BaronVonSteuben (u/BaronVonSteuben)

BaronVonSteuben commented on MIT abandons requirement of DEI statements for hiring and promotions whyevolutionistrue.com/20... · Posted by u/nsoonhui

jhardy54 · 2 years ago

> diversity applicants

Friendly nudge that this isn’t a meaningful term. Once you start noticing people saying things like “our hiring pool is 60% diversity” it’s hard to unsee.

BaronVonSteuben · 2 years ago

I don't agree. "Diversity" has a commonly accepted meaning which in the US at least, means everything except white men. Female or non-white are "diversity." A great example are the statements and articles from 2020 when Biden announced the most diverse ever White House Communications Team which was 100% female. Biden talked about how critical diversity was and bragged about this 100% female communications team. All the articles I read about it had things like "most diverse White House Communications Team in history" to describe it. At least from a gender perspective, I don't see how they could make it more clear that diversity == women

BaronVonSteuben commented on Ask HN: Should you include salary range on an international job post? · Posted by u/BaronVonSteuben

JohnFen · 2 years ago

I've never had this problem, so I have no personal experience or research to draw from. But my first thought is that if you're going to adjust the salary you pay according to the location of the employee, then perhaps you should specify the salary range in the listing as a percentage of median income?

So instead of saying "100-150k/yr", you could say something like "2-3 times the median income for the area where you live".

BaronVonSteuben · 2 years ago

Thanks, that's an interesting idea. We have developers in the US, Europe, and South America. I have no idea what the median incomes are (or how the salary bands were calculated) but I'll check and see if there are enough consistencies to give a meaninful number.

BaronVonSteuben commented on CBD products don't ease pain and are potentially harmful – new study finds bath.ac.uk/announcements/... · Posted by u/thisislife2

BaronVonSteuben · 2 years ago

For those of us pain patients who had their opioid-based medication taken "because of the opioid epidemic" (even though we did nothing wrong and had been stable for many years or even decades) and were just told to "use cannabis" by all the non-pain patients on the internet, and when we said "cannabis doesn't work for me" and you called us liars or said we are using it wrong, this study is not a big surprise.

Meanwhile people I know have been driven to suicide as their only (legal) option to escape the pain, or spending their food money for illegal opioids that might do nothing for you at best or kill you at worst (fentanyl), instead of having reasonable lives and getting safe and known medication from a pharmacy. And these are people who did nothing wrong and hurt nobody. I suspect history is not going to look back kindly on the people who have mismanaged this in such a grotesque and inhumane way (such as politicians and bureaucrats who waved a magic wand and decided that all doctors should scale some percentage of patients down or face legal threats from the DEA or FDA and possibly loss of license), under the guise of trying to help.

BaronVonSteuben commented on Telemetry in Front-End Tools telemetry.timseverien.com... · Posted by u/gravitate

mhink · 3 years ago

The site in question isn't even talking about web apps. They're talking about telemetry in tools commonly used to build webapps, which is perhaps more surprising.

The Next.js CLI phones home to Vercel with statistics about how many times e.g. `next dev` is being called, along with details of the developer's OS and CPU, as well as what Next.js plugins they're using in their project.

BaronVonSteuben · 3 years ago

Wow, I'm really disappointed by that in Next.js. I love the product, and I'm sure they're being ethical about what they collect and how they track it, but I deploy this on my production servers. The idea of them doing stuff on my production instances that I'm not aware of and don't approve of is not pleasant. Not to say it's fine if it's on personal machines, because I don't think that is either, but yeah.

BaronVonSteuben commented on Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again? · Posted by u/jesuscript

BaronVonSteuben · 3 years ago

What's the scene like for music piracy nowadays? It seems like it was mostly gone. I've looked in a few different places and finding music released in the last 10 years is somewhat difficult. Do you just have to know where to look or is music piracy just dead/dying?

BaronVonSteuben commented on The Truth Matters and Secular Humanists Should Defend It secularhumanism.org/2022/... · Posted by u/mckern

BaronVonSteuben · 3 years ago

I've made this argument to many progressive friends, and nearly all of them replied with a variant of "you're 'bothsides'ing this" which apparently is supposed to mean your argument is invalid. That then leads to me pointing out that world isn't a clear binary and "both (major) sides" can be wrong or have problems. For some reason though, that seems to be the end of the conversation and no progress toward reaching agreement is made.

BaronVonSteuben commented on Capsaicin is a psychoactive substance p.migdal.pl/blog/2022/10/... · Posted by u/stared

snoot · 3 years ago

It would be hard to ban a national dish.

BaronVonSteuben · 3 years ago

Won't somebody please think of the children??

BaronVonSteuben commented on NYPD Arrests Cyclist for Uncovering Obscured License Plate, Lets Driver Go jalopnik.com/nypd-arrests... · Posted by u/quantified

dahdum · 3 years ago

> I'm a social ignoramus so wondering: is the cyclist in this case being a "Karen"?

No, I'd say it's more of an act of civil disobedience meant to draw attention to the casually corrupt practices of the NYPD. The driver is likely affiliated with government or the police department. Officers have been found doing it themselves.

BaronVonSteuben · 3 years ago

> I'd say it's more of an act of civil disobedience meant to draw attention to the casually corrupt practices of the NYPD.

Didn't the driver call the police though?