impendia

That's a David McCullough quote, which I believe I've seen repeated by Paul Graham or otherwise on HN. I am curious if anyone has tried to put this advice into practice? In my case, my chosen vice is the computer game…

I am a university professor. Our provost has just created a committee to come up with “a comprehensive definition of quality teaching", calling for "a unified understanding" of what excellent teaching means across…

In my work (academic research), I will often get momentarily stumped and not see a good way to proceed. Sometimes this is over something big, but quite often it's over something small which I figure out soon afterwards.…

College professor here. Owing to the pandemic, I've just pulled the plug on a class I'm teaching in elementary number theory, and moved it to online delivery. I am hoping to get some lively interaction going on between…

I am a math professor at a second-tier state university, and many of our Ph.D. students decide (rather sensibly, in my opinion) to avoid the academic job crunch and instead to seek positions in industry. I would like to…

I have heard HN'ers describe being in the "zone", a mental state where you block out the entire rest of the world and are extremely productive. I used to be able to get there regularly, but I went through a stage in my…

I'm thinking Dear Abby or Miss Manners, HN or Less Wrong, and something like Stack Overflow all mashed up. Where one can ask questions about "common sense", and both social convention and skepticism thereof are…

I am a research mathematician. I collaborate with various people on papers, around the globe. Math papers are written in LaTeX, which is basically plain text with markup. When I worked for a software company, we had…

Hello all, I just moved from San Francisco to a smaller town (Columbia, SC) for a new job. I am an academic and I am very grateful to be here, my department is excellent and the job is really great overall. It has been…

I don't have a particular horse in this race, but as an academic far removed from the world of business, let me ask the HN community something I've long been curious about. How much would/do changes in tax policy affect…