dr jimbob

1,255 reputation

415

bio	website
	location	Brooklyn, NY
	age	31
visits	member for	2 years, 5 months
	seen	2 days ago
stats	profile views	32

Good Morning how are you, I'm dr jimbob
I'm interested in things.
I'm not a real dr,
But I am a real jim bob.

Have a PhD in Experimental High-Energy Physics, but left academia in mid-2010 to program professionally.

Mostly program/script in python, django, and jquery these days doing mostly web apps.

Also have experience programming in C, C++, java, haskell, php, and (bash) shell more in the past.

Linux as primary OS since 1999, ubuntu user since 2005 (Hoary).

	1,255 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years, 5 months
415 badges		location	Brooklyn, NY		seen	2 days ago

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Apr 13	awarded	Notable Question
Apr 8	awarded	Good Answer
Feb 18	awarded	Caucus
Feb 5	awarded	Nice Answer
Jan 19	awarded	Yearling
Jan 10	revised	Is every number in the code considered a “magic number”? added 890 characters in body
Jan 9	comment	Is every number in the code considered a “magic number”? @RossPatterson - This is not C where we constantly compare against a global var MAX_ARRAY_SIZE, but a decent web framework. The only place that the magic number comes up is where you declare the database model; everything else is compared against this value (e.g., 40 appears nowhere else in the code). Also note, you can't change this variable easily without doing schema migrations as its tied to a DB. If I wanted to change to say 1 character middle names its immediately obvious the one place to change in the code `40` to `1`. You have to think of context.
Jan 8	answered	Is every number in the code considered a “magic number”?
Oct 28	awarded	Nice Answer
Jul 21	awarded	Popular Question
Jul 14	comment	How does learning assembly aid in programming? @StriplingWarrior - that seems more for learning about how compilers work to optimize your code than learning assembly. E.g., you could learn assembly and end up writing much slower code than if you wrote straightforward C that your compiler was able to better optimize your code than you and there also are the rare cases where assembly will be faster as you can't access the specific assembly calls you need in C.
Jun 14	awarded	Nice Answer
Jun 14	revised	Learn programming backwards, or “so I failed the FizzBuzz test. Now what?” grammar; fix link ; expand
Jun 14	answered	Learn programming backwards, or “so I failed the FizzBuzz test. Now what?”
Jun 5	awarded	Nice Answer
May 30	awarded	Announcer
May 30	answered	Why is quicksort better than other sorting algorithms in practice?
May 25	comment	Which hashing algorithm is best for uniqueness and speed? For random input and an ideal hashing function, you expect 5.5 collisions with N=216553 and a 32-bit word size (d=2^32) by N-d-d((d-1)/d)^N. The probability of no collisions in this ideal case is p ≃ ((d-1)/d)^(N(N-1)/2) ≃ 0.00426 (0.426%). Sheer luck that CRC32 had low collisions. So when collisions aren't significantly above 5.5 and input is sufficiently random, only speed matters. (For consecutive integers; low collisions are desired).
May 4	comment	Is it bad practice to name an unused variable with a single underscore? Also, using `_` for dummy variables in python will clash with `_` for last returned value. E.g., in the interpreter, if you do `5*5` on line 1; then on line 2 `_` will have the value `25`. However if you then set `x,_ = (3,'not used')`, you will find that `_` is now `not used` instead of the last returned value until you `del _`. You probably shouldn't be using `_` for last returned value in real code; but its often handy in the interpreter when trying new stuff out.
Apr 27	comment	Completion time on a company where the supervisors don't know programming It's also reasonable to give a generous initial estimate due to Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstdter's Law. If you finish early, great, there's always the next project/feature. If you finish late, you will have untold levels of stress and misery.