And that's the reason I am packing my stuff and heading to London. At this very moment. I was just about to remove the legs from the table I am writing these lines on (well, I am writing them on a computer, but thats not the point). And surprise, surprise, I am moving from Central Europe. And yes, I can speak with a thick Slovak, Czech, and Hungarian (Andy Grove style) accent. If anyone had a job available for a fresh CS graduate, please let me know (email is in my profile)!
What I really like about the search, is that it accounts for seasons on different hemispheres. E.g. it returns Lisboa and Cadiz as places similar to Sydney. Even though the months with hot weather are different in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
As a side note - clicking the name of a place shows an overlay in the graph. It was not obvious at first; the names are in black.
IO is the place to launch new products. It's just slightly more impressive than showing a message "And btw. we've lunched this new version of maps. Check it out (with the probability of 0.00053846)".
I don’t like this new “flat and monochrome” thing. I think it’s a fashion.
One should always be cautious about simple design rules. As design goes, in one setting the flat, grayscale approach can be dull, in another one, it can be cheerful and captivating.
I have a recent example for the new mantra of removing color and flattening things. Take Sourcetree, which is one of my favorite applications. A few weeks ago they’ve switched to a new icon set for their main icon bar:
I don’t think there is any usability or aesthetic benefit to it, quite the opposite. The original version had something slightly funny and frivolous about it, which made it pleasant to use. And from the usability perspective, one could subconsciously click the yellow icon without examining the picture itself.
There are also many counter examples where grayscale and flat design make things a joy to use. I used to do DTP for a black and white newspaper and we never had the feeling it was dull, quite the opposite, we considered it quite elegant and calm as compared to the flashy tabloids.
Are there any similar tools available for Ruby? When I've checked it a few years ago, there were some projects at very early stages; hardly comparable to their Python counterparts.
As for the integrated stack problem, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Enthought Python Distribution [1]. I've used it on both Windows and Mac. It includes all the important libraries for linear algebra, matrix computation, and visualization (SciPy, NumPy, matplotlib, etc.). So it is a great replacement for Matlab, which probably falls short of any programming language known to mankind.
That would have been my answer a year ago as well, however we've (continuum analytics) put out our own distribution now which gives you much more - all for free.
How does this distribution play with the outside world? Will I be able to install other third party libraries into the distribution? Does it have its own 'installation procedure'?
So, we ship anaconda with our own package management system, called conda. Conda is open source and was created because for scientific python, we need to manage versions of non-python libraries (blas/atlas/mkl,libhdf5, etc..). But you don't need to use conda if you don't want to. Conda is just what we use to install stuff. You can use pip on top of Anaconda if you would like, and we even have functions to turn whatever you did to your anaconda environment into a conda package if you wanted to.
I was going to read through the comments in my usual routine of gathering insights the original link missed. Then it struck me. I liked that t-shirt. It simply looked good.
What comment was I expecting? Some kind of logical reasoning about what's wrong with that t-shirt? Or a proof that the t-shirt is just fine?
As wise barber once said, "We think too much and feel too little."
They probably do not know much about the banking sector, as most of the banks (I would say 95%) are branches of Western European ones, like the French Societe Generale, Austrian Erste Group, or the Belgian KBC.
The way they bought/privatized/stole them in the 1990s is a whole another story.
It's cultural for the last few generations. From a historical perspective it is rather inaccurate.
Let me just scratch the surface of the history of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. It is much more complex, but I hope this simplification will be enough for getting a feel for it.
Czech lands, which are east of Germany and Austria were a part of the same Holy Roman Empire for roughly 900 years until the beginning of the 19th century and then part of Austria-Hungary until the First WW. The influence is clear in trade, culture, education.
Slovakia is a bit different story. During the same 900 year period it was part of the Hungarian Kingdom, which was again a Central European entity.
Both countries sort of met in Austria-Hungary in the 19th century.
Post WWI they formed Czechoslovakia, from 1918 to 1938. It was democratic country with strong ties to the West.
The most intensive period of Eastern European/Russian influence was from the end of WWII to the Velvet Revolution in 1989. The time where the term Iron Curtain comes from.
This and the "slavic connection" with Russia are probably the sources of confusion. The languages are similar.
In the period of "romantic nationalism" of the 19th century, part of the so-called intellectual elite was intrigued by the idea of Pan-Slavism and wanted close ties with the Russian Empire. This was always more of a romantic idea that comes back every now and then. When the real decisions have been made (formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, Velvet Revolution in 1989, joining the NATO and later the EU in 2004), they were always in a "westward" direction, in terms of both economy and diplomacy.
