Viewing profile — kiwih

I am an academic at a big Australian university. I can't disagree more with this article. Students are not just machines that convert ideas to papers (and nor should faculty), they…

There's a drinking game which I guess is inspired by this game, which I believe is called "Pizza Box" (at least that's what everyone I ever met who knew it called it). You start wi…

Hi HN, I wanted to share a side project from my work at UNSW that has recently become all-consuming! Essentially, we built a new kind of CTF where players competed to dominate an i…

Strange question - has the "submitted at" times been edited on this post and all the comments here? I swear I read everything on this submission, including the comments, several da…

I left US academia for Australia in 2023 and have never been happier - I'd be happy to talk to you about the changes I encountered if you'd like!

I am devastated by this news. I was lucky enough to work with Mohamed and Andy for several projects (including taping out the world's first ChatGPT-authored silicon [0]), and I've …

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/n…

Not always one for pithy remarks, but the quote from George Orwell seems prescient here: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." I'…

I noted in a different comment in this thread that we teach all first-year compsci and software engineering students at my university MIPS assembly. They may then specialise into o…

At my institution we teach MIPS, or rather, we teach MIPSY, which is our own version of MIPS which includes a bunch of helper pseudo-instructions. It's taught to all computer scien…

In Australia at least, anyone who is enrolled at or works at a university can use the taxpayer-subsidised "Gadi" HPC which is part of the National Computing Infrastructure ( https:…

In my experience in computer engineering in the academic systems of the USA, New Zealand, and Australia, a very large proportion of students will write their first paper in their f…

I quite enjoyed the broken earth trilogy, and took no issue from each entry winning. Which book would you have preferred win from those years?

I've recently been designing a custom implementation of a DCC controller for a new model railroad I'm setting up - what don't you like about the protocol? I find the protocol fasci…

That's interesting and I appreciate your response. I didn't subscribe until 2020 so perhaps I missed the downward swing and have only seen it on the up?

I'm a print subscriber to Wired and read it cover to cover most months. I find most issues pretty good and usually learn all kinds of interesting details about things happening in …

In March of this year a post made it to the front page of Hacker News regarding Tiny Tapeout( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35376645 ). Here, they had made a process where y…

Wow, this is cool! It has never made sense to me that a platform with thousands of times more compute and capabilities than Gameboys from two decades ago is worse in every regard f…

Firstly, well done on making your first PCB - and it looks like you've done a pretty good job besides! > I passionately hate Digikey’s search interface. It is shockingly bad at hav…

I'm sorry at what university was this assistant professor getting 200k? I clearly need to find better universities :)

Former postdoc in 30s here - I only had to postdoc to 31 (am now on the tenure-track, woohoo) and I still felt like the impermanence was unsettling and stressful. It made it nigh-i…