It's been a couple of years, so Joel and Andrew catch up on what's new in life and in data science.

It turns out Joel wrote another book: Ten Essays on Fizz Buzz (Quarantine does strange things to a person.) In this episode Andrew and Joel discuss Fizz Buzz, what makes the book interesting, the value of deconstructing problems in different ways, Joel's side career in acting, why fluffy talks are easier to write than technical talks, the importanc…

About a month ago we recorded a podcast with Jowanza Joseph about engineering and COVID-19 and other mundane topics. While I (Joel) was procrastinating on editing it, a lot happened in the world. And then Jowanza wrote a blog post about his experiences with racism and how they've affected his life. Which made it feel really weird to just put out an…

Joel and Andrew break quarantine (metaphorically) to discuss treehouses, remote work, distance schooling, outschool.com, Joel's attempt to teach his daughter Python, old-school text adventures, socially-distanced eating, the Twitter UI, what happens to school in the fall, OKRs, and whether we should keep the economy closed or re-open it and kill pe…

in which Joel and Andrew briefly break quarantine to talk about Covid-19, social distancing, and the data science grift

Our guest this week is Pardis Noorzad (@djpardis), former data science manager at Twitter and now Head of Data Science at Carbon Health. Our conversation spans a wide range of topics: the Tenderloin Carbon Health what Duran Duran has to do with Black History Month the "cold start problem" for becoming a DJ how long it takes to achieve domain expert…

Our guest this episode is Carl Gold (@carl24k), Chief Data Scientist at Zuora and author of the forthcoming book Fighting Churn with Data. Use the discount code podadvl19 to save some unspecified amount on it. Topics include * churn * writing a book * churn * running a subscription business * churn * domain expertise * p-hacking * churn * how Joel …

On this episode, Andrew is joined by Joel Grus (@joelgrus), the author of Data Science from Scratch, whose second edition just came out. They discuss spreadsheets, writing a book, Python 3, type annotations, Jupyter notebooks, reproducibility, and what it's like to do standup comedy at a conference that has a code of conduct. Please listen to it.…

Our guest this episode is data scientist Peadar Coyle. Topics include Brexit whether Europe is a Python continent or an R continent GDPR how data science is different in Europe than it is in the USA Joel's stock rant against "domain expertise" PyMC3 and Bayesian Analysis teaching online courses whether "primer" is pronounced "primer" or "primer" wh…

Adversarial Learning is back from its extended hiatus! Our guest is famous data scientist Josh Wills. We discuss why Josh is a famous data scientist, what it's like working at Slack, data science conferences, NLP's "imagenet moment", whether Joel should remove the MapReduce chapter from the 2nd edition of Data Science from Scratch, and which is the…

Adversarial Learning is back! In this long-delayed episode (thanks, technical difficulties) we are joined by data scientist Schaun Wheeler to discuss our favorite topic, data ethics. Highlights include: * Schaun's Medium post "An ethical code can’t be about ethics" * Do we need a "Hippocratic Oath" for data science * How to hire data scientists who…

Our guest this week is data scientist for good Lisa Green. Topics of discussion include What is ethics Joel's previous life as a financial analyst and the ethical dilemmas therein whether there's anything incriminating in Joel's Yahoo history "identity theft" as a bullshit concept Google's corrupt bargain with the NHS what the medical code of ethic…

Our guest this week is flashcard kingpin and former Partially Derivative co-host Chris Albon. Topics of discussion include how good it feels not to have a podcast machine learning flashcards being a "natsec bro" whether Chris would punch a Nazi whether Chris would sexually harass a Nazi whether "magister" is a good woke replacement for "master" whe…

Data scientist Vicki Boykis joins Joel and Andrew to variously debunk and rebunk common Data Science Myths. Is data the new oil? Do data scientists spend 80% of their time munging and cleaning data? What happens if you look in the mirror and say "data science" five times? And many, many, many more. Please listen to it.…

Andrew and Joel come out of hiatus to discuss data conferences: when to attend them, how to get your talk accepted, how to network, optimal heckling strategies, where to stay, and so on. Somehow they also end up talking about fidget spinners, the "objective" section on resumes, the right way to use LinkedIn, why Andrew doesn't think much of data sc…

Friend of the podcast Tim Hopper joins us as we share stories of Very Bad Interviews we've been on. (As you probably expect, Joel has the most humiliating stories.) If you've ever gone on a terrible interview, listen and commiserate. If you've never gone on a terrible interview, listen and live vicariously. Halfway through, Andrew's Internet flakes…

Our guests this week are Curtis Yarvin and Galen Wolfe-Pauly, which means that our topic is Urbit ("a virtual city of general-purpose personal servers"). What is it? Why is it? Is is a political project? And does it have anything to offer data science types? Curtis and Galen try to explain what Urbit is and answer Joel's objections, while Andrew ke…

Our guest this week is Trevor Grant (@rawkintrevo), an Open Source Technology Developer Evangelist (or similar) at IBM. We discuss how to be a high-energy public speaker, all sorts of weirdly-named Apache projects, the "my name is" meme, why Joel and Andrew don't like Jupyter-style notebooks, Voltron, and how to talk to your kid about "normies". Pl…

Our guest this week is Juliet Hougland (@j_houg), data scientist and engineer at Cloudera. We discuss that bad Wired article about physics and software engineering, why Juliet knows so much about Urbit, censorship (Twitter and otherwise), dark patterns (LinkedIn and otherwise), and why none of us was savvy enough to start a social network for data …

Is good data science always political? Our regularly scheduled guest had to cancel at the last minute, so Joel and Andrew decided to talk about politics. Topics covered include: the one data scientist who’s not on twitter how much Joel hates the xkcd cartoon free speech in Canada (which Joel gets very wrong, please don't @ me) how one (or one's bot…

Our guest is Jake VanderPlas, who is a real Data Science Fellow at the UW eScience Institute, and is the author of the recently published Python Data Science Handbook. Topics discussed include BiCapitalization bridging the astronomy-astrology divide whether the e in eScience is the same as the e in eBay Myers-Briggs why Jake keeps saying “transcrip…

Our guest this week is Sarah Guido (@sarah_guido), Senior Data Scientist at Mashable. We discuss datasets we hate, how to pronounce "La Croix", what makes "library science" a science, 9/11, data science networking, Joel's plan to build a Twitter client that automatically inserts a "clap" emoji after every word, and Mashable's "best celebrity feuds"…

Our guest this week is Andrew Therriault (@therriaultphd). We talk about data science in the big city, politics, slime in the ice machine, labor unions, how easy it is to join datasets, and whether Boston really deserves to be called Beantown.

Our guest this week is Tim Hopper (@tdhopper), the tallest data scientist. We discuss life, blogs, robots, Twitter, and other data-related stuff, but Joel keeps returning to the topic of his height.

In the first episode, Joel and Andrew cover who they are, how they met, how they got into data science, why they have a podcast, and chat about topics they have in mind, including but not limited to: Politics Technical tool development Whether to get a PhD How to get into data science How to hire data scientists Ethical questions in data science Ja…