chevreuil

In the 2010 Boréal conference Ted Chiang had an interesting take on the singularity and the computable brain. There is a transcript (in french) here : http://www.actusf.com/spip/article-9802.html.

To sum it up that is what he says : "There is this thing called ethnobiology, a sub-dicscipline of anthropology, that studies the way civilizations understand and represent the living things. Ethnobiology reveals a constant in History : we tend to compare our brain to the most complex technology we know. At the Renaissance, philosopher assimilated the brain to a very complex and subtle clockwork, Freud compared it to a steam engine, which pressure should be evacuated to avoid explosion. In the 40's, schoolboy and schoolgirls were told that brain was like a telephone exchange. Today, computers are the most advanced technology we know, so we tend to compare our brain to it. But like our predecessors, it's very likely that we are wrong. Let just think forward, and admit that we are totally biased by the fact that computer are now inherent part of our life. Let's admit that there is a chance that our brain may never be modeled by a computer."

I'm french and I worked with two foreigners (US & Canada) in a parisian startup. One of them didn't bother learning french, and it was ok. He was mostly hanging out with other expats, and seemed to enjoy it.

Nonetheless, it is hard for foreigner to find an apartment to rent, but it's hard for everyone. And since whining about real estate is the national sport it somehow eased their integration and they quickly found colleagues to help them in this task.

France is not the UK, and it's not the US either. If you want to come in Paris make sure you're compatible with locals culture and habits. That means try to talk to some people mentioned in the slideshow, visit coworking space and startup offices. You'll be welcomed.

This one for example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8013773

The title was "The Tech Industry vs. San Francisco " : http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/07/140707fa_fact_...

Main economic institutions [1] already maintains databases of consumer goods and services price across countries, but they don't give easy access to the raw data. Glad to see Expatistan filling this gap.

[1] International Comparison Program for the Worldbank (http://icp.worldbank.org/), Eurostats (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index....)

The data format bothers me. Why not use a standard one like JSON?

The Paper demo is quite impressive on my phone (iPhone 5s). Anyone who struggled with touch events in an HTML app should be impressed.

I like how you sumed it up

> Famo.us is built around a neat idea: by directly using the CSS matrix3d transform in combination with the window.requestAnimationFrame function, you can describe the complete layout and animation of your app in a way that’s hardware accelerated with consistent performance.

> It’s a stroke of genius, but in order to implement that simple idea you need a sophisticated math library to help translate your app’s UI into the series of matrix transformations that get pushed to the GPU. This library is Famo.us.

Yes that's insane. But the blogger is also to blame here, he should not have used a Hotmail account to share such sensitive information.

why ?

I'm a bit new to bitcoins, but is it technically possible for the bitcoins community as a whole to make a blacklist of bitcoins addresses and "ban" the stolen bitcoins ? Such blacklist would daunt robbers and enforce public trust in bitcoins.

Relevant Bret Victor video : https://vimeo.com/66085662#t=9m20s

Same thing for French : I have not heard of anyone named Brigliador in France, or maybe in some medieval poetry.

We all know there are a lot of existing tools that does the same things. But I've not met one with such a polished UX. Kudos to the Kimono team, I'll definitly recommend your product.

I think it stands for "Confederatio Helvetica", and is the official abbreviations (eg : on licence plates)

Can you explain how ?

I use git on the command line too, it fits well with my workflow (branch features, "commit -a" when it seems relevant, rebase/squash when ready).

Maybe a more complicated workflow could justify an IDE plugin, but for me CLI is fine.

> It's Borges at his funniest

Exactly. My feeling in the first pages of Fictions was : is it some kind of joke ?

For those who read the House of Leaves, it's good to know that Danielewski took a lot of inspiration from Borges (among other things). If I recall correctly The Garden of Forking Paths is very similar in its purpose and construction.

I'm not too versed in Node frameworks : is Sails a direct competitor to Meteor ? If so how is it different ?

Yeah, that's the biggest misunderstanding about the teaching of philosophy in France. At the start you think "Cool, I'm going to learn to think by myself!", though what you actually do is learn what other famous thinker have been thinking, and spit it out in your personal fashion. It really has little to do with thinking by yourself, it's more about answering an open question by cleverly articulating school of thought.

Quite disappointing , but still very enlightening (even more if your teacher is cool).

Agreed, Angular and d3 are two of the most beautiful and useful pieces of JS out there. Radian's approach is very inspiring for the ones that use both of these awesome libraries.

But I find it too low level : I don't see the point of manipulating <dot> and <line> directives : is'nt it what SVG does already?

I'd rather use a <barchart> or a <piechart> directive.

Very cool use of transitions, one of the many fields where d3 really rocks. However, I've always wondered if word trees are really usefull... Sure it makes nice things with the Luther King speech or extract from the Bible.

There is one constant in the History showing that a generation of human can achieve goals that were admitted impossible by their predecessor

Apart from that, there is this thing called ethnobiology, a sub-dicscipline of anthropology, that studies the way civilizations understand and represent the living things.

Ethnobiology reveals another constant in History : we tend to compare our brain to the most complex technology we know.

At the Renaissance, philosopher assimilated the brain to a very complex and subtle clockwork, Freud compared it to a steam engine, which pressure should be evacuated to avoid explosion. In the 40's, schoolboy and schoolgirls were told that brain was like a telephone exchange. Today, computers are the most advanced technology we know, so we tend to compare our brain to it. But like our predecessors, it's very likely that we are wrong.

Let just think forward, and admit that we are totally biased by the fact that computer are now inherent part of our life. Let's admit that there is a chance that our brain may never be modeled by a computer.

PS: for those who read french, a part of the above is largely inspired by a talk of Ted CHIANG, available here : http://www.actusf.com/spip/article-9802.html (sorry I can't find an English version)

Le canard enchainé is highly respected by french reader for its accuracy and independence. It happens that they use a satirical tone, but their investigation are always strongly documented. That's why they are feared by every politician and public figures in general. By the way they are one of the very few french newspaper that make a profit without any financial help from the state (4,81 M Euros profit in 2011, french source : http://www.challenges.fr/media/20120828.AFP6975/le-canard-en...)

Cool name for a location app, even if only French speakers can get it.