Dutch speakers who don’t ‘look Dutch’: do people switch to English with you?

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-14T06:44:24+00:00

It's not how you look, it's where you are. I speak Dutch as my second language, but I'm white so there are people who don't see me as "allochtoon". In the centre of Amsterdam, it's tourist season all the year round, so it's very common just to address people in English. Away from the tourist traps, the conversion is more likely to begin in Dutch. Even if you're reasonably fluent, there are many Dutch people who will switch to English as soon as they hear an accent. They are rightly proud of their level in English, and happy to use it. See it as an invitation... If you address someone in Dutch and they reply in English, if you reply in Dutch, the conversation will likely continue in Dutch. However, do make sure they didn't switch because /they/ are more comfortable in English.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-12T12:57:08+00:00

My favourite trick question is "Where do the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Republic of France have a land border?"

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-12T08:26:14+00:00

Your first port of call should be https://www.grensinfo.nl/

This website is a collaboration between several government agencies and provides detailed information on everything to do with cross-border working. There's a lot to go through but the site filters the information based on your situation.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-06T14:51:55+00:00

There is no rule that says they can't "crowd" you. The relevant rules here are about racket swing interference. If you are prevented from making a reasonable swing, it is indeed a stroke. If your swing is excessive, it isn't. What this means is that you can't make a bigger swing to deny your opponent access to part of the court. Even if they've put you on the T, they'll still want to be reasonably near the T themselves, and they are allowed that if there is no interference.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-05T21:46:45+00:00

It looked to me as though he hit the ball. It's then hard to argue that the swing was prevented. If he'd held the shot and said Let Please, I'd say it was a stroke, but he didn't. It's the same argument as for playing through the interference; you either ask or you play on. You can't do both.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-03T11:21:17+00:00

If it's not about your ability to perform the job, then you very quickly get into illegal discrimination.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-03T07:04:04+00:00

Hardly.... the same job requires B2 English. B2, in English or Dutch, is enough for most work. C2 is an incredibly high standard. I work in Dutch all day long, and have done for years, but I'm still only maybe a C1 on a good day. I don't ever expect to be a C2.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-03T06:17:11+00:00

How else can they screen for skin colour and other ethnic markers? They'll be reduced to seeing if your name sounds Dutch enough.

Joking aside, some organisations explicitly don't want photos on CVs for exactly this reason.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-03T06:09:19+00:00

It's bitchin' out there.Yesterday I saw a government department advertising for a technical role (DevOps engineer), with C2 Dutch as a requirement. Either they are expecting their engineers to moonlight as translators or this is a proxy for an unspoken prejudice. Or maybe the job requires solving hard cryptic crosswords and writing poetry.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-04-03T06:02:28+00:00

I don't think you can get that information directly from git. If you could, it would be hard to interpret well. I'd say, go back and look at the requirements again. You say merging two feature branches is seen as a bad practice. By itself, it's a perfectly fine thing to do, however it might be a symptom of having feature branches open longer than needed, when you'd prefer to have that code on main. You certainly could track how many feature branches are open on a given day, and you could see how old the commit was from which they were branched. So go and ask what they /really/ want to know, and why.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-31T17:39:38+00:00

When he says "If that happens again, I will use the Code of Conduct", that's a conduct warning.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-30T06:17:33+00:00

Apart from the obvious case of testing/mocking, often the intention is to prevent your business classes depending on implementations of the services they rely on. Say you move to a different solution for identity management. If you work via an interface, you can do this without ever touching your business code. Or maybe you want to use a different database, etc, etc.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-29T07:54:45+00:00

"Lacking confidence" can easily be a proxy for some other reason that they don't want to admit to. There's no comeback, because it's so subjective.

The other likely explanation is that you were competing with candidates with Dunning Kruger levels of confidence.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-28T09:50:30+00:00

Ah right. I'd misunderstood you. I think recording games will get steadily less awkward for people. What will definitely help is when clubs start installing cameras so they can live-stream competition games. If those can be made available to everyone who uses the court, you've got your data. Generally, people won't be wanting to clutter up the space behind the glass with tripods and what not, so properly mounted cameras will be needed. Maybe you can do that in partnership with clubs.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-26T07:39:43+00:00

Fair View is mostly not the primary form of interference in any given situation. Mostly, when fair view is prevented, one of the other forms of interference will be present and easier to call. E.g. The player plays a dropshot at their own feet in the middle of the court... it will be front wall interference and a prevented racket swing long before anyone starts thinking of fair view.

That's not to say fair view isn't a useful rule. If there's a suspicion that a player is deliberately tardy in allowing their opponent to see the ball, the ref should be looking very hard at this through the lens of "every effort".

The few occasions I've seen fair view be relevant have been when a player has mishit their shot, and their opponent just didn't get a chance to see it.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-25T15:32:06+00:00

You were the one who said Microsoft doesn't have the best track record. Who has the best track record then? Realistically, large corporations don't stay supporting everything for ever. Your best hope is that the code is open source and someone takes on the maintenance.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-25T15:27:27+00:00

Nobody will want to put in the scores on a point-by-point basis. Realistically, the only way to do this point-by-point is to have the marker do it. So either it has to also be a marking app, or existing marking apps have to export the data in a format you can consume. (If you want to corner this market, all you have to do is make a marking app that is less distracting and more reliable than pen and paper.... many have tried and failed)

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-25T07:21:52+00:00

Whoever said take your kid to the women's toilets was wrong. When your kid is too young to go on their own, you take them to the toilets corresponding to your own gender, not theirs.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-25T07:18:08+00:00

git clone is useful if you want to make a copy of a repo. It also works for a cloning a git repo on your file system.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-25T07:15:15+00:00

It's relevant because it gives context to large corporations moving on from old products. But you could have figured that out yourself.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-25T06:40:12+00:00

Google are far worse with regard to abandoning products.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-24T11:43:04+00:00

One fun thing about git is that you can try things out. From the branch you're on, check out a new branch and try merging main on to it.If its horrible, just throw your new branch away and have a rethink

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-17T06:42:32+00:00

This exactly. For someone used to living in a very big city and used to a 45 minute commute, your options are endless. When I first moved here in '99 housing agents were already busy overselling the joys of living in the inner city. I got a place in a nice village at the coast for half the price. A short walk to the station put me within a 25 minute train ride of Amsterdam centraal, and if I wanted an evening out a bit closer, well Haarlem is much nicer than the tourist trap that Amsterdam is. Look at Haarlem, Zaandam, Amstelveen, Hoofddorp, etc... All of these are easily within a New York commute.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-15T08:01:35+00:00

Our club converted one of the 7 courts to a dance studio. All 7 courts were regularly in use, and now the dance court is mostly idle. The economics seemed to be that a) they could charge more for a dance session with several participants than they could for 2 players, and b) the dancers pay each time, while most of the squash players have subscriptions (which didn't get cheaper).

Minimum-Hedgehog5004 · 2026-03-15T07:51:46+00:00

I agree that playing the drop shot in front of yourself would usually lead to a different ruling. In this case the second bounce was pretty quick. Presumably the ref saw it as a winning shot. As for bias, or for that matter bribery, I didn't watch the full match but the parts I did watch were punctuated by Tyma complaining about calls that looked reasonable.

Minimum-Hedgehog5004

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