laingc

A lot of people, including myself, don’t believe that central health authorities have the right to make that call.

Moreover, I personally don’t have confidence in their ability to make those kinds of decisions, and I believe the abysmal performance of the NHS supports my view.

Allianz Global Digital Factory, or whatever it’s called these days?

We use Kubeflow at our shop. If you use a managed K8s offering, it’s quite simple to manage, and of course you can deploy all your other stuff alongside it using the same tool stack.

Adding my voice to this too. I have a PhD in Differential Geometry and would consider myself to have been a decent student and researcher. The "good" people in my field were more than a head and shoulders above me, and the "great" people were somewhere off in the stratosphere.

The nature of Mathematics is that the potential depth of understanding and progress is essentially infinite, which frees truly spectacular minds from the constraints they would experience in other fields.

Your comment didn’t challenge anything about my approval of Thiel. In fact, your comment didn’t add anything substantive whatsoever apart from a tone of disapproval - hence my question about starting flame wars.

Usefully, your comment has demonstrated the exact phenomenon I was referring to.

Which of my views are you challenging?

> If your 20 friends are all "massive fans" of a given person, I agree, that's a pretty solid indicator of significant bias.

I'm glad you agree.

Would you say that the tone of your comment reinforces, diminishes, or is neutral with respect to my comment about starting flame wars?

I can't speak for Silicon Valley, nor for the majority of HN, but my (obviously biased) sample of approximately 20 HN-reading friends are all massive Thiel fans. Myself included.

So perhaps there are more of us than you think, we're just not keen to speak up in the comments section because it just invites a flame war?

As a New Zealander, I am super supportive of easier pathways for wealthy people to bring themselves, their expertise, their connections, and their money here.

Furthermore, my anecdotal observation is that articles in The Guardian about New Zealand reflect not reality, but rather the talking points of a very small subset of the hard Left of our political class. I know that this is The Guardian’s line in general, but it somehow feels more egregious when applied to a situation I’m more personally familiar with.

It comes from the dimensionality of the hidden state of popular NLP models. The number 768 in particular comes from (if I recall correctly) the largest of the original BERT models.

From my experience as a mathematician, I would say that only a very small minority of mathematicians would accept computer verification of proofs, let alone view it as a gold standard.

Very nice! The baby name app we used worked on a Tinder-like swipe-right basis. At the end, you ended up with your “matches”.

But the best part about the app was the name - Kinder. (German for “children” and rhymes with Tinder)

When I worked there a few years ago, Xero was a pretty stellar employer. Lots of really lovely people, lots of opportunity to explore different avenues in your career, and active attention paid to employee wellbeing.

Not at all - it might work and it might not. It’s just that calling it bullshit at this stage is just begging to be proven wrong.

The Metaverse is definitely bullshit. It will fail for the same reason that Amazon never managed to beat Barnes & Noble, that the internet failed to become popular, and that nobody ever bought a PC. Just ridiculous.

As I said, I really don’t want to get drawn into the environmental debate, but there is one persistent myth that does need to be corrected: the idea that emissions from “heavy” vehicles are not priced. They are. They’re in the ETS. Reductions in heavy vehicle use due to tax will not reduce carbon emissions at all, as it will be emitted elsewhere in the economy. The only way to reduce the emissions of an activity covered by the ETS is to lower the cap, which can be done without a vehicle tax of any kind.

The New Zealand meat and dairy industries do not receive subsidies after radical market deregulation during the Labour government of '84.

We have a highly efficient and profitable sector, mainly for the reason that we compete in fairly extreme conditions against subsidised international players.

Note that this process incurred significant pain for many individuals while the industry reoriented and consolidated, and I am not inviting any argument around environmental impacts (which I would contend are bad, but also clearly less bad than other countries).

So yes, "natural" meat can be competitive and efficient without government subsidies.

I think GP is prefectly well aware of what was meant, and their point still stands - you need to do a lot of careful analysis to actually claim any ROI for these kinds of government handouts, and the burden of proof is very firmly on those claiming the benefits. The history of these things is overwhelmingly that in the final tally, actual benefits fall far short of break even.

What is outrageous is that the divers got at most an MBE - on the same New Years Honours list where heroes such as Michael Palin and Twiggy received knighthoods.

I have never seen anything really deserving of a knighthood than what those divers did.

Well, we actually do know how to do this fairly well. An Emissions Trading Scheme is the way to go.

Why does half of HN seem intent on ruining the iPhone for the rest of us?

The explicit selling proposition of the iPhone is that it is a closed ecosystem. I and my family buy it for precisely this reason.

If you want a choice about what you install, you can have it! It's called Android, and hundreds of phone manufacturers are lining up to sell you a compatible handset. Leave us with the one phone manufacturer who has managed to reliably deliver a mostly safe and secure handset.

There’s a difference between “being a doctor” and “Dr Watson”. Nobody would ever say an academic is “a doctor”.

Yes

As others have commented, you would indeed say, “I have an appointment with my GP.” However, people would certainly know what you meant if you said “I’m going to see the doctor.”

You go to the GP - General Practitioner.

It is important to note that in many places outside the US, Physicians are only honorary Doctors. For example in New Zealand, Physicians graduate MB ChB - Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of surgery. Lawyers likewise graduate LLB - Bachelor of Laws. You’re only technically a Doctor if you have a Doctorate - PhD, DPhil, DSc, MD.

It doesn’t invalidate your opinion, but it’s worth being aware of your own cultural context when making judgements.

The Bernoullis were Swiss (and Dutch and Belgian, depending on how you want to count it.)

I used to live in Europe, and a bicycle was my primary mode of transport. That was when I was a single man with no children. However, I can't see how I could possibly use a bicycle for really any transport at all today.

Advocates of cycling, I would be genuinely interested in how you would logistically achieve a typical weekend day in my life, which might consist of:

- Transporting myself, my wife, my daughter, my dog, and (say) 3 large bags full of the stuff that they require from my house at the rural/suburban boundary to the part of town where the hardware stores are - about 25km away, with about 600m elevation change.

- At those hardware and big box stores, I'll need to buy (say) 300L of sand (bagged) for the sandpit, a new powertool, a bag full of clothes, and a new bed for the dog.

- We then need to have some breakfast at a cafe, and transport the whole lot home.

- We have to do all of this in the rain or in the very high winds that my city is famous for.

- Total time to achieve all of this has to fit between my daughter's naps, so we have about two and a half hours all up.

Some version of this is my life almost every weekend.

Now, I would genuinely like to hear how I could achieve anything approaching this using a bicycle. I'm not being facetious - I don't know how it would be possible at all - but cycling advocates seem determined to assume that I somehow can, so I'd love to know how.

Yes, that should be our default assumption.

Excellent to see the continual progress of my favourite text editor. So long as the quality bar stays high and the price doesn’t become unreasonable, Sublime Text has a customer in me.