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eckesicle

1,649 karma · joined May 25, 2018

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eckesicle··on Swedish study finds discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations
Upon reading the headline I immediately wondered if childcare and cleaning were in the set of the female dominated careers.

My hypothesis is that men are considered much much riskier hires for certain roles.

The reason I thought of these two roles in particular is because socially I've often heard expressed worries that men in daycare are more likely to be sex offenders, and for cleaning I've often come across the sentiment that men are more likely to steal (in Sweden). If those beliefs are pervasive the discrimination should be reflected in the data too, as employers steer away from hiring men.

Indeed the discrimination effect is significantly weaker if you look at table 1 in the 'Data' section of study while discounting these two roles.

eckesicle··on “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says
It doesn't. The legal framework leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the judge. They look at the law itself, and interpret the intent of the lawmaker.

Suppose I wanted to cancel a service from a firm that was hard to reach. I'd block the payments through my bank and if it ever went to court I'd just need to show I took reasonable steps to attempt to contact them before blocking any payments and then most likely win the case.

eckesicle··on “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says
Meanwhile in Scandinavia:

You are legally entitled to unsubscribe from any contract in any way that is most comfortable to you. [0]

For example, you can:

* send them a letter

* send them an email

* call them and tell anyone who picks up the phone

* write it on a napkin and hand it to an employee

All are equally legit and legally binding.

Companies obviously do not want to deal with the manual overhead, so services typically have an easily accessible button for you to click.

Furthermore, companies are required to notify you at least 1 month before any contract is extended and offer you an easy way to cancel - and if they don't you can cancel at any point and get refunded. [1]

[0] for example in Finland: https://www.kkv.fi/sv/information-och-anvisningar/kop-forsal...

[1] for example in Sweden: https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-f...

EDIT: Just realised Finland isn't Scandinavian, but oh well :)

eckesicle··on I hate password rules
NIST best practice recommendations state:

* Require more than 8 characters

* Don't require special characters

* Don't force the user to reset their password

* Do check for compromised passwords

* Require MFA

* ...

All very sensible.

https://auth0.com/blog/dont-pass-on-the-new-nist-password-gu...

eckesicle··on Ask HN: What can you do to help the grieving?
Thank you.

We had a fairly rich social life before she died, but many people just stopped keeping in touch.

Maybe they don't know what to say or feel uncomfortable around us now.

eckesicle··on Ask HN: What can you do to help the grieving?
My wife died 7 months ago.

On day one I received dozens of bouquets of flowers and enough food to fill the fridge and freezer three times over.

On day fourteen all the flowers had died and the food gone bad. I received practically no phone calls or visitors in the months that followed.

If you want to support someone through grief just stay in contact with them regularly over an extended period of time.

eckesicle··on Ask HN: Are you also getting extremely obvious spam bypassing Gmail's filters?
I've been getting these for a couple of months too. I don't speak Russian so I just picked a couple of common Cyrillic characters and created a filter that dumps any email with any such character in the spam folder.

What's more annoying than the emails is that I'm getting Google drive documents shared with me with in a similar format from Russian senders. There doesn't seem to be a way to block or spam sort Google drive docs.

eckesicle··on Why most gas stations don’t make money from selling gas
Except that (in the UK) 99% of charges are made at home or at the workplace. I imagine the numbers will be a little lower in the US since the average travelled distance is longer but as range improves it'll decrease too.
eckesicle··on Weird Languages
I think it has to do with active choice. The first programming language that people are introduced to are unlikely to be the "best" for them. The first programming languages are disproportionately java, c#, PHP these days. By extension the talented people mostly move on as they learn new and interesting ideas. This leaves the pool of developers poisoned by the mediocre or bad people who spend their entire careers being expert beginners in one domain. People come to the more exotic languages, like Haskell, as their second, third or fourth language. By default the average developer in that pool will just be much much stronger.

Just because the average developer in a language is bad it doesn't mean that the language itself is bad.

eckesicle··on There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”
I've not used this particular image myself but I have installed glibc in an alpine image, then compiled some code and copied that over to run on the scratch image as part of a multi-stage build.

Super useful as alpine is a small image and with none of the drawbacks mentioned in the blog post.

eckesicle··on The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy
I have mostly changed my opinion on this matter after reading this blog post (linked elsewhere in the thread too) https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
eckesicle··on The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy
Thanks!
eckesicle··on The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy
In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that.

Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times.

The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart).

It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat?

I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms.

In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.

eckesicle··on What was the last breakthrough in computer programming? (2019)
'Maybe Not' is a great talk on this subject matter. https://m.youtube .com/watch?v=YR5WdGrpoug
eckesicle··on Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job
Why don't you go ask for your old job back? Worst case they say no.
eckesicle··on REPL vs CLI: IDE wars
Which function is that? I couldn't find it in the docs
eckesicle··on Heart inflammation cases in young men higher than expected after mRNA vaccines
My wife died from myocarditis 2 months ago. The only thing she tested positive for was COVID.

The coroner's report however, was quite clear that COVID did not cause her death or the myocarditis and that there has been no such reported case anywhere in the world.

If anyone has information to dispute that I would be very interested to see it. Thanks

eckesicle··on If Not Overturned, Bad Copyright Decision Will Lead Many to Lose Internet Access
These are all words but I have no idea what any of it means.

Are you feeling okay?

eckesicle··on Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs (2017)
I suspect that this is partially caused by the fact that 'spaces' is the non-default choice in many standard IDEs such as Eclipse and the rest of its enterprise friends.

Software engineers who make active choices in their setup rather than just accept default configurations and tools tend to be better at other aspects of their job too?

eckesicle··on Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
"To make up an Oscar Wilde quote just add '- Oscar Wilde' at the end" - Mark Twain
eckesicle··on No, Cellebrite Cannot “Break Signal Encryption”
They're not talking about extrapolating from one mistake though. They're talking about drawing one observation from a population of an unknown distribution. At that point that single observation the only estimate of the quality of the entire book. If you decide to not sample further (that is find other chapters in the book of which you are an expert) then the conclusion that the book is trash is the only rational one.

(If you want to read more about this then google "single observation unbiased estimator")

eckesicle··on Johnny.Decimal
Love this idea, and I want to adopt it for our organisation. Could you advise what you would do in the following situation though? I imagine one folder called "1 Projects" and immediately stumble upon an issue. We have 100's projects, not 10's.

Do I introduce another decimal point? Like so: "1.123.0"

eckesicle··on If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail
If you do only one thing then following the "functional core, imperative shell" idea of application development will set you up nicely for easy refactors in the future.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts/catalog/funct...

In short. Keep mutations to the edges of your application and keep your business logic purely functional.

Day 1 may be too soon to introduce queues etc, but having a clean separation between application logic and attached resources (like your storage layer) will greatly help with maintainability, testability and extensibility from the get go

eckesicle··on SteelSeries include adware in driver automatically installed by Windows Update
I bought the original Razer Mamba mouse and just now replaced it after ~10 years of happy use. I bought the latest Mamba model, Wireless 2020 or whatever it's called.

Quality is just awful in comparison with the original.

They removed the docking station, battery life is terrible and the drivers are buggy.

I'm incredibly disappointed. I wish they still manufactured the original product instead of this new mouse whose only improvement is that the LED changes colour.

Oh and it doesn't work in wired mode on the mac ...

eckesicle··on Epic Games has filed legal papers in response to Apple [pdf]
I guess that's that then.

I'll let Epic Games know, so that they can drop the suit and save themselves some vbucks.

eckesicle··on Amazon’s business model meets Sweden’s labor unions
You absolutely have a point but I also think that you perhaps don't have the social or historical context to understand how deeply rooted unions are in Swedish society.

The Toysrus strike has been mentioned and at the time the unions did not even use all means at their disposal.

In the event of a general strike bus drivers could well refuse to stop at bus stops servicing the warehouse. Banks will refuse to process transactions for the company. Members will refuse to give them their business (4 million or so out of the total 10 million population). All of this happened to Toysrus.

Nearly 90% of workers in the country are members of a union and most will follow a general boycott if urged to do so.

There really isn't much of a choice here. They don't have to sign an agreement, but they certainly will not be profitable unless they do.

eckesicle··on Amazon’s business model meets Sweden’s labor unions
I think the union rep from Handels is correct. They'll get Amazon to cave.

Amazon is the quintessential hill to die on for the unions and the labour laws are incredibly strong in Sweden. Here's how I think it might play out if Amazon refuses to sign:

- Handels requests collective bargaining

- Amazon declines but are sued in court and loses (you are required to bargain)

- Negotiations fail and Amazon refuses to sign

- The union realises that this is their David v Goliath and blockades the company

- Amazon refuses to cave

- The union declares widespread "sympathetic strikes".

- in the end garbage collectors will refuse to pick up garbage at their warehouse. Electricians will refuse to service their warehouse. Plumbers will not plumb. Workers, builders, postmen etc will all simply stop servicing Amazon. Companies that deal with Amazon can also be put in a blockade.

- Amazon will also receive zero support for from politicians for two reasons, first it's not a political matter. Second even the right wing opposition party will know better than to go against the electorate on this matter.

It's simply not possible to operate a large scale business in Sweden without support of the labour unions (or by having workers conditions that exceed the perceived minimum). If a large scale business wants to operate in the country they _must_ sign a collective bargaining agreement.

eckesicle··on Vertigo – a public domain 3D flight simulator (2003)
Falcon BMS is great!

Imo it's the best FS out there for a few reasons. I think what really sets it apart is it's dynamic campaign and large scale multiplayer wars that run over the course of weeks or even months.

It's incredibly fun participating in an air battle with 60 other online pilots (with human AWACS) working together or scrambling defensive flights as an enemy strike package comes in.

The high barrier of entry, both in terms of difficulty (you probably need at least 10h of tutored instruction to be remotely good at the game) and hardware investment (you need a joystick and trackir) is a feature not a bug. It keeps the toxic players out and indeed the community has barely any problems with toxic players.

Here's my view of a mission from a large scale PvP campaign. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TXqYky97auQ&t=9m51s

eckesicle··on Design Docs at Google
My thoughts on this matter:

1. Start with defining the problem you want to solve and identify the stakeholders. Then meet each stakeholder 1-1 and get approval.

2. Propose an API. Then meet 1-1 again for approval.

3. Make a high level arch diagram. Seek approval again.

4. Proceed with actually writing the design doc and begin the formal and official review.

Points 1-3 could be done in a week if planned well and will make the design doc a lot less controversial and get you through the review process quicker

eckesicle··on Ask HN: Production Lisp in 2020?
Not OP but to achieve this in clojure you could use something like:

For builds and dependency management: Leiningen, boot or deps.edn

For the front-end (clojurescript): Shadow-cljs + reagent

For the backend (clojure): Nrepl and nrepl.cmdline, Ring, jetty + compojure for a REST API

Frontend and backend can share code with .cljc files that work on all clojure dialects. https://clojure.org/guides/reader_conditionals

Both nrepl and shadow-cljs support code reloading through the REPL connection.

You can compile to a jar file and deploy that, build a docker image, or compile to a native executable with graalvm, or deploy on Aws lambda with Cljs+Lambada. Lots of options.

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