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ellen364 commented on Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers   reuters.com/world/uk/brit... · Posted by u/alex77456
rtpg · 3 months ago
> anyone running e.g. a restaurant is having to essentially guess whether a potential employee is in the UK legally or not, on pain of criminal charges if they get it wrong in one direction and discrimination lawsuits if they get it wrong in the other.

I don't get this. Is there nothing like some sort of number to register any tax withholding or the like? I imagine that tax authorities and immigration authorities don't actually cooperate together (and for good reason!) but my impression for places like the US is that you really do have to provide some sort of number provided by the government for most kinds of employment.

Unless of course you're just not trying to pay payroll taxes I guess?

ellen364 · 3 months ago
To work, you need to provide a National Insurance number, which is unique and tied to certain state benefits like pension. The idea is you work, pay "national insurance" contributions and accrue "contributing years" to get a state pension later.

The wrinkle is that it doesn't seem to be tied well to identity. Someone working illegally can provide an NI number that's legit but not theirs. Their work accrues to someone else's NI record, but the person getting the extra years probably never notices and the person working under their NI number doesn't care because they aren't entitled to a state pension anyway, they just want to work now.

ellen364 commented on A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy   apiguy.substack.com/p/a-b... · Posted by u/Qwuke
simianparrot · 3 months ago
As a fellow Scandinavian, DHH is just writing what the vast majority of us think. And it isn’t racist. That word is being misused until it soon has no value left; you sure you want that?
ellen364 · 3 months ago
I've been thinking about whether "$some_country rape gangs" seems racist to me. I've come down on "yes".

The reason might seem odd. But it ocurred to me that if you want to use immigration to reduce crime, including rape, the obvious solution is to ban all male immigration.

That shocked me because it seems so wildly discriminatory. Yes, most violent crimes are committed by men. But very few men commit violent crimes. Banning male immigration would punish a large group for the appalling actions of a few. Making it about "$some_country's men" doesn't seem a whole lot better. It's still unjust to punish someone for someone else's crime.

If anyone is curious about the exercise, I recommend trying it. It was disconcerting to sit with the idea of banning male immigration, really seriously consider it and realise how viscerally shocked I was by the idea.

Edit: for context, in the UK right now, phrases like "rape gangs" are part of the debate/argument about immigration.

ellen364 commented on Microsoft has urged its employees on H-1B and H-4 visas to return immediately   timesofindia.indiatimes.c... · Posted by u/irthomasthomas
ellen364 · 3 months ago
"Approximately 1 million a year net" is completely true. In 2023 the UK's net migration was 906,000. But for context I'll add that it was a historic high and in 2024 net migration fell to 431,000.

The Migration Observatory at Oxford publishes excellent summaries about migration trends, e.g. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...

ellen364 commented on How can England possibly be running out of water?   theguardian.com/news/ng-i... · Posted by u/xrayarx
krona · 3 months ago
You're arguing a kind of strawman of unbridled economic liberalism which hasn't existed in England since probably the late 19th century, if at all.
ellen364 · 3 months ago
Based on "a third of customer bills go on interest payments", I'd guess the original comment was about Thames Water.

In 2023 their interest payments were 28% of revenue. They also made the news for dumping particularly large volumes of sewage into rivers.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/dec/18/water-firms-us...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67357566

ellen364 commented on Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up   mikelovesrobots.substack.... · Posted by u/dbalatero
atleastoptimal · 3 months ago
I think this hits at the heart of why you and so many people on HN hate AI.

You see yourselves as the disenfranchised proletariats of tech, crusading righteously against AI companies and myopic, trend-chasing managers, resentful of their apparent success at replacing your hard-earned skill with an API call.

It’s an emotional argument, born of tribalism. I’d find it easier to believe many claims on this site that AI is all a big scam and such if it weren’t so obvious that this underlies your very motivated reasoning. It is a big mirage of angst that causes people on here to clamor with perfunctory praise around every blog post claiming that AI companies are unprofitable, AI is useless, etc.

Think about why you believe the things you believe. Are you motivated by reason, or resentment?

ellen364 · 3 months ago
Love a bit of source analysis.

I'd widen the frame a bit. People scared of losing their jobs might underestimate the usefulness of AI. Makes sense to me, it's the comforting belief. Worth keeping in mind while reading articles sceptical of AI.

But there's another side to this conversation: the people whose writing is pro AI. What's motivating them? What's worth keeping in mind while reading that writing?

ellen364 commented on Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?   shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/08/... · Posted by u/ColinWright
an0malous · 4 months ago
You can install your own OS on iPhone hardware, what you’re demanding is that Apple allow you to run your own software on their OS. It’s like saying that you don’t own your microwave or lawnmower unless they provide you with an API to build apps on it. Are you just renting your Xbox because you can’t run PlayStation games on it?
ellen364 · 4 months ago
> what you’re demanding is that Apple allow you to run your own software on their OS

Yes. I'm not the original commenter, but this is what I expect.

From my POV, the OS exists to virtualise the hardware it runs on. I don't want the OS manufacturer to decide if I'm allowed to have a web browser or play games.

Naive in hindsight, but until game consoles and smartphones came along, it didn't occur to me that an OS would forbid me from installing something.

ellen364 commented on Intermittent fasting strategies and their effects on body weight   bmj.com/content/389/bmj-2... · Posted by u/lxm
lkrubner · 4 months ago
I have read that before the Industrial Revolution, most people faced famine for about 10% of their lives. And while, historically, that would have probably been concentrated into a few bad years during their lifetime (months of starvation, during a few bad years), if we were to generalize that and make it a rule, it would work out to 3 days a month.

There is some evidence that there are health benefits that are specific to the fasting mode. This has mostly been studied in the context of chemotherapy, where fasting can protect against some of the side-effects of chemotherapy:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5870384/

Most of this has only been studied in animals, not humans, but in animals the results were clear:

"Fasting before chemotherapy (CT) was shown to protect healthy cells from treatment toxicity by reducing the expression of some oncogenes, such as RAS and the AKT signaling pathway [2]. This reduction is mediated by the decrease of circulating insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and glucose. In addition, starvation and calorie restriction activate other oncogenes in cancer cells, induce autophagy, and decrease cellular growth rates while increasing sensitivity to antimitotic drugs [2]."

If we assume that we have been shaped by millions of years of frequent famine, then our evolution has been shaped by famine. It is possible that our immune system simply makes the assumption that we will soon face famine, and therefore some important tasks, such as extreme autophagy, are normally postponed till the famine arrives. However, in the modern era the famine never arrives, and so we may have to induce it by artificial means.

I have experimented with very long fasts. My longest fast ever was in September of 2015 when I managed to go 12 straight days on nothing but water.

Obviously, any health benefits from that incident might have been psychosomatic, since I was expecting health benefits. But all the same, I did find some of the health benefits to be shocking and completely unexpected. Since at least 1995, and possibly 1990, I had a mole on my skin on my left arm. I wasn't worried about it, so I simply ignored it. I had it on my arm at least 20 years, maybe 25 years. I recall one morning in November of 2015 when I was in my kitchen, making breakfast, and I reached over to pour myself some coffee, and of course my arm was in my field of vision, and after a moment of thinking something was different, it occurred to me that the mole was gone. It had been there at least 20 years, and then it disappeared, at some point during the weeks after I had done the 12 day fast. I don't know when it disappeared, it just slowly faded away at some point between September and November. There was no remaining sign of it on my arm.

Again, that might have been purely psychosomatic, but it was interesting.

ellen364 · 4 months ago
Admittedly a minor point of interest, but the last famine in England happened in 1623 and was local to an area called Westmorland [0]. That was 150 years before the Industrial Revolution, so the 10% figure might not be very reliable.

[0] https://bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/59_23_Healey.pdf

ellen364 commented on U.S. autism data project sparks uproar over ethics, privacy and intent   washingtonpost.com/health... · Posted by u/perihelions
0x1ceb00da · 8 months ago
One thing this will do is disincentivize high functioning autists from identifying themselves as autists, which is a very good thing IMO. Just look at this channel https://www.youtube.com/@NationalAutisticSoc/videos. There is a lot of survivor-ship bias on this channel towards high functioning autists who can talk in front of a camera.

Just to give an idea to those not familiar with the difference between high functioning and low functioning autism, high functioning autists face problems like not being able to communicate properly some of the time, and low functioning autists face problems like not even being able to tell their caretaker which part of their body is in pain, or which kid in the group punched them.

Edit: The National Autistic Society is UK based but the situation is not that different in other countries.

ellen364 · 8 months ago
Channels about autism also disproportionally cover people who are willing to talk about their autism. Recently I've been reading The Lost Girls of Autism. Something that stood out in the anonymous accounts is the fear of being "discovered" and the associated anxiety and depression. Since reading that I'm not super comfortable with the idea of incentivising high-functioning people to hide.
ellen364 commented on Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney   washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
sgc · 8 months ago
It shouldn't be that hard for you to show some evidence things would be different then. There is nothing indicating a stronger preference to vote has anything at all to do with which direction you lean. More and less does not equal right and left, so the burden of proof is on those who claim it is relevant. Yet polling indicates things would have gone pretty much just as they went.
ellen364 · 8 months ago
I don't know if voters and non-voters have the same political leanings. It isn't something I've ever looked into. My observation was merely that measures of statical confidence assume random samples. Extrapolating from a non-random sample can give odd results. But this isn't a research paper, so it doesn't much matter.
ellen364 commented on Backblaze: Mounting Losses, Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, Insider Selling   morpheus-research.com/bac... · Posted by u/PaywallBuster
sixhobbits · 8 months ago
I know nothing about them so not saying you're wrong but the statement "X is not an MLM" is normally a positive indication that X is an MLM.

And then promoting them also gives strong mlm vibes.

So I would bet more money on them being an mlm after reading your comment than before

ellen364 · 8 months ago
Under that rule of thumb, anything accused of being an MLM will seem like an MLM, even if the accusation is absurd.

"Uh, what?? Air isn't an MLM, it's just the thing we breath. We all need it to live."

"Huh, I guess air is an MLM after all. Wild."

u/ellen364

KarmaCake day633July 16, 2021
About
Former historian, current software developer.

https://ellen.dev/

Email: hn at my domain

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