blahedo · HackerLangs

2 months agodiscuss

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.

blahedo

2 months agodiscuss

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

blahedo

2 months agodiscuss

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 info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide shutdown" and "cybersecurity attacks", no further detail). I don't get a sense that they know much more than that, not that I would expect them to.

A perhaps telling detail: they're instructing us to have students email us directly with any work that had been submitted via Canvas. That suggests that they have no particular confidence that it will come back up soon.

I personally am only slightly affected; as a CS professor a lot of my students' work is done on department machines, and submitted that way, and I do the actual exams on paper. More importantly, I've never liked or trusted Canvas's gradebook, and so although I do upload grades to Canvas so students can see them, my primary gradebook is always a spreadsheet I maintain locally.

But I have a lot of colleagues for whom this is catastrophic at a level of "the whole building burnt down with all my exams and gradebooks in it"---even many of those that teach 100% in person have shifted much or all of their assessment into Canvas (using the Canvas "quiz" feature for everything up to and including final exams), and use the Canvas gradebook as their source-of-truth record. We've been encouraged to do so by our administration ("it makes submitting grades easier"). For faculty in that situation, they have few or zero artifacts that the students have produced, the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas in the first place, and they have no record of student grades or even attendance (because they managed that all inside Canvas). I guess they have access to the advisory midterm grades from March, if they submitted them (most do, some don't), but that might be it.

My gut feeling on this is that this is either resolved in hours (they have airgapped backups and can be working as soon as they can spin up new servers), or weeks (they don't). Very little in-between. And if that's true and we wake up tomorrow with this unresolved, I really have no idea what a lot of professors at my university and across the country are going to do to submit grades that are fair and reasonable. In the extreme case, they may have to revert to something we did in the pandemic semester (and before that, at my school, in the semester that two major academic buildings actually did burn to the ground a week before finals): let classes that normally count for a grade just submit grades as pass-fail. Because what else can you do?

(Well, one thing you can do is not put your eggs all in one basket, and not trust "the cloud" quite so much, but that ship's already sailed. I do wonder if in the longer term, anybody learns any lessons from this....)

UPDATE: As of 11:45pm EDT, my university's canvas instance is up and running! Here's hoping it stays (but I'll be downloading some stuff just in case...)

blahedo

7 months agodiscuss

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 quite enough of the legal specifics in this case, though there are certainly others that are more slam-dunk-y in this respect).

What are the enforcement mechanisms here if the states in question---MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and VA---just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building? I'm not saying they should but at this point rule-of-law has fallen apart so badly that I literally don't know what happens when the government invents a new rule and people just... disregard it. (Particularly if state-level enforcement decides not to play along.) Do they bring in the FBI? Military?

blahedo

8 months agodiscuss

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 "some un-tested gen AI output". Which, clicking on the link, seems to be what happened?

Anyway, yes, "infinite monkeys on typewriters" seemed to be the relevant meaning of "monkeys" here.

blahedo

9 months agodiscuss

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 maybe a tiny bit warmer than the ambient air. (Which together with the forced-air circulation makes the room feel even colder, even if the temp is technically going up, but that's more a complaint about forced air, not heat pumps.) Insulation problems would mean I'm running it more and I'm paying more to heat the place than I might with better insulation. But insulation problems aren't what's causing the emitted air to feel cold.

Also, as noted, I'm sure part of it is that they gave me a heat pump that's rated to 5°C or whatever instead of -15. Probably because they expect that everyone around here has a backup heating system, and it doesn't get Sweden-cold (or Chicago-cold, for that matter) in this area. Cool cool, but that just reinforces the message that heat pumps can't hack it and if you're buying a heat pump system you really need to also buy a second system—which may not be entirely true but there's other people on this very thread with a kind of dismissive "everyone knows" attitude regarding backup heating that fundamentally undermines the original message (which was my whole point).

blahedo

9 months agodiscuss

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 in practice, a lot of us that have interacted with heat pumps have the specific experience that they get anemic as the temperature goes down and eventually become unable to do much of anything.

I live in the mid-Atlantic (US) climate zone, where it's certainly not as cold as the north but definitely goes well below freezing regularly for several months of the year. The place I've lived for 15 years had a heat pump and a (oil) boiler with radiators, and when it was below 40°F (~5°C) I had to switch to the radiators. It's because it's old, everybody told me, modern heat pumps are better! So last year when both systems needed repairs at the same time, I not-entirely-willingly switched to a brand-new 2024-model heat pump. It absolutely could not keep up when the temperature was freezing until they came back and installed resistive heat strips for low temperature---these seem to be a fancy version of the heating elements in a space heater or a toaster. They do not seem to be particularly efficient. And to the extent that my "heat pump system" does now more or less keep the house adequately warm, if not as comfortable as the radiators always could, it's not solely due to the heat pump, but the other stuff they had to put in because the heat pump couldn't keep up.

My experience is far from unique. Maybe it's that they only install the good ones in farther-north locations! Maybe it's that the good ones are just way more expensive! I'm perfectly prepared to believe the factual statements about the physics and the tech. But if we're talking about perception and "why aren't more people looking to install heat pumps", it's because lots of people have experiences like the above, and that is what the industry needs to work on.

blahedo

9 months agodiscuss

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 (e.g. histograms, which are something I frequently want and Excel just doesn't support, or at least didn't used to). Downside: once you've got a spreadsheet with really informative charts, it's sometimes hard to share, because saving it as .xlsx breaks some of them. :(

Oh, another nifty feature of gnumeric: if you save it in its uncompressed format, it's literally .xml (good both for version control and for scripting certain kinds of things)

blahedo

9 months agodiscuss

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's on the other side of it.

blahedo

9 months agodiscuss

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 better than MS's own web client.

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

> 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 fact that both are invisible does them less favours than you might think. Type errors happen all the time in Python, but they aren't caught until runtime and only when given the right test cases, and the error message points somewhere in the program that may be quite distant from the place where the problem actually is. Syntax errors are less common for experienced programmers, but newcomers struggle just as much with syntax in Python as they do in languages like C++ and Java (both of which I've also taught intro programmers using).

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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 get a model that would also work overseas, but the phone itself was still fine. My second Samsung (the one I got in 2016 for the overseas trip) I just retired last fall, 2024, and even then only because a job required MS Authenticator and it wouldn't let me download it to the phone. Battery life was still fine, everything I used worked fine.

I fully expect to be using my current Android phone into the 2030s.

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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 :)

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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/item?id=16540539

EDIT: actually, let me also just paste the recipe here:

    3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
    2 eggs
    ¼c. water
    ⅓c. vegetable oil
    and the included packet of Hershey's syrup

The baking times on the old box were: for 13x9 pan, 28-30m at 350°, for 9x9 pan, 35-40m at 350°, and for 8x8 pan, 50-55m at 325°. (We usually use the 13x9, can't speak as much to the other sizes.)

As of the original redesign mentioned in [the 2018 article I'm pasting this from], the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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 time ago now (ten years?), that the recipe on the new boxes had changed, but since she still had a few of the old boxes, did some measuring and experimenting (and calls to the company) and found that a) the mix itself hadn't changed, just the amount of it, and thus that b) if you bought multiple boxes and kept a jar to "save the rest" you could measure out one "old box equivalent" of brownie mix and make it according to the old recipe and it would come out just like before.

So now we really do have a "secret recipe", that's just the old box instructions. Since the first time it happened we've noticed the box change several times (and the article above acknowledges this with an "(again)") but from what I can tell the powder itself is still the same stuff, it's just a different amount each time.

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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 calculus and the Y combinator were for a long time on the front page of google results for info about either!

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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 "OK"). There were also some websites where OmniWeb (remember OmniWeb?) would interpret the Enter key (but not Return) as "click the 'next' link on this page", which was great for paging through webcomic archives and the like.

blahedo

10 months agodiscuss

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 specific reasons for such a choice, I do know that nobody was worrying about scaling up to billions of memory locations, and also using particular bit combinations to signal "special" values was a lot more common in older systems, so I imagine both were at play.

blahedo

3 years agodiscuss

Thanks for pointing this out---when I read the article I tripped on that word, thought it odd and not sure what the author was trying to say, and moved on, but now that you call it out it seems very obviously to be used in just the same way that a lot of people used to use the r-slur (and some still do).