impendia

A scammer just attempted to phish several attendees at a scientific conference. They falsely claimed to be affiliated with the conference, and asked for their credit card numbers. The request was made via a document…

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…

For New Year's this year, I want to break my habit of checking my email inbox, as well as a variety of websites, absolutely all the time. Has anyone managed to do this, who has success stories to share? As an academic I…

Dear HN, I'm a professor in a math department. We just moved back into our building after a year-long renovation, and one of our rooms -- currently piled high with junk -- is to be remodeled into a seminar room. I'm on…

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.…

I recently got an email from an "experience management company", on behalf of a local plumber whom I had recently hired, asking me to rate them from 0 to 10. After I deleted it, I later got a "reminder". I find these…

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 a junior professor in math at a large state school. I was just talking with a colleague about how much thankless schlep work our junior administrators (i.e. the assistant chair) have to do. Here is one example. We…

I have observed that posts about sexism and racism draw a lot of upvotes, but also a lot of flags, and are considered to be off topic by many. Fair enough. Do HN readers know of any websites with HN-style discussion of…

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…

Surely I'm not the only one here geeky enough to want to buy a can of whiteboard paint, paint a wall of my house, and proceed to solve math problems there. Looking online, the reviews are mixed and the prices are very…

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…

I saw the quote "The audience is never wrong. Never." on PG's website, and I thought I might ask the HN community for advice. I am a first-year assistant professor of mathematics in a second-tier state university. I…

Define a covering to be a set of residue classes a (mod m) such that all the integers are covered. Example: 0 (mod 2), 0 (mod 3), 1 (mod 4), 5 (mod 6), 7 (mod 12) is a covering, because every integer belongs to one of…

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…