> Choosing to post anonymously, rather than using my real name, made things much easier. I’ve occasionally commented under my real name, and am embarrassed looking back at my post history. There’s nothing terrible, but I’m sure some of my colleagues and friends have stumbled upon it and smirked. This might be projection or paranoia, but it causes enough anxiety to deter me from posting regularly.
One thing that pseudonymity will do is allow you support positions you don't actually hold. To steel man them. To really stretch your brain to find the best way to present and argue in favor of them. Doing so pseudonymously means never having to explain yourself to friends, family, employers, or three-letter organizations later.
This also works really well for positions you're leaning toward but don't know why. Or half-baked ideas you'd like someone to respond to. Or just questions that you're embarrassed to ask.
This may not fit with the letter of the HN guidelines, depending on the distinctions between "throwaway," "pseudonym," and "temporary pseudonym":
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
But I think it fits with the spirit. From "What to Post?":
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I was expecting the author to define "real peer review," but didn't see that. The best approximation is probably gleaned from the conclusion:
- integration of preprint servers and alt metrics
- tweaking incentives to review
- making comments on papers public
- use of software to detect fraud
- directing resources specifically to improving peer review
The bigger problem is that the author doesn't seem to actually zero in on the problem peer review is supposed to solve today. The author notes that peer review really got going in the 1970s as a way to filter content flowing to overwhelmed editors. But the emergence of the internet largely nullifies that problem. Wide distribution of scientific information no longer requires scientific publishers.
The real problem is the ways in which science funding, journals, and peer review have become intertwined, with publishers playing the role of bankers in this economy. This problem is cultural, not technical. It's a historical relic and it increasingly does not serve science well.
So, what is the actual problem that journal-supervised peer review is supposed to solve in the age of the internet?
Knowing the difference between a project that will provide value and one that won't. This is a very hard skill to learn, but delivers massive payoff. Almost everything else can be learned from books. Build the wrong thing and it won't matter how well you did it.
> The runway also “melted” at the RAF Brize Norton, military air base in Oxfordshire, west of London, on Monday as the UK struggled to cope with the weather.
That word "melted" seems unjustified. CNBC reports:
> The RAF didn’t specify why it suspended flights, but a spokesperson said “the runway has not melted” as early media reports indicated.
> Germany’s nuclear phase-out was prompted by Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power disaster in 2011.
What's interesting here is how Germany's public policy is swaying in the winds of current events. First it was Japan's experience that triggered the country to pull the plug on nuclear. Now it's the Ukraine war triggering them to plug that sucker back in.
Sacrificing the long term for the short was in former times described as a characteristically American problem. I remember reading article after article about how far-sighted the European governments were. How they built consensus across public and private sectors, working on a scale of many years rather than just one quarter. How much better equipped they were to weather bad times.
It turns out all democracies face similar problems (The People want benefits without pain), but good times create illusions to the contrary for a while.
Several commenters take the position that the distinction doesn't matter. This is "an old person's battle." What matters is getting things done.
I'm not so sure. For one thing, it's of both theoretical and practical interest to trace the path of how a technical term comes to mean its opposite over time. If you're in the business of creating technical terms (everyone building technologies is), you might learn something by studying the REST story.
For one thing, Fielding's writing is not exactly approachable. REST is described in a PhD dissertation that is dense, packed with jargon and footnotes, and almost devoid of graphics or examples. His scarce later writings on REST were not much better.
Others who thought they understood Fielding, but who could write/speak better than him, came along with different ideas. Their ideas stuck and Fielding's didn't because he wrote like an academic and they did not.
The other thing that happened is that the technological ground shifted. To even begin to understand Fielding requires forgetting much or all of what one knows about modern web technologies. Part of that shift is the timing of Fielding's rediscovery with deep frustration over XML/RPC.
> Writing up my thoughts in presentable state took too much time/effort.
What you may not realize is how crucial writing is to thinking. You won't really know what you think about a topic until you try to put those thoughts into a persuasive or informative essay. The "time/effort" is an investment in your brain.
This is something I've personally experienced hundreds of times.
It's possible to do as you are doing and not publish written thoughts. However, doing so motivates thinking about the topic from many different perspectives as you try to anticipate objections/questions.
I like the idea, but to echo another comment, the hardest part of running a blog is not selecting the blogging engine or how to host it. The hardest part is keeping new posts flowing through the engine.
What blogging platforms focus on this side of things? Which ones help solve the "What do I write next?" problem?
> ... Given the sorry state of Mr Biden’s approval ratings—by some measures, the worst at this point of a first term of any president since the 1950s—and woeful perceptions of the economy, it is unlikely that the tentative steps that Democrats are taking back towards the median voter will be enough to avert the serious electoral losses that they are facing. It is only after a serious drubbing that the descent from peak progressive will gain speed. Better it be in 2022 than in 2024.
In this entire article, just one mention of the word "inflation."
In 1992 Democratic strategist James Carville coined the expression "It's the economy, stupid." He was talking about then-incumbent George HW Bush's inability to do anything substantive to relieve the economic pain the country was going through.
> But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches … The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him.
A commenter here (and one on the original article) has noted that the part being elided appears to be the following:
> I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.
That this is the only elision seems very strange. The passage is crucial to understanding how Hitler was able to do what he did. Orwell is expressing his admiration for Hitler's deep understanding of human nature while at the same time despising its application. It's a lesson too hard-won and too relevant today to be brushed aside.
Still, I can't help but think that Orwell, who gave us the Ministry of Truth and its capacity for historical engineering at scale, would be highly amused.
The video clip omits the most important part of Vonnegut's lecture. He does Hamlet and it's a flat line. It's odd because this is the point of the article yet the clip omits it.
> Programming Rust (link to review) is the first book I read for an initial introduction to the language.
This book is very much under-rated. If you've unsuccessfuly tried to learn Rust by reading "the Book" cover to cover, you might try reading Programing Rust in the same way.
> ... I felt like I had to walk away with dignity and just declined.
You dodged a bullet. Whatever company this is appears to be circling the drain. The problem you'll face now is: how many other companies are in the same position?
> PowerCo will use the prismatic unified cell architecture in its batteries which allows for use of different cell chemistries. The cells will be manufactured from 2025 with the factory planned capacity to be 40 GWh which is enough to supply 500,000 electric vehicles. By 2030 PowerCo plans to have all six European factories up and running with a combined capacity of 240 GWh. The unified prismatic cell harnesses synergy effects and can offer manufacturing savings of up to 50% when compared to current batteries.
I didn't see anything in this announcement about where raw materials will be sourced from. It looks like the idea is to support multiple chemistries, but it's far from clear where the materials for all those batteries will come from.
The autopilot part of Tesla has never made much sense. Is Tesla the electric car company, or is it the luxury car company? Either way, why does the power train (EV or ICE) come into play at all?
Not only that, but Tesla has played the Innovator's Dilemma game from the position of the upstart financially, but targeted the segment of the market that incumbents will defend to the death (luxury cars).
Tesla could have gone a different way and played the game from the true upstart: targeting the low end of the car market. Attack from below. But it didn't do that.
Incumbents always win at the sustaining innovation game. The electric power train is a sustaining innovation for the automobile industry. It doesn't break any incumbent's business model (financing the purchase of expensive cars), especially at this point. And we're now seeing this with all of the EV introductions and announcements from incumbents. Oddly, though, there are plenty of upstarts trying to do exactly what Tesla tried - attacking the blubber-rich end of the market with an immature technology.
The trick is the to get those inflation-adjusted returns you need 100% time exposure. No selling because circumstances force you to. No selling because you get spooked at a 50% drawdown. Not many people can tolerate even a 20% hit, which explains a lot about the situation the world economy finds itself in.
One thing that pseudonymity will do is allow you support positions you don't actually hold. To steel man them. To really stretch your brain to find the best way to present and argue in favor of them. Doing so pseudonymously means never having to explain yourself to friends, family, employers, or three-letter organizations later.
This also works really well for positions you're leaning toward but don't know why. Or half-baked ideas you'd like someone to respond to. Or just questions that you're embarrassed to ask.
This may not fit with the letter of the HN guidelines, depending on the distinctions between "throwaway," "pseudonym," and "temporary pseudonym":
> Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I think it fits with the spirit. From "What to Post?":
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.