I am a fan of Mark Allen Weiss' Data structures and algorithm analysis in C (https://www.amazon.ca/Data-Structures-Algorithm-Analysis-2nd...). It is much smaller than CLRS and the algorithms are listed as C source code rather than pseudo code. I also like the coding style presented in the book.
As much as I agree with you on the importance of good public transport, I am hopeful that the "car culture" will evolve into an alternative to the existing public transport systems; Once we have self-driving cars running on clean energy operating in an Uber like sharing economy model, there will be no need for car ownership and the cost of a ride will be low enough for the majority of people to afford.
I understand that this is more difficult to achieve in reality than in ideas but I am hopeful. About health related issues, we will still have to look for other ways to make a healthier society.
> considering how the state holds what was injected in higher esteem than whatever is native. It seems that most of the indignance pointed to at @pmarca is about (white) guilt shaming.
If I understand your logic correctly, it seems that you are suggesting that a country or a community should either reinvent every useful thing that was introduced by colonialists or should not take a stand against the ideas of colonialism, racism and discrimination!
It's a fact that Britishers introduced a lot of technology in this world and helped bring it to many countries but I feel that it would have been much better if they would have tried to integrate with these countries rather than trying to follow a master-slave approach. Anyways, what's done is done but we can certainly hope that going forward the world can be a more equal place.
Technological/economic structures are separate from cultural spheres; most countries follow a Western model today. It'd have been a great loss if during Meiji period Japan lost all its culture.
I'm sure you sensed the sarcasm, but forgive me, I don't think a country which produced Panini, needed the English to teach it to speak.
Is this strange "stockholm syndrome" a result of the country's caste system ? Does everyone in India speak English ? If not, is there a linguistic class/caste divide (like South Africa) ?
I don't see how the choice of a language that is practically the lingua franca of the modern technology and business world is related to being against the ideology of colonialism and people who support that.
In my opinion, India's adoption of English as standard language of business is a logical choice as it is not only helpful in faster technological progress of the country but is also understood (in some capacity) by majority of the population.
I don't think you understand what 'lingua franca' means. No self-respecting people (in Europe/East Asia atleast) give up their languages for a common medium.
India is not exactly on the same stage globally as China or Japan, when it comes to Tech, despite what you claim.
It looks like http://www.aliexpress.com/ has support for more Indian languages than Flipkart. Surely supporting different languages for such a unicorn (which often shows up on HN) can't be that difficult a task ?
>No self-respecting people (in Europe/East Asia atleast) give up their languages for a common medium.
It's not giving up the languages if we were to find a logical(because the rest of the world speaks this too) common medium to speak.
And,
I am amazed as to how you are trying to connect dots from 'you guys speak English, so you have to also support colonialism, if not, you are hypocrites and pmarca is right'.
None of the countries you named were ruled or for that matter created by a colonial ruler with another language. India in its current form never existed, its like the EU, there are several states with their own languages, and English is the common one.
As for Aliexpress offering several languages - its just the google translate plugin ;).
India in its current form never existed, its like the EU
This is technically true in that yes, a state with precisely India's borders today did not exist before 1947. But that is a useless claim because that is true for every country in the world.
There are have been many many empires, going back all the way back at least 2300 years, and these empires have ruled the majority of the Indian subcontinent. This includes most of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan. Some of them also ruled parts of Iran, Tibet, and a little bit of Central Asia. And these empires all had linguistic diversity. The idea that one language = one country is a stupid byproduct of European nationalist movements.
The gestures for fullscreen and minimize operations need 6 fingers. Using both hands to do anything on a touch screen seems very impractical (except for typing with both the thumbs on a reasonably sized screen or a split keyboard).
Yeah, the two 6 finger gestures are certainly not ideal. I imagined a much larger touchpad, between the size of the Apple Keyboard and Apple Trackpad, so that might make it a little easier.
It's also important to note that these two gestures perform features (fullscreen / minimize) that can also be done by just resizing the panel (either with 3 fingers, or by going to App Control).
It would be nice to also have some notes about performance of both the languages for each of the tasks compared. I believe pandas would be faster due to its implementation in C. The last time I checked R was an interpreted language with its interpreter written in R.
And like pandas, many of the performance bottlenecks in R have been re-written in C. See dplyr and data.table for packages that solve a similar problem to pandas with similar speed (and for some scenarios they're actually faster!)
I feel that a good infrastructure by itself is hard to sell, but easy accessibility of the infrastructure and stuff built around it (for example the play framework in case of Typesafe) could be a good sell.
In my opinion, The value of programming "systems" like MATLAB lie in the fact that their primary customers are not really programmers but people like scientists and engineers who need to use computers and don't really want to (or have time to) learn new or better programming languages; These companies make their customers' lives easy by giving them easy to install and use, complete programming environments including a large set of domain-specific libraries.
I would add the very large old codebase in science. These systems gained popularity well before the advent of Python and other more user-friendly/approachable languages, so very large numbers of people in academia are familiar with them and have large volumes of code written for them.
As a grad student you're going to want to solve some problem, and your choice will be 1.) reimplement large segments of the lab's codebase in your language of choice or 2.) build something on top of the old code in Matlab.
I tried convincing my grad advisor to do things in python and not matlab, but no dice. He went with matlab for the problem he (and to as certain extent I) was trying to solve because of these kinds of institutional factors.
