catears

I think there is some truth to this. Obviously too complicated subject for me to understand everything, but I wanted to add my own experience.

One of the most motivating things I did to get a well-paying job and work hard to earn it was by having a deadend job as a kid. There is nothing that has motivated me to study hard as much as the realization that some people will be stuck stacking boxes their entire life.

Motivation makes a big difference, but obviously those who always think about how to make rent and still have food on the table don't always have the opportunity to live a better life...

I started programming at gymnasium and through uni. Throughout uni I did a lot of Competitive Programming. Most programs in CP are written and discarded within hours of each other. You also pretty much only use the standard library and no third-party tools. You never interact with the hardware of the system that the program runs on. Maybe reading files from the filesystem (depending on judge software) but definitely no networking. No threading or parallelism. No CI/CD. No Docker, K8s. No build systems. No project management & other "soft knowledge". No "Does it work on IE8?"-stuff.

Essentially you become an expert in writing 100-200 lines of code that reads data from standard input and prints data to standard output. Useful for CP, not so much in the real world. After doing CP as a hobby for a few years at uni I realized this and instantly looked to my peers. What were they doing? One guy was building something similar to IFTTT in golang. Another one was building his own window manager for Linux. Some were really good with constructing websites. But what except solve toy computer science questions could I do?

I don't come with any specific advice, but the way you described being down in the dumps felt very similar to my experience. I think that kind of experience is quite common and normal... Maybe more people have had such a moment than not? I hope you manage to find a way were you get to do what you love.

I think the argument goes something like this: if the state lends money to allow more people to educate themselves, then in the future those people will be earning more money and then be paying higher taxes. Therefore the interest on the loan does not need to pay it of, the increased income to the state from taxes need to pay of the loans.

I don't know about other countries but here in Sweden we have Lantmäteriet ("The land measurement agency") and they have an interactive map based on their data that is free to use. https://minkarta.lantmateriet.se/

The two main ways to get into university in Sweden is through your grades or through a national test (Högskoleprovet ~ The university test). From your grades you calculate a score and then people are accepted into programmes at uni based on that score.

The grading has seen a lot of debate over the last 10 years or so from when it changed (IG/G/VG/MVG --> A-F scale). The way things were graded in the old system had national guidelines, but I think teachers were supposed to take a holistic view on the students performance. Essentially, teachers gave an overall grade. With the new system there were two things that were rather unintuitive. MVG was the highest grade in the previous system, but this does not translate well to an A. Under the previous systems a few programmes required MVG in every subject to compete with other students. So as far as I know the new system required a grade "above" MVG. So that is one thing that makes it different. But also, the new grading system should grade you high if you scored high in ALL criteria for that subject. You were only supposed to be able get one grade higher than your lowest criteria. Of course, a lot of teachers thought "Well IG should translate to F, G should be E-D, MVG should be A. And then I'll just grade like in the previous system.". I think this line of thinking has created a lot of joy grades and unfortunately locked a lot of hard working kids out of their fair spot at uni while letting less hard-working people in.

I know some people who barely got into uni from their grades but turned out to be some of the best performers among their peers because they got fair grades while others got joy grades.

I can't remember which TV-series I saw it in, some kind of murder or "who dun' it?" show. But I remember that they had a pretty genuine and true role for a mathematician in that episode.

The mathematician was tasked with calculating the areas of manhattan that would be hit during stormy weather and give a rough estimation of the required drainage for the water to seep away.

That's the rough details, can't remember exactly. However, it always struck me as a job where the "mathematician as a job" fit really well.

I work in the med-tech industry and Jira is a very good fit for that industry. Most compliance issues are solved by defining a way of working that uses a project management system like Jira. Someone else read how to label a product with CE-label and HIIPA, and all I have to do is report my work in Jira. Don't have to understand CE-labeling or HIIPA.

For compliance it must be possible to find who made a change, why they made that change, and how they validated and tested that change. In a heavily regulated industry like medical, it is very useful to have a tool like Jira when the audit comes up.

I still accept your point tough, if you need to go fast and break things (you know, innovate and prototype things), jira is a real blocker and the "jira mentality" slows things down, for better or worse.

I don't think that lockdown is an instant recipe for covid handling success. There are many countries that "performed poorly" despite going into lockdown.

Also, I think you are missing the point. The swedish strategy was based on people following the recommendations over a long period of time. Locking down is not a sustainable strategy, especially when you believe that the pandemic might last for several years.

Reading the article I understood it like this.

~10 million residents from Wuhan (almost same size as Swedish population) got screened for covid. In ~30k people who recovered from covid, 107 tested positive for covid a second time. Roughly ~1000 people were in contact with asymptomatic carriers, but none (as in 0) tested positive for covid.

I know these countries are often compared. My point is that it is not a very good comparison to make in all cases. And mind you, the original claim was that a comparison between Sweden, UK, Spain etc. was not valid "because you should compare Sweden to Denmark and Norway". Where should you draw this imaginary line of which countries can and cannot be compared? Sure Saudi Arabia and Sweden are pretty hard to compare, but why not include the baltic states? Germany? US?

It's also very strange to me when people compare the nordic countries they forget that there are real differences between them. The difference in immigration policy is one plausible factor for a different response to Covid. I'm not claiming that the high death toll is caused by immigrants, I'm claiming that the lenient Swedish immigration policy adversly affected the death toll, compared to a more strict one like Denmarks. Is that a straw man argument because it doesn't fit a specific version of reality?

I did some simple google searching as well, and while it seems possible to transmit the virus without symptoms it also seems that a small minority of cases are transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. The numbers I find are ~20%. Sure, that isn't negligible, but I can understand why experts would base a strategy on those with symptoms.

To me, this sounds like Tegnell (who is an expert and has studied viruses and pandemics) knows what he's talking about. If you've ever seen an interview with him it becomes quite apparent that he's got a real scientidic mindset.

To be honest it sounds pretty denialist to me when someone says you have to compare Denmark, Sweden and Norway, but adding other countries is "not comparable". To me it just sounds like cherry picking.

An example of a big difference between Denmark and Sweden is that Sweden has a much more lenient immigration policy (for better or worse). I have heard anectodes from (swedish) friends about how these groups fare worse. I can very much imagine that differences like this make the comparison between the nordic countries less valid, so to me it makes sense not to cherry pick those three countries.

I think this is actually incorrect. Again, there is so much misinformation about this that I don't blame anyone. I think there was quite a lot of things being done.

I believe the goal was to keep people informed about the dangers of the virus and how to protect themselves, the most important parts being to wash your hands and social distance. I think they also provide information tailored to different sectors (like healthcare) and advise them on how to fight the virus. It's then up to the different sectors how they handle their specific situation.

I think that Sweden is perceived to not take action when it did. I think this comes from the politicians stepping aside and "transferring the leadership" to FHM (doing the opposite would be political suicide in Sweden). In some other countries you have had politicians boasting how good their response is. I've even seen politicians claim that people of their race just handle the disease better. FHM doesn't have the same vested interest in looking good.

The covid response did not depend on the opinion of a single person. The FHM is responsible, not Tegnell. This was clarified early during the pandemic (somewhere around May maybe?). The director of FHM essentially told everyone during the press conference that it was very shameful of "some people" to paint Tegnell as the sole responsible for "the failures of the swedish strategy". An example here disproving the "crazy scientist Tegnell myth" is that the messaging remained exactly the same even when Tegnell went on vacation during the summer.

Also, it's even more complicated since FHM don't have authority to tell other government institutions how to run their business. You could call them a governmental support function, if that helps.

Regarding that Swedish politicians are "free dumb" and "they can't do anything". We have laws that could impose lockdown in the event of war, but these laws do not apply to a pandemic/epidemic. My understanding is that Norway and Denmark have similar laws, just that they do apply to pandemics/epidemics. I don't think it is right for politicians to have the ability to lock up people when the law does not support it. We should have had a law that could be used during a pandemic but we didn't.

I also think that the asymptomatic carrier thing is more complex than you describe. I don't think a majority of the cases were from asymptomatic carriers and if you follow the recommendations (social distancing + wash your hands etc.) it wouldn't be a problem.

Hey, that was pretty cool to hear. Thanks for sharing that experience.

The one thing I have continuously relearned about this virus is that pandemics are incredibly complex. It makes sense the pandemic spreads into every context humans place themsleves in.

I feel like Sweden (the world?) wasn't well prepared for a pandemic. Hopefully we can prepare better for the next one.

This is incorrect, please refer to the press conferences held by FHM between march and june. I think every other one had a question about herd immunity (mostly from international media) and that herd immunity was not the strategy that sweden focused on.

Yeah, that is my understanding as well. We have a word for politicians that try to use the ministeries to "get it their way". "Ministerstyre", very roughly translates to "rule through ministry". Ruling by "Ministerstyre" is a surefire way to never get any votes for you and maybe even for your party again.

Maybe I should make it clear I don't defend the strategy. I'm not an expert and honestly I don't know what the best national strategy for protecting against a pandemic is.

Regarding the lack of information for the elderly care tough, I know Anders Tegnell (who was the spokesperson for FHM during most press conferences) have said in several interviews that he regards that as a failure on FHMs part. They believed that stressing that the elderly were the most vulnerable would be enough, but says that this was probably a mistake.

As a swede, I want to correct you. There has been a ton of outright mis-information about my country and how it handled the coronavirus so I don't blame anyone for not knowing. The poor journalism that has been conducted is to blame and the resulting mis-information.

Misinformation 1: Swedens healthcare system did not collapse on itself. Fact: In the region where most people got sick (Stockholm) the military was called in to set up an emergency hospital. This was never used because the hospitals in Stockholm managed without it.

Misinformation 2: Sweden imposed no lock-down. While technically-kinda correct that we did not lock people in their homes, quite quickly it became illegal with public events of 50 or more people. (mid-late March I think).

Misinformation 3: Sweden "remained largely the same after the virus". Goodness sake, no. Anyone that claims this hasn't talked to a single swede.

Misinformation 4: Swedens strategy was to achieve herd immunity. No. In spring this question was asked at almost every press conference with FHM (ministry of public health). The strategy from the beginning was to preserve the overall health of Swedes as good as possible. During the open questions with FHM they have repeatedly brought up and said that the goal was not to achieve herd immunity. This stuff is complex and poor journalists don't like complex answers. As far as I remember, the reason for this "milder" strategy focused on spreading accurate and correct information about the virus was because FHM (correctly) predicted that we would have to live with the virus for a very long time. They decided that the best way to protect people over a period of possibly several years was by arming them with information on how to protect themselves and others (social distance, wash your hands, work from home if you can).

The real issues that caused Sweden to have such high rates of death compared to similar countries like Denmark and Norway are more complex and has to do with lack of information for those caring for the elderly, poor equipment (and especially reserves with unusable equipment), and other systemic failures when it comes to elderly care.

Those in care homes were especially vulnerable because they are both older and come into contect with a lot of people. I believe the Swedish healthcare system failed to protect these people, and that is a major contributor to the high death toll.

There is already protection against this form of attack in the browser with CORS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS

I tried looking up if there are any previous examples of FIPS 140 that allow bcrypt. I can find 37 matches when searching for "bcrypt" here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141226152243/http://csrc.nist.... . Seems that BitLocker in Windows used BCrypt at one point. Author doesn't mention how old this is, but BCrypt seems to have been approved for FIPS 140-2 compliance since 2008. If the event described was after 2008, I would not hire those same auditors again...

It will always baffle me how some programmers believe that meetings are the bane of their existance because "they only waste time", while at the same time they can entertain the "tabs vs. spaces" (or "vim vs. emacs") discussion for hours.

I don't care about the indentation method, I just want to press Tab, or Ctrl+S and have it do the right thing. Not waste any brainpower thinking about it.

It's true. Unfortunately whichever road a project takes it will eventually lead to Rome.

But if you google "twitter bots state level actor" the first three links are two government sites and one is nature.com (as in the big journal Nature).

I can give lots of examples of googling that gets you to conspiracy sites, but I am not sure how those examples would prove anything...

I want to tackle a misunderstanding I have seen from some posters in this thread about passwords/secrets/keys. Using a password should not be considered a form of "obscure defense".

If you are using a password there is a mathematical definition of how hard it is to crack, the number of bits of entropy contained in the password. If you use a password manager like KeePass it will tell you the number of bits in you password.

If it takes me 2^100 guesses for a 50% chance to discover your password then that is not obscurity, that is a valid defense mechanism. That the password itself is obscure is not a reason to call the strategy obscure.

Passwords and keys are used to create an artifact that will unlock access to a whole bunch of information. Instead of protecting each piece of information individually, we can now focus our efforts on protecting the password instead.

With a password we have managed to make the process of protecting information simpler, less obscure.

Sorry to discuss something a bit off-topic from the article, but I figured I had seen the "passwords are obscure" argument so many times here and that this could be a valuable opportunity to teach something about security.

While the article does have a point that obscurity can improve defences, I think security is not about defence. Security is about managing risk in a consistent and rational manner. This means that any defense mechanism need an appropriate level of defense against the threat.

Having a network share on the home network that only your household can access and use 2FA for that? Maybe a bit too much. Do you know your organization will be individually targeted by smart and tenacious actors? Changing the SSH port isn't gonna stop them.

I agree with the article that more discussion about what makes something secure is valuable security work. Disregarding defenses at first sight because they "sound obscure" isn't a good argument. But it also doesn't mean that "small things that might stop someone" is a good layer of defense.

And then there is also the cost of adding security layers...

I recently found this out. You need to specifically create a "secret chat" in order for telegram to actually use E2E. I originally chose Telegram because I wanted a messaging app that respects my privacy and E2E by default is pretty obvious in that case.

Maybe I'm stupid for not realizing or looking it up before chosing Telegram. Luckily there are a lot of other apps out there in the same space that do this better. Have switched to Signal now and really like it! Privacy should never be an opt-in feature like in Telegram!

Would you mind stop telling everyone that they don't understand compounding interest?

I've read a lot of comments and your replies and I have noticed a disturbing amount of normal comments being greyed out while you explain to them that they don't understand compounding, because if they did understand it they would be against any form of wealth tax.

Pretty much everyone who owns stocks or invest money, which quite a lot of people do, understand the effects of compounding interest.

If I understand you correctly, you mean that wealthy americans who have built their fortune and life in america will choose to not only leave but also revoke their citizenship and leave the US? All because they have to pay more money than before in taxes?

Personally, I don't think all millionares and billionares are willing to leave their life and family behind because of a some dollars in federal tax...