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.

- 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?

> Interoperate with your existing C++ code, from inheritance to templates

Somewhere in the docs (can't remember where) is a link to a Rust/C++ interop project sponsored by Google, Crubit:

https://github.com/google/crubit/blob/main/docs/design.md

In case it's not clear, Carbon is also at the moment a Google project.

There's not much in the Crubit README (although there is a warning not to use it), but the docs directory has some interesting stuff:

> The primary goal of C++/Rust interop tooling is to enable Rust to be used side-by-side with C++ in large existing codebases.

https://github.com/google/crubit/blob/main/docs/design.md

It's not entirely clear whether this interop is to work as envisioned for Carbon (source level?) or some other approach.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32157267

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

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.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/london-flights-suspended-aft...

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.

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.

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.

What blogging platforms focus on this side of things? Which ones help solve the "What do I write next?" problem?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid

Looks like Dems will be on the receiving end of "It's the economy, stupid" this time.

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.

The full review is, apparently, here:

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112649

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

See this one, for example (near the end):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_RUgnC1lm8

Vonnegut concludes:

"We don't know enough in life to know what the good news is and the bad news is."

Cinderella and the rest are fantasy. Hamlet is the truth. Life is ambiguous and stories that tell us otherwise are lying to us.

This story graph thing has been quoted out of context so many times that people have completely forgotten the point Vonnegut was trying to make.

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.

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?

https://celsius.network

Business as usual. Oh yeah, check out our hello bar for that minor detail that withdrawal, swap, and transfers are "currently paused."

These guys are going to prison.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32102292

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

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.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32089854

Points: 1

# Comments: 1