Barrera

> 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.

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.

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?

From the README:

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

And yet the site apparently continues to accept deposits:

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.

> 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.

That is the consensus view. But what if it doesn't work? What if the rate hikes keep coming fast and furious and the CPI keeps rising even faster?

Recall that until the late 1970's the thought that inflation could persist through a recession seemed absurd.

Nobody is ready for that scenario because they think it's impossible. But then again, how many predicted the situation we find ourselves in right now?

> This has nothing to do with monetary policy.

How can you be so certain? Gasoline prices started rising well before the war:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GASREGW

I would agree that the war has made a bad situation worse. But to say this has "nothing to do with monetary policy" seems like a stretch.

Why would that be a measure of "monetary inflation." Shouldn't such a metric actually measure, you know, money?

Define "monetary inflation" and how to measure it. It would also be helpful if you could point to a metric that allows one to distinguish "monetary inflation" from some other kind.

Meanwhile, Gold takes a dump, falling 1%:

https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=NASDAQ%3ATSLA

Remember how gold was going to protect you from hyperinflation?

Something nasty is brewing in the economy. It will be obvious when it hits but until then it will be confusing as hell.

The bond and eurodollar markets have been signally for about a year now that the nasty thing will be a recession that will force the Fed back into accommodative mode as early as this year.

The funny thing is that both can be true. Inflation can soar and the economy can crater. The Fed can be accommodative while inflation runs hot. It has happened before. If it happened again, it's hard to imagine a scenario that would cause greater confusion.

> On a monthly basis, headline CPI rose 1.3% and core CPI was up 0.7%, compared to respective estimates of 1.1% and 0.5%.

Here's the number to pay attention to. CPI increases are accelerating. Have a gander at this chart:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

Also notice how that chart only goes in one direction - up and to the right. There are very brief periods in which it reverses, only to return to trend with a vengeance.

> The discussion is not over yet, but we believe this statement is equivalent to the well-known BSD or MIT licenses.

That's not now I'd interpret it. "Open Source" in my mind means that the software uses one of the OSI approved licenses. The quoted paragraph:

> Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right comes from the company, DRDOS, Inc.'s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all assets, dating back to the mid-1990’s. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in interest of Digital Research assets.

is not even a license in the traditional sense. It defines nothing. Whatever rights it grants do not appear to be transferrable. Worst of all, it does not even mention source code.

If the owners of the CP/M source code want to make it open source, what's so hard about attaching the actual MIT or BSD licenses to a source distribution and publishing it?

> I spent 22 hours, 18 minutes, and 47 seconds writing and editing “India World” across 42 sessions in Google Docs. (Not including hours more spent editing on paper, revising the story at workshops, or reading critiques.)

Given the quality of the work, I suspect that 2x-5x that many hours were spent on developing and revising the story (the parenthetical part). So let's call it 66 hours total.

Later:

> 8/27/2020 - RUOXI FROM TOR.COM EMAILED TO BUY THE STORY! They offered $1422.80 for exclusive digital, audio, and ebook rights for one year, non-exclusive afterward. Likely publication: early 2021. I said yes!

So, ballpark $20/hr. Some commenters have noted the low pay for this kind of work. How it's a labor of love rather than a living. And Tor apparently pays top dollar. On top of the fee, there's a profit sharing program, which starts to sound pretty good. But again, this looks to be the ceiling.

What's more interesting are the non-financial terms. The author can sell the work to others after one year. Depending on whether the author retains copyright (seems to be implied), this could be a pretty interesting way to go. I'm thinking about things like expansion into a novel, movie or other derivative works, for example. The acceptance letter doesn't quite make it clear how this works. How does it work?

It's easy to lose sight of this in the amazing images:

> In a dream come true for exoplaneteers, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has demonstrated its unprecedented ability to analyze the atmosphere of a planet more than 1,000 light-years away. With the combined forces of its 270-square-foot mirror, precision spectrographs, and sensitive detectors, Webb has – in a single observation – revealed the unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, and evidence for clouds that were thought not to exist based on prior observations. The transmission spectrum of the hot gas giant WASP-96 b, made using Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph, provides just a glimpse into the brilliant future of exoplanet research with Webb.

and later:

> WASP-96 b is one of more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way. Located roughly 1,150 light-years away in the southern-sky constellation Phoenix, it represents a type of gas giant that has no direct analog in our solar system. With a mass less than half that of Jupiter and a diameter 1.2 times greater, WASP-96 b is much puffier than any planet orbiting our Sun. And with a temperature greater than 1000°F, it is significantly hotter. WASP-96 b orbits extremely close to its Sun-like star, just one-ninth of the distance between Mercury and the Sun, completing one circuit every 3½ Earth-days.

This is an evergreen story.

The actors change, but it's the same play over and over again. Roughly once every four years. People with addiction problems and their influencer-enablers find "crypto" and go absolutely apeshit over it. Even after the inevitable crash, those who lose everything are mainly concerned with how to make it back.

What's not production ready about Bevy?

Have the cultural undercurrents that made the franchise popular in the first place abated at all?

The article kind of dances around the cause. It suggests that the war might have something to do with it. Then it pivots to the ECB being "behind the curve" on raising interest rates in the face of sky-high inflation. The higher bond yields in the US must be drawing capital out of the euro and into the dollar. Maybe there's some safe haven buying.

Unfortunately, this article is representative of the kind of aimless search for an answer to the simple question of how the US dollar can be surging like this at a time of domestic inflation the likes of which haven't been seen in four decades and gargantuan budget deficits.

What the article does not mention is US dollar-denominated debt taken out by foreign entities. As the dollar rises, these entities must scramble to find the dollars to service the debt, driving the dollar still higher and so on. This seems like a strange thing to do (borrow in someone else's currency, specifically US dollars), but it is very, very common.

If this dynamic sounds familiar, it's because it's called a "short squeeze." Those foreign borrowers have shorted the US dollar by borrowing and then immediately spending the proceeds. If the dollar falls, the borrowers make out like bandits (sell high, buy low). But when the dollar rises, they come under pressure and must cough up assets to sell to buy... more US dollars (sell low, buy high).

In today's world dollar strength is a sign of a distressed world economy. Selling assets to buy US currency to service debts is not sustainable. So the long-term picture for the US is not rosy, even less so for the rest of the world. A lot of debts will be defaulted on because the squeeze squashes borrowers like bugs. In the intermediate term, however, the dynamic of a rising dollar and distressed world economy can work very much to the benefit of the US. The stock and bond markets can soar as capital floods into US markets, driven by the far higher return potential compared to the rest of the world. This in turn can severely distort the economic picture, causing catastrophic policy mistakes and private mis-readings of the economic picture.