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It will certainly do that. Previous attempts at this (the Olympics did genetic tests from the 1960's through the 1990's, other organizations have done similar tests into the present) always did wind up discovering cis women raised as women from birth, with female presenting genitalia, who failed whatever genetic tests they were doing. At least one of these women even went on to give birth to a live human baby! You would think that would prove that they actually were a woman, but their medals were still kept from them. They were still driven from the sport, branded as cheaters, etc. Because someone who was so much better than the rest can't really be a woman, they have to be cheating somehow, they have to be a man.

In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.

1: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen


I wouldn't call it cheating. But I have no trouble drawing lines that exclude some people, if that levels the field for a bigger group. In this case the female olympics would soon be known as the intersex olympics given the selection pressure. I can understand the decision to make the competiton more interesting by barring intersex people. No need to frame it as cheating though.

Since we don't actually do genetic tests at birth, this would only ocurr in the context of national qualifying, think about what the experience of someone who trains to be good enough to qualify for the Olympics, then gets this test and is told, "Sorry, you aren't really a woman. Too bad. No Olympics for you. Sorry you wasted all those years training."

How else should the person who just got that information interpret it except... Sorry, you're not really deserving, even though your score qualifies you. And what do call someone who has a score that qualifies but doesn't get to go?

And there are far more of people with this experience than the experience of being born and treated by society as a man and becoming an Olympic athlete as a woman.


The Olympics used to do this. From as early as the 1960's they were doing genetic testing on female athletes. They stripped Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska of all her medals and records in 1967, in spite of the fact that she gave birth to a child a year later, which would seem to indicate that she was a woman. The Olympics only abandoned this testing regime after the 1996 Olympic Games when 8 women who were cis and assigned female from birth to that moment were wrongly tested as male (7 AIS cases, 1 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency ). The uproar from that caused the Olympics to realize that this was a lot more complicated then they thought and abandon the idea of a strict genetic test.

Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.


Anecdotally there has been a common knowledge that some of the record-setting Soviet women in disciplines line disk throwing, etc, had genetic abnormalities and had to suddenly finish their careers when the aforementioned testing came.

Fascinating that this is being downvoted.

Anyway, some more links to spread the getting-downvoted love:

"Gender verification of female Olympic athletes" (Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 2002): https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/fulltext/2002/10000/gende...

> The shift to PCR-based techniques replaced one diagnostic genetic test with another but did not alleviate the problems. Positive results still stigmatized women with such conditions as androgen insensitivity, XY mosaicism, and 5-α-reductase deficiency. Both sex chromatin and SRY tests identify individuals with genetic anomalies that yield no competitive advantage. Therefore, finally in 1999, the IOC conditionally rescinded its 30-yr requirement for on-site gender screening of all women entered in female-only events at the Olympic Games, starting with Sydney in 2000. Rather, intervention and evaluation of individual athletes by appropriate medical personnel could be employed if there was any question about gender identity. This change has not been made permanent.

"World Athletics' mandatory genetic test for women athletes is misguided. I should know – I discovered the relevant gene in 1990" (Andrew Sinclair, 2025): https://www.mcri.edu.au/news/insights-and-opinions/world-ath...

> It is worth noting these tests are sensitive. If a male lab technician conducts the test he can inadvertently contaminate it with a single skin cell and produce a false positive SRY result.

> No guidance is given on how to conduct the test to reduce the risk of false results.

> Nor does World Athletics recognise the impacts a positive test result would have on a person, which can be more profound than exclusion from sport alone.

> There was no mention from World Athletics that appropriate genetic counselling should be provided, which is considered necessary prior to genetic testing and challenging to access in many lower- and middle-income countries.

> I, along with many other experts, persuaded the International Olympic Committee to drop the use of SRY for sex testing for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

> It is therefore very surprising that, 25 years later, there is a misguided effort to bring this test back.

"Medical Examination for Health of All Athletes Replacing the Need for Gender Verification in International Sports" (JAMA, 1992): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/39507...

> Even if a molecular method could be devised that had a very small error rate, it would still just constitute a test for a nucleic acid sequence, not for sex or gender. Although one can test for the main candidate gene for male sex determination, SRY, it still holds that most XY women test positive and some XX males test negative for SRY. It is possible that there will never be a laboratory test that will adequately assess the sex of all individuals.

...

> (IAAF proposals held) that the purpose of gender verification is to prevent normal men from masquerading as women in women's comopetition was reinforced. Perhaps a genuine concern decades ago, this fear now seems to be a less pressing concern. One reason may be that routine drug testing now requires the voiding of urine be carefully watched by an official to make certain that urine from a given athlete actually comes from his or her urethra. Thus, athletes are already carefully watched in "doping stations". The likelihood of a male successfully masquerading as a female under such circumstances seems remote in current comparison.


Santhi Soundarajan (1) shows exactly how this ends up catching cis women who were raised as women from birth. Which is why it's a bad idea to draw strict lines.

Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.

This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.


Yeah but buying a sofa from Ikea doesn't let people steal my banking passwords. There are serious consequences to software bugs that there aren't in cheaper ready-made clothing.

Side point, but clothing industry are some of the biggest pollutors in the world

Study of self reported emotional closeness with best friend (from a 2002 questionaire of a 1997 longitudinal study) found no difference between black men and black women, and a small gap for Hispanics, no economic differences for white women, and a large gap for wealthy white men, who seem to be an outlier demographic group, in this variable at least.

It's not a really strong data set (the survey is all of people born between 1980-1984, surveyed in 2002, and they threw out AAPI responses because there were only a few of them) but it suggests that male loneliness might be an artifact of a culture common among the American economic elite.


Optuna or skopt are open source and won't take any GPU time at all to do it.

Optuna requires exploring the hyperparameter space which means running the experiments with those hyperparameters.

For a fixed search space it will almost certainly be better though.


When both members of a couple Work From Home at least 1 day per week, they have an estimated lifetime greater fertility of 0.32 more babies (if both WFH versus if none do).

This is one of the strongest effects in the natalism literature I've ever seen, and all it takes is greater support for WFH, no baby bonuses or anything like that.


It's opposite Gell-Mann-Amnesia: I am a SWE and I come here because I find it one of the best places to keep abreast of the broader software world, not just the little corner of it that I'm currently working in. So in the things that I know well, I trust it. My wife is a medical professional, and so I know just enough to see that most medical conversations here are complete and utter nonsense.

So the mental model I have of the average HN contributor is basically that they are all SWE's- they know software engineering extremely well, and the farther you get from that the less valuable the conversation will be, and the more likely it will be someone trying to reason from first principles for 30 seconds about something that intelligent hard working people devote their careers to.


Probably mostly accurate. Though a few of us do know lots of topics. Can outscore med students on USMLE prep, know what private credit is, etc., etc.


After the crash, the Wright's built a new plane, the 1909 Military Flyer. It came back the next year to Ft. Myer and became the first plane, anywhere in the world, to be bought by a government (1). Orville Wright taught three Army officers to fly on that plane, and then, the Army being what it is, a fourth guy got a letter from Wright explaining how to fly and told "take this plane to San Antonio and teach yourself to fly at Fort Sam Houston." After he had done about 40 more flights, only some of which ended in crashes, the 1909 Military Flyer was retired in 1911. It was given to the Smithsonian. While the other Wright airplanes (2) in the Smithsonian collection have been cleaned up and restored, made to look more like they did when brand new, the Military Flyer has been kept in its 1910 parts: there is a stain on the bottom wing (right below the engine) that is from the use of this airplane more than 115 years ago.

1: The contract was for a plane to fly for an hour, at 30mph out and back, carrying two people (pilot and observer). There was a 10% penalty on the 25,000 for every mph by which the plane was slower than 30mph, and a 10% bonus for every mph by which the plane was above 30mph. The Military Flyer averaged 32 mph on the loop it did, so the Army paid the Wright's $30,000.

2: There are 8 surviving original Wright Airplanes left in the world, the Smithsonian owns three of them: the 1903 Wright Flyer, the 1909 Military Flyer, and the Model Ex Vin Fizz.


And a flying field was established at College Park, MD where Orville Wright began teaching Army officers to fly in 1909.

That airport is still operating and is the oldest continuously operating airport in the world.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/college-park-airport.htm

FWIW, I think there are 5 surviving original Wright bicycles, so they are outnumbered by the airplanes.


#1 sounds like a dangerous incentive. But different times!


War sometimes involves a degree of danger.


Then they should have mentioned that in their court filings!

The reason that the tariffs were collected while there was doubts as to their legality is that the US Government promised, in court filings (courts literally marked this as estoppel in a ruling: they are unable to change their mind on it, locked in argument) that they could repay this easily, and so courts allowed them to collect it while they figured out the legality. When they promised this, if it did require software changes, they should have done that then, or else they were lying to courts.

This is why the judges are not giving them any slack here. They promised to courts that this could be done easily, in such a way that they can't change their mind now. This is all very basic tenets of law that even non-lawyers can understand.


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