I suspect moderators was very careful of allowing such questions to multiply on the site.

The other value I found was in fringe questions, like how do you access the model object of the value of a django form field from the template environment. If there even is an answer, the answer will hopefully point me to some non-documented way to accomplish what I want, or give hints to what kind of ugly hack I need to create. Those question don't seem to have much moderations applied to them at all.

Let say investigators would look at ycombinators and the design of the algorithm. Do we expect to see a major publishing-style on what content get promoted? Doubtful. There have been exception where they seem to have done moderation that has been close to publishing, like the early time around metoo, but they seem also to have been fairly open that they were experiment with moderation and testing how it effected the community. I remember HN moderator posts in the past talking a bit about promoting important articles or demoting tiresome topics.

Let say you are helping, for free, young adults/children to learn programming. You sacrifice time and energy for a good cause, and generally make the world a better place. No string attached, and no expectation for payment by those you help, a clear example of giving something away with no conditions or string attached.

Let now say that a for-profit tutoring company notice this and start to send their students to you. Instead of paying expensive teachers, they will use you as free labor and still demand payment from the parents. Does this change the context for your teaching? The parents, not knowing that you do this on your spare time for no pay, starts giving demands and expect you to behave as a paid employee, and do not recognize the sacrifice. Does it now mean something has changed, or are you still doing the exact same teaching to children as before?

I have seen multiple times when developers that release software under permissive licenses getting upset and stop developing when a for-profit company takes advantage of the fact that the license was permissive, breaking a social norm that has been created around the project. The permissive licenses only worked for those developers if everyone followed the social norm of reciprocity. How should such motivation be interpreted?

My experience disagree with that statement. The places where I find the strongest form of reciprocity is when social norms heavily emphasize reciprocity and punish defectors, which is typical in environments where peoples survivability depend on social norms and reciprocity.

A typical example is rural community vs a city. In a rural community there is existing and historical dependency on reciprocity to handle accidents (a barn burning down, a poor harvest, a bad hunt/fishing season, and so on). Defectors from the social norms can be punished for several generations ("I remember that your grandfather did not help my grandfather"), which makes defecting rare and expensive. The stereotypical example from large cities is that a person can bleed out on the street and people will continue to walk past, pretending to not see.

Naturally neither is an utopia and both has their own problem, but saying that the strongest form of reciprocity is found in places with no social norms, social expectations or enforcement seems to be plainly wrong from my experience.

If it is cheaper is less clear case. Having all those peaker plants at standby is expensive and require a lot of subsidizes, and there need to be transmission both from the peaker plants and wind farms, which is also paid mostly through subsidies. German subsidies to both fossil fueled power plants and renewable energy producers has only increased by time. The owners of peaker plants can also recover most of losses from periods of optimal weather, not only by subsidies, but also by increasing prices during non-optimal weather as there is very little competition during periods of high demand and low supply.

Not everyone agree with this strategy. EU has no plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the energy grid, despite having a clear plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the transport sector. With the war in Ukraine and war in Iran, the strategy of peaker plants are also looking to be poor in terms of economic and national security.

EU need to issue a full phase out of all fossil fuels in the energy grid by banning any construction of new power plants that burn fossil fuels by 2030 and a final decommission date by 2040. The solution to non-optimal weather has to be done through some other way. The discussion of renewables vs nuclear will then be mostly irrelevant.

In term of politics however, that is a much harder sell. When EU got together and voted on green policies, two strategies emerged. One side wanted renewable energy that is supported by natural gas, and thus natural gas got defined as "green". From central to northern Europe it has also been a core strategy to combine renewable generation with thermal power plants that burn fossil fuels, and looking at party platforms (which obviously is public accessible to anyone who want to read them), thermal power plants are a described as critical in order to enable renewable energy. The other side calls for nuclear energy, which EU also defined as "green".

In the transport sector, we also have two main strategies, that being electric and bio fuel/green hydrogen. The green hydrogen has failed to become anywhere close to economical viable, and currently the stage of the struggle is for chemical processes to change from dirty hydrogen produced from natural gas towards green. So far the progress is slow and has costed billions in subsidies, and converting the transport sector is still multiple decades away from becoming economical viable. The electrification process is developing much better, but it too is struggling under both the constraint of the grid and the cost side. Currently the best example is Norway, which strategy was to have the government subsidize car purchases by around 50%, and more than that in terms of car ownership. The grid however is still the major bottleneck when transportation converts to electric.

On the bio fuel side, the way it get described is that by-products are the main ingredient, but in practice only a fraction come from that process and the rest is corn, soy and sugar beets, which in turn is produced using artificial fertilizers derived from natural gas (a common theme).

This all means there is a common shared resource in most of those strategies, which is natural gas. When prices of natural gas increases, the grid cost increase in places which has a high dependencies on renewable energy. The cost of farming increase, resulting in higher bio fuel costs (and food costs).

If we want to serious ramp down fossil fuel use we need to remove natural gas from the political strategies. No peaker plants and no bio fuels produced by farmers using artificial fertilizers. That generally only leaves a few very expensive options, for example nuclear, green hydrogen, massively expanded grid transmissions, and government pouring money to get people and companies to volunteer in the change toward non-fossil fueled options.

Last time I tried it was a pain to setup and a pain to use, but as a sysadmin there is a lot of thing that share those attributes. The only question if its worth it. If the current avalanche of patches continues it might.

What happens at that point? Can shipping companies manage to pay both US and Iran? Will companies and nations complain to the international court, and will UN step in and prevent either side from doing this? As noted the US did this already in south America and nothing happened, and Iran has already started extracting a toll.

I would not work on a ship going anywhere near that area, and I wonder if investors are that willing to put money on that kind of venture. That leaves nations that are dependent on exports to put military personal on ships (like what Russia is doing), but will that be enough to discourage either US or Iran?

As with other recent trade wars, the value of this kind of behavior goes down when other nations start to retaliate. A ship might be able to pay the insurance from Iran, but can they afford to pay the same fee for each time they pass some other nations territorial waters? At some point the US blockade won't matter and the profitability of the venture will be zero.

There is no evidence that there would be far less farm fields without that. Farm fields exists if there is profit to be had. Right now the demand for biofuels are directly competing with the demand for animal feed. Farmers will primary grow and sell crops based on what pay the most, and can easily switch if one pays more than the other.

https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/360637/?v=pdf The Impact of Market Prices on Farmers' Crop Choices in Ghana https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373480516_Farmers'_... Farmers’ risk rating and crop portfolio choice in Kewot Woreda, North Ethiopia https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X2... Understanding factors influencing farmers’ crop choice and agricultural transformation in the Upper Vietnamese Mekong Delta

Notice that none of those says that farmers would not use the fields if the current most price worthy crop would go away. Farmers choose what to farm based, among other things, the market. If you remove animal agriculture, you don't get far less fields. You get fields with a different crop in them.

The only thing that will stop farming is either if the external cost of farming is applied, such as pollution, or if climate change makes farming the land unprofitable. Currently that pollution is not applied as a cost. A carbon and water pollution tax could be a strategy that addressed this, and would impact all farming regardless of crop. If that is "perfection" and "enemy of the good", then the definition of perfection is not shared.

One of the few areas of sustainable farming is aquaculture like shellfish and seaweed, which could actually be used to reduce the negative effects caused by modern farming. If there were a competition in least amount of harm, those would likely be the winners.

Fields of corn or soybeans will still exist without animal-based agriculture, especially with current demand for biofuels. As long as the land can be farmed to generate revenue, people will farm it. Artificial fertilizers is the primary enabler of this.

A similar situation exist with hydro power. We know that it is causing major extinction of species that depend on migration, with major harm to the ecosystem, and yet no one want to give it up despite being fully aware of the harm. Removing hydro do not fit any of existing strategies and so the current situation, as unreasonable it is, continues unchanged.

I have also seen similar issues here on HN when people discuss emission per capita vs absolute emissions. A large portion of people who heard the warning and are aware of the effect of global warming, would still argue that reducing emissions where emissions are being created is unfair if emissions per capita is relative lower compared to other places. The two camps created from this has opposing strategies, even if both camps agree with the current situation.

Building redundant infrastructure that can withstand BGP and DNS configuration mistakes are not that simple but it can be done.

It could be that that Leisure Suit Larry age verification was actually fairly good, if one put it in relation towards how much of their customer base and revenue came from selling the game to young children.

I would look if there is anything close to the idea of an "magnetometry" that could be used for communication with an sender and a receiver. Something like say the idea expressed here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.4218/etrij.2023-...

We used to have a battery developer, but they went instant bankrupt when the almost exclusive funding through government subsidizes stopped. They even rejected an offered loan from the government as not being what they wanted.

There is zero party platforms advocating for wind and batteries for weeks/months long storage. No party advocating a overprovisioning of solar either, possible because output during worst winter month generally reaching single digit percent.

The only political platforms that exist currently are either wind and thermal power plants to burn fuel during non-optimal weather conditions, or to expand the nuclear fleet, and it seems fairly similar when you look at other nearby European countries. Batteries are used as a grid balancer when switching between different form of production, but not as a replacement for the natural gas which is the primary form of fuel being burned in the thermal power plants. Election prediction is that voters are going to demand that construction of something is getting started as the Iran war is likely to trigger new spikes in fossil fuel prices, and thus this will be one of the major issues for the election. Other European countries will likely see similar election debates.

The consumption numbers for the worst month is a bit over 16 000 GW/h of electricity, with a steady growth each year (despite the transport sector being quite slow to electrify), and for a seasonal battery storage you would likely need capacity a few times of that. I would welcome it if a political party would adopt such strategy however, if nothing else because then we would have an alternative to the current two strategies being debated. They could calculations on what it would cost, either by buying it from china or building the production domestically.