wanderfowl

Hm. At some level, this would be great, particularly for fluidly switching among keyboards across many languages, or even for particular games or applications (remapping the keys to functions which are nicely labeled). But it would need to get the haptic cues right, such that touch-typing remains possible and enjoyable.

One side bonus is that presumably, your keyboard would now be covered in a continuous non-permeable sheet. Combined with haptic touchpads, we're edging closer and closer to a more water-resistant laptop.

This is sadly common, but I'd like to assure you there are many of us who are interested in pedagogy, and measure our long-term success on the success and learning of our students.

This seems like a feature, not a bug. If developers know that tricking or coercing kids into IAPs will not profit them, they will stop doing so.

And even putting the kid issue aside, anything that discourages repeated-purchase IAPs is itself a net benefit to gaming and app development.

Much like UPS targeting boxes, this is 100% not OK, and as a professor, if I found out my TAs were doing this, they would quickly find themselves someplace between "disciplined" and "fired".

I love that idea, and it seems like a reasonable way to slowly move a toolchain, provided that there are clean breaks to shift from MATLAB to the next step.

And cluster computing in MATLAB, I agree, is just that: a cluster.

As somebody in an academic field where many scripts exist for MATLAB (mostly digital signal processing focused), there are few projects I want to succeed more than Octave.

It's very hard to recommend that students and colleagues grow invested in toolchains involving proprietary software that they may not reliably be able to afford/activate/use in the future, particularly when some students may end up working in developing nations.

Here's hoping that someday, Octave does to MATLAB what R has done to SPSS and SAS. MATLAB is a dinosaur deeply begging for an asteroid.

Given that he put "teaching" in with "overhead", there's no shock that he left. The precise reason I chose to push to continue into a professor position was my love of teaching, and my willingness to sacrifice lucrative pay and work-life balance for it.

To me, hearing this is like an architect talking about loving the job, but not caring for all the designing buildings it seems to entail. And it's part of the reason that I never advise my students who dislike teaching to even contemplate the academic job market and trying to get a faculty position. If you don't love teaching, go get actually paid elsewhere.

It's an assumption, but in my experience, the celiac folks tend to be the "screw it, give me the hash browns" type, rather than starting a shouting match over their allotted gluten-free toast.

If she decided to go full vegetarian tomorrow, I'd absolutely support it. But I love the rest of her enough to disagree on this point.

Nothing makes "I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain" carnivores faster than dickish vegans. And there's a difference between an ethical problem (killing and eating something morally relevant which would rather not be killed and eaten), and a social problem (violating the social norms of cooperation and causing complication).

As a vegetarian (by ethical choice, not medical necessity), I do my best not to lose sight of the simple fact that I'm the problem here. When I walk into a steakhouse with my carnivorous wife, they're helping me out by finding something to put in my stomach. If I'm on a camping trip, I'm bringing my own food, or doing my best to make it fair to folks who are helping me out. And if I'm visiting for dinner, I try to make it clear that I'm happy to scavenge sides, you don't need to do something special for me. Because, again, my self-made diet choices are not your problem, but mine.

Celiac is real, folks who have it should be cut a break, and in my experience, folks who actually cannot eat gluten are just trying to make things work, rather than being a dick about it.

But deeply screw people like this lady who make a voluntary diet choice who use it as an excuse to bully others and make people cater to them. They trivialize people's actual medical needs, breed a culture of "Yeah, sure lady, there's no gluten", work against whatever cause they're in favor of, and largely, they're why we can't have nice things.

I've always found it slightly amusing that we've now reached the time in the history of civilization where immortality, even were it possible, has become a massive liability. One can no longer simply assume a new identity of proper age, and attempting to do so is liable to get you jailed, or worse still, in some shady government lab.

It's even getting to be the case now that you can't just move to a new country and start over. Unless you've got skilled forgers close at hand, you're going to have a bad time immediately, and with facial recognition and biometrics, you'll have a worse time still.

It's perhaps the definition of a low-probability corner case, but if any alchemists happened to succeed, they're no doubt having a pretty depressing century.

I love this idea. With insane mobile processors, terabyte storage on phones, external GPUs, and USB-C docking, we're tantalizingly close to "I do my computing on this device. It's in my pocket with a phone interface right now. But once I plug it in at my desk with the GPU dock, it's my computer. And later, I'll throw it in the tablet and use it on my couch."

Backups will need to be good and easy if your main computing device can fall out of your pocket on the subway, and an OS which is happy doing this will need to exist. But for many people, this could be a beautiful world.

Am I the only person who struggles with the idea of anything that's set at 1-to-1 with a single fiat currency being called 'stable'?

Certainly, USD is more stable than BTC or ETH, so a "stablecoin" pegged to it will share that increased stability. But that's more a question of prevailing economic conditions than anything, and there's nothing stopping a fiat-based coin from sharing in the inflation, deflation, or collapse of the pegged currency. Even if we assume the implementation of the currency perfect, you're just changing the set of things your currency is vulnerable to.

I wonder if anybody's working on a Stablecoin which tries to mitigate this using something like precious metals, or a pool of fiat currencies (with the understanding that something hitting USD hard might not hit CNY or EUR or GBP as hard, mediating the effect).

Having NLTK and SciKitLearn in the same environment as my stats tools is... tantalizing. And if I could write Markdown-to-TeX docs straight from Jupyter, rather than the R -> TeX tables/variables read into LaTeX I'd used before, that'd be a massive win.

I like R for many things, but Python just keeps getting more compelling, particularly given the excellent machine learning packages. As these sorts of toolchain elements get better and better, and as more people realize that there's a benefit to simultaneously training researchers to run code as well as stats, I suspect we'll start to see an exodus from pure R solutions.

The real question is when (and whether) new social scientist stats courses will start teaching Python stats toolchains, rather than R. That seemed to be an inflection point for R (as folks moved away from SAS), and could be for stats-centric Python too.

This is one of the things I dislike most about modern games: We used to have cheat codes in single player games which allowed you to skip the BS and have a different kind of fun. Now, we have money that does the same thing.

As a result, new games not only tend not to support cheats, but they also treat the users as hostile, preventing even things like memory read hacks and config file edits. Some of the most fun I've had was editing lua config files to modify how units moved in single player games like Command and Conquer Generals, to change the game entirely.

User hostile, anti-hacky, 'skinner-box-or-nothing' design in single player gaming is only a symptom of the problem, but it's a nasty one.

What's hardware compatibility like? Did/do you struggle to find good portable machines to run Qubes on with solid wireless/bluetooth support?

As somebody whose (trash) recently-current MBP just spent the weekend with Apple due to a display failure, I'm evaluating my options.

Considering the amount of pain going into fighting the million drivers and black-box chips in a commodity X86 box where you can run user code as root, I can't imagine a smartphone would provide anything but suffering for a Qubes-style security project. Unless, of course, $OEM was directly on board with the research or work, and willing to modify the software and hardware as needed.

Sure, but at the same time, a big part of Qubes involved creating very secure jails for processes, which they could not escape. So, 'keeping untrusted stuff in its box' is sort of her expertise, and if anybody's going to do that right, it's probably her.

Chances are, the NSA won't be renting out Top Secret machines for Golem, but some rando with a multi-thousand dollar gaming rig she's just using to browse HN on may well view the tradeoff differently.

Reading the Golem website, I'm no longer sure that I 'get it'. Is this just a decentralized AWS or supercomputing service which is payable using $ThisWeeksHotCryptocurrency? Her description made it sound less like a marketplace for spare cycles and more like a thin-client sort of thing.

Joanna's brilliant, and this Golem project is fascinating. The idea of a secure remote compute arrangement is sort of a natural extension from Qubes, and this is a pretty unique approach. May she (and Qubes, and Golem) find great success.

I agree that this is probably the cultural solution, provided the author can't be coerced to post on Arxiv, but it's an ugly one, which reeks of an ivory tower and gatekeeping ("nobody who isn't an established scholar in our tradition is truly capable of our work").

Perhaps this is better seen as a substantial defect in the fact that the academic web-of-trust model implemented in publication is based on quality of source (e.g. journal's prestige, or the submitting scholar's prestige) rather than quality of scholarship (e.g. whether a critical mass of researchers, rather than 1-3 anonymous reviewers, find it compelling and 'sign off' on it being good work).

I hope (and suspect) that whatever emerges or is developed to replace the paid journal model of academic trust is designed to handle these situations gracefully.

This is a particularly appropriate link right now, given that the core idea of "saving data and state is something which should be avoided" is seeing a renaissance in both privacy-focused circles and in privacy-focused regulatory policies. I love the idea that saving state is to be avoided, and I hope to see it implemented with increasing granularity, both on other people's computers (e.g. web services) and locally.

Remotely, a trend away from "You must create an account to view this cat meme, now enter your date of birth and present a working email address which we'll send a message to" is particularly appealing. And with hosted services, particularly paid ones, I'd love to see privacy policies focused on how little data is kept, rather than how much. I keep hoping that the regulatory or legal or insurance environment will change such that sooner or later, companies will view stored user data as a liability more than an asset, and 'zero knowledge' will be a desirable thing.

Locally, as per-application permissions and sandboxing grows stronger, I can picture a class of applications which would be hard-restricted from saving data between sessions (e.g. the browser, a calculator, a scratch-pad app). Or perhaps, "the only data you can save must be XML, in this plaintext file, so that preferences are saved, but nothing else. Qubes (OP's baby) does this already, but I think a dash of this in existing OSes would be a small step towards big security.

As an aside, in my estimation, Joanna Rutkowska is one of the most compelling computational thinkers today. Although her work tends to be at the most elaborate-threat-focused edge of computing security, reading it, it often feels like she's already running "where the ball is going", and I wouldn't be shocked to find that in 20 years, some of the 'whoa, crazy' things from Qubes or this stateless approach are actually regularly used in mainstream computing. I have no particular threat, and no particular need, and I suspect that many of the programs I use regularly wouldn't work there, but there's a part of me that would love to spend more time in Qubes.

This is a stellar comment, I've always found that a person's level of (dis)comfort with their past work is a great judge of how willing they are to learn and improve.

I've liked Airmail, but it has a tendency towards weird bugs (e.g. adding gibberish attachments to email chains in large numbers). Email tools, imho, need to be 'boring', stable, and predictable, and Airmail never has been, any of the times I've tried to use it.

Mutt is great if you're not often dealing with images or rich text, and if you love keyboard-based workflows. I was a mutt guy for a while. But I've found apps like MailMate or even GMail's web client to be keyboardy enough, without some of the compromises and pain points (e.g. fighting OfflineIMAP)

This is amazing, both in process and in result. Very well done, and a pleasant reminder that great things can come in small filesizes.

Notational Velocity (and clones) always seemed to do well with that. Very light, very plaintext, but great as a sort of reactionary "Open and start typing and ask questions later" platform.

Even having won the Tenure-Track Lotto, I don't do this.

Generally speaking, a student telling me they want a Ph.D in my field gets a strong warning and a frank discussion about the nature of the job market. I'm willing to support them if they simply cannot imagine doing anything else with their lives, but the pool of students for whom getting a Ph.D is actually a good idea is a very small pool indeed.