FYI regarding that book: https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-und...

It would be great if he would publish an amended second edition - unless he already has.

On that page he wrote:

> I am still attached to every study that I cited, and have not unbelieved them, to use Daniel Gilbert’s phrase. I would be happy to see each of them replicated in a large sample. The lesson I have learned, however, is that authors who review a field should be wary of using memorable results of underpowered studies as evidence for their claims.

So it sounds like stands by the claims in the book. If that's the case, then I'm not sure what would be in a second edition.

Fun fact: Much of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler was written/influenced by Simon Peyton Jones, who is at Microsoft Research.

On the other hand, stopping yourself because of fears of imagined rebuke removes you from changing the status quo at all.

Do you own some of this? Are you associated with the project in some way?

I'm in no way whatsoever connected with the SingularityNET ICO or project. I actually couldn't get on the whitelist but I'm curious if the underlying point of the ICO is why it "appears" to be doing better than your average one. Could it be a model for future projects and whether they decide to go IPO or ICO. Clearly more successful ICOs are good for the model in the long run.

There have been hundreds of ICOs and some of them are actually trying to make an interesting product. I'm guessing this one is above average though the return has been unspecatcular. It says 1.08x on the website in USD terms.

Zil is an example of one building something with a real purpose and non trivial technology - a sharded blockchain that should be able to scale indefinitely which is up 20x in USD. Built by university researchers rather than obvious scammers https://icodrops.com/zilliqa/

There are some interesting things out there amongst the silliness.

Zilliqa is pretty cool, actually. I read the whitepaper and found the pieces on Zilliqa consensus and incentivizing miners based on their sharding architecture that "allows the mining network to process transactions in parallel and reach high throughput" very interesting. A great example of tech that presents solid algorithms or functions that do real work, or that could set the stage for new future work, within the context of cryptocurrency.

Books in a library seem more free than privately owned books.

I'm very unfamiliar with gnome as an organization. What are the political reasons you're referencing?

You chose to leave out that OPW was an internship program that GNOME managed on behalf of a number of organizations, that they simply fell behind on sending out invoices and collecting late payments, and that this took place 4-5 years ago. How does any of that show that GNOME has compromised technical hiring for political reasons?

You are blaming problems with Ubuntu 18.4 on a project to encourage diversity from 2013?

And apart from the 5 years since: it seems the problems were administrative, having nothing to do with the actual content of the program?

Any other problems in your life that’d easily go away if only these women weren’t meddling?

Really, GNOME's problem is the low quality of their software and poor responsiveness to user feedback and needs, not inane social initiatives. So long as Red Hat is one of their primary sponsors, it's not going anywhere.

You're saying their software is poor quality* because they employ... Women?

* Your opinion, not mine.

That is a deliberate mischaracterization of the OP's comment. It in no way implies that the software is poor because of women.

The outreach program is political, and is rather discriminatory and sexist.

Your analogy makes no sense to me. When evaluating applicants, the only metrics used should be how well the applicant can do his or her job.

Giving applicants preference for having some blessed sex or political leanings is generally a recipe for disaster.

To explain: certain groups are underrepresented in sought-after professions, at colleges, etc. It is rather widely agreed that this is a result of historical injustices, such as racist or sexist policies and habits not allowing women or non-whites to study at colleges, or get certain jobs.

That is the bank robbery: these groups were robbed of opportunity.

The remedial measures are programs such as the one discussed here, or affirmative action for college admission.

That is "taking the money from the robber, and giving it back to the bank".

The analogy is that the last action does fit your everyday definition of something bad: you are not supposed to take a bag of money from someone against their will. You are not supposed to make employment or acceptance decicions based on sex or race.

Yet, quite obviously, it's stupid to look at those actions in isolation. You have to zoom out, and you'll see: it wasn't his money in the beginning.

That's the analogy, just in case your ignorance was genuine.

If a program deliberately excludes one sex, is it not sexist?

Targeted programs to increase diversity are not sexist, in the same way that taking a bank robber’s loot and giving it back is not theft.

"taking a bank robber’s loot and giving it back is not theft."

I mean, that is technically theft. It's just very obviously justified theft in response to a previous theft (assuming you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is in fact the bank robber from whom you're taking the money).

It's not. Here's the definition from wikipedia: " theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission with the intent to deprive the lawful owner of it"

...but that's really not the point here, is it?

No, it's not the point at all. I just like going off on these sorts of weird tangents :)

Curiously, Wiktionary has a different definition: "The act of stealing property". "Property" in turn has a lot of different definitions, the first being "Something that is owned". Relevantly, neither definition specifies by whom the property is owned; as long as it's someone's property, stealing it is technically "theft" under this sort of broad definition.

Merriam-Webster seems to agree more with you than it does with me ("[...] the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" / "an unlawful taking [...] of property"), while Dictionary.com seems to be similarly vague ("the act of stealing", though this is lumped in with "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another" and "larceny").

But affine transformations are indeed not linear. The augmentation trick creates a new, linear transform in n+1 dimension, which is related but different to the affine transform in question.

The categorization in the article seems correct.

Yes, exactly, you're right. The article is correct, it's just not telling quite the whole story. Affine transforms aren't linear, and their augmented matrices that do the same thing are linear. In practice, it's both, and it's precisely cool because it's both.

Sure, that could totally work. Part of the benefit a type system provides is that those checks are provided for you automatically, every time.

Are we talking about automatic type inference then?

Otherwise you'll still have to work out each type before it becomes "automatic". Which is not entirely dissimilar from working out a test suite.

For the Japanese service, did anything prevent users from putting an address that received mail, but wasn't theirs?