ihaveajob

The LyX folks would say it's a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean). Great tool. I wrote my dissertation and several papers on it, and it was a huge time saver, and a great way to focus on the content, not the form.

No, I meant a gap hour for an individual teacher. If they have 3 class hours but 1 gap hour in between, that reduces their schedule's flexibility.

Teachers (at least in Spain) get a salary that covers class time and off-class duties. Most teachers don't hang out at school unless they have a reason to be there, or they prefer to work from their office, when they have one.

The problem with a gap hour (from the point of view of a teacher) is that it forces the teacher to stay in school when they don't necessarily have to. It reduces flexibility in their schedule.

Even then, the interest tends to be in key moments and stages. A final sprint, a hard climb, a segment with side wind or cobblestones. Back in the 90s, during Indurain's dominance, just about everyone in Spain tuned in to watch, but other than special moments, most people dozed off the afternoon nap.

Sounds like transit scheduling in the SF Bay Area. I forgot how many times I've seen a Caltrain depart just as a matching BART train was arriving in the station, just because they're separate agencies who technically coordinate some schedules, but in practice don't have any system constraints to enforce synchronized transfers.

Oh yes, class scheduling is about the most political aspect of high school management. My dad is a retired high school teacher, and he served as a deputy director for several years. Part of the job is to make the schedules for everyone, and it was his most dreaded task every year.

Early in his career, it was done by hand, with large sheets of paper and moving cards around until all the pieces fit. Later, a couple of software companies came around, and they had this service where he would show up at an office, discuss the constraints with an operator, and choose among a handful options for the final schedule.

However, the crux of the problem was never the scheduling itself, but the accommodating of constraints which, given that teachers are in-class for 18-20h a week, but school is open for 30h/w, can get complicated pretty quickly. Some examples:

- Every teacher wanted to have one day with very light load, 1-2h max, so they could run other chores at home. Some people were very specific about this (i.e. they needed early Tuesday off), while others didn't care that much. - Nobody could just have a no-class day, due to administrative and legal reasons. - Having a gap hour without class was a big NO, because it adds to the time requirements without delivering actual teaching, so it was to be avoided at all costs. - All things equal, senior teachers outranked their junior peers in terms of choosing class levels, lab vs lecture, etc. - Some teachers had their own children attend the same school, and nobody wanted to teach their own kids (nor would the kids)

All in all, no matter how much time and effort he sunk into scheduling to everyone's liking, there was no perfect solution, and every single year there were aggravated teachers who would raise hell. He was called inhumane by someone who claimed the right to a free hour every morning to drop off her own kid, but only got her wish 4 days out of 5. He had peers stop talking to him over class level choices. The only reason he kept doing it was because the director was his close friend, and he asked my dad repeatedly. But he didn't wish that job on his worst enemy.

What, Chrome has autoplay on? How can anyone stand that? It reminds me of IE7 with auto-installed toolbars that took 1/3 of the screen.

I got one of those as a birthday gift in grad school, and it's a lot of fun, even 10 years later. I used to fill (yes) mine with tinted water for added joy.

I thought that is no longer the case and 3rd party web engines are now first class citizens on iOS. Firefox-iOS works great, for example.

My taxes in Spain were pretty much like that. You get a letter with the government's estimate. If you agree, you don't have to do anything else.

Nonsense, that's an apples to pears comparison.

Indeed, there are lots of stories about the effect of eye contact in human behavior, charisma and persuasion. Sam Harris has a few stories about this, and [writes a bit in this post](https://samharris.org/look-into-my-eyes/). Try to catch Osho, the guru in the video, blinking. He doesn't, he barely moves his eyelids 1/4 of the way down once a minute or so. It's fascinating.

A handgun won't be of much use if you're jumped on from behind by a beast 3 times your weight and many times your strength.

Yes, especially in local elections, where participation is often ridiculously low, the electorate skews heavily toward long time, older residents, and more on the homeowner than the renter front. So the incentives are clear against new developments.

Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.

The board of supervisors routinely rejects housing projects, or puts them up for an absurd review process that involve things like banning buildings if they cast a sliver of shadow on a park (which would on the other hand be tremendously welcome these days). Several supervisors are landlords who are personally invested in keeping the supply low so that prices keep rising.

By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.

Except it's been shown over and over again that even something as innocuous as your name can invoke inherent bias. For example, see https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/5494/black-sound... for a study comparing certain names and how they suggest a more or less muscular/aggressive person.

Correlation is definitely an important factor, but there are multitude of studies demonstrating an important inherent race/gender/origin bias in many important decisions, from hiring to housing to financing and more.

It comes to mind an experiment carried in France where they sent fake housing applications where the only difference between two sets of applicants was a Muslim-sounding name vs a Christian one. The results showed a much higher response rate for the latter, despite everything else being equal. I can't find the original, but found this similar one working with job applications (https://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/22384).

Not to negate the main point about "showing up", but there's more to it. When I've had the chance to hire someone and there are two similar candidates, I preferred to choose the one with the lower ranked school credentials. My thinking is that if this person has reached the same level of achievements with less environmental help, they probably have more grit and get-it-done in them than the candidate from the top school. Much more than that can be done in a systemic way, but it's a start.

Reminds me of my first year in college, when we'd log into each other's machines at the computer lab for some intro to computing class, and launch a fork-bomb script that simply launched itself twice, quickly rendering the machine useless. The tricky part was to test it without halting your own machine, as a newbie programmer and Unix user.

Interesting idea. I assume you're buying that time with post-tax money? As opposed to an unpaid holiday which would lower your taxable income.

Supposedly you need a reserved space for work. The US has (had?) a similar home-office tax deduction (https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...).

I personally don't care for this podcast, but imagine if a popular website (say HN) were to sign a deal to be available exclusively through a walled garden (say Facebook). The open internet loses overall.

From the fundamental point of view, the cost of raytracing grows proportional to the number of pixels rendered times log(scene size), whereas rasterization grows linearly with the scene size. So raytracing enables much more complex scenes at a fraction of the cost of rasterizing, which explains why it's being used more and more in real time rendering.

Thank you. This is quite worrisome to me personally, as my family lives on the south of Spain and a good deal of our livelihood is from olive farming. It feels like being tied to the railroad and watching a train barrel down toward you from the distance.

They also propagate pests. The olive industry in Italy is being decimated and the flower trade is suspected to be at the root.

They had a story on this at Marketplace. Storage is limited and not free, with oil tankers being used as extra storage units during the glut, at an increasingly large cost. Also capacity reduction is not trivial either, particularly for smaller wells that can't just shut down (vs larger wells that can slow down extraction).

Hand delivered.

I don't know much economics, but one thing I learned is that markets tend to not work as such when the players are few and motivated by other reasons than pricing. Airlines are one such example, depending on the time period, because being so few and dependent on entry barriers such as airport slots and flying licenses, they can easily collude. Oil producers are even more so, being driven by government decisions and geopolitics more than just profit alone.

So I wouldn't say that the oil market is broken, as much as it has never really worked as a close-to-ideal market.

Ah, the Stanford bunny. It's been a decade since I last worked with it in grad school, but I can't help feeling fond for the little guy. We spent hours and hours of frustration together.

Nice to see computer graphics pioneers being recognized. Reading Ed Catmull's name always brings fond memories of learning mesh processing techniques they first thought of, like the Catmull-Clark subdivision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivis...). Elegant stuff.

The problem with local, less aggressive measures is that people act in their self interest to bypass them for convenience or safety, and they make the problem worse. Recent examples:

- Lockdown in northern Italy: People ran to the south taking the virus with them. - Schools closing, folks asked to work from home in Madrid: Families drive to the coast where bars and restaurants are full.

I agree that in a place where compliance with social distance measures is high (I'm thinking South Korea, Japan), that would be enough. But that doesn't work everywhere.