droffel

Don't worry, they backed it up to Google Drive

Without a valid certificate, any ISP MITM attacks would be obvious

In the short term, flexible power production like coal generation gets used to satisfy grid demand during situations with abnormally high power requirements. It has the benefit of being able to be turned on and off practically instantly. There is no economic incentive to build out sustainable generative capacity if it won't be running all the time, and balancing the load on renewable power is awkward (see power price rate inversions for examples of utilities paying people to use excess energy).

I remain unconvinced that cryptocurrency is long term detrimental to clean power generation infrastructure. Quite the contrary, the existence of cryptocurrency to mine acts as a 'productive' sink for power produced in excess of grid baselines. In practice, our entire grid could be renewables in excess of peak demand, and cryptocurrency mining a flexible network load. It could quite possibly get us off of non-clean energy entirely.

Harpoon guns are designed to do exactly that.

> What about the crops they destroy because they would be less profitable?

To clarify this point specifically, food self sufficiency is considered a national security issue.

Consider the situation where a hostile country floods your market with cheap food products (below cost) until your country's farms go bankrupt due to an inability to compete. Once you stop producing food of your own, you give significant power to whoever controls your food supply.

This is a large part of why agricultural subsidies exist. And yes, sometimes it means paying farmers to let crops rot on the vine in order to not cause market gluts. That is an entirely different situation from futures and hedging, which in any sane market match supply and demand (with the result of minimizing waste).

To put it in terms HN might understand:

For moderators, the switch from being able to use third party clients to being forced to use the official reddit client would be like a programmer being told their favorite IDE/text editor can no longer be used for code, and you'll have to get used to notepad or something.

Existing code? Fine! No problems, you can run it like normal. Writing new code? I'm not so sure you will have nearly as many developers willing to work in that ecosystem. Third party applications are part of the core moderation loop of pretty much every subreddit that operates at scale, and depriving those moderators of the tools they use will be to the detriment of the quality of the site.

People saying this won't change much probably haven't tried to moderate at scale using only first party tools. It sucks.

Merkle trees! You (simplified) hash the data at the leaves of the tree, merge adjacent leaves (concatenation for example), and hash the new leaves, until you're left with just the Merkle Root, a single hash representing the entirety of your data. Verifying the root is easier than loading the data itself into memory and hashing it there since you can verify it piecemeal and without loading it all into memory at once.

Is residential water use really the problem? Relative to agricultural use of water in California, residential water use is a drop in the bucket. Agricultural use of water on its own exceeds the maximum use of water the state can support long run. I can understand the desire to make an impact as an individual, but even dropping residential water use to zero won't do much at all for the problem as it stands. It's a distraction.

Why use a mixer at all? The technology is fundamentally centralized/trust-based, and even assuming a perfectly trustworthy mixer, vulnerable to many forms of analysis (the list of which will only grow as time passes). If you want privacy, use something that actually gives it to you, like Monero.

Solar and wind are nice, but they don't solve the base load problem. They aren't consistent enough to operate as base load on a power grid. They are certainly convenient for maintaining peak load, but without solving the energy storage issue in parallel to the added capacity, we need alternatives.

I've been hearing the same line about nuclear plants taking decades to be built for decades, as if its a valid dismissal. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was a decade ago, the second best time is now. We should be scaling up our nuclear capacity.