blahedo

6 ms·

1.
by blahedo 4mo ago
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 mechanism to schedule an(other) exam.
2.
by blahedo 4mo ago
Nope! We're encouraged to keep all that exclusively in canvas. (As noted, I have my own spreadsheet. But I'm an outlier.)
3.
by blahedo 4mo ago
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 that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little inf
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by blahedo 9mo ago
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 them. This may be another example (I don't know
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by blahedo 10mo ago
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, was probably standing in for "
6.
by blahedo 11mo ago
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 put my hand over the forced-air duct it feels at best ma
7.
by blahedo 11mo ago
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 models out there that work. But i
8.
by blahedo 11mo ago
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 configurable, and there are options for more of them
9.
by blahedo 11mo ago
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 was a little unexpected. It slows down but then it
10.
by blahedo 11mo ago
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 itself, and supports a lot of Excel formulas and formatting be
11.
by blahedo 1y ago
> 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 worry both about types and about syntax, and the fa
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by blahedo 1y ago
Just a few weeks ago. Annoying, but you can use Reader mode to get through it, for now.
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by blahedo 1y ago
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 retired somewhat involuntarily after 3 years so that I could g
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by blahedo 1y ago
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 Midwestern, so maybe not :)
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by blahedo 1y ago
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 itself: https://news.ycombinator.com
16.
by blahedo 1y ago
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 specifically, in fact—but people still love them. She noticed, a long
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by blahedo 1y ago
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 own lecture notes from one of his classes about the lambda
18.
by blahedo 1y ago
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_ choose the button with the thick black bar around it (typically
19.
by blahedo 1y ago
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 (and 60s), and while I can't speak to the
20.
by blahedo 1y ago
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 he'd said—and that the
21.
by blahedo 1y ago
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 METAFONT in order to be able to write and typeset the
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by blahedo 1y ago
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 changes even for a sing
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by blahedo 1y ago
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 Bulgaria, the only EU country to use the Cyrillic al
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by blahedo 1y ago
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.
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by blahedo 2y ago
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 anti-DST argument: "Why should we move the clock
26.
by blahedo 2y ago
It's because if it's out of order, your "partial interpretation so far" in your head gets messed up. A relative of mine pulls a version of this in English (that I find hilarious): in American English we usually read pho
27.
by blahedo 2y ago
> It's true that this means all similar US-based things should be banned as well Or... regulated? I'd be all for privacy regulations and data handling regulations that would affect the algorithms of everyone but as long as
28.
by blahedo 2y ago
> pretending that the TikTok law is a speech issue A lot of folks here are saying that the TT ban had nothing to do with free speech. A couple of indirect rhetorical questions that might be relevant to help illuminate opinions about T
29.
by blahedo 2y ago
> flip-flop so quickly The timing and phrasing make it clear that this was planned and negotiated in advance, and the shutdown was just for show in order to be able to post a memo about how "President Trump" saved it. If act
30.
by blahedo 2y ago
Yes, agreed. My dad said he didn't want a wake or funeral---I think he didn't want to put anyone out---but we overruled him, because the services weren't for him . Once he thought about that, he agreed (and gave some input

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