Viewing profile — blahedo

That's maybe something a school can do if exams are next week, or after. At my school, tomorrow is the last day of exams. Most of the students have left campus. There's no time or …

Nope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.)

Perspective from the trenches: I teach at a university that uses Canvas. We are in our final exams period right now. We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us tha…

I've been wondering all year about what happens when an executive-branch office issues orders that it is not legally qualified to issue; by and large everybody has just... followed…

Evidently not "clearly", given the number of people who didn't see it, but that was my first interpretation as well: I took it as an "infinite monkeys" reference that, in context, …

Responding to this and more generally to everyone mentioning insulation: I'm not saying that insulation is irrelevant, but when I say it fades out at low temps, I mean that if I pu…

People are reluctant to install them because they don't work as well as the good old boilers we'd be replacing. I'm not saying they can't, and I'm not saying that there are zero mo…

Glad you liked it! For charts in particular, I find gnumeric to be more solid than any other spreadsheet software I've tried (including Excel)—the charts are more stable and more c…

It's giving Qix, a little bit, although the critter's different and the lines are way more freeform. Bug, I think: the critter definitely can cross some of the paint lines, which w…

I use LO for its word processor fairly extensively and have been pretty happy with it, but for spreadsheets I am 100% on team gnumeric---it is rock solid, less buggy than Excel its…

> since students don't have to worry about typing and syntax As someone who regularly teaches intro programming using Python, I assure you that students learning Python need to wor…

Just a few weeks ago. Annoying, but you can use Reader mode to get through it, for now.

This... is the opposite of my experience. Friends with iPhones seem to upgrade them unreasonably often, but my (Samsung) Android phones last a loooong time. My first Samsung I reti…

Neal Stephenson referred to the phenomenon as "recombinant cuisine" in Reamde and identified it as specifically Midwestern, although I think it is more broadly American. (But I am …

This is a link to the last time I talked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16534745 and to the particular comment in that subthread where I give the recipe itse…

Oh wow this article was written specifically for me! :) My mom has been known for decades for her brownies, which she openly tells people are box brownies—Betty Crocker specificall…

In addition to the general sibling comments, I can personally attest that Shriram knows what the Y combinator is and has been teaching students about it for at least 25 years. My o…

On at least some Macs well into the 2000s, I remember that if you had a dialog with a text field in it, Return would add a new line in the text field, but Enter would _always_ choo…

I believe that 10- and 12-bit bytes were also attested in the early days. As for "why": the tradeoffs are different when you're at the scale that any computer was at in the 70s (an…

Or "tschüß". I have a friend who speaks German and frequently says goodbye with "tschüß", and one time I heard it, thought he said "cheers" (as I often do), and then realise what h…

Definitely belongs on the list; notable not just because it's a slow/long project spanning 60 years and counting, but because part of it included the side trip to write TeX and MET…

It's worse than this: it's not just "what's my (app developer) reference frame for time in this app" but rather "what is the user's reference frame", and that is a thing that chang…

Random observation: I remember seeing the second round of euro bills and momentarily thinking, "EBPO? cool, but why did they add Cyrillic to the design?" It was specifically for Bu…

It was pegged originally to the Deutschmark. If you look up a currency table the historic DEM has the exact same conversion rate as the lev will have.

As someone who actually likes the time changes, as part of the annual cycle of stuff that changes and lets the year "breathe", I just want to set up and knock down my favourite ant…