bjeds

Expect that this Hacker News thread will be overrun by Swedish patriots who will, with tooth and nail, argue for Swedish exceptionalism and downvote all criticism. War is Peace and all that.

I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.

I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.

I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.

I think you are thinking about this in the wrong way.

Sure Lat/Lon is the common presentation format for this particular coordinate system.

Right now in Sweden the time is 10:41 (it would be great if it was a couple of hours later, then I could say it's 14:41 to demonstrate the 24 hour time format). Yet, in software, I would represent that as time in UTC. Only when presenting to the user would I convert that to the users time zone.

My last name contain the letter "ö". In software, I would use an unicode string internally, then when writing out I would encoded that to utf-8. (20 years ago, I would have used an old character encoding called ISO/IEC 8859-1 or something like that, but you get my point).

For some damn reason I till don't understand, the decimal separator in Sweden is the comma and not the period. Still I would represent numbers internally as an integer or maybe float, and then when printing to to the user would I convert that to "123,4" (123.4) or something like that.

In Sweden, WGS84 is not the only common coordinate system. There are many others: SWEREF and SWEREF TM for example. Yes internally, depending on usecase, I would probably use a representation of WGS84 as reference, then convert that to present to the user...

This is how I think about coordinates.

I have a hard time following this article because it's so obviously one-sided and ranting.

FWIW the Stockholm Metro is also privatized in the sense that operation, planning and maintenance is done by MTR Corporation, the same company that owns and operates the Hong Kong Metro. MTR also operate a lot of other subway systems in the world, for example Sydney. I don't see any problems inherit in the privatization: Stockholm is excellent and so is Hong Kong.

Tokkaido Line in Japan runs at 187 percent capacity according to a quick googling.

I'm noticing a sad trend recently.

* This article is one instance.

* Within the past 24 hours there was a Hacker News submission "Self-improvement is embracing your messy, imperfect life" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29928873 )

* Combine this with the sudden appearance of subreddit "Antiwork".

Are people depressed or anxious because of covid, or what's wrong?

Trying to be a better person every day, in combination with the wonder of creativity and building, is what made the internet interesting in the early days. Who are these people who are turning communities into sad opposites of these values?

"Company X got state aid and paid Y in bonuses" seems to be one of those cookie cutter news reports that pop up several times per day the past year. The titles seem to imply that state aid directly went to a few senior executives. Outrage, right?

But why not look past the knee jerk reaction?

1) In most cases I'm aware of, after digging deeper, you find out that the state aid is not for the company - it's for the employees. Running a business is no charity and if you have employees that are superfluous due to current market situation you lay them off unless the cost of retraining future employees is higher than paying operating expenses to have employees around that are not working as much as they used to. State aid can affect the decision by offloading expenses to the state, for employment safety.

2) Bonus payouts may be for last year performance and not related to either covid or the state aid at all. Just because you have two large numbers within the same order of magnitude doesn't mean they are related. Bonuses may have been paid of regardless of state aid.

15k orders over 20 years is on average 2 per day or 750 per year. Is that a typo?

I think this one is my "favorite" in the list, in the sense of most surprising:

On December 10, 2019, Kosovo declared the Austrian author Peter Handke persona non grata after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[94]

You are being downvoted, but this is not as off-topic as it may seem.

Simone Weil had a brother, André Weil. You may not know his name on the top of your head, but I guarantee you that you've heard of the pseuodonym he created together with some other mathematicians: Nicolas Bourbaki.

I'm sure Weil and/or Bourbaki has lots to say about these topics.

I wonder what the unintended consequences are with this measure. Here are some:

1) I can imagine weird situations where a multi-leg flight could be broken up by this ban, especially if you are traveling from the middle of nowhere (connected to a smaller airport in France) and you are flying to another middle of nowhere place (connected by _another_ smaller airport in France). Instead of having one flight, you now have two flights with a train trip in the middle, which can of course be inconvenient in case the first flight is delayed and so on.

2) Say I live in one of the larger French cities, but not Paris. I want to travel to northern Japan, for example. Previously I could go to my local airport and transfer in Paris CDG. However now there are two other options viable for me because I can no longer fly to Paris: I can either take the train to Paris (Charles de Gaulle), hauling my checked luggage on the train and possible taxis (skis, travel gear, lots of duffels)... Or I can just go to my local airport, dump the luggage on that airport, and transfer in Frankfurt.

It doesn't actually matter, you can remove that data point and you are still at mercy at who actually interact with the ad once it's published.

Sensationalist.

The key point of the article hinges on one particular statement: "These gender differences cannot be explained away by gender differences in qualifications or a lack of qualifications,"

How the heck is Facebook supposed to know about someones qualifications?

Facebook _obviously_ have a set of standard data points they use for ad targeting, such as location, gender, age-span and so on together with dynamically updated data who have interacted with the ad.

Just because the outcome is not what the journalist want doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong or discriminatory.

Sure, it could of course be that Facebook algorithm is explicitly discriminatory, but it's more likely an algorithm such as this one is actually fairly neutral (compared with pre-trained data that can have built-in bias, for example photographs of people with mostly white skin - ad targeting is probably keyword based, and should be trained on actual data from what actual people click on).

Is it discriminatory? I don't think so. Is it "filter-bubble-reinforcing"? Yes, that's more likely. As more men initially click an ad, it will be shown to more men. And vice versa.

As far as I know, Nature explicitly allow open access... if you pay extra for it.

They call it "open access" if I remember correctly and it's a couple of times more expensive than it already is.

Universities pay a lot of money to publish in these journals.

Thomas Sowell has a greater reach than many people at Hacker News may think. In Sweden (of all places), he is one of the most quoted conservative intellectuals by some of our most read right-wing writers.

That's true, but in my experience vulnerability researchers mostly focus on the online presence/product of internet-active companies (the FAANG:s of the world, and their smaller competitors - companies that could realistically be on HackerOne/BugCrowd without standing out like a sore thumb).

If you've bought some software you install on your computer - like the good old days ( :) ), it's more fair game as you said.

I'd be a bit careful if I were you. Bug bounty programs are after all the exception rather than the rule - the security equivalent of open sourcing software - an active decision by the company to sign away normal rights and normal legal protection.

If you find a vuln and publish it and the company does not have an explicit bug bounty program allowing such things, you may be sued or face other legal action.

I know several security researchers who have been sued for hacking, in many countries (mostly across US and Europe), because they assumed they were doing a "good thing", whereas the law doesn't care - it only cares about what is legal or not legal. Apart from the hacking charges, the very nature of bug bounties means it's pretty easy for the lawyers to add a coercion/blackmailing charge as well, which makes it more serious.

My, possibly naive, view is that this has nothing to do with the "benefactor" of a policy (transgender people, in this case). It is more about power, politics and influence for the people who institute the policy.

15-20 years ago, working in tech was a good job in the sense that being a mechanical engineer, doctor, or lawyer was a good job.

Today, these are the most powerful, richest, and most influential companies in the world, and people who like power are involving themselves more than they used to.

15-20 years ago, these companies were more meritocratic in a domain knowledge sense: the "nerds" were powerful because they had knowledge and could build stuff.

Nowadays "politicians" (in the corporate sense, people good at office politics) have realized they cannot compete with the nerds who've been building stuff since they were kids, so to get a piece of the pie there's a political fight to redefine what's important.

Now "values" are important instead. Those who have the values have the power and influence.

I'm personally looking to move to a different industry than the tech companies. Some industry with less power and less prestige. Those will attract more interesting people who care about what's important.

You are correct of course. I was intending to make an alchemy joke about a particular phrasing of the parent poster (the part about creating 1 tons of "carbon"), but misread the entire message and commented on the wrong part. :-/

Now the jokes' on me.

Are you saying 1 litre (about 0.71 kg) of fuel creates 2.6 kg of CO2? :-)

Do you live in Europe?

If you don't then what you say make some sense, but the European Union think differently.

The EU ban things all the time.

For example: inefficient vacuum cleaners banned: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41119355

Light bulbs banned (this didn't originate from the EU, but the EU were early)

High watt hair dryvers banned https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/1106153...

Single use plastic banned https://time.com/5560105/european-union-plastic-ban/

As someone living in the European Union I'd be extremely surprised if bitcoin isn't taxed/regulated to death within 1-2 years here. The recent price increase will attract the attention of governments sceptical of assets they don't understand (they don't understand it, but they want a piece of it), and they will get loud support from the environmentalists who are alarmed by the reports making the rounds ("more power than Argentina", "more power than The Netherlands") etc.

?

This is discussed here, at Hacker News. It's also discussed at many other places on the internet. :-)

Why is this chat room you mention relevant? And who are "we" you speak of? You are presenting yourself as some kind of authority, but you need to back that claim up.

Wow, this is some Old Internet content right here. Hundreds upon hundreds of blog posts about a specific technical content, going back all the way to 2005. Thanks for posting!

Without much planning, I happened to end up in Ethiopia in 2018, just a few months after Abiy was elected prime minister. It was an unusual experience.

In Addis Ababa the feeling was.. electric. People were so hopeful and happy. Everyone was talking to me about Abiy and how everything was changing.

Then I traveled around the country, further and further north. I visited Tigray - not the place where the massacre happened, but very close by. Not the church in the articles, but many like it.

And then (long story) I had an opportunity to visit a military camp at the Ethiopia/Eritrea border... and then you start to realize how complicated everything is. Ethiopia has a border on Google Maps, but that doesn't mean the people in the north see things the same was as in Addis Ababa.

What is a national border anyway if you define yourself more by your tribe than your so called nation?

The people in Ethiopia are fantastic and I hope some peace can come eventually.

The cat is already out of the bag and IMHO the only correct solution now is for all countries to do what they should have done in December already when the vaccinations started ramping up: complete lockdown with mandatory quarantine for all people travelling, with significant fines if people break it. Until a majority of the population in all countries are vaccinated.

I see only two viable outcomes. Either we do what I said above and accept a boring life for 3-9 months. Or Covid will continue to mutate and this will affect the world for years or longer, as vaccines need to be updated and populations need to be boosted with updated vaccines, whack-a-mole-style.

No I'm not drawing any conclusions about Swedish education, I'm talking about KTH specificially. Are you replying to the wrong person?

I'm not sure what you are claiming here. Are you saying that I'm wrong in questioning calling KTH "elite" because I used one anecdote in a larger argument?

You can look up the admission statistics yourself: it's very easy to get in to KTH. Maybe there are some programs that are more competitive than others.

When I finished high school, the admission criteria for example Electrical Engineering was roughly "you need a non-failing grade in all high school courses". How is that "elite"? Compare with medical school where it used to be "you need the best grade in every single course otherwise you're not getting in". Or the Opera school where there's an admission test in front of an audience.

I can guarantee that MIT is more difficult to get into than KTH.

Now you are exaggerating. KTH is of course a good school for Swedish standards but calling it elite is weird. In what way would you say that KTH is elite, because I genuinely do not understand how the word "elite" applies to this school?

I'm a bit out of touch, but of all schools in Sweden, the only I'd call elite - by the common meaning of the word - is Operahögskolan (I think it's called, the Opera school) and possibly Stockholm School of Economics and the medical schools of the larger older universities + Karolinska. Those places are highly competitive.

Everyone I know, from the little village I grew up in Sweden, who wanted to go to KTH, did so.

Roughly: Education is tax funded so each kid has a pile of money in the local government budget. The school where the kid ends up, gets this pile of money. The kids (or rather the parents) can pick and choose between schools.

This naturally leads to a bunch of complexities, for example marketing catering to what the kids think they want (iPads, 3d printers, whatever) instead of what they need. Also, there's an incentive from privately owned schools to use this money as efficiently as possible.

(Note: when I say "as efficiently as possible" I try to mean that in a neutral way: if you are reading this and are left-leaning, feel free to interpret that as "the school will cut costs to make a profit" whereas if you are reading this and right-leaning feel free to interpret that as using the budget more efficiently than the government could).

If you are a glass-half-full person (I am), it's fair to call it grade inflation. In the sense of an unfortunate (or natural) the-standards-keep-chaning-over-time and suddenly people have better grades than 10 years ago, but the same knowledge.

If you are glass-half-empty person, you can interpret is as a sort of implied "if you pick my school (which means I get money) I will make sure your kid get good grades".

Haha I don't know where you're from but Swedish people are often stereotypically bad at both dealing with emotions and resolving conflicts. "Van der" = Gonna guess you are Dutch? Well Swedish people are, as you know well yourself, the opposite of the Dutch in how to handle things.

Source: My partner is Dutch.