Hacker News: whenc

New comment by whenc in "UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M"

whenc — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:09:21 +0000

I could have sworn your comment originally said "track and trace" not "test and trace". Perhaps not enough coffee.

New comment by whenc in "UK Government’s ‘AI Skills Hub’ was delivered by PwC for £4.1M"

whenc — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:18:39 +0000

Test, track, and trace.

https://fullfact.org/health/NHS-test-and-trace-app-37-billio...

"The NAO said that of the approximately £13.5 billion spent on the NHS Test and Trace programme in 2020/21, £35 million was spent on the app.

The vast majority of the spending in that year was accounted for by testing (£10.4 billion)."

New comment by whenc in "No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me"

whenc — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:59:27 +0000

Out of an abundance of caution, I've deleted it. So there we are.

New comment by whenc in "No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me"

whenc — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:49:47 +0000

...

New comment by whenc in "No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me"

whenc — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:13:20 +0000

It went un-noticed here, I think, but The Pragmatic Bookshelf recently fired most of its staff and are taking on no new books. In the email they sent to authors, they quoted a 40% YoY fall in non-fiction sales, industry-wide.

New comment by whenc in "Ireland's Inability to Defend Itself"

whenc — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:22:08 +0000

And when they came back, they were blacklisted by order of the government:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16287211

New comment by whenc in "Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files"

whenc — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:32:23 +0000

You can do:

  cpdf -output-json in.pdf -o out.json

(Modify out.json as liked)

  cpdf -j out.json -o out.pdf

(Disclaimer, I wrote it.)

Landline and mobile networks down across UK

whenc — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:40:53 +0000

Article URL: https://downdetector.co.uk/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568819

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by whenc in "Ask HN: What is nowadays (opensource) way of converting HTML to PDF?"

whenc — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:32:55 +0000

PDF annotations sit within the file.

New comment by whenc in "Desktop Publishing Tools That Didn't Make It (2022)"

whenc — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 23:12:12 +0000

The last big RISC OS program written in BASIC and assembler. I published something through Cerilica called TextFX, also in BASIC and assembler.

There was also Composition, by a chap from New Zealand. Multiple transparent layers of any size and position, and and interesting system-wide plugin system.

New comment by whenc in "PDF to Text, a challenging problem"

whenc — Tue, 13 May 2025 16:01:51 +0000

Try with cpdf (disclaimer, wrote it):

  cpdf -output-json -output-json-parse-content-streams in.pdf -o out.json

Then you can play around with the JSON, and turn it back to PDF with

  cpdf -j out.json -o out.pdf

No live back-and-forth though.

New comment by whenc in "V.S. Naipaul: The Grief and the Glory"

whenc — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:14:39 +0000

"....financial precarity (his income through the 1970s averaged £7,600 a year)"

£100000 in today's money in 1970. £35000 in today's money in 1979. Minimum wage today about £23000.

New comment by whenc in "Bikes in the Age of Tariffs"

whenc — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:29:34 +0000

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

New comment by whenc in "Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly"

whenc — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 23:27:34 +0000

"Management is that for which there is no algorithm. If there's an algorithm, it's administration." (Maurice Wilkes, IIRC)

New comment by whenc in "Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth?"

whenc — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 23:17:02 +0000

Trains in operation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_139

New comment by whenc in "How the U.K. broke its own economy"

whenc — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:43:15 +0000

I suspect they are confusing "total market capitalization of companies on stock exchange" with "financial industry".

New comment by whenc in "2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past"

whenc — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 03:16:12 +0000

We come mentally of age when we discover that the great minds of the past, whom we have patronized, are not less intelligent than we are because they happen to be dead -- Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

New comment by whenc in "Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?"

whenc — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 23:28:29 +0000

No, they don't. Whilst Switzerland is not in the EEA, it does have agreements with the EU which include FoM.

New comment by whenc in "Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?"

whenc — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 23:04:03 +0000

Iceland already has freedom of movement (to live and work) due to its EEA membership; and it is only somewhat to do with Schengen, which is about passport free travel not living and working. You can have FoM without Schengen - e.g Romania until 1st Jan 2025.

New comment by whenc in "Is Iceland getting ready to join the EU?"

whenc — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 16:45:26 +0000

Iceland is not in the CFP.