WesternWind

There's some great studies, (and, as I recall a few HN famous anecdotes) on just the effects of using feminine names in emails or resumes vs masculine ones.

Google also isn't great at surfacing genuine product reviews that aren't just people reiterating amazon reviews with referral links and SEO. Like even stuff reviewed by reputable websites somehow loses out regularly.

If I want someone's actual opinion and people I know don't have one, I have to check reddit or metafilter.

Yeah I turned of email notifications on my pebble (and quite a few other apps), but I still use it for a quick check if someone texts or whatever.

Plenty of things are abstracted not because they need to be, but because they can be, and doing so increases efficiency, security, the ability to scale, and the ability of engineers to reason about the development.

To be clear, this is a book extract, not something she wrote for the guardian, but for someone who picked up her book to read.

She says many of you. Why are you including yourself in the many, if you already knew what she has to say?

Why are you so upset by a comedian writing about her experiences that you have to engage with it at all?

I just don't see a sneer. I just took a bit and reread the while thing. What I read is frustration, not superiority.

I don't think she's looking down on folks who haven't had her struggles. I think she wants people to understand them, perhaps so they can be more understanding to autistic folks in their lives.

But I don't think I'll convince you to see it my way, so I'll drop this.

I don't think it's a sneering to point out that if most people who talk about something lack the direct experience of having it, they may not represent it well. Personal experience gives folk's different perspectives. Autism certainly seems to.

And whether the struggles she enumerates are common or not, if suffering is normal and near universal as you suggest, I think it's good to ask, does it have to be so? Are there things we can do to make the world better?

I think not talking about something is unlikely to change anything.

This is what I use. It's a little hobbled in terms of add-ons to the standard because the orginal standard isn't centralized or versioned, but it works really well for a lot of things.

"I've got in trouble with white progressives in my social circle (which is mostly white progressives) for saying we should carefully scrutinize refugees from Syria and Iraq."

He was saying he got in trouble talking about Syria and Iraq.

That said, Afghan evacuees undergo the same vetting process. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/21_0903...

I mean those are possible outcomes. It's also possible they may make simple changes and have a more accessible webpage.

Given they already have a site and pay for hosting and a domain name, that seems like they might see having the site might be seen as a sunk cost.

The thing is, we do carefully scrutinize refugees, very carefully.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kyleblaine/some-things-...

Saying we need to do so very carefully is implicitly suggesting that that's not currently the case, and that does absolutely feed into racism against MENA/South Asian people and Islamophobia.

It's interesting that you are mainly considering the experience of a hypothetical small business owner and what they would be happy to do, and not the experiences of disabled people, and what's easy for them.

It's a lot easier to fix the issues the Justice Department mentions, and it's really a pretty short list, than it is to live with a disability. If your business is open to the public then it has certain responsibilities under the law.

Anyway phone calls don't necessarily work well for deaf blind folks, people with disorders like ALS (Stephen Hawking etc), and some folks on the autism spectrum.

I'm actually moving the goal posts, and I should be explicit. I'm using career criminals to differentiate from people who are violating laws but not for personal gain, for example those that require them to use censored services, or buying drugs, both of which may be technically criminal in their countries.

You could condition your companies annual grant on that, and make it large enough that they'd forgo crypto.

I mean I urge folks who have the ability to direct some of their company's money towards Tor. It's directly helping both Ukranian and Russian citizens right now.

Most people using tor aren't terrorists, oligarchs, extremists or career criminals though.

I've had intermittent issues with my motorola's camera app. Sometimes it picks up qr codes at restaurants, sometimes it refuses, maybe because of lighting issues, though turning on the flash doesn't help. I ended up downloading BinaryEye from F-Droid and I just default to that now.

First, I commend you on wanting to do something about poverty. I also feel that policies that help all improverished folks and bring more people into the middle class are important and necessary.

That said, the idea that Black people only have issues because of historical discrimination does not reflect the data, and thus I feel affirmative action would still be needed to address those inequities.

That is to say both Black and White differences, and rich and poor differences need to be addressed in my view. You can't simply ignore one or the other.

There's a rich body of observational and experimental research into racial discrimination, which shows racial discrimination continues to exist in health care, hiring and careers, apartment rentals, punishment in schools, etc.

Black babies have worse health care outcomes with white doctors than black doctors. White babies show no difference. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/17/black-babies-s...

Black boys were watched more in an eye tracking study by teachers https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-black-b...

Black and Hispanic names are significantly less likely to get a response when inquiring about renting a property. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29516/w295...

People with Black names are less likely to be hired as per this meta analysis of studies https://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10870

Those are just a few examples.

We also know that household income affects exam results, FYI, so your exam solution would disadvantage poor folks. https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/sat-scores-and...

Yes absolutely I'm sure ir does reflect other's experience, most likely the person or people behind it. That is why it's okay that it's not for me.

Though now I'm trying to think of dating apps that just wouldn't work. Cuffed could totally be the name of a dating app for people on house arrest or out on bail.

"Dating apps throw way too many options at us. You're supposed to swipe on people, maintain dozens of conversations, continue going on dates until you're exclusive. The lack of commitment undermines true intimacy. Cuffed only lets you match with one person at a time - forcing you to think about whether this match is worth your time."

This conflates exclusivity, commitment and intimacy in a way that doesn't reflect my romantic and dating life, or the lives of a number of my friends. I can only imagine what other assumptions it makes.

It's okay that this isn't for me, there's honestly a lot of room for innovation in the dating app or socialization app space. I've yet to find an app I consider perfect, though there are definitely ones I'm using that are more niche, and better suited for me, than tinder/CMB/OkCupid.

Affirmative action isn't racial discrimination, it's an attempt to correct for racial discrimination.

The figures cited above are with affirmative action. They would be a lot worse without attempting to correct for it.

But of course correcting for historic and systemic inequities is more obvious than just letting the status quo happen. That doesn't make it morally reprehensible, anymore than the status quo, in which white students are advantaged, isn't morally superior.

If you think white students aren't privileged, even now, I suggest you consider the figures regarding folks who get in who are recruited Athletes, Legacies, Donors, of Students of faculty members and staff.

less than 16% of Latino, Black, or Asian students are from the ALDC groups, but 43% of white students are. Of the 43% who are, 75% would have been rejected if treated as white ALDCs.

Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

Thank goodness I'm not trying to speak for everyone then, just for myself, because it doesn't seem like tyranny.

Some facts (and a few polls) suggest that the Trucker convoy isn't a broadly popular movement of truckers as much as a well funded tiny minority without broad support even from truckers.

First 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. https://newrepublic.com/article/165341/fox-news-vaccine-cana...

Evidence suggests that funding for this protest is in large part foreign (IE not from canada) and that most canadian donations are from wealthy business owners, not workers https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/14/22933772/givesendgo-fundi... https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/world/canada/canada-truck...

The convoy is unpopular both in Ottawa and provincially, and is in fact not supported by a majority of Canadians

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22926134/canada-truc... https://www.cp24.com/news/almost-2-3rds-of-canadians-oppose-...

Blocking bridges with trucks to protest public health members seems dystopian.

Doulas may or may not have midwife training, they aren't the same thing

https://thewell.northwell.edu/pregnancy/doula-vs-midwife

A friend set up a minecraft server recently, like in the last couple of days. Needs my username to white list.

I gave them my microsoft username. No dice But the old mojang one works. So I don't know if that means I won't be able to play on my friends server come march.

Single sign-on is best when it's an alternative, not the only way.

One thing I have read about though, is that, since unlike radio or tv stations there is no real regulator of who owns how many websites, conservative media networks are creating news sites for towns using a local contractor for local stories, and then having national or international stories be presented with a conservative slant.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/hundreds-of-hyperpartisan-...

There's also been a huge rise of non profit journalism.

A bunch but not all, Picking out a few I recognized (though I had to double check freesia).

A doula is basically a birthing coach often used for at home pregnancies, a pessary is a vaginal medical device, kohl is eye makeup, verbena is an herb, freesia is a flower, chigon is a type of hair bun.

I think part of the problem is companies wanting to police misinformation, or problematic language, or whatever as a single step without feedback loops.

I think you have to see it as an iterative process, where moderators, policies and heuristics intended to target misinformation will, inevitably, have both false positives and false negatives. You then have to have systems in place to correct those, and minimize them in the future.

Currently that system is basically just public outcry or boycotts, because the companies assume they got it right or don't have to do more, and that they can apologize their way out of it, or give 100 million to a charity and keep it, or whatever.

But we deserve not just better systems, but also continual work to make those systems better.

Without it, I believe the best thing you can do is public outcry, and moving your content or your subscription.

You are linking to correspondence, not to the study, the study suggests the opposite.

Saying they are completely ineffective is wrong based on what we know, to the best of my knowedge. I read, I talk to friends and family in the medical community, I am not an expert.

My understanding is that the vaccines have some effectiveness in preventing further infection but aren't fully effective, as evidenced by the study in Lancet which you indirectly linked to.

Your letter in reaction to this study:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/alrticle/PIIS1473-...

Here's the author's reply to the correspondence:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8694752/

Just because peak viral load is apparently the same doesn't mean infection duration or transmission rates are the same, and the study suggests they aren't, in part because of faster decline in viral load among vaccinated folks.

Of course that data is only about delta. The science may change, and I follow the science.

Getting back to what I said, you know that, in the US, vaccine hesitancy is correlated with both less mask usage and less social distancing, right? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33592035/

If your idea is true, and the vaccine is completely ineffective, that still suggests unvaccinated folks are more likely to get infected with COVID, and to transmit it.

Getting back to the article, "Bastian said Delta has placed nearly 1,900 people on Delta’s “no-fly” list for refusing to comply with masking requirements"

Those aren't people I particularly want to fly with during this pandemic, but I do find the scope creep of the federal no fly list, as opposed to the company's list, disturbing.