7 ms·
If gender female
- devenblake 5y ago>Consider using a gender neutral title like Mx – or earn yourself a doctorate. Haha, yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women past 30) have kids it would be pretty easy to assume any Doctor is a man. Also slight nitpick of the title: if(gender == "female" && married && age >= 30) would work just as well. But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 101008 5y ago> Yeah, I think if they'd go as far to assume all women there (or all women past 30) have kids it would be pretty easy to assume any Doctor is a man. Sadly true. > But the use of strings for the gender field is excellent practice! Not only for non-binary gender(s) but also for "unknown" and any other edge cases. I can see this option more popular nowadays due to the gender discussion, but how did they manage unknown back in the day if they used a boolean for this (I assume something like isMale or isFemale)?
- diarrhea 5y agoFor a third gender option of "unknown" you could extend the Boolean with FileNotFound, it's a classic trick really. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_ https://thedailywtf.com/articles/what_is_truth_0x3f_
- pdkl95 5y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20170914014648/https://qntm.org/gay https://web.archive.org/web/20170914014648/https://qntm.org/...
- GuB-42 5y agoIn SQL it may be a NULL value, which has a weird logic but one that makes perfect sense here. Otherwise, it can be represented as two booleans, one that tells if the gender is specified, and another one for the gender itself. Or it can be a 3 value enum, which is my preferred solution, even if we don't consider non-binary genders. We should always consider the case when a field has no value. And I hope those who stored gender as a boolean did. Because what if you don't have that information? You can put a default (ex: male), but what if later, in another database, that person is explicitly female and you want to merge. You now have a conflict where you shouldn't.
- maratc 5y agoAs a slight nitpick to your slight nitpick, non-zero numbers, non-empty strings, non-void pointers, non-empty arrays and more are known to evaluate to TRUE in boolean contexts. So, values of 12L, "empty", &gender and [null] for the `married` variable would break your condition but not the original one.
- watwut 5y agoif(gender == "male" && married && age >= 32) would likely work too.
- onion2k 5y agoor earn yourself a doctorate Or just lie. Several apps think I have been knighted...
- code_scrapping 5y agoWhy stop there? Respectfully, Emperor code_scrapping III Leader of the Free Code Monkeys Debugger of print statements Divider of Sets, Walker of Lists, Mapper of Dictionaries May his hash always be unique, and infinite his TTL.
- Balgair 5y agoOne fun section of wikipedia is the list of US state honorary titles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Colonel#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Colonel#See_also Fun Fact: KFC's Colonel Sanders wasn't commissioned as a military title. He was a 'Kentucky Colonel', one of these honorary titles.
- blfr 5y ago> Here are a few tips if you want to avoid getting microtargetted like this Why should I care if I occasionally get a mistargetted email?
- danparsonson 5y ago> if you want to If you don't, then don't worry yourself about it.
- blfr 5y agoWhy would I want to then. Or why would anyone want to. Or why is it of any importance. There's a pretty clear intent behind that question.
- watwut 5y agoI do want to avoid those. Not sure why you have such an issue with other people avoiding those, getting advice to avoid those and giving others advice how to avoid them.
- blfr 5y agoI don't have an issue. In fact, I have over 200 filters for my own email. But it's still interesting why since it underpins the whole post and isn't really explained.
- watwut 5y agoIt actually is. You just have to stop assuming it is about convincing you to care or about you in general. It is for people like them and about people like them.
- dnh44 5y agoPeople like to be outraged and outrage generation makes for good clickbait. The only reason I’m interacting on this post is because I feel a mild sort of outrage about the author’s mild outrage. And I feel like a bit of a sucker because of that.
- stewx 5y agoThe content of the post is highly speculative. I don't have a problem with companies sending out emails tailored to customers' demographic profiles. The issue is really the wording, which in this case assumes the customer has children. It could easily be remedied by changing it to "Do you have kids? Make sure they know this."
- watwut 5y agoI am women and often check "male" in combos to avoid weird assumptions about me.
- tjpnz 5y agoOr even "Make sure you know this for the child in your life" so you can cover nieces and nephews.
- Dobbs 5y agoIs playing devil's advocate really necessary here? How many times do women have to complain about these assumptions being constantly made will it take before people believe them that there is a systemic problem of these types of assumptions?
- II2II 5y agoThe issue with targeting advertising is its ability to create problems. I was going to say: cases like this illustrate how insensitive such advertising can be. While it sounds like she underwent sterilization since she didn't want children, there is also a possibility that the choice was forced upon her for medical reasons or that she didn't undergo a procedure but was sterile. Of course, that would have happened even if the email was sent to everyone rather than targeted. More realistic issues pop up when the criteria are prejudiced (age, gender, race, etc.) or criteria that may have an implicit prejudice. Using income is more likely to bias towards a particular gender due to well known income disparities. Using postal/zip code is more likely to bias towards a particular race simply because of the amount of segregation we see in housing. While those biases don't guarantee an outcome, historical and contemporary ills in society means they are a problem.
- 5y ago
- Hypergraphe 5y agoIs the 'married == True' instead of just 'married' is done on purpose to trigger me ?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Thiez 5y agoYou can go further with some simple rewriting rules. For instance, if (condition) { variable = true; } can be rewritten as variable |= condition; So if we're streamlining the sexism we end up with a more pleasing hasChildren |= gender == "female" && married && age >= 30;
- vidarh 5y agoYou're assuming you know which language this made-up code was written for.
- Hypergraphe 5y agoNice, I would add some parenthesis after |= to enhance readability ;)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shockeychap 5y agoNice. :-)
- yakshaving_jgt 5y agoI'm suspicious of the code presented in the title. - It looks like JavaScript, so the explicit weak comparison against a boolean is unnecessary - I believe and& will be a parse error - I don't think you'll want to assign a value to the age variable in the condition
- ape4 5y agoGood points, and I would make it a member function `hasChildren() { ... }`
- vidarh 5y agoThe "and&" is "&&" in the linked article, and the "=age" is ">=age" in the linked article. But it's not real code, so making assumptions about the semantic is pointless.
- GuB-42 5y agoActually, it is "&& age >= 30", I guess there is some HTML messup somewhere.
- blackbear_ 5y ago"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"...
- hrktb 5y agoWhat is actually the point you want to express ? It seems to me the OP is questionning generic assumptions, and I don't get how the meme relates to the situation.
- squid_demon 5y agoWill the author of this post ever have kids? Thankfully, no.
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoI fail to see how this is "dreadful", as some commenters there put it. On the other hand, at least it shows they still don't know something about their customers, which is good.
- brazzy 5y ago> I fail to see how this is "dreadful", as some commenters there put it. The author is apparently part of a "childfree community" that collectively has a huge chip on their shoulder.
- hackeraccount 5y agoSure. So why was the article complaining about it? I mean I guess it's kind of a joke thing but it fails for me because even though it's one person trying to make sport of a presumably huge company it still seems like he's punching down which adds a degree of difficulty to any joke.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoSeems like a storm in a teacup, really. The email is poor because it is worded as if they knew for a fact that the recipient had children whereas clearly they don't. On the other hand, I'm sure that statistically the hypothesis that married women aged 30+ have children is probably correct by a good margin (although we don't know how they targeted so this is speculative by the author). Of course this is only a statistical likelihood and like always in such case you should proceed with caution if you decide to make an inference (which I don't have a problem with). For instance they could have targeted who to send the email to but used an informational and neutral wording not to give any impression. Pretty minor annoyance, though.
- bluetomcat 5y agoFirst world problems caused from an elevated sense of self-entitlement. Just because you are in a small minority based on a certain set of criteria, doesn't mean that society should be tweaking the environment around you in order not to harm your oppressed snowflakey mindset.
- hrktb 5y agoCouldn't your argument be expanded to "marketers should be immune from critique if I am not offended by what they do" ?
- bluetomcat 5y agoOne thing is to complain about excessive or mistargeted marketing, another is to complain about marketing which is almost properly targeted, but hurts your inner self because a soulless algorithm decided that most married women above 30 have children.
- brazzy 5y agoNot the case here, but what about someone who just had a child die from cancer or suicide?
- bluetomcat 5y agoThat would be an entirely different moral case where negative, soul-crushing emotions are inevitable and justified. It wouldn't be solved by rewording the email to "in case you have kids". The least of your problems in such cases is mistargeted emails. The same emotion can be triggered just by looking at other people's playing kids or even from passing by a toy store. What we're dealing with here is nothing like that. It's inflated egocentrism where one thinks that the whole world should respect their personal willful decisions, when no harm in any meaningful way is being done when they are ignored.
- shockeychap 5y ago> Here are a few tips if you want to avoid getting microtargetted like this They sent a mistargeted email. Wow. A fair number of people who meet the known characteristics of your wife have children, thus it seems reasonable to send them a PSA pertaining to kids. It looks like a sensible email and it’s not a judgment or anything. I think the email could have been better qualified. But this whole things just smacks of hypersensitivity to perceived micro aggressions.
- EForEndeavour 5y agoThe blog author seems rightfully fed up with years' worth of people obliviously asking them about children when they've chosen to live childfree. It's no surprise that this mistargeted email is received so poorly. That said, I think it's really imprecise to infer whether someone has a child from their age, sex, and marital status. Regardless of how many 30-year-old married women in SE Railways' database show strong signs of having children (e.g., they regularly book child's fares), the consequence of incorrectly believing a woman has a child when they really don't is potentially really bad. How many infertile couples, recovering stillbirth mothers, or childfree advocates who complain eloquently enough to get to the front page of HN do you want to risk upsetting with this tone-deaf campaign email?
- shockeychap 5y agoTo do anything in most situations risks some degree of offense. I wholly sympathize with parents who are dealing with loss in any of its forms. I wish there was a way they could be shielded from the world for a time. But SE Railways’ email was quite sensible. If privacy is the concern, there’s plenty to discuss about FB or Google who actually do target people based on personal and private insights. I think that ranting about this email is misplaced at best.
- pwinnski 5y agoI think it's sad that anybody spends effort justifying targeting rather than lamenting that companies feel free and justified in sending marketing drivel regularly. The ratio of useful mail to garbage in my mailbox is approaches 1:100, and email without regularly efforts to prune and filter is even worse. This should not be okay.
- ElectricMind 5y agoFeels like author got triggered by just one mistargeted email and went long way to "justify" not having children. Maybe there is a "doubt" about that decision? No offense just guessing if there is something deep issue underneath this blog..
- hackeraccount 5y agoI'm not sure I understand the complaint. He doesn't like that SE Railways isn't aware that he has no children so his response is going to be to give them less information?
- brazzy 5y agoI think the logic is that if they have no information at all, they'll stop trying to send targeted advertising.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoWhat is the most likely alternative to targeted ads? No ads or untargeted ads? I think it is the latter, which would only mean receiving even more irrelevant emails.
- brazzy 5y agoYes, of course it's goign to be untargeted ads. I guess the author would rather have irrelevant emails than emails that make wrong assumptions about their life choices.
- jonnyrockit 5y agoCancel culture pioneer right here, folks. Cry me a river.
- HeyZuess 5y agoIf you have strong convictions about not having children, why would you be offended by an email which targets a large audience which in general the majority would. Being offended here is a personal choice, it's a message about children traveling safely on trains. Yes, you may not fall into that group but that doesn't mean you're a victim unless you want to act like one.