cdavid

67 ms·

661.
by cdavid 16y ago
Why the downvote ? I believe it is pretty much agreed on that letting lehman brothers fall was a mistake - of course, saying it afterwards is easy.
662.
by cdavid 16y ago
Python is my main language, and I think you underestimate the speed different for a same implementation by an order of magnitude. That is, CPU-boud tasks will most likely be around 100x slower. The realy argument, of course, is that in a
663.
by cdavid 16y ago
I have programmed in python for almost 5 years, with medium-large (several 100kloc) projects, this has never ever been an issue. If you mix tabs/space, you can have issue, but that's nothing that any decent text editor cannot fix/highlight.
664.
by cdavid 16y ago
I don't think it is fair to base your impression on GAE. GAE is a very particular platform. I am not so familiar with testing for web applications, but nose on python certainly supports test runners, fixtures, etc... I am actually surprised
665.
by cdavid 16y ago
I guess taste comes in place - I find producing good (as in academic publication good) figures in matlab an exercice of pain. The subplot mechanism is awful (at least was 5 years ago), and it is hard to control the layout. I heard mathemati
666.
by cdavid 16y ago
I cannot speak for mathematic, I have barely used it. For stats, R is hard to beat, it has a lot of "cutting edged" toolboxes through CRAN (CPAN for R), and that's what uses most academics in statistics - most leading academics in statistic
667.
by cdavid 16y ago
While the security issues does not seem as high in "modern" environments (mostly single user systems), I think it is still a significant risk because of the surprise factor. For example, on my mac, there are > 2000 binaries available in
668.
by cdavid 16y ago
I said much choice, maybe it is stronger than what I really meant (English is not my native language). He certainly had a choice, but there were accounts from witnesses that complaining about the usage of slave labors or conditions in death
669.
by cdavid 16y ago
Von Braun was far from the worse - although he directly contributed to the German war effort, and knew about death camps through the usage of slave labor, it is generally acknowledged he did not have much choice. Low-ranking nazi researcher
670.
by cdavid 16y ago
But they are academics. As most people familiar with computers and their technical usage, I also tend to organize things in a hierarchical manner. But I cannot ignore that most people around me do not: they just put everything on desktop an
671.
by cdavid 16y ago
[caveat: I am a numpy/scipy developer] The idea of rewriting a large body of code in a different language does not make much sense. Also, being a niche language has some nice consequences: * R has been there for a long time through its
672.
by cdavid 16y ago
Partial rebuilds are obviously quite important - but in that case, IO is even less of an issue, because it is the hot case assuming you have enough memory. I forgot about one case where you may not have enough memory: large C++ program with
673.
by cdavid 16y ago
sure, that's exactly the point I am trying to make: if it takes 75 % time more to compile @ O1 than O0, it means that parsing takes at most ~ 60 % of compilation time for quite conservative optimization. I think it is quite common to compil
674.
by cdavid 16y ago
Unless you have gigantic projects, your project source code is likely to be mostly in memory through kernel IO buffers nowadays, so even this is not true anymore IMO. EDIT: just for kicks, I compiled twice numpy (100 kLOC), first just after
675.
by cdavid 16y ago
Indeed. I have read that parsing is the slowest part of compilation several times, but I guess this is very dated. For example, compiling numpy (a python package with ~ 100 kLOC of C code): - CFLAGS="-O0" -> ~ 20 sec - CFLAGS="-O1
676.
by cdavid 16y ago
If you consider that CPU, ram and hard drive is the only thing that matters in a laptop, then yes, apple is definitely overpriced. But mac unibody, battery indicator, magnetic connector, pluggable power unit (to change the type of connector
677.
by cdavid 16y ago
I don't have much experience with mysql, but I can think of at least of few reasons why it would make sense to me. First, you get a relatively solid, well known storage backend, with > decade of bug fixes. Writing things reliably to dis
678.
by cdavid 16y ago
The article is just really poor, and mostly shows the author's complete lack of knowledge on how science is done, and even what it is about. One the biggest reason for not opening your code is to avoid given an unfair advantage to other res
679.
by cdavid 16y ago
yes, but oracle is expensive, especially since it requires people who really know about oracle if you want to be up to speed relatively quickly. So as always, it is a tradeoff: it seems that in some cases, not having the usual RDBMS guarant
680.
by cdavid 16y ago
The problem is not whether you can, but how long does it take. At least with mysql, alter table for a large table will take a long time (hours, if not more), during which the table cannot be written to.
681.
by cdavid 16y ago
R. Pike was involved in both projects, if that's what is meant by lineage. I am basing this on the author list in the sawzall paper, I am not working at google.
682.
by cdavid 16y ago
Well, what does a + b means in C++ ? You are playing with the work meaning here. Of course, the syntax of a language is well defined - because it needs to be parsed, hopefully somewhat unambiguously by compiler/interpreter. But that's not
683.
by cdavid 16y ago
What's ambiguous about mathematical notation ?
684.
by cdavid 16y ago
Typing is not such a big issue. I mean, many languages require many more symbols than keys on a keyboard, and are used every day by millions of people who are not programmers and without any particular technical skill (think Japanese and Ch
685.
by cdavid 16y ago
It is both specific and non-specific depending on what you are trying to achieve. In the special case of 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3, this is specific, and using decimal will "fix" it. But decimal, or for that matter any representation will have the
686.
by cdavid 16y ago
The C API also has a learning curve, and is certainly harder than cython. You don't need a couple of weeks to learn cython - I rewrote one small package from ctypes to cython in ~ 1 day, without previous experience in cython. The problem of
687.
by cdavid 16y ago
Then you checked a very long time ago :) It is quite easy to pass numpy arrays to cython functions. I would say that except in some very special cases, writing raw Python C interface is useless (of course, writing numerical code which is in
688.
by cdavid 16y ago
Assuming RDBMS is to be understood as ACID, this may be because of the need for more reliable hardware, and good IO hardware is comparatively expensive ? If you use things like mongodb and co, you are giving up on single-node durability, fo
689.
by cdavid 16y ago
There are other things which sound too good to be true and yet are true (the sampling theorem for exact reconstruction of periodic signals is pretty unintuitive IMO, and even more "magic")
690.
by cdavid 16y ago
The core ideas behind SVD and eigen values are very rich and profound. It has always fascinated me when I studying maths in undergrad. Someone else already mentioned compressed sensing, which expands on some of those ideas. Terrence Tao had

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