> 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.
> 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.
Anonymous posts also allow honesty which might otherwise be impossible. Job safety, physical safety, and protection against embarrassment etc are potentially easier when anonymous.
I have a generally pessimistic outlook but do see a positive here.
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?
Nowadays, journals and peer review solve the problem of, people need to make hiring decisions and funding decisions. But these decisionmakers don't have enough technical expertise or time to evaluate all the papers from all the applicants.
The decisionmakers do have enough time to learn which are the most prestigious journals in the field. So, they can pick the people with the most papers submitted to prestigious journals, or at least use that to filter applicants down to a short list for closer examination.
> It's a historical relic and it increasingly does not serve science well.
It's also pretty devastating evidence that the world is not going to improve in any sort of an organized way if the experts that we would expect to lead the effort for a rational world can't clean their own house. It's hard to trust academic systems to design ways to improve society when the academic system is built around an irrational base in journals.
An academic system that exhibits the same shitty array of characteristics as every other corrupt status quo institution doesn't give me a lot of hope for everything else.
Politicians get voted in, so they answer to the newspapers but in case that’s not funny enough, we tried just having an all powerful person in charge of things in the past but it turns out that works even even worse.
I dont know why would one expected academics and scientists to "lead the effort for a rational world" or be especially good at organizing or leading. It makes sense to expect them to be good at math, physics, sociology and what not.
>Wide distribution of scientific information no longer requires scientific publishers.
Wide and voluminous distribution of bad information requires filters to extract the good, peer review has some form of filtering functionality, although I wouldn't say it is great I think it would probably be better than the filter that a Facebook or Twitter of Science would provide (or just Facebook or Twitter if you don't like the 'of science' locution)
I think having a public forum for publishing and reviewing is valuable, and then having journals or something similar, that produces curated selection of published science based on that public review.
"But the emergence of the internet largely nullifies that problem. Wide distribution of scientific information no longer requires scientific publishers."
I'm not at all convinced that this is true - people have been saying it for a long time, and it's not manifested itself in a particularly compelling fashion yet.
I'm in mathematics, and this is very much true in my field. Papers can be, and nearly always are, widely distributed on the Internet (arXiv) before formal publishing. They are widely read, cited, and built upon.
The publishing industry survives because researchers need to put "Published in Journal X" on their CVs. The peer review process also can lead to incremental improvements, and will occasionally catch major errors, but at this point everything other than the stamp of approval is secondary.
Arxiv, and it's various follow-ons - I think I was one of the first submissions to medRxiv, are excellent as far as they go, but if we take the COVID-19 pandemic as a stress test, they still have a long way to go.
Beyond that, their curation is...lackluster at best, even if we're not talking about gatekeeping, filtering, etc. but just "What if I want to do something other than key word search?"
I find unexpectedly interesting articles all the time reading journals. I have yet to do so for a preprint server unless someone sends it my way, or it ends up on my Twitter feed.
Journals still play the role of quality filters/QA, which is very important. While your typical Internet-only journal is going to be like Alibaba, a top journal like Nature is more like Harrods - you're not going to waste money by browsing through trash there.
I would not even say those things would count as “real peer review.” Peer review is supposed to involve replication. Unfortunately that almost never happens these days.
What gives you that impression? Replication is a too-often neglected aspect of the scientific process, but I've never heard anyone ascribe it to the peer review aspect.
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.
I wish we had a pithy term for people underplaying exceptional events (complacency-mongering?) to show off how unflappable they are, because it would be nice to use it in this case.
Temperature records being broken are, by definition, exceptional events. In this case, the UK's temperature record was broken by 1.5C, which is a huge increase.
> This was in 1911
Cherry-picking a data point. There's a very significant trend of hotter days and record breaking occurring in the past few years. One outlier in a century of data doesn't mean very much (and your source of a paragraph from an Australian newspaper in 1911 seems to get the value wrong).
The 38.7C and the 100F were also each one measurement. Also it's not just one measurement, at least 33 places broke the all time temperature record of the whole country today (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62217282)
Yes, the trend is in higher maximum temperatures on individual outlier hot days. That doesn't make it insignificant, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I'm objecting to the sensationalism and overtly incorrect account of the temperature being 40C and the runway melting. What good does that do? "Approaching" 40C isn't 40C. Depending on who you ask, it was 38C there. I guess it's also approaching 50C, why not...
Where are you finding this trend data? It's not in any of these materials. Please share if you have it. I've seen all sorts of trends, but they always start after the last cycle, when it was very hot in '30s.
I'm not sure if you're just being disingenuous but the title says 'as temperatures in UK near 40°C', not specifically at the location of the runway, which I guess is overtly incorrect in the sense that it's an understatement, as it exceeded 40C at multiple places today.
>Heathrow Airport was the first place to break the 40C mark, hitting 40.2C at 12:50 BST but several other places also passed 40C during the afternoon, including Gringley on the Hill in Nottinghamshire and St James's Park, Kew Gardens and Northolt - all in London.
I think you missed my point. To spell it out: a modern Australian news outlet should be easily able to report accurate data. In 1911 they presumably relied on the telegraph (small "t") and human transcription, leading to a high probability of errors.
And, indeed, an error seems to have occurred in this case. The maximum recorded temperature for that year was actually 36.7 °C (98.1 °F) [0]. This was presumably due to errors in transcription, rounding errors, or (ironically) deliberate sensationalism.
Are you, perhaps, unaware that these are in different units? 38.7C is 102F. The UK switched in the 60s to centigrade[0]. I'd also be suspicious of the accuracy and method of temperature collection in 1911.. the Met Office didn't start collecting data until 1914, and of the source accuracy.. Wikipedia[1] seems to suggest 98F (36.7C) and in another town. It certainly was extremely hot that August in 1911... especially without modern conveniences.
What's your point? That this is unreliable reporting?
I'll take your word for it that the met office didn't start collecting temperature data until 1914. Countless other entities didn't either, and none of them were cited either. In what year did Wikipedia start collecting temperature data?
I imagine his point was that there is no reason to believe a disputed 100f peak temperature during the notorious 1911 heatwave makes today's 104.5f temperature advance on 2019's 101.6f peak in a country that does a lot of weather reporting unremarkable and unworthy of media coverage. Unless one was using the wrong Fahrenheit/Celsius conversion factor and somehow didn't realise the claimed 1911 temperature was smaller...
>In England 90° was exceeded on several days, the hottest being AUGUST 9th, 97° at Camden Square, London, Wokingham and Hillington, 98° at Raunds, and 100° at Greenwich (in the Glaisher screen; the value recorded in the Stevenson screen was 97°), the highest ever recorded in this country.
AFAIK Stevenson screens are now the standard, and Glaisher stands tend to record higher maximums, so the 100 isn't directly comparable.
> 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.
And I'd like to clarity that never did I mean that the knowledge and history fueling this so-called battle was meant to the trash.
Quite the opposite actually. As a self-described old person, I much appreciate the historical perspective and the subtleties and the changes the term has seen.
> 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?
If you have nothing to write about, you should not write; Not write about nothing.
You should write about nothing though, it's a good writing exercise. Just maybe don't publish it? Publish what you write after that, when you know what to write about.
> ... 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.
I am not sure what Biden could have done to fix the economy based on what he inherited. Interest rates should have risen a long time prior to his inauguration. The costly War on Terror should have ended with Bush’s presidency. Trump shouldn’t have moved so aggressively to alienate trading partners and exit free trade agreements.
He asked the American people to vote for him knowing he was walking into a mess. I don’t think these problems are his fault and he had been hampered by both parties in implementing any of his plans to fix it. At the end of the day though, how is giving him 4 more years a good idea? He’s ineffective. He should let another Democrat run so they can at least claim they have the right plan to fix things.
This is always the line I hear when a democrat is in office and the economy is bad, to the point where I simply don’t buy it anymore.
He could have started by at least acknowledging inflation was a thing and started working to combat it. They spent a year BS’ing the country about it and ignoring until they just couldn’t anymore because everyone whole works for a living was seeing it first hand.
Indeed! Under Obama's second term, Janet Yellen did not want to raise interest rates to help Obama. However, during Trump's term, she wanted to raise interest rates, an event which Trump did not like; that's why Trump replaced her with Powell.
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.