310 karma · joined December 4, 2017
I do feel, however, that the converse would not work as well: most MDs I met do not practice the "abstract" thinking that is required to be a successful programmer. But that's just my experience.
Trudeau has even stated that he thinks each province should be acting on that since they're competent wrt healthcare. Borders are under his control, yet weren't seen as a particularly pressing issue as I highly doubt (as we have, I believe, clearly seen) that this was even on his daily agenda before a few days ago. He went from 0 to 100 in a day. Just yesterday he was serving the same old same old.
There were a bunch of statements made by some of his ministers on Twitter. Overall bad handling of what should have been a no-brainer. Premier Legault had to publically call Trudeau out multiple times on his inaction. That kind of thing shouldn't happen.
Actually, Gerbil used to be written on Racket. As you can see, it now benefits from Gambit's strengths without having to re-implement them...
I don't say this to be demeaning! I would say there are far more chances you really enjoy the language than not. Give it a try and stop worrying about the parenthesis and start thinking in terms of an AST.
(let ((x 0)) (+ x 1))
You write the parentheses because they have meaning. I can understand your frustration but I don't think you gave lisp a fair chance if you are asking "why parens".
> '(this is a list)
> this is a list
I take issue with the closed entrance door policy. I'd rather see selective internships than selective pre-screening.
Curiously the MDs I work with have been relatively unanimous about this: there is a variability in cases and you do, in a way, have to be "creative", but in a very limited sense of what that means. "Creative" in your analysis. Some thought that was a boring aspect of the job, some thought that was the whole point.
What kind of creativity could you demonstrate in the OR?
There is also the money. Sure you can train 10-100x physicians, but total compensation won't grow as fast, and so you should see lower overall wages (supply and demand). But it's still more complicated than that, because some people choose not to undergo X or Y procedure for various reasons, insurers don't cover or whatever. So even if you could train enough doctors to fulfil the whole population's needs, that doesn't mean you will have: 1. enough equipment, material, operating rooms, etc to do the procedures 2. enough supporting staff, and on and on.
The most common reason I hear from MDs against training much more doctors is the first one I gave you: less practice means a more dangerous practice.
My own opinion is relatively simple. Medical schools should stop screening applicants as much and let students join freely.
Medical schools are all about getting well-rounded individuals who did extra-curriculars etc. They usually view it as a good thing that you have life experiences outside of medicine, like working or studying an entirely different subject. However it works one-way: you can't (generally) just go to med school, learn the subject matter and then move on to another field, enriching _that_ one with your experience. I have come to believe that if we are to see any improvement, med school will have to open up just like every other discipline. The current system of stressing out students for a few years before even being allowed in the classroom is, IMO, partly responsible for the job dissatisfaction that you see.
Now freeing up med school admissions does not mean allowing everybody to _practice_ medicine. Prospective students would actually get a chance to learn the material for a few years before having to interview for internships. So instead of filtering _before_ med school and forcing a huge sunk cost psychological barrier to students, you can let the students figure out by themselves if they actually enjoy the subject matter. It's not a perfect solution but I am quite certain that society as a whole would benefit. It is entirely unfair that medical knowledge (not practice) is restricted to a lucky few.
As I've gotten to do business, negotiations, and dealing with "money" more, I became kind of disillusioned to the power game. It's not always as fun as commonly portrayed and medicine seems like a very demanding but cool job. Maybe the grass is just greener and it gets as boring (if not more due to the lower potential for creativity).
Maybe I should let this pass but this essay really rubs me the wrong way. I would like to stress that the author is _not_ a chemist. That was obvious before he wrote it in his text. He does not have formal training in the discipline (art?) and thus his opinion should be taken with serious skepticism.
On the other hand, I am a (published) college trained chemist, specialised in computational/theoretical chemistry in grad school but I did go through a very good program with anywhere between 10-15 hours of lab work every week, every year. Contrary to the author, I remember the names of all the textbooks I used because I spent so much time with them. Really, the author seems frustrated with his own _very_ limited experience of chemistry.
There is a reason why we "follow recipes". Mishandling of chemicals can and do cause injuries. Labs do get blown up. For all of my education, entrance to any laboratory was conditional on passing a test. Every time. One would be evaluated by either graduate students or professors before being allowed in. If you did not know what you were going to do, how you were going to do it, why you were doing it, what you should expect to happen, along with any other necessary information deemed essential by the instructors, you would be refused access to the lab and consequently get 0 in the mandatory laboratory report. And accidents _still_ happened, sometimes innocuous, sometimes dangerous to the point of having to evacuate the lab for a few minutes.
Not all experiments were "cookbook laboratory work" either. From the very first lab session, students had agency in how you plan and execute your experiment. No two students held notes exactly the same, for example. And no two students researched the subject as much beforehand, something which was _very_ obvious during lab work. Sharing a laboratory with students who did not prepare properly is dangerous in a way you can't really grasp until you're three hours into a multi-step anhydrous synthesis, you need to act fast to add a reagent in your air-free setup and the student next to you flushes a syringe of oxalyl chloride[1] in the sink beside you.
We _did_ have to analyse unknown compounds. We _did_ have a lot of liberty in how we conducted experiments, as long as we prepared well and acted safely. Practicing balancing chemical equations is NOT useless as the author suggests. Contrary to what he seems to believe, empirical evidence is _all there is_. Theories have to conform to reality, not the other way around.
All in all, this is a very bad argumentation that _completely_ misses the point. The author is talking about general chemistry as if it defines a complete chemical education. In actuality, general chemistry is only the very most basic knowledge one needs to have to be allowed in a lab. Chemistry doesn't stop there.
I was ready to give the author a chance but he has shown himself to be unqualified to discuss the topic. Being a dilettante is fine but there is a mountain of work separating a dilettante and a professional. Nobody on HN would seriously consider a rant about the current state of Medical education written by someone who had 2 semesters of biology.
You might as well say that quebecoi don't want to
learn the language of the rest of the country.
The word "Canada" has had multiple meanings which have been thoroughly perverted. Technically, Canada is not a country per se, rather it is a federation. Canada referred to the nation of what were later called "French Canadians" long before English settlers came. This [1] map from 1579 uses the word Canada almost 200 years before the English conquest. The process of nation building was underway a _long_ time before any English settlers joined. The English appropriated the name (and the flag, and the national anthem) for themselves and promptly outlawed giving or receiving education in French in _all provinces except Quebec_. Some are still fighting against it _to this day_. These facts would not be disputed by any party at he national assembly because... they are facts.
So did the English not want to learn the language of the rest of the country, even when they were vastly outnumbered? No, they did not (and still don't). Yet for example, they generously split their debt between all of the inhabitants of the federation, at a time when the English were vastly outnumbered yet millions of dollars in debt, and the French were much more numerous yet had budget surpluses!
The Quebecois (Canadiens) have absolutely no lesson whatsoever to receive from anybody. The English minority in the province receives many times more funding than it would pro rata. It is cited by the UN as the world's most well treated minority. You, like a lot of other English Canadians, are merely expressing your disdain for Canadiens. The history of this federation is clear, if only more people would learn about it.
Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.
I bought a Macbook Pro in 2009 and used it until 2017 when I switched to a T470. Haven't regretted it one second. Debian works flawlessly, as does OpenBSD.
All languages are typed in one way or another. Unless you write a generic function, you cannot evaluate (+ 2 "a") in scheme. Here is racket's error message:
> (+ 2 "a")
; +: contract violation
; expected: number?
; given: "a"
; argument position: 2nd
; [,bt for context]
>
I have a small theory about why they chose to do that. Telegram is the de facto messenger for cryptocurrencies. There are a LOT of scams being perpetrated on Telegram. This new feature facilitates plausible deniability for scammers, with the intent of making lawsuits against Telegram less likely.