I’m not sure “culture war outlet” is quite accurate. I think the FP covers culture war topics, but is far more nuanced than typical rage bait. I have some negative things to say about this article in particular but the outlet itself is not all bad IMO.
I think it's just possible that some of what you refer to as "culture war" content might actually be rather important. So one rather suspects that dismissing it in this way suits your ideological inclinations, rather than your objective assessments of the world.
Furthermore, on HN you are supposed to respond to the article's content; not to what you suspect the content is based on the "outlet" and title. If you are unwilling or unable to contribute to HN along those lines then the community would appreciate you not contributing at all.
Even if nuclear were built as fast as possible it can't replace fossil fuels fast enough to mitigate before major feedbacks kick in. We're left with significant decrease in energy use as the main thing that has to be done and that there's no will to do.
We need to get generation to carbon neutral within ~10 years. Nuclear can't do it on that timeframe, and conservation can't reduce to 0.
OTOH, wind and solar can reduce emissions by 70% and save money over the long term while doing so. Wind + solar + short term storage can reduce emissions by 99% and save money over the long term while doing so.
Getting from 99% to 100% will be hard and will require likely either long term storage or carbon capture, which will be expensive. But don't let that get in the way of getting to 99%.
Realistically, we probably need energy all of efficiency, renewable boom and nuclear, and more. We should get going as fast as we can, but definitely will not be done in ten years. It is not just electricity that needs to be got off fossil fuels, but also transportation, industry, heating etc. Very likely nuclear power will have roles to play too.
PS. I live in Finland, our electricity is already mostly clean, in large parts thanks to nuclear. Next we will need to clean up heating and industry, probably with a combination of electrification (heat pumps), storage (heat storage, hydrogen), renewables and nuclear.
What grid scale storage are you referring to? The only one I know is pumped hydro, and that's quite iffy efficiency wise, can be expensive, and you need the landscape to do it (I'm personally in a very flat area with nothing for a good thousand miles).
Legit question too. I know we have a bunch of nascent tech, but haven't heard of anything at scale.
It's perfectly possible, it would just take will. We'd need about 5000-10000 GW. Even if you take the very high cost of the newest U.S. reactor at 11.6 Billion for 1.12 GW, you get about 50-100 trillion. Gross World Product is about 80 trillion, so if you did it over 20 years, it's 3-6% of Gross World Product.
If you're sincerely interested the IPCC reports and their summaries describe the basic science and the projections and are surprisingly readable if you're willing to read scientific writing.
If they're going to report on this then I sure hope the media demands more than third hand personal testimony. If there's anything real here then it has to be global and we have no indication that people all over the world have seen anything similar.
Like discussed on the Engadget version of this same story earlier, this is basically like saying that because Gab runs on the Mastodon codebase that Mastodon has a fascism problem. Good server administrators already block 90% of the problem servers and quickly block the rest through user flags. The problem servers are apparently are mostly in Japan. (Sounds like Japanese authorities need to crack down better.)
«To conduct its research, the Internet Observatory scanned the 25 most popular Mastodon instances for CSAM.» Are you saying that the 25 most popular instances aren't good? Or that what the researchers found is the last 10%, after 90% has been blocked? Or something else, and I misunderstand?
Also the underlying report is mostly about servers in Japan where the laws are different and/or that are blocked by almost everyone else because they are toxic. As they should be, because the whole point is that servers can block badly run servers elsewhere.
A misleading headline. Not too different from the last round of headlines that there are card carrying fascists in the fediverse. Both are true and they are blocked by all well run servers.
This is like the web and just like we don't say that HTTP has a X problem it doesn't make sense to say that open source software run by thousands of people across the world under different laws has any specific purpose or problem.
Improvements can be made to the software but bad admins can just rip that code out. Still I bet good instances will make changes.
Is everything culture war all the time now on this site? Every post becomes a stupid comment section where we'd be better off getting an LLM to write the comments for us.
Here it's people trying to insert their affirmative action narratives and also rant about California a bit (in a backhanded way).
What are you looking for? Do you think the post shouldn't have been on here at all? Or if it's here do you think discussion should be limited to a certain perspective or a certain axis? Admitting a political story inherently admits political opinions. What would "doing better" look like?
I completely understand that everything has a political dimension. And the broader culture war is leaving nothing untouched. But that means we have less room for a shared community even in small spaces like this.
What I lament is that the community of tech folks, embodied by sites such as HN, have splintered and moved away from their roots. I mean go watch the documentaries about the early days of the 70s and 80s and even the not so early days of the 00s: vision, tinkering, weirdness, geekery, cussedness, anti-authority, pay it forward, etc. That is what defined the scene. That's our roots and I'd like it to come through in comments here. Instead it's just culture war: us vs. them, grievances, IGMFU, and all the rest.
What kind of discussion did you expect on a post like this? Obviously everybody is going to talk about the politics involved, that's the only thing that you can discuss here.
Perhaps we'd be better off not having any country or state or city does X type posts here unless they're about tech. (That won't solve it, though, because any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.)
This site doesn't limit posts to only tech. The social culture in this site simply makes technical posts more likely to hit the front page.
I'm not surprised techies are inherently interested in some socio-political stuff. Especially a topic like education where they may feel it should be an egalitarian endeavor (the interpretation of "egalitarian" inevitably causes conflicts, of course).
>any mention of certain cities or states, even in a tech context, brings out the culture warriors.
any mention of any high level topic will bring them out. I don't know what to say about that. As long as they are engaging with the topic and arguments and not devolving into attacking users or spreading hate, there's nothing wrong with a strongly opinionated comment.
I think about it information theoretically. Oversimplifying, the information content of something is how unpredictable it is in a given channel. On HN, in 2023, the information content of yet another comment ranting about some given city or state or group of people is basically zero. Everyone has seen those comments a thousand times recently and it adds nothing to the discussion.
I think about it more pragmatically. If we removed a post because we were afraid of an effortless comment, we'd have no posts.
I think the post itself is worth noting and is interesting. It has room for, how you put it, unpredictable responses. I can't control who or what comments on it, only who to engage with or flag. In that regard, it sounds like a moderation problem more than a content problem to me (Maybe a user problem, but I'm assuming that banning 10 specific users doesn't solve the problem). And I feel you're offering a content solution to a moderation problem, which simply doesn't align.
The real question to ask is: is the moderation inadequate? How do we fix it? I feel like asking to ban these posts is giving up to the trolls and provocateurs rather than fixing the underlying problem.
I agree that a ban on the posts isn't the right way. I agree moderation is the right way forward but we need much more active anti flamebait and anti culture war moderation.
Why post like this should be here at all? How it meets the inclusion criteria?
If I remember correctly, not so long ago dang was editing out posts about ongoing armed revolt in Russia - a country that started largest war in Europe in recent history. And yet there is a post about minor policy decision in one of the 50 states.
>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I think you can argue there's an interesting new phenomenon here. By these rules, I'm guessing the original "Russia attacks Ukraine" post would be allowed, but not the 50th update on the war.
It is an interesting new phenomena. I think it dilutes the original purpose of this forum and as a side topic it would be interesting to figure why it's happening more, but maybe its fair to just let things evolve to what people what them to be, even if people that used to come here for technical things mostly might stop frequenting it as much I guess - it takes time to keep hitting the hide button. It's getting like posting political commentary on a recipe site, and I do get that it's not a perfect analogy but hopefully you see what I mean....
Honestly we'd be better off cutting out everything political and err on the side of being over-inclusive with "political." California deserves to be dunked on for a lot of things but should hacker news be the place for that?
I'm sure someone will glibly informs me that "everything is political". So please tell me how "High-Performance server for NATS.io, the cloud and edge native messaging system"[1] is political like this discussion about controversial public policy. Clearly, and thankfully, there is a spectrum.
I flagged that top level affirmative action comment, and I hope more people do. Contentless flamewars about unrelated culture war policies are boring, and are a negative contribution to the discussion.
I agree with the guidelines, but they aren't working anymore. I can predict the tenor and content of the comments on half of the HN front page these days just from the title and domain, which means flagging isn't cutting it.
There is also a "hide" button. I assure you that right now there are countless internet fora where countless people are having discussions that for some subset any of us would find horrible. Better just to not engage with what you don't like.
It seems pretty relevant to me. The comment was also positive, applauding this policy for actually trying to identify improvishment.
I don't see how you could describe this point as "culture war", "negative", or "flamewar". I suspect you just don't agree.
What's unfortunate about HN is that when enough people disagree, those ideas go away and others aren't aware they are even being expressed. The intent of these moderation features is to remove low quality content, but it's almost always a filter for ideology and sociability.
I can't count the number of times I have been reading an interesting comment or submission, and suddenly its flagged and completely invisible.
