MyHypatia

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
1,008
Submissions
240
Member since
Dec 18
I've been a lurker since 2009, and finally decided to create account in 2014 to participate in the endless stream of fascinating conversations that happen here.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 9 months ago
A treatment is available but it doesn't seem to work in some cases. The author of the post is motivated to improve that. Honestly, I feel happy when people choose to spend their time trying to solve these types of problems instead of working on things they may not be that interested in or on problems where success doesn't really yield a real benefit to humanity.

Maybe, he spends a lot of time on it and doesn't have success. That seems better to me than spending time on something he doesn't really care about.

Comment · 9 months ago
While uncommon, people deeply researching their loved ones disease have had success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Lorenzo...

Even just fundraising for diseases yields tangible results. Some folks dismissed the viral ice bucket challenge, but it raised over $100 million dollars and funded a lot of research in ALS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Bucket_Challenge

Hopefully he accomplishes new knowledge discovery and/or fundraising for research into this disease.

Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Hyundai is investigating 12.6 billion dollars in Georgia, and the response is to raid the facility and arrest ~500 people working there. How does that benefit Americans? Korea is pumping money into our economy, and we throw the people working there in jail. For what? Working?

If Hyundai's operations keep getting disrupted, they can't justify spending billions here. Other international companies also won't waste their time investing and building infrastructure here. They'll spend it somewhere else. What is pro-American about this? Is the Republican party now anti-money? Anti-capitalism? How is this a win for Americans or Republicans or conservatives or anyone?

Comment · 1 year ago
I get that only talking politics can be exhausting, but I think not talking about politics is the trap. If a hurricane can destroy my life, I should prepare for that before it impacts me: pay for home insurance, buy a generator, weatherproof my home, talk to neighbors.

I should prepare for politics that can destroy my life before it impacts me, and preparing for it means talking to other people about it.

If people don't vaccinate, and my baby gets measles before I can vaccinate her, she could die. If I have a complicated pregnancy, I could be forced to wait it out and get sepsis and die. If my friends get deported, they lose their jobs, homes, cars and I lose my connection to them. If I have to pay more for goods because of tariffs that is less money I can spend on my family.

If I wait until my baby has measles, I have sepsis, or my friends get deported to talk about these issues and convince others, then I haven't adequately prepared for politics that can destroy my life.

Comment · 1 year ago
I had this experience too! My math professors in community college were much better than at my significantly more expensive university.
Comment · 1 year ago
You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?
Comment · 1 year ago
On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.
Comment · 1 year ago
Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.

I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!

For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.

One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.

In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.

Comment · 2 years ago
Sure, it almost certainly won't unless you buy a mansion. However, a job is still required to pay a mortgage, save for retirement, have health insurance, and cover living expenses. In a lower cost area, there are fewer job opportunities. If I spend 40+ hours a week at my job, I'd prefer it to be a job where I don't spend my days looking at the clock waiting for the day to be over every single day.
Comment · 2 years ago
Because that's where many good paying jobs are. If I buy a home in a lower cost of living area, and my employer decides to do away with remote work, I may not be able to find another job that can pay the mortgage even though it is in a cheaper area.
Comment · 2 years ago
A $10 gift card after messing up millions of devices and stranding tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...this seems completely tone deaf. Giving people a $10 gift card feels worse than just apologizing.

It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.

Comment · 2 years ago
A $10 gift card after messing up millions of devices and stranding tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...this seems completely tone deaf. Giving people a $10 gift card feels worse than just apologizing. It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.
Comment · 2 years ago
I agree that the word "trauma" is overused and exaggerated to describe situations that are not really traumatic. Ironically, I think that the word "outrage" is similarly misused. I couldn't help but giggle at the irony of "outrage" being used as the word to describe the response to this.
Comment · 3 years ago
Yep, I wear a hat and a mask. Keeps the sun off of most of my face.

Sometimes I forget the hat or the mask and then I just wear one.

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