cdavid

47 ms·

481.
by cdavid 15y ago
But the article is about the over-regulation in France - in that aspect, you have the same idea of banning some language. The reason why is different, but the idea of controlling language itself is not specific to France.
482.
by cdavid 15y ago
The usage of couriel instead of email is not enforced by the state, but is suggested by the French Academy (which is not a governemental organization). The State can enforce the usage in the documents it produces itself, but this is differe
483.
by cdavid 15y ago
I doubt this is true: I believe it is illegal to have a job written only in English, which is a bit different.
484.
by cdavid 15y ago
Given the languages they are using, I think it is fair to say that they are interested in system-programming kind of tasks, which for google means the stacks below what you normally use for web programming (i.e. I would expect google to hav
485.
by cdavid 15y ago
Yes, but his remarks suggests that hamming distance is not very nice for pictures after his transformation (d(i1, i2) == 5 -> small, d(i1, i2) == 10 -> big). As I am not familiar with image signals, I don't know if this can be someh
486.
by cdavid 15y ago
That would be a good idea as along as you have a good distance between images (d(image1, image2) small equivalent to image1 and image2 are equivalent). I have little experience in image processing, but this is generally a hard problem with
487.
by cdavid 15y ago
As mentioned by others, xen is used a lot in the wild (I believe it is the underlying virtualization architecture on EC2, for example). One big advantage of KVM is that you can use your existing kernel, and there is little chance of conflic
488.
by cdavid 15y ago
It can be used for caching, etc... It is only a problem in production if you expect data there to be durable (i.e. resistant to mild crashes).
489.
by cdavid 15y ago
Unit tests are not that useful IMO if you are alone on a project, but it is quite useful when multiple people have to work on the same codebase. They are a coding tool firemost: they help (but cannot substitute to !) documenting intent, the
490.
by cdavid 15y ago
"France" is not involved - the French gvt is, which is slightly different. I think few French citizens would even care about this law, and for those who do, would most likely be against it. There is also the context of presidential election
491.
by cdavid 15y ago
Indeed. The point being that comparing cities is much more relevant than countries. It has also the nice property to avoid too much country-bias.
492.
by cdavid 15y ago
Generalizations like Europe is more expensive than the US make no sense. Where in Europe, where in the US ? There is quite a difference between cost of living in London, Paris and Munich already, and the cost of living in the Bay Area is no
493.
by cdavid 15y ago
The employee caries the cost of insurance, tax, etc... in every country: that's the tax incidence concept ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence ). The fact that from an administrative POV, some part is split between the employee and
494.
by cdavid 15y ago
Not sure about that: qick sort is generally said to be O(NlogN), but its worst case is O(N^2) (the simple implementation anyway).
495.
by cdavid 15y ago
None of that is available on the GAE, though (you cannot use custom C extensions on GAE, which includes 3rd party tools like numpy).
496.
by cdavid 15y ago
No, but there is some bureaucracy. Not so much taxes as much as being able to make sure not to pay things you don't have to. I have done internships in some companies where they did not realize they could recover a lot of taxes, etc... if t
497.
by cdavid 15y ago
Another issue with evented frameworks in python is that you have to ensure nothing is blocking anywhere in your code, which becomes harder the more complex your application becomes. People will often mention IO, database, etc... forgettin
498.
by cdavid 15y ago
Floating point do not exist for performance optimization - they were much slower than fixed points at first (not anymore on general purpose CPU). The point of floating point is to have the same accuracy (number of meaningful digits) indepen
499.
by cdavid 15y ago
Not really, numpy depends too much on cpython internals. There is an interest in rewriting numpy for pypy, but I am not sure whether this is the best way of doing it. From what I understand, the choice is between better pypy's compatibility
500.
by cdavid 15y ago
It is dubious whether Linus would be more productive using LISP. I mean, git is based around the idea of being super close to the metal, with a consistant focus on speed. We are talking about people who say (and can reasonably claim !) that
501.
by cdavid 15y ago
The website by Julius O Smith noted above is a goldmine for a lot of theoretically grounded but practical descriptions of many algorithms. Then, you have http://www.musicdsp.org which has a lot of code snippets, + the ML is frequented by
502.
by cdavid 15y ago
Sometimes you cannot easily not share state. The fact that you can use multiple processes to scale is not an interesting statement when comparing python to other languages because it is true for every language out there. I think the GIL has
503.
by cdavid 15y ago
The problem with most methods to improve ref counting speed is that it generally breaks existing C extensions. For that reason alone, I don't expect cpython to significantly change its way of doing things in that area for a long time.
504.
by cdavid 15y ago
You are playing with words here: of course you can run multiple python instances to scale your application on multiple-cores, that's a trivial statement. But I was talking about python the interpreter (more exactly cpython). There are leg
505.
by cdavid 15y ago
And it is one of the reason why python is slow and difficult to scale on multiple cores (the main difficulty by far of removing the GIL is reference counting).
506.
by cdavid 15y ago
Those are very conventional mathematics, and most core concepts have been settled for a century now. Cantor in particular paved the way toward a better understanding of many related concepts in that area. As for the significance of those di
507.
by cdavid 15y ago
Getting a working visa is rather easy if you have a company sponsoring you - certainly much easier than for the US for a EU citizen, and much shorter. If the company has experience doing it, it can take less than 2 months between the very b
508.
by cdavid 15y ago
I don't know about Chinese culture, but I am always amazed that so few people in software engineering actually understand the difference. I think that's the essence of the "being smart and getting things done" thing of Joel Spolsky. Things
509.
by cdavid 16y ago
Ah, but they are not synonyms, since you cannot use one for the other: you cannot use the counter for animal for things (except for puns - I let you guess what it means to use the counter for long, thin things to count guys). I am no specia
510.
by cdavid 16y ago
If it has been used by millions users, it cannot be bad code on every front. For example, maybe the architecture sucks, etc... but this came after you already had many users, so you could not change it easily: that's inherent to most projec

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