I made a new account, wrote a message, upvoted it with my current account.. and no change in points. I never see any message become black or "less grey" after upvote + refresh. It is a no-op for me.
HN likely does something to prevent vote manipulation from using multiple accounts coming from the same IP. That doesn't exclude the possiblity that your account had a flag to desregard votes before. I personally dislike this kind of hidden moderation like shadow banning. I know people will defend them saying that they are needed to deal with spammers but that does not make them any less dishonest when they invitably affect genuine users.
> High-quality drivetrains in bicycles can have an overall efficiency of up to 95%, can this system beat that?
It almost definitely cannot. I tried researching efficiency of suitably small generators some time ago but it was surprisingly hard to find useful numbers; however, I'd assume combined generator + motor efficiency won't be better than 70%. Add in conversion efficiency (for charging the battery), it's even worse.
However, that's not necessarily a problem if you consider the battery to be the primary power source and pedal power as something like a opportunistic range extender. If your battery can take you there and back, then does it matter if pedal power is only 50% efficient? I would consider such a tradeoff for the joy of not ever having to clean or replace a chain (or listen to it squeak), put it back on when it drops, or getting jeans stuck in it...
If it's an electric bike, one might care a lot less than on a bike that runs on meat power only. You may consider the battery to be the primary energy source, and pedal power a supplement.
Which works until you are out of battery, and then you have a lot of extra weight to carry uphill with greatly reduced peddling efficiency. At that point why not just have an e-bike with no peddling at all? Saves weight, battery lasts longer, can still walk it up hills.
You don't worry about being out of battery on a Tesla, so why would you on an e-bike? Clearly you need to fit the drivetrain to the expected use case, but there are plenty of people who might ride the bicycle down the street to the grocerist, but would never even consider going on a ride lasting more than half an hour.
In some places, the pedals hold legal weight to mark it as an "e-bike" (legal) as opposed to a "motorcycle" (illegal without appropriate license, registration, insurance, tax, inspection etc).
> Searching google for war in ukraine returns over 2 billion results.
Google always lies about the number of results. You'll see the real number once you dig in. First screenshot shows what you get by default, second shows what you get after you enable "omitted results."
The reason to use the tor<->plaintext bridge is to route around censorship, eg the great firewall of china, or various western ISPs blackholing the pirate bay, and also to prevent the server from learning much about the client’s identity
If you don’t want any MITM possibilities, that’s what the onion services are for (both client and server are speaking over tor connections)
I recall there being lots of "experts" around during the Fukushima disaster, explaining that there's nothing to worry about (because insert explanation of safety mechanisms in a modern reactor that either weren't there at all or were not working).
I hope the experts this time around actually know what they're talking about. It's hard to tell armchair experts and real experts apart.
I think this is an important topic to discuss, but not right now, if only because whataboutism and deflecting criticism of Russia's aggression to aggression by the US has been part of Putin's rhetoric for a long time now.
Releasing such an article at this time is a good way to get people to roll their eyes and dismiss it as yet another mouthpiece of Putin's trolls. It's also borderline insensitive. At this moment, the western world doesn't want to hear these complaints, there's something more pressing to deal with.
> So far the Russian protests are pretty anemic (I mean in numbers, not in passion, and I greatly respect those currently protesting)
Well I don't know about passion. I've seen videos where there are a lot of people protesting but when the police come grab a girl, everyone just stands around watching and filming. When the police come running at a crowd, the crowd runs away and it fizzles out. There's none of the Maidan passion.
