trextrex

Couldn't this be done a lot more simply with a mailing list or RSS feed? Using GitHub issues seems a bit convoluted, although I'm guessing it's probably because it's easier to set up and free to use. It seems like somebody should build a service which makes use cases like this 0 config.

If we are making statements based on history, you are squarely ignoring the progress that happened in Europe in spite of it being very "fragmented". Some argue that it was this competition between various nation states that pushed development faster ahead.

Yes, I'm aware that India is a single country, while Europe wasn't. But with the right amount of autonomy, you end up with the same conditions, and it's not too different in practice.

On one hand, the author takes a lot of effort (with a lot of references) to explain that stereotype threat, implicit bias, etc. may only be a small contributor to the unequal representation of women in STEM.

But, on the other hand, his counterargument for the existence of other potential factors seems to me to be quite weak and lacking the same rigor. The existence of "basic sex differences" is not discussed in detail, with only a couple of references. And a lot of his counterargument seems to be based on a few example countries with high gender equality rankings and low STEM participation.

Is there any validation that these gender equality rankings are a useful indicator of gender equality? What about factors that surface only after school/college in these countries? What about network effects in various fields?

Not that I'm saying such factors do exist. But the author makes a somewhat strong (IMO) argument against stereotype threat, implicit bias etc. and a very weak argument for the existence of other factors.

Yeah, except that it seems like PySide still doesn't support Qt 5.x according to [1]? While there is a page for PySide2 [2], I can't figure out if it's complete or not.

[1] http://wiki.qt.io/PySide [2] http://wiki.qt.io/PySide2

In the few years that I lived in the US, there were at least two occasions where I have been approached with a somewhat scammy story in different (large) cities. I'm not saying its endemic in the US, but it does happen.

But compared to China, (a) the frequency of an encounter with a random person on the street as a pedestrian is significantly lower in US cities and (b) I imagine the levels of poverty in China were/are much higher, which might be a factor why scams are frequent?

Surely, it was quite noble of them to stop the slave trade in Benin while colonising, exploiting and draining their wealth.

Right, this was probably because it was already called "cha" in India by then, and the Portugese didn't have direct contact with the people speaking Min Nan Chinese, but rather the Indians who used the Sinitic version of the name.

You should check out https://github.com/IGITUGraz/live-plotter (I am the author of the package)

It is designed exactly for this use-case -- visualizing results of an ongoing simulation. It does best effort plotting, but doesn't block computation for plotting. I would be happy to receive feedback on the package.

It is interesting to hear about what it takes behind the scenes to run a hosting company.

There is also http://hn.premii.com/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6178534 (~2013)

I use Opera quite extensively, and have been, starting from Opera 7 or so. There was a brief gap in my usage during the time when Opera switched to blink and a lot of the old features were missing, but now it is pretty much back to feature parity (at least for the features I care about).

I think (IMHO) it has the most usable UI and apparent performance. It has nice built-in features like ad-blocking, mouse gestures (including rocker gestures), some nice single key shortcuts for moving around tabs. The V7 tabs extension [1] provides a really good experience for vertical tabs. It has also sufficient customizability, full compatibility with Chrome extensions.

I am aware that all of these are possible in other browsers, and I do use Chrome/Firefox for non-trivial amounts of time for various reasons with all equivalent customizations, but Opera just seems so much more usable and performant for me across platforms, although I can't put my finger down on one single thing that makes it so.

Edit: I have to say I'm really liking the vertical tabs on the new Vivaldi and their new features. Maybe I'll try making it my primary browser for a while.

[1] https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/v7-tabs/

Looks like OpenHatch is planning to shutdown? (Or maybe I misunderstood the blog post)

https://blog.openhatch.org/2017/celebrating-our-successes-an...

Yes, but cloudflare issues only shared certificates (that are shared across multiple domains) on their free plan [1]. If I wanted to use a dedicated certificate I'd have to upgrade to a paid plan.

[1] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203349264-A...

As far as I know, Github pages doesn't support https for custom domains [1]. A better option for free hosting would be netlify, which supports Let's encrypt for custom domains.

[1] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/156

For people who were confused like me, this wired article - http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bbc-digital-pidgin-language-s... - explains the launch of BBC in the pidgin language. Very cool.

I wonder how much of the citizens' indifference to and mistrust of the government and politics is a product of living for decades in a communist authoritarian state, as opposed to a fundamental nature of the people there. Seems like a classic case of fundamental attribution error.

Last I checked Laverna, they had really serious issues with losing data after every update or so. I stopped using it after encountering one of these. Looks like a lot of these issues are still open:

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/547

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/683

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/678

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/675

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/770

https://github.com/Laverna/laverna/issues/747

Edit: Formatting

I wonder if this means Hangouts is going to be deprecated soon.

> That analysis is from 4 years ago and is wrong in many, many ways at this point.

Can you elaborate on how it is wrong at this point?

I've found that python future [1] does a pretty remarkable job of converting code to be both python 2 and python 3 compatible.

[1] http://python-future.org

Looks really cool! I have been looking for a solution similar to this one. Signed up.

One thing that I miss though is a nice web interface for calendar and contacts. Especially if I want to do some sort of cleanup of data. Is this functionality planned? Or is there some open source web calendaring software that you would recommend?

According to the history on wikipedia's page on Tobermorite [1], this has been known at least since 2013.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tobermorite&actio...

We recently released a thin wrapper around matplotlib that makes it easier to do live plots [1] (since matplotlib has a few gotchas). We use it in a fair number of projects internally, since it makes it easier to monitor performance of various models as they are trained, which shortens the code-test loop.

[1] https://github.com/IGITUGraz/live-plotter

That's not really constant time is it? Constant time implies that the time taken to solve the problem is not a function of the input size (input in this case being the sudoku board). For a board size of 9x9 it's O(9!x9!).

The paper which showed that the general case of Sudoku is NP-complete was apparently this one [1] (Linked from wikipedia)

[1] http://www-imai.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yato/data2/SIGAL87-2.pdf

That looks interesting. Sudoku is a fairly useful constraint satisfaction problem/testbed to test neural networks architectures on, since the most general version of sudoku is NP-complete.

There was some interesting work a while ago that solved sudoku using spiking neural networks too [1] (Fig. 5) with some nice associated theory.

[1] http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...

> OTOH, having watched the field of computational neuroscience there has not been a lot of progress since , basically the 80s. So i believe it would be best to leave each of the two fields go their own way.

I wouldn't really say that. There's a lot of progress being made in using and understanding biological processes for useful tasks. Not surprisingly, the biological mechanisms are surprisingly complex and rich and vary a lot through the brain (like you mentioned with the dendrites. Dendrites also work like coincidence detection mechanisms sometimes in some layers of the cortex [1] for instance)

[2] gives a very nice overview of what is needed from both machine learning and computational neuroscience to solve the entire problem of understanding the human brain.

There was the liquid state computing paper [3] in 2002 which showed that random networks of spiking neurons can perform some computations and have memory even in the absence of special learning rules.

There has also been quite some work on understanding e.g. the role of assemblies of neurons (groups of neurons firing), assembly sequences, plasticity rules, theory formulating neural activity in a probabilistic manner, a better understanding of the role of inhibition, dendrites etc.

And lastly, there have been huge advances in neuromorphic computing, both digital and analog. In some cases, the performance on these chips (that use spiking neurons) approaches that of state of the art machine learning. e.g. [4]

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166223612...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5021692/

[3] http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/089976602760...

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/41/11441.abstract

Well it depends on which part you are interested in.

The Neuroscience book by Mark Bear gives a nice introductory overview of the biology behind a lot of neural processes: https://www.amazon.com/Neuroscience-Exploring-Mark-F-Bear/dp...

If you're interested in computational neural models, I would highly recommend Wolfgram Gerstner's recent book (available for free online): http://neuronaldynamics.epfl.ch

The book by Dayan and Abbot on theoretical neuroscience is quite nice too: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/theoretical-neuroscience

After this, you'll probably want to read new review papers, since it's a field that's moving quite fast now. (Especially with new measurement techniques in the past few years)

I wonder why reviewsignal doesn't have nearlyfreespeech.net listed among the hosts. Is it not considered a hosting provider?

It would also be nice to have some data about which company the hosting belongs too, since as a general rule I try to avoid hosts from the Endurance International Group [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group

Well, the new Opera already had an option to load tabs on demand when you switch to it after starting up. I guess now they're adding an option to load them in the background. In terms of performance the load tab on demand works reasonably well.

NPR has a very nice article [1] on how Rwanda ended up having such a large number of women in their parliament, and the limited influence it has had on women's empowerment there.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/07/29/48736009...