benbataille

I kind of doubt the econ department of UChicago needs this kind of advertisement. It's probably the most famous in the world. They have the record for econ Nobel prizes as a university. If I had to take a guess, they are probably overwhelmed by applications rather than lacking some.

Anyway, if it is, it's a cool one. :-)

Interesting application but I think they should bring a native french speaker on board. The french sentence provided in the only screenshot isn't correct.

"Puis-je avoir le menu encore, s'il vous plaît ?" is a word for word translation of english. Unfortunately, "encore" needs to be put before the complement and the correct form would be : "Puis-je encore avoir le menu, s'il vous plaît ?". And even like this, it still sound phoney and using "à nouveau" would be better. French tends to be more tricky than english as its rules of construction admit a lot of irregularities.

I don't know how they get the translation. Apparently, they have a set of sentences translated "by hand". Well, if I was them, I wouldn't be too prompt to criticised machine translation as they do on their home page. Google Translate got the sentence they failed right. With a huge corpus (Google uses the European parliament translations if I remember correctly) and proper alignment, the result can be pretty awesome. Google Translate is now really awesome for European language and will probably give as good if not better results than a phrase book but I don't know how good it is for Asian languages.

Did someone compare both Google Translate and Mantaphrase for Japanese or Chinese ? Of course, Mantaphrase still has the advantage that it can work offline.

To be fair, France is insanely biased towards maths. The typical curriculum if you want a correct career in CS outside of research is to go through an engineering school and the amount of maths (and physics) you need to enter and then to graduate is mostly equivalent to a BSc. I did an engineering degree in France and an MSc in the UK, I can compare. Globally, a French student leaving high school has done slightly more maths than a UK/US first year university maths major (calculus and basic linear algebra are taught in high school). A typical CS major in France, independently of the cursus, will most likely have done the same amount of maths than someone with a maths MSc in the UK (I am talking of a 5 years curriculum which is standard for a CS degree in France). If you take a country still using the old French curriculum like Marocco, the difference is even worse. Part of the high school maths program of Marocco are only taught in advance algebra course in the UK (stuff like cyclic groups).

Everytime I read this kind of article, I can't prevent myself from thinking it's mostly a UK/US problem.

Well, don't panic. Grass is not greener on the other side. France nº1 is a phone provider, nº2 football and nº3 is the French equivalent of Big Brother. The presidential election is not even in the TOP 10.

Oh, and yeah, McDonalds is nº5. So much for French gastronomy...

To be fair, with all due respect, while I understand the concerns of Messrs. Berners-Lee and Cerf, I think they are also kind of missing the point. Unless newspapers are intentionally or not misleading us which is another possibility.

If you read what Russia is actually asking for, you will see that it has nothing to do with technologies and standardisation, everyone is pretty happy with that. No, what some governments start questioning is ICANN and especially IANA powers.

IANA is overseeing the whole IP allocations business and supervise root DNS management which give it a huge power over the network. However, while private, ICANN operates under a DOC contract and is headquartered in LA. I'm not overtly surprised it tickles some countries which are not too fond of the USA.

IHMO keeping ICANN but making it operate under a UN contract (maybe through ITU) would be a step in the right direction.

>I don't see how this particular response was arguing in favor of laziness.

In a referentially transparent language, you don't care about order of evaluation because whatever the order you will always end up with exactly the same result. Thus, losing control of it through laziness doesn't matter.

However, IMHO, the initial argument is kind of wrong. Laziness doesn't really make you lose control of order of evaluation. You know when expressions are going to be evaluated : when they are going to be needed. Obviously, when you use a lot of abstraction you didn't write like in Haskell, it becomes tricky. But, if you perfectly know how your data structures are processed by the compiler, you can safely use side effects with laziness. Not that you should, but you can.

They do. Which is with they don't care for the USA. Naively, some readers though this thread was going to be about a car. Some of them actually fail to see how where a car is produced should influence its merits.

They didn't realize that as the USA were involved, the discussion was doomed to degenerate into a mediocre and moderately interesting patriotic blabber. These readers simply lake basic knowledge of the average American state of mind.

As someone who used to be one of them, I give you our sincere apologies and invite you to keep going on your war veterans and industrial pride.

Doubtful.

In the same way being an hobbyist programmer will never give you the same skill set than a CS degree. It's highly unlikely you are ever going to study extensively algorithm, os and databases design, compilation or declarative and functional programming all by yourself because objectively it's not something you need to get the job done. Nevertheless, this knowledge becomes really useful as soon as you start designing complex system.

Doing an MBA (or an MSc for what it's worth, MBA cult is mostly anglo-saxon) is exactly the same thing. You will study a broad range of subjects and business areas and see different theories on them.

Don't misunderstand me, practical knowledge is invaluable and running your own company gives you a good understanding of your area. It's just than MBA will give you a broader if less practical view.

Indeed, it is. As long as you operate from Ireland that is.

The French tax authorities apparently have proofs that the whole business is done in France by employees of Google France but billed in Irland. So, technically, if I understand correctly, Google France is accused of paying Google Irland for prestations that don't exist since they haven't been done by Google Irland and that's illegal.

Summing undeclared revenues and penalties and considering the size of Google, I'm not overtly surprised it reaches one billion. I guess Google is going to contest the validity of the tax authorities proofs and it's going to languish in courts for some time until they eventually decide to settle on a lower figure.

Considering that this whole tax dodging is clearly gaming the system, I'm certainly not gonna shed a tear for them anyway. If you do business in a country, it seems only fair to pay its taxes.