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.