Wolfram Mathematica

12:00 AM

@OleksandrR. And apparently, also pays in Wolfram dollars :D 1 W$ ~ 0.4 USD, judging by the salaries here

@rm-rf if you look at it as more of an academic environment, these salaries don't seem so bad. But surely you can get better pay elsewhere at an equivalent level of seniority, if the assessments are really accurate.

I have another theory for the Wolframization of everything. As most people probably know, Wolfram himself no longer goes to the corporate premises very often, and directs operations from his home office instead. So, I could imagine, after this decision was made, he has a lot more free time (not so much of his day is taken up by shouting at employees) and wants to make some changes. In his absence, a meeting is held. "What will distract him?" Oh yes, let him name everything after himself...

rm -rf

@OleksandrR. I think I'm ok with most of the Wolframization. Every body does it and it's a way to improve your brand identity (or make the products appear coherent) — for instance, Amazon-X or Google-X and so on. What is disgusting is that he wrote a loooong blog post soliciting a name for the language behind Mathematica, only to eventually name it after himself (something that everybody expected him to do from the start). Why not just rename it and be done with it instead of putting on a show?

Oleksandr R.

@rm-rf I don't know. Ego? What other explanation is there for most of his statements in blog posts, talks, etc.? He might have been sincere in his solicitation, but in the end unable to overcome the urge for self-aggrandizement. Anyway, I don't know. But I think what this renaming has mainly accomplished, rather than strengthening the brand, is to make the company, and especially Wolfram himself, look foolish.

Actually, I think it harms the brand identity, because now we have so many different things called Wolfram that one can hardly tell what the individual products or ideas are any more without having already been familiar with them under their old names.

Oleksandr R.

12:42 AM

@rm-rf many of the reviews on the site are extremely unflattering toward management, even if they praise other employees in general

Aron

1:07 AM

Hello, does anyone know why my Manipulates look like the image above but other people's on the site look like the latter image?

I'm talking about the colours of the panel, the shape of the slider button and the groove of the slider

Oleksandr R.

@Aron the styling comes somewhat from the OS. Since the FE is native in each OS and tries to emulate its parent environment's look and feel, there are differences in the appearance between Windows and Mac.

Aron

1:22 AM

Thank you, @OleksandrR.

Oleksandr R.

You're welcome. (The first ping worked, by the way. If the first four characters of the name are correct, it still works.)

Aron

Haha, ok I didn't realise.

I don't suppose there's any way of styling the Manipulates on Windows to look more like on a Mac?

Oleksandr R.

@Aron I was just looking at that myself. And I think the answer is no: the corresponding styles simply don't exist on Windows. They are taken from the native OS UI library I suppose, perhaps via Java Swing.

@Aron You can get a different appearance, but not the Mac one. Try Style[Manipulate[x, {x, 0, 1}], ControlsRendering -> "Generic"], for example. Docs in ref/ControlsRendering

jtbandes

2:03 AM

Does anyone have a better way of finding the largest distance between any two points? Max[Norm[Subtract @@ #] & /@ Tuples[points, 2]]

(They are 2-dimensional if that matters)

It seems like this should be doable in something better than n^2 time by taking advantage of some geometric properties, but I'm not sure

Michael Hale

@jtbandes Convex hull then rotating calipers stackoverflow.com/questions/2736290/…

jtbandes

@MichaelHale Good find, looks neat, thank you!

ah, I didn't know about ComputationalGeometry`

Verbeia

3:52 AM

Folks, just a reminder, if you see spam, don't vote to close it. Flag it as spam, and if you have 10,000 rep or above, vote to delete. Thanks.

Sjoerd C. de Vries

8:38 AM

@Verbeia I usually do all of the above, would that be a problem?

halirutan

@rm-rf Question: Is this salary, say 50k before taxes or is it what you have in your hands? In Germany, this is always before taxes but maybe the glassdoor site handles it differently.

Sjoerd C. de Vries

@Mr.Wizard I noticed quite a few of the deleted duplicates had quite a few answers. It's a pity they are sent into oblivion now. I feel duplicates should be closed but rarely deleted.

@halirutan that might make quite a difference indeed, given the tax rates in the Us being as low as they are that could make up for the low $ to € rate.

Pickett

10:22 AM

One blog post says that "For example, compared to where I live now (Champaign, Illinois), my rent in Manhattan would be 326% more while groceries would cost 57% more." so that's bound to make a difference. And the effective tax rate is only about 20 % I think. Europeans are used to about 50 % income tax and a sales tax of about 25 % so I think our intuition about US salaries is off. :)

Verbeia

12:08 PM

@SjoerdC.deVries that's fine, it's just that I'm more likely to see a flag earlier than a vote to close.

Sjoerd C. de Vries

12:34 PM

@Pickett Sales tax in Europe is closer to 20% and while c. 50% for income tax is about right this holds only for the last step in many progressive tax systems, with the average rate being considerably lower.

Also don't forget that most US citizens pay both federal and state income taxes

Pickett

1:05 PM

You are right, actually I realized later that since rm -rm is American and he thought the salaries weren't good my point about tax perspective is rendered moot... but living expenses still affect salaries. In Silicon Valley engineers seem to wallow in luxury :D

(Which I guess is partly because the wages are so high that other benefits such as free rides to work, free food etc. is comparatively a cheap way to compete.)

Basically I shouldn't even talk about this. It's the same human tendency powering these "insights" as those tendencies that fill comments sections all over the net with crap. So nvm.

brama

1:30 PM

I have trouble using C-Compiler in MMA. I have MS Visual Studio Express 2013 installed on my computer and works fine to compile C-code. However, when I run Needs["CCompilerDriver"] CCompilers[] ` in MMA, it gives me {} as the output. I even added "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\VC\bin" to the path in the environment variables.

Jacob Akkerboom

@brama I think I saw trouble with visual studio before on this site. I suppose it is probably not in CCompilers[Full] on your system. On my system, clang is not listed, neither under CCompilers[] or under CCompilers[Full].

brama

Yes...When I run `CCompilers[Full]`, it gives me "`{{"Name" -> "Intel Compiler",
"Compiler" -> CCompilerDriver`IntelCompiler`IntelCompiler,
"CompilerInstallation" -> None,
"CompilerName" -> Automatic}, {"Name" -> "Generic C Compiler",
"Compiler" -> CCompilerDriver`GenericCCompiler`GenericCCompiler,
"CompilerInstallation" -> None, "CompilerName" -> Automatic}}`". It does not have VC++. What are my options?I want to be able to use `CompilationTarget -> "C"`

Jacob Akkerboom

1:45 PM

Did you see this one already?

4

Q: C compilation not working with Visual Studio 2013

I'm running Mathematica 9 on a 64 bit Windows 8.1 laptop. I'm having no luck getting C compilation to work. Needs["CCompilerDriver`"] CCompilers[Full] CCompilers[] returns {} {} The package did load successfully, as $Packages shows CCompilerDriver entries and $ContextPath//First re...

ccompilerdriver

brama

@JacobAkkerboom No..I have not..will look at it now.

Jacob Akkerboom

@brama okido, good luck!

Oleksandr R.

2:04 PM

@Verbeia I don't think we can vote to delete without it being closed first. My reasoning for voting to close is that if closed and downvoted it would be deleted automatically after a while even without any moderator intervention. That seemed to me the best that we could do as users, though perhaps it's possible as a 20k+ user to delete an open question. Of course I also flagged it.

@Pickett +1 insightful

Szabolcs

Here is says that something flagged 6 times as spam will be auto-deleted: meta.stackexchange.com/a/5222

Oleksandr R.

Oh, I didn't realise that the flags are also handled automatically if no moderators see them in time. That would seem to be a quicker way to do it, then.

halirutan

@Pickett What I really wanted to estimate is whether to work for Wolfram (with all the difficulties pointed out in the glassdoor comments) is really worth a thought.

rm -rf

@OleksandrR. What @Verbeia meant is that some users cast a vote to close but not a spam flag (we can see who cast both). 6 spam flags (not any other) will automatically delete a post, and is almost always faster than a close + delete or scheduled deletes (after 1 week, for downvoted and closed questions). In the same vein, flagging as "Low quality" is also not useful.

halirutan

@Pickett I guess I'm living in a pretty cheap region in Germany and although we seem to have higher taxes, the salaries paid by Wolfram seem very low. So the only benefit would be to be around awesome people... and of course to be yelled at by God Wolfram in person.

rm -rf

2:19 PM

(I see that Szabolcs already covered this above...)

@halirutan Those numbers are before tax, and for between 50-60k, the effective tax rate would be around 15%, I think.

Oleksandr R.

@halirutan I would hesitate to conclude that WRI is a bad place to work, especially given that there's an inherent bias toward negative reviews as people with positive experiences often won't comment. But from what I read, I got the idea that it is perhaps not worth the trouble to find out for sure.

brama

3:58 PM

My code compiles, but will not run CompilePrint[]. what could be the problem?

brama

4:11 PM

@JacobAkkerboom Thank you. That post helped me fix the problem. Now, when I execute DefaultCCompiler[], iit outputs CCompilerDriverVisualStudioCompiler`VisualStudioCompiler`,but when I compile the code with CompilationTarget -> "C", it does not compile. Any ideas?

Oleksandr R.

4:24 PM

@brama didn't load the CompiledFunctionTools` package?

brama

@OleksandrR. Yes...did not load it..it works after doing so!!Thank you.

brama

5:18 PM

@OleksandrR. when I execute DefaultCCompiler[] in MMA, it outputs CCompilerDriverVisualStudioCompiler`VisualStudioCompiler`,but when I compile the code with CompilationTarget -> "C", it does not compile. Any ideas?

Oleksandr R.

@brama I have an idea that you need to be more specific about what happens than just "does not compile"

brama

@OleksandrR. when I compile a function fn with CompilationTarget -> "C", it does not give me any errors, but when I execute the function with sample values,fn[a,b,c,] it does not give output, merely prints f[a,b,c]

Oleksandr R.

@brama Compile[{},1.,CompilationTarget->"C"][] gives...?

brama

5:35 PM

@OleksandrR. Please bear with my insufficient knowledge of MMA. I am not sure what you mean? Do you mean I add [] outside my compile? what is that 1., just before the CompilationTarget->"C"?

Rojo

@brama It's a compiled function that takes no arguments ({}), returns 1., compiles to C, and that he is evaluating with no arguments ([])

Oleksandr R.

@brama just run it and report the result

brama

@OleksandrR. gives me 1.

Oleksandr R.

@brama if no messages, then there's nothing wrong with the compilation step. The problem with your program lies somewhere else.

brama

@OleksandrR. They are in the same file and I compile first and then run the function. Do you want to take a look at the code?

Oleksandr R.

5:44 PM

@brama well, all I can tell you is that Mathematica can apparently compile to C without a problem, so the issue must have crept in somewhere else along the way

brama

@OleksandrR. Ok.. Thank you. Let me see if I can figure it.

Sjoerd C. de Vries

6:00 PM

@rm-rf and add 5% state tax to that...

halirutan

7:09 PM

@rm-rf A big part of fees here in Germany is the due to the health- and social-care system. From what I have heard people in US are not too keen to get medical care and operations for free.

halirutan

7:23 PM

Anyway, I guess it is pretty hard to make a guess how high a salary is when you don't know all local circumstances liek food prices, rental fees, etc.

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