Viewing profile — wsprague

My thoughts about Tk: 1. I think buttons with relief are easier to use, but other than that I am always surprised at how worked up people get about theming (but then I prefer a ter…

"Murray and Strout don't understand human nature. People -- especially teenagers -- don't like following pointless rules." Au Contraire -- Murray and Strout understand fully, but a…

Interesting point, though I more or less disagree about the level of curation necessary to make a minimally useful product. I think data.gov is FAR below that level, and is just no…

I moved my reply to my top comment and screwed up the reply tree here. So this is for the comment that follows this one: data.gov is fundamentally flawed, and won't be anything but…

If you need hierarchies, use JSON, IMHO, or keys that reference between tables (the census PUMS data does this with persons nested within households, using two tables).

OK, we disagree. Except that #4 IS sort of redundant, though I want to make the point that data is almost impossible for a layperson, and still really hard for a practiced analyst.…

I mean that for all practicing data analysts that I know, XML is a pain in the ass (parsers, xpaths, etc, all to get it into a csv that you can import), while nice ascii text is ea…

The problem with data.gov and sites like it is that they are built on faulty premises about data: 1. Fiction: Data doesn't require lots of work to make it useable, so we can just u…

The only thing I HATE about Python is the mandatory indentation. The problems with it are: 1. It mixes format with logic. Don't we all know this is one of the greatest evils one ca…

I would like to see this supported (or not, methinks) by empirical evidence. A priori arguments without evidence aren't worth a damn, in my estimation.

I upvoted you because it is a good point, but ... who is advancing the most quickly in manufacturing these days? That would be China.... Plus, I would hesitate to naturalize the id…

In python, it seems like it would be trivial to add a __test__() method to a class that was run, well, whenever.

I liked the way he applies moderately useful statistics to a real world application, mostly just as an example of how we all could be using the standard deviation along with the me…

I know people who work in social services who have noticed a change in the last generation. Before, you would think twice before telling a working class parent that the child misbe…

Levi Strauss is not only probably one of the two most famous anthropologists of all time (Magaret Meade being the other), but his work is cited by many of the foundational thinkers…

Here is how to say "NY", according to the wiki article on RDF: http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# xmlns:dcterms=" http://purl.org/dc/terms/&#62 ; NY hehe. That's funny...

What I meant was "why would you downvote my comment?" Is not giving you much a good reason for downvoting? Seems ok if it is, but I only would downvote things that are stupid or ob…

Why would anyone downvote this entry? Not that I care, just curious...

The existentialists (well, at least the one that matters, Heidegger) would say that to be human means that one never forgets a deep "uncanniness" or an emptiness, and that part of …

Which means that an engineer is a "loser" in this system; and in terms of monetary gain, they may very well be. The author stresses that "loser" is not the same as "bad person" or …

"the reason people aren't compensated accordingly [sic] to their production is that it's incredibly hard to judge production." ... perhaps .... ... but perhaps Karl Marx was correc…

Am I the only one bored with Martin Fowler and the whole 1990s object oriented schtick? It was so refreshing last to see articles on fork() and waitpid()...

I think "[old school unix] has gotten so much attention lately" because of accidents in the timing of computer science culture and its victories. The Linux / BSD driven revival of …