skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NHS spending has not dropped, but it has not grown at the appropriate rate

Yes, this is how such threads always go. It's a simple three step process:

1. Someone claims the NHS funding has been cut

2. I point out that's a lie, no such cuts have ever happened and in fact the budget has always gone up

3. Somebody else replies with: but it should have grown even faster.

The point I'm making is not about the correct level of healthcare spending, which is arbitrary and values-based as healthcare systems will consume however much money is given to them. Rather the persistent level of outright lying that accompanies any discussion of the NHS in Britain. It's absurd and quite obviously linked to a belief that misleading people is fine if it's for a 'good cause'.

But this behaviour has to stop. It isn't OK to lie even if the outcome might appear to be desirable (more political pressure for higher healthcare spending). People learn that they're being manipulated and support for the desired cause can collapse.

Having no money for CapEx is not how you maintain a health service long term.

I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face. The NHS has more money now than it's ever had. Not only does the NHS have money for capex but it's been repeatedly allocated money specifically and only for capex, because NHS managers have a long history of preferring to divert spending on upgrades to other forms of spending - frequently salary increases.

It's bad management. The government attempts to combat this lack of forward thinking by earmarking of money specifically for upgrades (what you criticise here as "pots of money for very narrow purposes"). One of the first things Boris Johnson did is allocate a billion pounds to the NHS only for capex. Unfortunately it doesn't work:

https://www.hsj.co.uk/technology-and-innovation/exclusive-qu...

"Capital spending was particularly tight with only £150.3m spent from £354.1m of allocated funding ... funding to help NHS trusts to become more digitally advanced accounted for most of this capital underspend. The DH planned to spend £116.2m of capital on these trusts in 2016-17 – instead it spent nothing."

The idea the NHS doesn't have money for capex is just another piece of misdirection. It refuses to spend on upgrades even when central government is trying to force its hand, because it knows that the result is No 10 will blink and give up, which is what happens:

"The money was not allocated elsewhere but “as with all Department underspends, was available to offset pressures in other parts of the system”, she said."
Not really. With all due respect to the author, most of the advice there doesn't really apply today in the world we are living (well, maybe after COVID it will again?). I remember reading it a few years ago and it was already dated by then.
Frightened by Coronavirus, Many of UK’s Poles Are Heading Home
>In a world where ads don’t exist these kinds of videos wouldn’t be viable as nobody would pay for them, and the ones who would will then ask for their money back when they realise the free energy generator doesn’t actually produce free energy.

You'd have a point, if Google had a policy of banning videos that didn't generate ad revenue. As it is, these videos would exist and be available regardless.
Maybe you should add a /s? It is a joke right? If not it doesn't seem to be working, I'm just getting back my keyword with hundreds of suffixes.
Super interesting, thanks for replying!

So you are aware that your estimate is biased because of your other beliefs, but you don’t try to fix that? Mind if I ask why?
I see these senior vs non-senior engineer contrasts pop up a lot. I’m not a huge fan of them.

It seems that there is a spectrum of skills an engineer could excel at: programming, infrastructure, managing, planning, etc. I’ve known senior engineers who only excel at a particular skill. I’ve also known senior engineers who are moderately good at many but not particularly good at one.

In my experience the only difference between a senior and non-senior is that the senior’s distribution of skills makes them more effective.

I’ve also seen senior engineers change roles laterally and become more or less effective, yet still maintain the senior title.
I wonder which one the author lives in, big city or town? I would think most people feel safest where they live so I can understand why one would feel safer no matter where they call home.

I can also see how once herd immunity takes hold how you might think it is safer, but what a terrible price is required achive it.

I actually live outside a small town/city < 10K and can tell you people are taking this pandemic seriously. I live next to a highway and the amount of passenger vehicle traffic is down in my estimate 90%. I had to go into town yesterday to pick up a prescription and the streets were empty.

I think there may be some truth to the argument for greater public services being offered in big cities than small towns, including hospitals but what happens if during this pandemic another disaster occurs? Small towns and their citizens are generally prepared to spend long periods of time isolated from others because they don't have as many of the supports offered in large cities, this creates almost an immunity to dependence of these services.

When I lived in Vancouver we had a unusual cold snap and snow event and I watched the news as people were fighting over rock salt, others were hoarding it and price gouging their neighbours. It was no surprise when the toilet paper rush occured, these things are happening while the supply chain is still functioning, what would happen in Vancouver if an earthquake or major flood took out the transportation network?

Living in a herd is generally safer until things go bad, then you better hope your not one of the weak lest you get trampled.
Turns out DeepMind has already been working on exploring variants with Vladimir Kramnik!

https://www.chess.com/article/view/no-castling-chess-kramnik...

Currently they have to train from scratch, but adapting to new tasks is an active area of research for RL broadly.
Single-issue voters don't vote straight party tickets. You have to learn about the individual candidates and only vote for the ones that support your pet issue.

The mayor in this story probably didn't care much either way about municipal broadband. They just don't see it as an issue worth the effort.

If there were a real chance that not supporting municipal broadband would hurt their re-election chances, they'd be more likely to support it. If not, perhaps their successor would see things differently.
Fidla, thanks for the tip. I'll check the open roles at those locations.

My previous experiences with the Amazon hiring pipeline suggest that (some of) the people responsible for the process do not care much about candidate experience. For example, a week after applying to be a Chinese-language app tester, upon checking the Amazon Jobs website I discovered that the job posting had silently been converted to a German position. Needless to say, I was not qualified for that job, and anyone viewing my resume would have been nonplussed.
> though they know how to do it straight away and I get unseasonably excited.

I can imagine how exciting that must feel!
that video is funny and very cute. but yes, los angeles, and that's good to know.

growing up out in the country taught me to not worry too much about wild animals generally, but that any animal can be dangerous under stress (including humans!).
Of course you can block it, a private DNS with ad blocking is trivial to setup. Knowing about it is far important as you can make informed decisions.
Awesome. But maybe add an option to disable domain checks? Because .com is not the only domain around...
I remember it being really good, though I haven't read it for awhile. I thought I remembered hearing a podcast where Rob talked about what he would change if he rewrote it today, but I can't seem to find it (maybe someone with better google-fu can)

Here is one of his podcast episodes where he talks about it though - so you can start here: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-219
Every good cs course has a section on cache aware algorithms. And i call bullshit that constant factor is not mentioned too
The fact that there's a unicode character for the entire word "Fax" is intriguing. There is also a character "Tel," which makes me wonder if these characters were intended to simplify the generation of e.g. fax cover pages by using a single character to prefix the caller number information. That said I can't find characters "From" or "Re" which would also be typical of that use.
If you can work from home the majority of time, and if you can arrange it so that those times you work in the office can be on a slightly shifted schedule so that you aren't traveling during rush hour, you might also be able to live quite a bit farther from the office which could greatly cut your housing costs.

For example, if you could do a 4 day home 1 day at the office schedule and were willing to do a 90 minute commute each way on your office day, that would be enough to let you work in downtown San Francisco and live in Modesto. There you can have a 3 bedroom 2 bath 1400 sq ft house on a 7000 sq ft lot with a two car garage for $300-500k. Many in that price range will even have a pool.
I like to start by thinking about cache locality and ensuring linear layout. Next focus on one-time, or minimal memory allocation. Then there are a bunch of small, systemic things you need to get right. After that you can start worrying about worst case big O scenarios.

Of course this depends on your language. A c programmer will have a different mental model than a python one.
yup, airbnb is almost the inverse of wework, and is way more of a tech company too.
Oh, that's really nice. Though, as a user one should remember: The approach described here gives up at some point. So it doesn't prove the absence of a bug class (e.g. double free), but it finds some instances. Which is already a very good thing, and hugely non-trivial.

The problem with "not giving up at some point" is the computational complexity: Analyzing big code bases takes half an eternity (days), while using huge amounts of memory (>128GB). And once you enter the "least-defined state", you either throw lots of false positives (which gives the users a hard time) or you need to "give up" (and hence potentially miss bugs).

Disclaimer: I work for a company that builds static analysis tools. I don't see this as competition, though. Our tools are used in industries where "safety-critical" is really important - so the "giving up"-part of the analysis is no option for us, and solely relying only on GCC isn't an option for our customers either ;-)
This is important. Favirapivir passed clinical trial and is now approved in China. Chloroquin, so much promoted by the President, has not passed a clinical trial, in fact current evidence shows that it's no better than placebo.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has filled in before when Linus has had to take time off.
> Once you've written sufficient unit tests to prove your code works as well as a C++ equivalent does just by compiling

You mean in the same way C++ dev write tests to prove that all their code has no memory error which you get in Python for free ?

Except:

- tests are way shorter to write in python than in C++

- C++ devs often write zero tests for their code, just like python devs

- python duck typing + REPL means compiler checks are rarely necessary

- if you need to be type checks, you use type hints in python, which even then is still less verbose than c++

> I'd also argue that operator overloading etc lets C++ be just as expressive as Python, the libraries just need to be designed with that in mind.

Ok, let's say you have this json:

[{
"name": "Kévin",
"age": 23,
"hired": "2005-06-03 02:12:33",
"emails": ["kevin@foo.com", "kevin@bar.com"]
}, {
}, {
"name": "Joël",
"age": 32,
"hired": "2003-01-02 12:32:11",
"emails": ["joel@foo.com", "joel@bar.com"]
},
... other entries
]

It's very simple. Very basic. There is no trick in there: it's standard utf8, well formed, no missing value.

You want to print people details in alphabetical order this way:

Joël (32) - 02/01/03:
- joel@foo.com
- joel@bar.com
Kévin (23) - 03/06/05:
- kevin@foo.com
- kevin@bar.com
... other entries

This is a 1rst year of college exercise. Nothing remotely complicated. I'm not choosing some fancy machine learning or data processing stuff for which Python has magic libs. Every language can do that easily.

In Python 3.7, which is already 2 years old, the code would be:

import json
import datetime as dt

with open("agenda.json") as fd:

agenda = sorted(json.load(fd), key=lambda people: people["name"])

for people in agenda:

hired = dt.datetime.fromisoformat(people["hired"])
print(f'{people["name"]} ({people["age"]}) - {hired:%d/%m/%y}:')

for email in people["emails"]:
print(f" - {email}")

The entire script is there. There is no trick. This is not a code golf version of of it; I could make it shorter. It really is standard Python. There is no 3rd party lib either.

It's not specific to Python, you would get this expressiveness with Ruby or Perl.

I don't see in which world you would get that in regular, honest to god, day to day, portable C++.

You have to declare types, many includes, you'll have headers and a main function. You have the memory and references to manage.

It doesn't make C++ a bad language.

It doesn't make python a better language.

The C++ version will take way less RAM than the Python version for example.

It's just the nature of those languages implies that.
> Yes? I don't even understand how this is a question.

Well that's where we philosophically disagree I guess. To me, version 10 of Mac OS is still the continuation of version 9 of Mac OS, even though they're fundamentally different systems under the hood.
It could be faster than some alternatives under some circumstances. A loop would probably be more code (== icache pressure) and would consume at least a register and a BTB entry.
If you can prove the tradeoff, fine. But until recently, the economy was doing great. There's no reason to think that significant numbers of people would have been totally idle if we required people to be paid living wages. Indeed, we can look at other countries that do require that and see low unemployment rates.

Your bogeyman in particular has been brought up with every advance in worker protections. But the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week did not mean mass starvation due to lack of jobs. Reasonable minimum wages don't appear to harm employment significantly.

The truth is that as a society, we a) create plenty of stuff, and b) have plenty of work that needs doing. The problem is one of allocation, and increasing worker exploitation doesn't solve that at all.
Sorry, no, I may have been unclear. I don't know that my estimate is biased - I believe I've properly adjusted for my other beliefs and desires - but I can't know for sure I adjusted correctly so it would be misleading for me to present an estimate as though I'm a dispassionate observer.
Dnh44 and mikechar, thank you both for responding. I've looked for Chinese->English contract positions and found little, but Dnh44's suggestion prompted me to think perhaps I hadn't looked in the right places. I'll reach out to my connections in China scholarship one more time.
That too, but it's only the cover story for people without a New York Metropolitan accent!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

>Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object. Incidentally, "boid" is also a New York Metropolitan dialect pronunciation for "bird".
Sure they can, e.g. look at the compensation for people who have been convicted wrongly.
Welcome to AI.
You're right that my tone wasn't great. I was surprised by your confidence coupled with what seems like complete ignorance of the severity of the treatment of native peoples during the colonization of the islands in Indonesia and elsewhere.

> blood feuds

Again, no one is arguing for that. We're trying to create policies which incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior in the world, in the long term. The straw person that you're fighting there has been defeated, but this has not (from my above comment):

> They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.
Ask HN: In times of corona how do you tip so. w/o transferring physical money?
In times of corona with social distancing, e.g. when the home delivery is already paid online and the delivery guy doesn't want to touch anything you handover (could be already infected), how do you give a tip to somebody? or to somebody in need on the street when you don't have any coins with you?
It's a great video. His source is here:
https://github.com/3b1b/manim/blob/shaders/from_3b1b/active/...
Complexity yes, but I feel scalability is similarly a word with a misleadingly narrow connotation in practice.

Is an approach dependent on swathes of training data truly scalable if it doesn’t work for the first n attempts?
Paying more attention to local politics helps combat this. There are people trying to do good out there, they're just not getting all the attention like those at the federal level.
The 1st amendment goes out the window in times of “national security”. The government will censor things if they believe its for the best interest of national security, which can be many things and anytime they want.
The value of being able to collaborate and share on the web in Figma has outweighed any feature of almost any other graphics editor.
Craigslist Is Hiring
It’s pretty exciting for rural areas — not that it should be hard to run fiber everywhere (not my area of expertise). It just seems like a very quick way to turn on access for a lot of areas. Especially places just beyond towns and cities that are still well within civilization, but just not connected. Current satellite is ok but the latency is pretty unfortunate.
Are you sure?
http://fftc.fujifilm.co.jp/en/avigan/index.html
And unfortunately even the people that wfh would be good for are getting a very bad impression of it as their first taste
The fundamental problem Theranos failed at overcoming was that you can’t accurately measure many things using small volumes of blood. All of the fraud was aimed at covering that up. (Glucose concentration is one of the few tests that does work with low volumes.) The CoV test we’re talking about has the same fundamental issue — you can’t have an accurate test for an antigen using a small amount of blood.

It’s less of a biological problem and more of a statistical sampling problem. The chances of there being a CoV antigen in the small drop of blood that you’d measure with a glucose monitor is very small. Sure, it might work, and the theory behind the device is sound. However, if you had a negative test, you’d never know if it was because you didn’t have CoV or if you just didn’t have any in that small blood sample.

I’d be happy to be wrong about this. A quick blood check as opposed to a 15min (the Abbott test) or 24hr (to 1 week with this backlog) wait would be amazing. But the amount of validation you’d need to demonstrate effectiveness would be equally amazing.
Inflation and population growth will force spending increases no matter what, and if the increases don’t track with those two variables, then service will obviously have to decline.

Doctor and nursing salaries are pretty low in the UK, if management is diverting capital expense money to salary increases, they are doing a poor job of it.
The one thing I really miss from Illustrator is “Select Same Appearance”. It doesn’t seem like it’d be that hard to implement, but it’s been “coming soon” for five years.
[citation needed]

Further, it's not like the only two options available are "exploit children in factories" and "exploit children in brothels". Things like the bolsa familia, for example, have been very effective.
Exactly. The problem with self testing is trust.

If you get tested by an authority - a doctor - then there is only so much discussion to be had. Whereas if you are asked to test yourself in the morning, who's going to be able to verify your claimed outcome?

Consider STD's and - in particular - HIV. Even with medical testing, the first basic lesson any teenager (should) get(s) is to use a condom if you don't know your partner.

Moreover, it's a good thing that many legal systems (a) only grant doctors the ability to issue sick leave and (b) protect the rights of those who are issued sick leave. Labor laws being byzantine as they are, allowing employers to test their workers at their own discretion poses a wide range of prickly legal issues.

The fact that South Korea or China (arguably) succeeded in curbing their epidemic happened because their public governance puts the collective above personal rights and people are totally fine with that because that's a deep part of the moral standard of their culture.

Current mass quarantine exercises are painful in the short term, but if you can keep them up for significant time, it might be possible to safeguard liberties and protections that aren't self-evident. You could curtail those exercises and favor self testing in order to open up the economy quicker, but doing that in a meaningful way requires that we all are prepared to compromise on some of those protections and rights, with all the unintended societal consequences that might bring.
I don't have the link right now but the one where they track down a scam callcenter all the way to India is also pretty impressive
Hopefully this may incentivize people to be a bit more self-sufficient. Gardens that you grow your own, allotments - the mentality of that has been driven away over decades and now people are starting to smell the roses and realize they can't eat them. So in many avenues - complacency gets highlighted more and I'm sure many and much will change on the back of this period in time. Overall I'd say for the better. Certainly the environment is doing better, so not all side-effects that bad, but even the bad ones, may well get exacerbated and become fear/panic driven.

Equally many manual aspects of farming have long been on the verge of better automation and with that, robots.

However that drive will only see less people working and the knock-on effects of any change has ripples.

But let's not overlook the whole import/export aspects and SPain for example exports a huge amount of fruit and veg, how that pans out over this period will be of note.

But for some perspective: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/E...

Shows the export and import of food in EUrope as a whole is somewhat balanced. How that balance plays out this year and for few years after will be interesting.

Though I don't see any fear of food shortages, sure may be case of some food items being more expensive.

But such articles, whilst are a caution warning, they themselves can drive fear and panic and they as always do more damage as any toilet roll can attest.

[EDIT spellings and grams]
The auto-generated fonts and logos are great! The site is a little bit slow from all the traffic right now, though.

For a fast and very simple name generator, I recommend https://startupname.website