jfischer

6 ms·

1.
by jfischer 5y ago
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 science and data engineering projects. We are independent consulta
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Show HN: Datahut.ai – free directory of open source for data science/engineering(datahut.ai)
2 points by jfischer 5y ago|1 comments
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by jfischer 12y ago
Anything that I can do to help move this forward as a Sunnyvale resident and voter? Thanks!
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by jfischer 12y ago
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 his days at SCO on his website
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by jfischer 13y ago
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 practical language out there for inter-machine and inter-pro
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by jfischer 13y ago
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 many implementations. Of course, I wouldn't do that for
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by jfischer 13y ago
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 . He has some nice insight
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by jfischer 13y ago
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 tried to use the result in an if statement
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 C.Y.A. organization this is often enough. Be sure to have w
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by jfischer 14y ago
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. In general, I think that fighting your boss only leads to a
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 failure when the CEO bought everyone a management book about d
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 building a simple computer using a Z80 and a few other chips that I
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 Berkeley that did "BYOB" (Bring Your Own Blocks) [2], an ext
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by jfischer 14y ago
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. I think, even if you aren't going into academia, they make a
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 let you take any liquids into the gate (beyond the 3 oz bot
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 an advantage or place the blame on someone else. Without the
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 most important (which it should be), but, if you always pri
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by jfischer 14y ago
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 closely matches the physics of distributed systems than othe
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 HN before it degenerated...
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 the means of production. The analogy would be "the base of e
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 this "open source is socialism thing". Although some (e.g. Sta
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 technology stack or your problem domain. I think that maturity is u
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 successor that he will name in the future [1]. I read Cringely
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 the space that Blackberry used to own? Or did everyone leave
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by jfischer 15y ago
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 engineers, etc. Why?
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35 new WebOS job openings posted by Palm in the last 3 days(jobsearch.monster.com)
8 points by jfischer 15y ago|9 comments
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by jfischer 15y ago
I think you have a good point here. The list has too many items framed as "write an application..." The building blocks section should include some harder problems like optimization, planning, or code analysis.
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by jfischer 15y ago
Back in the day, I learned a lot about basic electronics and computer design from their old "Engineer's Notebooks" (e.g. http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=108524... ) and some books they sold about TI's line of micropro
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by jfischer 15y ago
Hmmm. If we look at some past examples of cases in the consumer internet space where a new entrant overtook an entrenched player (e.g. Google vs. other search engines and Facebook vs. Myspace), I think you need to have something new and com
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by jfischer 16y ago
It sounds like the leadership at your startup needs to make the hard decision to fire the co-founder outright or to reducing him to a very limited consulting role (no coding, just answering questions about his code). I think that you would

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