Slightly off topic but I have to ask: would you be willing to share your markdown workflow for academic writing? I am very interested in graduating from latex :)
This is somehwat geared toward my specific preferences as a social scientist, but my cookiecutter template contains pretty much everything you need for academic writing using pandoc: https://bitbucket.org/jboy1/cookiecutter-pandoc-paper
You can also consult Kieran Healy's guide here: http://plain-text.co (again, this targets social scientists)
I would second this, having written a lot of documentation recently (markdown + template + pandoc -> pdf) I am very interested in improving this workflow.
Hey, I wanted to thank you personally, too. As far as I know, yours is the only completely open source implementation of the “shazam algorithm”, and it helped me a lot during my thesis work. The blog post was also great.
Actually, I encourage anyone interested to look up Panako[1], which is meant to be a framework for comparison of different audio fingerprinting techniques.
While I understand where you come from, this is the kind of advice I would give a friend or family if they came to me and said “hey, I am having a hard time in the industry and I think it’s because I am a minority”. Do your best, try to grow a thick skin, etc.
However, I believe you can’t possibly extend that (positive and helpful) feeling to an outside “political” statement. If our aim is to make the industry welcoming and accepting to everyone, I believe we should do more than what you describe and try to figure out a way to make it right.
It might not help minorities in tech right now, but it will eventually.
If you have a minority that has every disadvantage but believes that they CAN succeed by their own effort, that minority will succeed and it will reduce bigotry against them. Indeed the history of the USA supports this - we have had wave after wave of disadvantaged immigrants. They have nothing, have trouble with the language, and are widely discriminated against. But a generation or two later you have seen Italians, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian Jews, Afghans, and many other minorities integrate into the mainstream and do well.
But get a victim culture established in a minority, and things won't improve for them. They are unlikely to actually face more discrimination than, say, Cambodians did when they arrived here penniless and not speaking the language about 40 years ago. But they will have a worse future.
Look at it a different way. If you're from a disadvantaged minority, you've likely got a strike against you for having a bad background, and another for current discrimination. Add a victim mentality, and you're out. It doesn't matter how good the evidence is that you're an actual victim, it is the mentality that you can't afford.
Did you verify that the stuff you refereed to as only being known if you follows Italian news is not on the net? Don't those Italian news outlets have websites?
This guy seems to be pretty good at googling around for stuff.
