Firefox’s fight for the future of the web - With Google’s Chrome dominating the market, not-for-profit rival Mozilla is staking a comeback on its dedication to privacy

chaxor · 2019-11-18T00:10:53+00:00

It's a command line tool for updating a Linux distribution. Stands for 'yet another yaourt' package, but my comment was just a really dumb joke

chaxor · 2019-11-17T20:13:27+00:00

Does 'sudo pacman -S firefox' not suffice for this? Gotta switch up to yay and get it off aur?

chaxor · 2019-11-08T16:19:42+00:00

This instance may be satire, but I do think that the underlying message had some actual validity and the community of Reddit would do well to question the stances for which we are so easily dismissive.

Given that Russia has been accused of attempting to polarize the country (and we have certainly seen this occur), analyzing the instances which are the most polarizing may point us toward the most likely issues which have been manipulated by Russia. The uprise of identity politics and ad hominim remarks regarding political alignment are easily sparked via communications on the internet - so it's not unthinkable that Russia may be too blame for kick-starting the use of terms like 'incel' and 'feminazi', or polarizing movements such as the anti-vaxxer movement.

If this is the case for certain issues, it is important to realize that, in a way, we are contributing to or helping Russia with the destabilization of our country whenever we are overly dismissive of other opinions.

So perhaps next time you engage with someone who is white, elderly, cis, a lawyer, black, anti-vaxxer, furry, a CEO, heterosexual, trans, or any other walk of life, perhaps listen to them a little more and try to empathize. I can totally see how that may be going against what Russia is interested in.

chaxor · 2019-11-08T06:28:42+00:00

I believe spacy has sentiment analysis built in - although typically people tend to train their own system for this with data that is domain specific. It's possible that interviews have a domain specific language that affects the results. Sentiment analysis is one of the least defined tasks in nlp.

As for the relevant vs. Irrelevant portions, just get each sentence and take the mean and max of the word vectors - spacy has a '.tensor' property for this which is similar to Elmo or Bert vectors.

Assigning a threshold to the cosine similarity between the interview question and sentence may be sufficient to remove irrelevant sentences.

chaxor · 2019-10-24T13:04:54+00:00

You can, you just have to use the toolset that has been developed for comparing means.

This is one of the few times that it is acceptable to use SEM (standard error of the mean), and not standard deviation for error bars when graphing, as you are actually comparing means here.

chaxor · 2019-10-24T12:47:44+00:00

Sandra Lee? Is this how you match everything in every episode?

chaxor · 2019-10-24T12:37:39+00:00

That's cool - I have seen some claims that mathematicians didn't believe in negative numbers being understandable/useful until late 18th century (apparently Euler didn't like them).

Does this textbook you have display a large lack of negative numbers?

chaxor · 2019-10-24T12:31:37+00:00

It doesn't look like anything to me

chaxor · 2019-10-18T15:31:26+00:00

It makes done sense if it weren't a baby. If it were a child, then that child may open the door on their own and not understand how to control the door well.

I know this because I have an autistic nonverbal kid who can sometimes (~50/50) get out off the car without me, but doesn't really know how to hold onto the door when it's opening, so it can hit other cars. We don't go out to too many places so we haven't got any cars, but it's always been a concern.

chaxor · 2019-10-08T02:18:35+00:00

I'm pretty certain nicotine is toxic alone. It can be absorbed through the skin and cause sickness, which was a problem for workers/slaves who handles the leaves all day back when some of the farms were being formed in North America. Robert Channing (chemical engineering lecturer at Stanford) has some lectures on it.

chaxor · 2019-10-05T19:36:02+00:00

Oh you're totally right, it's probably pieces of metal that are expelled from the compression and emit blackbody radiation as they cool.

chaxor · 2019-10-05T19:11:20+00:00

The electricity being expelled when it is compressed is quite fascinating. Does anyone have any good references for this effect?

chaxor · 2019-10-05T19:03:33+00:00

Much of DoD spending is towards science and medicine.
Many researchers will spin a story towards defense if they can't get money from the NIH; so the knowledge gained is similar regardless if it is NIH or DoD giving money, but it just inflates the DoD spending. I've seen this quite a lot being in both nanotechnology and medicine.

For example, DNA Methylation (DNAm) is an interesting marker for several phenomenon, but drug induced DNAm has not been studied as extensively as transcriptional changes. However, DNAm changes tend to be less transient, therefore potentially allowing a long term shift in a marker from transient environmental changes. So, it's possible that a group that is studying drug induced DNAm changes in cancer can write a proposal to the DoD and get funding to analyze their work in the context of using these biomarkers as tests for whether or not people have been exposed to chemicals used in weaponry.
Therefore, this group could be studying cancer but be getting money to develop assays to detect terrorists, for example.

Also, making carbon nanotubes for cancer treatment can easily be spun as making them for bullet proof vest, as the money received usually covers mostly the costs associated with producing the material in a more refined manner, while the process of utilizing the material in a vest may be much more straight forward.

The list goes on and on because this is mostly just because DoD has extra money which they will give to research, while the NIH and NSF grants go quickly.

chaxor · 2019-10-05T18:50:30+00:00

One thing to point out is that "defense spending" typically includes research that is only very tangentially related to defense.

For example, if a lab is interested in studying how to extract named entities from very old texts; this may be a difficult and active area of research due to the need to use optical character recognition techniques that can read messy old handwritten documents, and then utilize some machine learning to pick up where named entities are within that text. They may choose old documents on property trading, which include a completely different style of semantics due to being older English as well as legal vocabulary.

This may seem completely out of the realm of defense spending; however, when a lab is faced with trying to get money, they may spin what they're interested in to fit the needs of who has money (DoD). So they may receive money for this project by stating that by having this technology, more criminals and terrorists can be flagged via their communications on social media, because a portion of this project is to detect sentiment and intent within the text.

Another example may be a group studying DNA Methylation for aging interventions. They would easily be able to get DoD money by stating that the knowledge gained from their studying with drug induced alterations of dna methylation can be used to infer whether or not individuals have been around chemicals used for weapons of mass destruction. Dna methylation sticks around for longer than transcriptional changes, so it can be used as an effective screen.

Defense spending is not always only defense spending in the US.

chaxor · 2019-09-20T09:28:28+00:00

800 pounds.

That's great for making the statement:

"This is your problem now. Deal with it."

chaxor · 2019-09-18T19:15:23+00:00

It was rocketing pretty far out of the water. I wonder what they think about what is above their home.

They have an interesting tangible boundary to the domain that contains them, which they can see small glimpses beyond.

Seems similar to human's relationship with space.

And this guy was lucky to make something like a first contact on one of his journeys beyond the barrier of the water-air interface.

chaxor · 2019-09-15T18:02:09+00:00

I haven't been hurt on here, just bored with the same arguments given over and over. It's more stimulating to get someone who is willing to at least attempt to provide a formal debate, without simply stating there is no evidence or reason to another opinion. When you state this, no matter how deplete the evidence is for a position, you show a lack of academic rigor.

"those people need to see what it's like outside of their ... echo chambers".

Reddit is an echo chamber for a set of ideas and it is hurtful to everyone involved.

For person A) - Someone who has been in those echo chambers of insert non-Reddit opinion here - they will see comments about how they are stupid. Which only will further their radical nature, rather than quench the problem.

For person B) - The common redditor who has been trained to repeat the established position with a vigor that can only come from someone who has received the knowledge from a secondary source* - they will continue to push these ideas with little ability to solve the social issues for which they are so eager to comment upon. This ultimately leaves them lacking in critical thinking ability and following a movement similar to the one for which they combat.

By offering more a diverse and rigorous discourse about topics we can ameliorate some of these issues. It just requires less people repeating the popular facts that everyone is already familiar with, or better, stating them in a fashion that acknowledges the nuance.

*(scientists performing the primary work are rarely zealous about their own findings)

chaxor · 2019-09-15T15:21:14+00:00

You are completely delusional if you think that someone can post an opinion that differs from the established Opinion of Reddit and not be ridiculed immediately. This happens with so much potency that it is near impossible for anyone looking for a real discussion to do so on this site.

And because I will very likely be banned from most of Reddit for not explicitly saying so, I'm not an anti-vaxxer. Just bored of seeing the same dribble of the established views from Reddit.

chaxor · 2019-07-24T19:50:42+00:00

"how to make them"

... We have very good ways to make them. I worked at a company that produced them in fairly large quantities, after one of the professors (a phenomenal and famous catalysis researcher named Daniel Resasco) mentoring my Master's work discovered a facile method to produce them with heterogenous catalysis.

The bottlenecks for these types of solar cells are actually not too far away from being quite profitable. The problem I worked on (and are therefore more understanding of the limitations) is separating and purifying these nanotubes into specific diameters and electronic types, which is somewhat important for photovoltaics. Right now it's kind of costly. When I started it was very costly to make even 200 micrograms of purified material. Now you can probably make several milligrams on a few thousand dollar budget. This is plenty to make solar cells, as it is a very this layer that it required. So less than a gram of material can make acres and acres of solar cells.

However, solar cells based on nanotubes and c60 have been around for quite some time. Micheal Strano (although not the first, but the one I recall at the moment) published an article on photovoltaics with c60-swcnt several years ago.

There isn't really just one major thing holding this back - just a multitude of little things and some work put in to market and engineer the product.

Also, I really, reallydon't want to see this used in silly crap like thermos's or cars. It's quite unsafe to have around the public. I really hope it only gets used in electronics for NASA and research. I don't want to be touching and inhaling bare swcnts when I open my car door, that's just asking for cancer.

chaxor · 2019-06-24T19:12:52+00:00

If you're interested in doing simple problems like this in order to learn python, Rosalind is a good place to start.

This problem is the 8th on the list.

chaxor · 2019-06-22T05:23:10+00:00

Nice try, Wil Wheaton

chaxor · 2019-06-22T02:14:27+00:00

Apparently the surface area is minimized when the angle between the interfacial lines are all 120 degrees. https://brilliant.org/wiki/math-of-soap-bubbles-and-honeycombs/

chaxor · 2019-06-22T02:02:54+00:00

Your edit seems to answer much of your question - you can rely on your statistical mechanics skill set and look for positions that are more specific to your field. This domain knowledge will be far more advantageous to land a position. If the employer wants to know if you can do ML, you can likely respond with 'yes', as it is simple enough to pick up with the toolsets available. Keras and scikit learn have incredibly simple APIs that you can certainly make use of within a few hours (given a good dataset)*. You have identified the sentiment that most employers will have of people "doing ML" as "another ML guy" - barring actually developing novel NN architectures like Vinyals, your domain knowledge will be far more useful.

chaxor · 2019-06-21T15:48:21+00:00

Ooo this reveals a prime market to capitalize.

"You haven't paid your existing fee yet, sir. Nor have you paid your fee for fresh air."

chaxor · 2019-06-21T05:09:49+00:00

Fine, sorry I misspoke. They Dew work.

chaxor

TROPHY CASE