> cannot receive donations directly anymore

Yet they all seem to exit office quite wealthy, despite their rather modest government salaries.

Not all.

Ideally yes, in practice it needs to return more than just parking your money in a savings account.

If bank is able to pay interest on your savings account, then it means it invests your money into businesses with positive margins.

Yes - itself.

Pretty much the same experience (on a much smaller scale). And just open up one of their servers and compare the engineering to a Dell or HPE server. Anything that can be cheaped out is. Corrugated plastic for cooling air channels, FRU assemblies held in place with sheet metal screws, all very bargin basement.

They look cheap even from the outside. They all look like they last went through a chassis redesign in 2002.

> why is it always that edTech seems to have such shoddy software

The people buying it have shoddy qualifications to evaluate it.

Exactly. They take the claims from the vendor as true without validating them.

Tuners?

We had the oboe tune from a tuning fork, then the rest of the band tunes off of that. Or everyone tunes from a piano.

> there's a far more positive community when people have a shared interest

Even old fashioned web forums and email listservs are still thriving in some niches and work this way.

I think reddit fails here because it's too frictionless. Requiring a little bit of intentional action to join or subscribe keeps out a surprising amount of drive-by trolls.

HN is pretty big now and has its share of trolls and bots but because it doesn't use social media accounts it's not nearly as bad as Facebook or Reddit.

How does reddit use social media accounts?

is it because I was young? I still believe phpbb forums were the best!

Even LaTeX just brute-forces dependencies such as building a table of contents, index, and footnote references by running it a few times until everything stabilizes.

It is possible (though very rare) to get a situation in LaTeX where it keeps oscillating between two possible “solutions” - usually forcing a hbox width will stabilize it.

Or do what everyone does and reword something ;)

VisiCalc didn't do this, though. It just recalculated once, and if there were errors you had to notice them and manually trigger another recalc.

but wasn't it documented to do it in some sort of "down and to the right" order, and if you wrote your formulas "up and to the left" everything would be hunky dory?

tables generally have row and column sums, subtotals, and averages down and to the right.

How does the smart watch have any service out in the middle of the Med? Must be getting it from the ship, are they not firewalling outbound traffic?

GPS watches don't need service, they just need line of site to the GPS satellites. Uploading to Strava requires service, but that can be done any time after the activity.

GPS tries to cover the whole globe, app uses GPS to get location. Ship probably has internet connection in the from of wifi or a cell tower with a starlink or other sattelite backbone link and app's traffic is encrypted so ships firewalls cannot easily block this

Under wartime conditions they would but rules are looser out of combat so sailors can use personal devices for entertainment etc to keep morale up.

Are the sailors really such wimps that they can't go without Netflix?

A still-very-common use case for spreadsheets is just to manage lists of things. For these, there are no formulas or dependencies at all. Another is simple totals of columns of numbers.

There are many common spreadsheet use cases that don't involve complicated dependency trees.

It's a common CPU vs RAM decision to make. Dependency graph consumes memory, while recalculating everything for a number of iterations could happen on stack one formula at a time in a loop. On 6502 it mattered. On modern CPUs, even with RAM crisis I'm sure for 99.9% of spreadsheets any options is good enough. Say, you have 10K rows and 100 columns - it's 1M calculations to make.

Keeping a dependency tree is not complicated

It's more complicated than not keeping one, at least.

But not keeping one has a cost too. Which cost is higher? Generally, I argue, not tracking dependencies is the higher cost for any real spreadsheet in production use cases.

All kinds of operational departments. I'm sure it was used for accounting, payroll and commissions, inventory tracking, I know that teachers used it for gradebooks as I helped set them up when I was in high school (early 1980s).

Pretty much anything that you used to do on paper with a columnar notebook or worksheet and a calculator, or anything that could be represented in tabular form could probably be implemented in VisiCalc, Lotus 123, and others. Spreadsheets are probably the most successful software application that was ever invented. Certainly one of the most.