Viewing profile — jfischer

Hi, this is a side project started about a year ago that we’re finally launching. We combine automatically generated statistics with manual curation on the most popular data scienc…

Anything that I can do to help move this forward as a Sunnyvale resident and voter? Thanks!

Ha! Charlie left the software industry and moved to bigger and better things ( http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/faq.html ). He does have some good stories about …

I think comments are really a bad idea. If you want comments, either make them explicit properties in your data structures or use something else like YAML or XML. JSON is the most …

In this particular situation, there was no else. I probably added an else clause with an assert return_value == False, as the function call was a virtual dispatch that could have m…

Alex Martelli gave a nice talk called "Permission or Forgiveness" about the exception handling style recommended by OP: http://pyvideo.org/video/1338/permission-or-forgiveness-0 . …

I've personally run into problems when I don't do exact comparisons with True and False. For example, I've forgotten to return a value in one path of a function/method, and then tr…

Another approach that can work in big organizations: make sure that your boss knows that, if they ignore your advice, the responsibility for the decision is theirs, not yours. In a…

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I've seen quite a few people use this approach in an attempt to get their boss's job, irrespective of the boss's performance in their position.…

It is interesting to see this from a (former) CEO's perspective. I've seen many big company executives who get stuck in stage 3. I knew that my last big company was destined for fa…

I welcome the maker movement and I'm glad that what I did as a kid is now cool. I got my start in engineering by reading the manuals of my father's HeathKit projects and by buildin…

You might also be interested in following the progress of "Snap" [1], which is an extended version of Scratch implemented in JavaScript for web browsers. This from the group at UC …

At my school (UCLA), there was not a formal requirement for publications or even an informal requirements. It looked like some professors emphasized publications more than others. …

This is just the tip of the iceberg - for some time now, many international flights inbound to the U.S. have had a secondary screening of your carry-on bags at the gate. They won't…

In this context, "In general" negates "I don't cheat...". Of course you may just mean that "nobody's perfect". However, there are people who habitually use lying as a tool to gain …

Nice article. I think it highlights the challenge of trying to balance multiple sources of priority, all of which are important to you. Of course, we can say that the family is the…

This was an excellent video for those interested in programming models for distributed systems. Hewitt explains the key features of the Actor Model and makes the case that it more …

Thanks for the encouragement! I think the discussion about values and work is very important and I appreciate that you brought it up on your blog. Hopefully, a bit got through on H…

Well, to call anyone a socialist outside the domain of political science is being a bit facetious. However, a loose analogy could be made. Socialism is about the government owning …

Thank you. I think the coffee analogy is a good one and I believe that it is important that we, as technologists, express our personal values through our work. Also, I don't get th…

I think you can divide (useful) experience into two components: 1) a person's maturity as a programmer / team member, and 2) their level of practical knowledge with a given technol…

Yes, Cringely can really be out in left field sometimes. A good example was his recent theory that Tim Cook is only a temporary CEO and that Steve Jobs has a secret hand-picked suc…

But their new strategy was described as a focus on enterprise software. Why invest further in a consumer device OS? Do they want to focus more on enterprise adoption? Maybe fill th…

Palm has created many new job postings on monster.com since HP announced they where getting out of the tablet and phone business. Product managers, product engineers, software engi…