cknight

We also need to consider that even with the rapidly improving costs of renewbales, the dollars per GwH generated are still beyond nuclear, and require orders of magnitude more space, which not all countries have available. "Wildly expensive" nuclear is simply not true when put in to the perspective of a national grid vs wind+solar+storage.

The space factor is also at play when you look at geographical dispersion. It's one thing for Australia or the US to have enough solar and wind farms around the country where conditions vary, but what about the UK? A cloudy winter with hardly any sun means they are left with wind, and a day with little wind across a geographical area the size of the UK is not uncommon. It has happened for some lengthy periods, in fact: http://euanmearns.com/flat-calm-across-the-uk/. No storage solutions proposed so far have the longevity needed for the odd extended calm+dark spell.

Europe is at least fortunate enough to have an international electricity market across its internal borders to help manage this, but that largely works because of France's nuclear plants. It is the largest electricity exporter in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...

Representative democracy is all about the acknowledgement of different views, so policies are often compromises or cop-outs. So not only is it both, it is an acknowledgement of recent history and current attitudes in various countries around the world.

More broadly, I can think of two notable examples from the past twelve months where strong democracies made insanely bad decisions despite strong evidence suggesting they shouldn't.

From an Australian perspective, we've had multiple long-term initiatives implemented by a government only to have the opposition rail against them (and eventually, repeal them) for no real reason beyond party differentiation. Long term projects often can't survive election cycles.

With renewables and storage we seem to have an active industry with broad support across the populace, and the only real political differentiation involved is at what pace to set. Having something we can actually do right now seems wiser than trying to get something off the ground which has a strong chance of going nowhere.

Yes, our democracies are quite broken. We need to try and make progress regardless, because we can't sit and wait around until they're working better.

While the parent comment essentially reflects my view over the last few years, your points above are what I have come to understand more recently, so I am a bit conflicted about what the best way forward is.

In addition, I think that pragmatism requires us to acknowledge that nuclear has too much of an image problem for it to be a serious contender for new investment in many countries. That investment will come up against all sorts of political and social pushback. Such pushback could blow out the time to build a new plant yet again, compounding your point about renewables/storage progress that occurs in the meantime. Germany is shutting down its few nuclear plants in favour of new coal ones. If that doesn't demonstrate an image problem, I don't know what does. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation.

I think those countries that have succeeded with nuclear power over the last few decades have done well, and should continue. Electricity prices in France are very cheap compared to Germany (I've lived in both places recently), and their emissions from power generation are tiny compared to their neighbours: http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/el... . I wish my country, Australia, had jumped on board with nuclear decades ago. We have the uranium, we have the space, and we have a horrid attachment to coal that we need to be rid of.

But for countries like Australia without an existing nuclear apparatus, its difficult to justify the investment when there are much more politically acceptable places for that money to go, with much quicker results. Places which are rapidly decreasing in cost, and are part of an industry currently undergoing massive research and investment across the world, guaranteeing further improvements.

The flip side for me, though, is that even 50 years from now when renewables and storage are prevalent and fantastic, we will still need some form of base load power. We don't want it to be coal. But then, how many governments bother planning for the long term future these days? Mine sure as hell doesn't.

Problem: Despite there being plenty of articles and discussion posts online, I've not found a way of easily tracking how a given corporation is conducting itself ethically.

Project: I started Suitocracy with a friend so we can log events as they're reported in the media, and also get peoples' thoughts. We're essentially trying to capture it in one place so we can see how companies improve (or not) over time.

https://suitocracy.com

Source?

All I can find is "Pricing and related information on StarCraft: Remastered will be announced at a later date."

Ah, yeah I forgot about that. It doesn't make a Diablo 2 remastering any less likely though, IMO, as opposed to a Diablo one.

This is what I remember seeing: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-looking-to-revive...

Since it won't even be using a 3D engine (let alone any modern APIs like DX 12) I would think that any tweaks needed for WINE to run it well should be pretty minor.

Using that same logic though, I would have thought that making a Linux release would have also been pretty trivial for Blizzard to do, but given their history I suspect they have a policy of avoiding this.

A new game. My understanding is that SC:R will be a new purchase, while the original StarCraft Anthology becomes free for everyone. So your key won't be terribly helpful.

Makes sense to me - they've put a bit of time and money in to remastering it, so they'll want a return on that. And they know plenty of people will be willing to pay for it.

Given the job descriptions which Blizzard had out for a while before this release, I think it's Diablo 1 & 2 which are more likely to find themselves remastered next.

I have a GS63 from MSI which has the power button on the side. It can't be activated while the lid is closed, to prevent just that.

Hopefully these guys have done the same thing...

NBN state is less than stellar, a vast majority of suburbs have no NBN at all, and a very small minority have actual fibre to the premise. Unmetered plans are becoming more common but are only "affordable" ($60-70 a month) at the lowest speed offering (12mbit). If you want unmetered at 25 or 100mbit, you're looking at 80 or 100 respectively, and that's looking at TPG and iiNet.

When the shills in question are lazy, it can be pretty straightforward to detect, yeah. This sort of thing was very high on my list of "problems that will need mitigating if this has any chance of working" with my Suitocracy project.

The more research one does on astroturfing and the like, the more depressing it gets. Dedicated desktop VMs running different browsers and OS's, directed through different proxies to get different IPs, etc. Where social media is involved, detailed online personas are set up for each one, with reasonable histories for using later down the track.

I think the best we can realistically do is to raise the cost of successful astroturfing/shilling to the point where it might not be economical to do, at least on a meaningful scale. As others have said, community involvement and skepticism play a huge role in that.

I'm no scientist, but I was involved in a couple of projects with a research group to develop web apps that others could use to run biophysics simulations.

When submitting them for peer review, there was an absolute requirement from the journals in question that the sites did not require a login to use, and not even an email address to be entered to alert the user to results/completion. Result pages and download links were to be provided at a hidden URL which was linked to from the submission page after the form was submitted. So while we did this, we also ended up maintaining emails for job alerts, but optionally so. Most users have since used their emails to run jobs as it is more convenient for them.

But for the reviewers, their requirements made sense. We were submitting to journals which had entire dedicated editions for online scientific apps. Hundreds of them, all of which required peer review by scientists who were being very generous with their time. For a free service, such requirements don't seem at all unreasonable.

They do, it's just not very good. Each VPS gets one IPv6 address (instead of a /64 block as you might expect), and the address is also not tied to the server if you ever power it down and then up again.

I didn't know Online was related to Free! I used their insanely cheap €2-per-month mobile plan when I lived in France for 6 months last year. Amazing value, they seem very popular for DSL too (though I didn't use that). Back in Germany now everything seems so damn expensive. The internet, the mobile plans, the electricity...

Anyway, thanks for doing this digging, it's interesting. Scaleway has its shortcomings but I find it to be one big fascinating experiment.

By "changed everything to sell x64 VPS" I guess you mean "Added VPS offerings alongside their bare metal ARM servers"?

I have snapshots of my Scaleway servers sitting there right now. I've also never experienced any downtime (6 months and counting).

I'm not saying anecdotes are completely without merit, but they don't pair well with rhetoric.

I've just had one small $5 VPS with them for about a year now. No downtime, no complaints. Since my needs are so basic I think I could probably get away with one of these $2.50 offerings, however the problem - and it's the only problem I've run in to with Vultr so far - is that downgrading VPS plans isn't possible. You can only go up.

It's a mixed bag. I live in Germany as an expat and found giants like Dell (incl. Alienware) offered QWERTY options for their laptops, and so did the smaller Clevo resellers who pride themselves on custom builds. But in between, with the mid-size players like MSI and ASUS, there's no such luck.

I ended up getting an MSI when I stopped over in Taipei on a trip, after hearing about the Razer reliability issues last year. Mind you, I am not considering MSI to be any better, given my experience so far.

You sure are. My parents are well inside Sydney's suburban sea and are stuck on 3mbit ADSL2+ due to exchange distance.

New Zealand's national fibre plan is brilliant. If only Australia could come up with such ideas...

I believe NGINX's caching is as efficient, if not moreso, but it is less flexible. The tools available to you in Varnish's VCL are substantial, plus you get ESI support - something NGINX lacks.

This is important, especially when compression is part of the picture. For example, NGINX automatically replaces strong ETags with weak ones if gzip compression is enabled. Something to be aware of, if you're using them.

I think perhaps the "Scaleway" brand name is less about what their users can do with their products, and more about what their business model is.

As for their hardware, I believe they have designed all of the physical servers themselves, so they'll contain nothing they don't need. https://www.scaleway.com/features/hardware/

I've made no claim that Cloudflare did anything wrong with that blog post.

I can however see how Dyn themselves might not have liked it all that much. And in saying so, I think both the content and medium that Dyn chose in r1ch's post might be further contextualised.

I suppose it could be seen as a response in kind after: https://blog.cloudflare.com/dyn-issues-affecting-joint-custo...

I would consider an email a bit of an escalation though, as opposed to a blog post.

As has been mentioned elsewhere on HN, those 3 features were capable of triggering the bug. Once triggered, potentially any Cloudflare-enabled site could have been affected.

Ökostrom is indeed big here, but the solar thing seems logical enough for me if you look at the policy picture: The German government needs to reduce the country's overall CO2 emissions by X percent over the next Y years to keep political promises. I mean promises in both the sense of treaty obligations, and also social expectations from its own citizens as you alluded to.

And it has to do that at the very same time that it is constructing new coal-fired power plants to keep the base load power it will lose by shutting down its remaining nuclear plants. So there is some urgency to this. Rooftop PV is really the only option that can be quickly deployed en masse through incentives, right across the country, skipping all that red tape you mentioned.

If solar in Germany can be very effective for half the year, then it is still going to make a sizable impact on those annual CO2 figures. So obligations are being met on paper while also having a pretty visible presence on the ground in cities and towns.

I fell very much in to the trap of his second point there. Mind you, I would never hire a marketer (not enough money is involved in my startup), so this "marketer" would of course be "me". I decided there was no point telling people about my web-based startup until I had a working site that they could see for themselves.

So indeed, by the time I was ready to let beta testers in, I had no real network on which to rely on to get it in front of peoples eyes. As a not-for-profit, I don't plan to make money off it (and hence don't plan to spend much on it), and am not interested in the VC side of things.

I remember initially reading BetaList's requirement of submitting to them before you actually launch and I found it ridiculous. Now I realise, if done right, it's the proper way to go about things. And I missed that boat badly.

For standard plans, both Vultr and Linode have 1 CPU core at $10, both have 2 CPU cores at $20, and so on. Up to $80 a month, both companies have the same CPU count, but Linode has double the RAM. Vultr's bandwidth starts out a bit better but is surpassed by Linode as the price tiers increase. Linode's disk space is also a bit more generous.

Were it not for Vultr's current promotion matching the first $100 of funds that new customers put in their accounts, I would think that they seem uninterested in competing.

I was a fan of Vultr until, after Linode changed their $10 plan to have 2GB RAM, Vultr didn't match it. Beyond $5 it's no longer all that competitive. I guess the same couple be said of DO but I've never actually used them.

As jsnathan mentioned below, Scaleway's offerings are all multi-core. Sysbench defaults to using only one thread - you need to tell it to use more. (In your case, use --num-threads 4)