by averagewall 9y ago
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.
10.
by averagewall 9y ago
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
11.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 sto
12.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 Chines
13.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 ho
14.
by averagewall 9y ago
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
15.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 alread
16.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 investme
17.
by averagewall 9y ago
Why not gold? It's doing fine. When do you expect that bubble will burst?
18.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 f
19.
by averagewall 9y ago
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?
20.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 clot
21.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 cheape
22.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 woul
23.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 cred
24.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 s
25.
by averagewall 9y ago
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?
26.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 ev
27.
by averagewall 9y ago
Transistors in TTL logic use mA of input current because they're bipolar, not FET transistors.
28.
by averagewall 9y ago
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
29.
by averagewall 9y ago
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 automaticall
30.
by averagewall 9y ago
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.

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