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bjeds commented on Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden   nature.com/articles/s4159... · Posted by u/areoform
deng · 4 years ago
Well, this is a peer reviewed paper, arguing quite coherently that the handling of the pandemic in Sweden did not follow scientific methods, and they have a ton of references to back up that opinion. If you are aware of similar papers arguing against this opinion, please provide links.
bjeds · 4 years ago
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.

bjeds commented on Lon Lat Lon Lat   macwright.com/lonlat/... · Posted by u/dbaupp
geokon · 4 years ago
Lat/Lon is really the standard. The fact that some software internally represents it as Lon/Lat doesn't mean it's not a settled issue. If you look up the coordinate of a location - it's always in Lat/Long. You can't rewrite all the books and change all the maps to make it nicer for programmers

As the linked post says, Lon/Lat is generally easier to deal with b/c it matches to X/Y (and the North/Up way we look at maps). But you still have annoyances. For instance Lon goes 0-360 but Lat goes -90 to 90. This is also mathematically inconvenient

Add on top of that the X-Y coordinate on images generally have the X flipped and starting at the top left corner. So changing to Lon/Lat doesn't fix everything.

What I personally lean towards now is converting everything on read-in to a South/East coordinate system so it matches the flipped X-Y of images (like GeoTIFFs) and just always working in that system. Image manipulation, drawing to screen, output etc. - those systems/libraries I can't really modify myself. Everything else I can manipulate in whatever coordinate system I want. So it makes sense to choose the most convenient. Plus only dealing with positive coordinates is a big plus.

That all said, I'm a total noob and I have no "geospatial" background (just writing some software to deal with rain data right now) So this isn't pro advice. I'd just be curious what others think

bjeds · 4 years ago
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.

bjeds commented on Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line   seungylee14.substack.com/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect
bjeds · 4 years ago
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.

bjeds commented on How to Be Useless   psyche.co/guides/how-to-w... · Posted by u/robtherobber
bjeds · 4 years ago
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?

bjeds commented on Booking.com to repay €65M Dutch State aid after €28M in bonuses for 3 US execs   nltimes.nl/2021/06/04/boo... · Posted by u/the-dude
bjeds · 5 years ago
"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.

bjeds commented on Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1   petapixel.com/2021/05/26/... · Posted by u/luu
marban · 5 years ago
I've placed approx. 15k orders with Amazon Germany in 20 years and have probably had less than 100 issues, mostly with FBA sellers. I get an answer from CS within 10 minutes and 1-day shipments are on time ~98%. Refunds are issued as soon as I drop the package in the return box. Call me a fan.

The best experience is still Amazon JP but returns are a little more complicated (Even within Japan) — Obviously b/c you more or less do not return stuff in JP [Hansei (反省].

bjeds · 5 years ago
15k orders over 20 years is on average 2 per day or 750 per year. Is that a typo?
bjeds commented on List of people declared persona non grata   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis... · Posted by u/areoform
bjeds · 5 years ago
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]

bjeds commented on Simone Weil and the Need for Roots   paulkingsnorth.substack.c... · Posted by u/acsillag
jqgatsby · 5 years ago
Did anyone else think this was going to be about algebraic roots?

The complex numbers are famously the algebraic closure of the reals, but I find myself wondering lately if there is a related thought which doesn’t privilege them over the hyperbolic numbers or the dual numbers.

bjeds · 5 years ago
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.

bjeds commented on French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights   reuters.com/article/us-cl... · Posted by u/finphil
bjeds · 5 years ago
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.

bjeds commented on Auditing for discrimination in algorithms delivering job ads   technologyreview.com/2021... · Posted by u/yamafaktory
DanBC · 5 years ago
> Facebook _obviously_ have a set of standard data points they use for ad targeting, such as [...] gender,

How can anyone read this about job ads and not think maybe it's a problem?

bjeds · 5 years ago
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.

u/bjeds

KarmaCake day1427July 7, 2015
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