cdavid

60 ms·

631.
by cdavid 16y ago
I am not sure why you are saying that english has been established once and for all. French was that language two centuries and half ago because France was very powerful, and latin was before because the church was the most powerful entity
632.
by cdavid 16y ago
Although PhD is a lot of work, its non-fixed schedule allows for some kind of freedom that you can use for networking. For example, PhD is a great time to be involved with open source projects where you can significantly contribute to, whic
633.
by cdavid 16y ago
I don't know the situation in the US, but in France, most shrinkage of the industrial sector is due to outsourcing within the same country . For example, car manufacturers did almost everything by themselves 30 years ago in France, and the
634.
by cdavid 16y ago
This is indeed no small accomplishment - but I doubt that that's what people have in mind when they say Germany's economy is an example to follow. It seems to have become a popular meme in the US (has been for a long time in Europe media),
635.
by cdavid 16y ago
So what's your measure of Germany's economic health ?
636.
by cdavid 16y ago
germany had an anemic gdp growth in the last two decades, significantly worse than most countries of comparitive size (population and gdp-wise). Look at gdp growth of other big european countries, or worse USA, it is quite striking
637.
by cdavid 16y ago
Python is clearly described as an OOP programming language, yet, interestingly, it does not have key features often atteched to OOP: it has no enforced encapsulation, and inheritance plays a very minor role in designing python programs. As
638.
by cdavid 16y ago
Unladen has never intended to remove the GIL - their primary goal was to keep compatibility with C extensions without even recompiling IIRC (google seems to rely a lot on python extension around their infrastructure), and removing the GIL w
639.
by cdavid 16y ago
There is no need to transition from unladen swallow since almost nobody was using it. It was a fork of cpython, and the speed improvements were so negligeable that I doubt anyone sane would try to use this without mastering the - heavy - te
640.
by cdavid 16y ago
Maybe because it is difficult to do so efficiently ? It is hard to get per-file information in git, so you would have to be pretty clever to get it working w.r.t. history. Other bugtrackers which were based on svn had a lot of issues with g
641.
by cdavid 16y ago
A few years ago (when Steve was still @ amazon), ocaml was one of his favorite language, and AFAIK, ocaml and haskell are the two most proeminent languages with a powerful type system. I think it is fair to say he has at least some vague id
642.
by cdavid 16y ago
I am talking about average/median salaries (everyday worker) - high end salaries don't matter much at a country's scale, I think. If neither gdp growth (below other European countries in the same category as Germany) nor median income growt
643.
by cdavid 16y ago
I think so-called German "miracle" is mostly a journalist and politics invention. What happened in the last few years is basically forced deflation through salary stagnation (even reduction), since you cannot play with you money anymore in
644.
by cdavid 16y ago
ah, sorry for the misunderstanding. Note that I don't pretend to be authoritative on the subject (although I think it is fair to say I am within the scipy community).
645.
by cdavid 16y ago
I am aware of distutils2 - the consensus in the scipy community is that it won't improve the situation at best, and will most likely make it even worse.
646.
by cdavid 16y ago
Actually, there is fragmentation: pip does not supersedes easy_install, since easy_install does things that pip cannot do (like installing from something that is not a source tarball). Also, distribute being a fork of setuptools, with neith
647.
by cdavid 16y ago
Python packaging is indeed a mess. The scipy community in particular is acutely aware of the issue - distutils and all the cruft on the top (setuptools, pip, etc...) are not robust and extremely adverse to extensibility. This is a complex i
648.
by cdavid 16y ago
What seems interesting to me as a European is that this type of reactions happened mostly in the US. Terror attacks have happened for a long time in Europe (red brigades, IRA, algerian terror cells, etc...), and the reaction has been quite
649.
by cdavid 16y ago
C++ has portability issue (where portability does not mean supporting g++ and MSVC), poor interoperability, and is much harder to maintain in a distributed team of people with varying ability in the language (e.g. open source). When those a
650.
by cdavid 16y ago
Memory allocation can indeed be amortized with specialized allocator, but that's not what I had in mind. The context I usually operate with is numerical computation, and the indirection cost is very high in those cases, especially when you
651.
by cdavid 16y ago
Fast atomic types support is indeed a good reason to do this sort of hackery - that's one of the reason why it is used in kernels. The difference of performance hashmap/vectors/sets between void* and int-specialized can be very significant
652.
by cdavid 16y ago
Given that North Korea is one of the poorest country in the world, and is ~ 50 % of south korea population, what do you think is realistic about reunification today, really ? I also doubt China would allow for the North Korean regime to fai
653.
by cdavid 16y ago
Given the past history of how that panned out in other countries, maybe it is actually naive to think bombing will solve anything, no ? Also, maybe neither the US, S Korea or China want to see a collapse of the region with all refugees that
654.
by cdavid 16y ago
You cannot compare salaries in Europe and the US directly. For example, average salary after mandatory payment to health care, retirement and unemployment insurance is around 26000 euros/year for men in France ( http://www.insee.fr/fr/them
655.
by cdavid 16y ago
Those numbers are not very accurate I think, they are too general. For example, VAT in France is 19.6 % only for a portion of products: medicines, food is around 6 %, while some other products are heavily taxed (the usual gas, tobacco, etc.
656.
by cdavid 16y ago
The word tax is misrepresentative - they don't buy you the same thing at all in Europe and in the US. Although most European also use tax to name anything they have to pay to the gvt agencies, a significant part of it buys you things you ha
657.
by cdavid 16y ago
I am not sure whether you are parodying a common attitude or are being serious, but do you think that the US attitude toward the rest of the world has been symmetrical ? Morality, "fairness", plays little role - what matters is the power ba
658.
by cdavid 16y ago
Dialysis also requires expensive medicine, like e.g. EPO, which contributes to a non negligeable part of the cost. The 77000 $ / patient surprised me a little because the figures I have heard in France (family members involved in dialysis t
659.
by cdavid 16y ago
Maybe the difference of age as well ? If I had to do some basic data analysis, age + family would be the first two explanatory variables I would look at. But without data, that's as clueless as anyone's else guess of course.
660.
by cdavid 16y ago
I read mostly on French ecoblogs, but in English: - http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/09/a-very-large-in.html - http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/business/12nocera.html?_r=1&hp You can find much more if you look a bit. I think

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