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bolaft's comments

bolaft | 10 years ago | on: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

Secondary speakers are not people who learned French in school and live outside a French speaking country. If you took French in high school in the US you are not recorded in these numbers. Secondary speakers are people like, for example, those who grew up in Morocco, speak French but have Arabic as a mother tongue (for example).

Plus those numbers only account for speakers who can read and write. As I said in another comment, the alphabetization of Africa over the next few decades is expected to boost these numbers significantly.

So, as the rest of the planet catches up, "curiosity" becomes LESS accurate over time.

bolaft | 10 years ago | on: France bids to reverse tech brain drain

I'm getting tired of hearing always the same uninformed comments about the French language and how the French perceive it. We're not very good with English because of the terribly inefficient way it's taught in school, not because of any kind of "phobia". A Frenchman speaks on average 1.8 languages, which is slightly less than Germans (and much less than Swedes and Norwegians), but still more than Spaniards and Britons for example.

And French is not a "mere curiosity". It's the official language of 29 independent countries. It's also the second most employed language in diplomacy, being a working language of countless institutions, and the second most common mother-tongue in the EU. Not to mention that with the growing alphabetization of Africa, and its potential for economic and developmental growth, it could very well know a powerful rebirth in the near future.

It's true that French is not the easiest language to learn though, but if you don't find it very pretty that's your opinion, however it's really subjective.

bolaft | 11 years ago | on: French civil code now on GitHub

No, version control can only handle textual changes, only humans with legal expertise can work out how one law affects another. Even if there was a graph that showed all the links between all the laws (which would take an enormous amount of work to build), it would take a semantic understanding of each modification to deduce whether it has any impact on other nodes.

bolaft | 11 years ago | on: French civil code now on GitHub

Did you take a look at the repo? It doesn't track new laws, it tracks the entire Code Civil and considers each new law a "commit", so it works perfectly. Here, as an example, the commit/law that legalizes same-sex marriage :

https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil/commit/b805ecf05...

You can clearly see that the "commit/law" changes the wordings of various files to replace "mother and father" by "parents" and "husband and wife" by "spouses".

bolaft | 11 years ago | on: Watson Services

Thanks, however I was already aware of that, I was looking for something more specific.

bolaft | 11 years ago | on: Watson Services

How do these services work, compsci-wise? Could someone link a few IBM publications explaining how the Question & Answer API works? That would be very helpful. The documentation pages explain nothing.

bolaft | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life?

I came here to say this. The importance of good food is severly underestimated. If you improve the quality of the food you eat, you improve your life. Also, you can save lots of money. And it's a great skill to have, socially. Being a good cook also makes you more attractive to members of the opposite sex, regardless of gender (that's not even a joke).

bolaft | 11 years ago | on: Facebook was down

Is this a first? I can't remember the last time it happened.

Edit: down in France as well.

bolaft | 12 years ago | on: Do Men Suck At Friendship?

He doesn't. At the end of his story, after he rekindled his friendship with this surfer guy, he still has no gossip for his wife.

bolaft | 12 years ago | on: What every founder fears

Giving a symbolic position to a spouse so she can mine for talent? That's nepotism with a papertrail.
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