cdavid

42 ms·

391.
by cdavid 15y ago
I think he is talking about the POV of the enterpreneur, in which case monopoly over something people want is often desirable.
392.
by cdavid 15y ago
While you're right it is an easy to make mistake with decorators, I don't think the issue is global mutable state as much as uncontrolled mutable state, especially if used against singleton. Typically, doing this: @register def fo
393.
by cdavid 15y ago
While I have no opinion on HFT myself, I don't think its value is firmly established (e.g. for a layman version of some of the arguments: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/mor... )
394.
by cdavid 15y ago
Many people feel the same way as you do, which means the information is very likely already in the current share price. Buying APPL stock today implies that you think apple will to better than current expectations , not current apple marke
395.
by cdavid 15y ago
I don't think the comparison with UI is so apt. Sure, they both use callbacks, but the granularity is quite different. In UI callbacks, you don't need to insert your own "scheduling points" as you need in explicity asynchronous programming.
396.
by cdavid 15y ago
I don't understand your statement. Numpy has been ported on python 3 more than 18 months ago, and scipy followed quickly afterwards. Our download stats show rather little interest for python 3, BTW.
397.
by cdavid 15y ago
How do you interpret the quote "The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regi
398.
by cdavid 15y ago
This may be a syntax error of my part: I meant that the US existed as a nation before a bureaucracy existed in the US . Obviously, bureaucracies elsewhere predates the US declaration of independency.
399.
by cdavid 15y ago
The idea that gvt should be run by common people is quite old in the US (Jacksonian democracy). I am not American, and this traits always made me wonder every time I go the US, as this is the only developed country where I heve been to whe
400.
by cdavid 15y ago
This is already a more interesting discusion. I cannot comment on Lisp, as I have too little experience with it. When you say python forces you to create interfaces, I am not sure I understand. For me, programming is mostly about creating i
401.
by cdavid 15y ago
I find the focus on dynamic typing a bit fascinating: you don't see people focus so much on it on a discussion about LISP. [EDIT: I meant to say that this most likely reveals something else is at work in the particular case of python]. When
402.
by cdavid 15y ago
It is not my experience that you can figure out how to call functions correctly just from the function signature. Certainly, that's not true from C++ when you need to figure out lifetime issues, etc… It may be possible to figure out from
403.
by cdavid 15y ago
On most projects I have seen where python was seen as problematic, I think that having types ala C++/Java would not have improved much. The real problem is that the function is not documented, nor is the function expectations. Typing in C++
404.
by cdavid 15y ago
scipy only depends on numpy, but both at the python and the C level (i.e. it uses the numpy C API).
405.
by cdavid 15y ago
Concerning Challenger, at least according to Feynman, the problem was one of organization more than actual technical (in)competency. From what I have seen, there is something fundamentally wrong in the finance sector - and I don't think it
406.
by cdavid 15y ago
It is most likely about signaling (branding as you say). For example, by bringing young, good looking consultants, you are using prestige pressure to force a certain strategy. Most of what they have to say is fairly trivial, and anyone with
407.
by cdavid 15y ago
A boycott may be effective to improve working conditions. The difference between a US factory and a foxcon factory is not a binary thing: surely, nobody would argue that increasing the wages of those workers of say 0.0001 % will make their
408.
by cdavid 15y ago
It is mentioned nowhere in accelerate framework that it uses atlas, and they removed functions like ATL_buildinfo. I doubt it has changed much in the last 5 years as well, and I am not sure what makes you think there is ( significant) non-a
409.
by cdavid 15y ago
Apple did not spent a considerable amount of time tunning BLAS - they just took Atlas, an widely used open source implementation of blas/lapack (and took care of making sure it does not look like ATLAS at first glance, although a simple loo
410.
by cdavid 15y ago
NumPy dev here. Note that numpy may not use BLAS (this was done though as to avoid any hard dependencies on 3rd party libraries). I am not sure what you mean by putting the FLOP count below what's required. BLAS will still need O(N^3) opera
411.
by cdavid 15y ago
There are a lots of misunderstandings about cost of firing, cost of employment, etc... in Europe. What is true is that it is complicated because every country is different, and some countries can be anal about one thing that others are not.
412.
by cdavid 15y ago
More likely, google requires compatibility with its set of C extensions. At least when unladen swallow was announced, this was one of the major requirement. I would expect the problem to be similar in most large corporate environments.
413.
by cdavid 15y ago
I think the matrix example is particularly unflattering, and highlights the fundamental issues with the language. For once, there is no agreed-upon matrix library in C++, but many different ones. They are only "compatible" at a very low-lev
414.
by cdavid 15y ago
I don't think living in Japan makes you especially more able to comment on the issue. Most foreigners are concentrated in a few areas, and it tends to be mostly anecdotal. It does help you to avoid having misconceptions for things that cann
415.
by cdavid 15y ago
There may be a point at which the features may worth it, I don't see why it should be automatic. Python 2.x is not going away, but staying at 2.7 is not a long term solution either.
416.
by cdavid 15y ago
Breaking stuff is worthwhile if it brings other things in exchange. Cleaner is almost never a good enough reason in my experience. New features is what makes people willing to upgrade. People will evaluate whether porting is worth the pain
417.
by cdavid 15y ago
It may just be anecdotal at this point, but several highprofiles libraries have given up on 2to3 entirely and use the 2/3 common codebase approach: Jinja, django, ply. For a library, that's the approach that I find more practical. I have a
418.
by cdavid 15y ago
To be fair, the idea has never been to maintain two code bases, but to re-run the 2to3 when building/installing. In practice, I find this quite pain to deal with (2to3 is slow, hard to use when you need to support python 2.3 or 2.4, etc...)
419.
by cdavid 15y ago
There are many people who are not expert in your programming language but need to understand it, though. When you work in an environement where you need domain people, who are hired for their domain first and are programmers second, this ca
420.
by cdavid 15y ago
But Patrick specifically mentions about the majority of "programmers", those who work for companies big enough such as people above them will barely know your name. Also, be careful about the notion that there is no question about the value

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