skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The current NHS budget is £125Bn/year. Many people think it is underfunded, but noone is willing to name a figure for fully funded. Is it £150Bn, 200, 500?

It's a moving target, because need continues to grow as the population ages. We're in largely uncharted territory, so it's difficult to make long-term cost forecasts. You could always find ways of spending money to improve a healthcare system, so it just doesn't make sense to pick a number ex nihilo. We do have other, better means of determining what a reasonable level of healthcare spending might be on a year-to-year basis.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence have determined a cost-effectiveness threshold of £30,000 per additional Quality-Adjusted Life Year. This threshold is a little bit arbitrary, but it's a reasonable rule-of-thumb as to what treatments provide a net benefit to society. Based on this figure, we can start to calculate a reasonable overall NHS budget from the bottom-up - the NHS needs enough money to provide all the healthcare interventions that NICE has determined to be cost-effective.

In addition to cost-effectiveness, we also have benchmarks in terms of quality of care. It might not be clinically significant if someone has to wait three weeks for a GP appointment about their psoriasis or six months for knee surgery, but it matters to the patient. We know that wait times have been going up and patient satisfaction is going down, which is a reasonable indication that the system is underfunded. It wouldn't be reasonable to aim for instant care and 100% patient satisfaction, but we should at the least hope for stability rather than regression.

The question of affordability is perfectly fair, but the UK doesn't spend an exceptional amount on healthcare by the standards of equally-developed nations. As a proportion of GDP, our spending is roughly average for OECD nations. In absolute terms, we spend about 25% less per patient than Germany or Ireland. We can clearly afford to spend a fair bit more before we start feeling the pinch.

I think that it's perfectly reasonable to spend a few tenths of a percent of our GDP to try and take the pressure off the system and get the quality metrics back to where they were in 2015. If costs start spiralling out of control, then we need to have some difficult conversations about what kind of care we're going to ration, but I think that conversation is premature if we haven't first tried a modest increase in spending.
I'm curious, what is it about Twitter that you'd pay for?
>The article says that Bitcoin is safer, but the article doesn't explain why. Can someone give more details?

We wrote a paper [0] in 2015 performing eclipse attacks against Bitcoin. You can watch me talk about it here [1]. At the time it required an attacker with 400 IP addresses. Many of our countermeasures were adopted by Bitcoin-core raising the difficulty of the attack even further. In fact at this very moment I am still working on adding some of our countermeasures to Bitcoin-core [2].

In our attack on Ethereum, only 2 IP addreses were required. We discuss this in our paper:

>"We present new eclipse attacks showing that, prior to the disclosure of this work in January 2018, Ethereum’s peer-to-peer network was significantly less secure than that of Bitcoin. Our eclipse attackers need only control
two machines, each with only a single IP address. [..] By contrast, the best known off-path eclipse attacks on Bitcoin [23] require the attacker to control hundreds of host machines, each with a distinct IP address. For most Internet users, it is far from trivial to obtain hundreds (or thousands) of IP addresses. This is why the Bitcoin eclipse attacker envisioned by [23] was a full-fledged botnet or Internet Service Provider, while the BGP-hijacker Bitcoin eclipse attacker envisioned by [17] needed access to a BGP-speaking core Internet router. By contrast, our attacks can be run by any kid with a machine and a script."

-Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum's Peer-to-Peer Network [3]

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/263.pdf

[1]: https://www.usenix.org/node/190891

[2]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/9037

[3]: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~goldbe/projects/eclipseEth
As a Jew, I'm embarrassed when other Jews say things like this. No! acknowledging the existence of Borscht belt comedy does NOT equate to asserting the superiority of the "Jewish Race", nor does it imply the inferiority of anyone else. Not every difference must be binned into superior or inferior, as a Nazi would do.

If you don't mind my asking, are you a millennial? I ask because the peculiar worldview expressed by your comments is one I've only encountered in millennials, particularly those who attended college in the last 15 years. A great confusion has been instilled in well-meaning young people about how to regard differences among peoples. Many have accepted without argument the idea that there are no differences between any human beings, because racism. This "idea" is not even wrong, it's a non-sequitir of jumbled reasoning, so it's impossible to argue with.

EDIT: after posting this, the classic joke "Ask two Jews, get three opinions" came to my mind, so there it is. If you're Jewish like me, and suffer from such a pinched PC worldview that you can't see the humor in that, then somehow you've missed out. Cheers!
> Some GP practices have reduced the strain by offering appointments with Nurse Practitioners, who can treat common and uncomplicated conditions. This solution is far from perfect, because there's a lot that Nurse Practitioners can't treat.

Are the NPs not permitted to treat these other conditions, or incapable? I fear there's a turf war between GPs and NPs, where GPs are worried about losing bread-and-butter work that takes little time but accounts for a large number of visits.
If MLB did this deliberately without the consent of the teams, some owners might be upset.

As the article points out, players are already adapting their hitting approach to produce more home runs, and presumably that’s at least partially due to the added likelihood of success for that strategy with the juiced balls.

So of course there’s also a team-building aspect of this shift for GM’s to consider. A decade ago, all the smart money was on high “OBP” (on-base percentage) players over boom-or-bust power hitters. If MLB did juice the ball, it shifted the ground out from under tens of millions of dollars of team analytics, and billions in payroll decisions made based on them.
The "unlimited" range comes because the thing is powered by a nuclear reactor, which would run out of fuel eventually but not before reaching any point you want on Earth first. So it doesn't have a limited range in the normal sense of "how far away can I hit something?"- the answer is, as far away as you like.
The NHS spends £11Bn/year on type-2 diabetes, 80% of which according to Diabetes UK is caused by or could be addressed by lifestyle choices. Not just diabetes of course, I don't mean to pick on one subset, I mean the NHS has to spend an awful lot of money on things that really shouldn't be things in the first place.

People who really love "our NHS" eat right, exercise, and get enough sleep... The rest are just trying to score cheap political points.
With a methodology for generating consensus...
Well, if there was I new guy around and he refused to steal a getaway car while I and my friends were preparing to steal the crown jewels, I know which guy I would be suspicious of. Also if I knew an agent is allowed to steal cars but not to beat up people, I know what I would ask the new guy to do. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs is a different question but if you concluded that it is a net positive then there is at least this argument to not be too public about it.
As almost everything I talk about it happened on econtalk: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/02/jordan_peterson.htm...

The translation is by Constance Garnett.
They only mention the book in passing. If I wouldn't have been wanting to read the book since years and called Russ Roberts highly the podcast wouldn't have made me want to read the book. It was in no way the topic of the episode or even close.
More aggressive than a radiation-belching nuclear ramjet?
Sadly, according to some people (most not Indians), eating Indian food is "racist".
How do you automate its updates?
By comparative metrics to the rest of the world the NHS comes out either top or pretty damn good. By comparison to whatever the metrics of whatever government is in power at the time the NHS always looks terrible. Budgets can be set arbitrarily by the government so it’s easy to make the NHS look like it is over budget (in fact all you need to do is increase the budget by less than inflation and talk about absolute numbers to fool the public and hey presto “the NHS is terribly inefficient”).

The whole “4 hour” thing is mad - you should be seen in a reasonable time frame for the ailment you have. Severed hand? Go right ahead. Headache and photo sensitivity that’s been going for a couple of days already? We’ll be with you when we can and if things get substantially worse come back to the reception and you may be deemed more critical.
Obviously I am over simplifying the matter but the NHS is staffed by competent trained professionals who should be allowed to use their own judgment as the whether someone can wait 30 seconds, or 6 hours.
It is not lost. There are still plenty of tools that helps individuals publish their own web content, yet most people would simply post on social media now.

I think most people only want to get their ideas published. Whether it is in the form of tweets, blogs or their own sites, it does not matter much. If social media were available in this early era, average people wouldn't need to publish their own sites.
Normally you'd be correct, but in this case troll insurance actually produces a game theoretic reduction in trolls. Going to court costs trolls resources, time if not money. By guaranteeing that all trolls will be fought tooth and nail, it makes trolling more costly, which makes it less attractive, which means there will be less of it.
Behaviour Is Considered More Moral the More Common It Is
I believe that this has been the case for some time, but given the context of an authoritarian government I am rather worried about this line of thinking by the government today.

I would prefer that they expand on exactly what they mean by criminal behaviour, because, even the police can engage in some criminal behaviours in their occupation as long as it's sanctioned and it has a limit.

I "know a guy" who worked in CID and it was the case they had more authority to do things unsanctioned. Much more than the standard investigators associated with the police were permitted without formal approval. I sincerely hope that is not the case when you go deeper into the secret services.
I was being very heavily sarcastic (as I indicated). There's no such abuse of Google's "monopoly".
What evidence do we want to compare?

That's kind of where it loses me. We already have a system very similar to single-payer for our veterans and it is notoriously inefficient, bloated, and unpopular. What many are clamoring for in the US is already being tried in the US and failing exactly the way opponents claim it will.

Evidence that it works well in other countries is worth considering, but it in no way proves such a system would work well here. It'd probably work well in states that are similarly culturally homogenous (like Vermont or New Hampshire), but the discussion always seems to be at the federal level.

I think what we need is more freedom for experimentation. Pick maybe a city or county and make it eligible to sidestep all of the federal and state regulations and build/create their own. Some will undoubtedly shoot for a libertarian approach while others might imitate the NHS. See how the costs and outcomes compare. Gather more evidence in a more relevant way.
.co.uk is the same.
why are you so triggered. stop attacking the guy
Gun injuries drop 20% during NRA conventions:study
Edit I didn't read far enough ahead before replying and I see there is in fact a very interesting discussion about the ethics of F2P gaming, that this particular gaming company is actually having and welcoming that discussion and seems to be at least very interested in making the right calls about it. So I downvoted your comment, because it's a bit ridiculous that a comment simply stating "well you're wrong because it is objectively wrong" somehow got voted above people actually having a proper discussion about the topic oldcynic asked about. /Edit

No, there's no such thing as "objective morality". There just isn't, and that's by definition. Frankly I'm a bit sad that jlarocco actually got downvotes for that.

You meant to say something different, and what would have been more useful if you had been a little clearer on what you actually meant to say, instead of your claim that patent trolls are objectively immoral--which is factually untrue.

I'm going to guess (and I might be wrong because you weren't that clear) what you tried to say is that you consider the wrongness of patent trolls to weigh significantly more than the wrongness of facilitating addictiveness of f2p gaming and/or premium currencies. Except you didn't give any reason why, except stating that it is objectively so. So how was that for usefulness?

And neither oldcynic nor jlarocco stated that patent trolling is ethical (which is actually a loaded question).

There's actually all sorts of arguments you can bring to discuss about oldcynic's point. Such as by analogy of a heroin dealer complaining about the sad state of healthcare in the USA (and however you'd feel about that). Or, you know, how HN is a forum of entrepeneurs so topics like patent trolling goes closer to the hearts of some here, while the OP probably wouldn't dare to bring their sob-story to a support-forum for gaming addicts.

And that is called having a discussion. Not calling one side of the point "like, just your opinion man" (subjective) and the other not (objective).

I'd love to read such a discussion actually, because I'm a little torn on the topic as well. I'm not at all sure whether I should care about a gaming company making profits with in-game currency, while it's an open secret in this business that you can't really make it without actively exploiting the weakness and addictions in the human psyche (similarly to network security, not everyone is equally vulnerable, just because you won't fall for it doesn't mean the sweet rich old lady across the street knows how to install a firewall and not click on the whatsits).

On the other hand, we (on this forum) all (seem to) agree that patent trolling is a bad thing. Still doesn't mean it's objectively so.
The joke's on Russia. American anti-missile defences couldn't stop their old missiles anyway!
If you scroll down further in the article, you'll see that those are cropped images of the cores. The cropping is off-center, not the cores. Otherwise, they would wobble terribly when thrown or hit.
> The main ledger and smart contracts should be separated, everyone smart contract is public, why??

You might find Blockstack interesting.

(I don’t have a connection. I’ve just started to explore this space, and have some of those same questions.)

[1] https://blockstack.org/

[2] Jude, “What is the difference between blockstack and Ethereum?”, Blockstack forum, March ‘17. https://forum.blockstack.org/t/what-is-the-difference-betwee...

[3] Alid Castano, “What is the difference between Blockstack and Ethereum?”, Sept. 13 ‘17. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Blockst...

[4] Alid Castano, “Why I’m betting on Blockstack to save the decentralized internet”, Sept. 12 ‘17. https://medium.com/@alidcastano/why-im-betting-on-blockstack...
Why is that? If both parties know what's going on, who is being harmed?
If you use “consent” as your “legal basis” and you are asking for consent that is related to the offering of services over the internet (such as a web shop, a social media web site, discussion forum, ...), you need to somehow verify age (16 years normally) or be very clear that under 18 years olds (“children”) are not to access your service (and not have evidence pointing to that this is undermined)

Note that the 16 years old rule applies to “consent” only. As I stated in a separate comment “consent” is often not the way to do things. I, and many EU data protection lawyers I have met, believe consent to be a “last resort” legal basis of processing personal data. Instead, the legal basis called “legitimate interest” should normally be used where you as a company decides what is resonable, you think is needed to achieve the purposes you are processing data for, and, what the data subject would reasonable expect.

There is no under 16 age limit or age verification requirement in general for “legitimate interest”
I think this minimal hand-holding is also my "pet criteria".

A senior developer can get stuck, but never gives up. There's always a way. Read source code, google around, be creative, trust your intuition (which is really just accumulated experience). Come up with a plan and make good use of available resources.
Just going off the games and how much faster the video capabilities were in Flash, I'd have to assume that it was in fact more capable. It could have just been the tooling? (That is a genuine question.)

The alternatives are catching up, no doubt. But flash was way ahead in those areas and is easily the reason it took so long to deprecate it.
The whole point of a blockchain is publicly accessible records of the transactions. Why not run your cryptokitties on a private server then? The performance and efficiency would destroy your blockchain version but no one can see what is happening so it can be verified by everyone as true.
This Amazon Google trade war is the best example of why Amazon will not be immune to monopoly talks in the near future.

I'm disappointed in them for choosing to not sell their competitors, it prevents me from wanting to use their services.
We don’t know the design used here. There are nuclear thermal designs that do not enit contaminated exhaust.
You need a special kind of attitude to be willing to fly one of these things over your own country

America tested nuclear weapons in its own country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_%28nuclear_test%29
This is the biggest problem with GDPR, there's no agreement what it means, but it will go into effect in a few weeks.
I don't think it really makes sense to call the way side effects happen in Haskell "lazy".

The way I think about it is that it's not so much that your program executes a lazy stream of side effects, it's that your program doesn't execute side effects at all. Instead, your program returns a pure structure which describes how side effects should be executed, and the runtime executes a program based on this description. By the time the runtime is executing that program, the pure structure which describes how the side effects should be executed has already been forced, so the side effects happen eagerly within that context.

That said, I'm not much of a Haskell-er, so I'd be interested to hear from more experienced Haskell programmers on whether there's a better way to think about this.
This should not really come as a shock.
The internal and external state security apparatus of most countries almost certainly operate in a hazy gray area on the edges of the law.
There's also the mixing of reviews, even across models, which makes it much harder for the uneducated user to weed out the bad eggs. The entire Amazon user experience is designed to hide the mixed source nature of their inventory and instead make it appear like a unified storefront.
> The whole “4 hour” thing is mad - you should be seen in a reasonable time frame for the ailment you have. Severed hand? Go right ahead.

it's already like this, A&E is run on triage, "4 hours" is a target not an instruction

and if you go to A&E with something like a cold you'll be given a stern talking to and sent home
That's how you can tell that cryptocurrency really is a from of money... only money could lead to this many strawman arguments and online mudslinging :-)
Maybe but either way the era of USA unilaterally pushing wars just ended.
Russia with their hypersonic nukes and proxy wars wins have just made western imperialism via war and culture have very high costs.
UK residents have the 20th highest life expectancy in the world. 21st for health-adjusted life expectancy. The Japanese take the top spot and live +2 years. The average American lives -2 years.

There's a lot more to health than the health care system, and this doesn't say much about how painful the process can be, but the stats look pretty good for the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
No vector instructions at present (I think an older version may have done).
Google have not even BEGUN to start selling your personal data.
>So how does the US improve its healthcare system?

On both sides of the pond, we need to break the false dichotomy of UK vs US. Our systems are almost diametrically opposed, but they get vastly disproportionate mindshare and airtime. In any debate about NHS reforms, people will inevitably hold up the US as a cautionary tale and vice-versa, but hardly anyone raises Germany or Australia as a workable middle ground. This false dichotomy also dominates the debate over gun control.

Healthcare Triage did an excellent series of videos summarising the strengths and weaknesses of various international healthcare systems. I can highly recommend it to anyone on either side of the pond who is thinking about how their healthcare system could be reformed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylsO0VVy29U&list=PLkfBg8ML-g...
I don't see how this in any way changes the stalemate of mutual assured annihilated.
Grimm Lite: Game Development Studio Free WordPress Theme
That might work. I spend most of my time teaching Python though :( I really appreciate the recommendation though.
Ask HN: Looking for input, what are some engineering problems that you face?
Hi everyone.

We're a group of three currently attending an engineering residency. Starting next week we intend to work on a month-long project that will contribute to the open source developer community, and are brainstorming ideas. Past projects created at the residency include: a tool for generating visual representations of React component hierarchy, and creation of node.js middleware for serving website content through a p2p network.

On languages / frameworks, we are comfortable with the MERN stack but will greatly appreciate any input on programming challenges that you're facing. Thanks!

- example of a challenge: rule setting of files for CI to reduce test run time.
Is there any other field of computer security where this argument is acceptable? Usable security matters. Ecosystems matter. You cannot put a boundary somewhere in the middle of what the end user sees and call your security job done.

When people majorly botch x509 cert validation because the spec is so monstrously complex that's still a problem with x509.
The good news is, no one wants a nuclear war anymore... at least I hope.

I think what changed is largely trade. China, usually the USA's enemy, has benefited enormously by trading with the USA and providing a cheap labor pool for manufacturing after Unions made it too expensive to continue manual manufacturing in the United States.

So if my theory is true, it's probably worth allowing vestment in our fellow nuclear superpowers. Seems backwards, but most things in economics and game theory are.
Oh my.. Never thought of that. Surely it does not use the atmosphere as the primary circuit coolant?
The thing about Linus's rants is that he's almost always completely right. As far as I am concerned, his attitude is part of the reason the Linux kernel doesn't completely suck, in stark contrast the pretty much everything that sits on top of it (at least in the Desktop space).
> Humans identify objects by looking at how different parts are geometrically located and connected, possibly in a hierarchical fashion

FWIW this is what capsule networks are designed to do.