east2west

15 ms·

91.
by east2west 12y ago
You may not realize this but because you worked hard for your position you believe you are entitled to it and the system that promoted you is near perfect. The reality is not so. I have been to UC Berkeley, where the average faculty is far
92.
by east2west 12y ago
The human genome project certainly was overhypered and had underdelivered on its biomedical benefits. You should look for articles, even in science press, about the 10th anniversary of the human genome project; it was not all roses, to say
93.
by east2west 12y ago
What is interesting is obviously personal, and I know you don't mean to denigrate some topics in general, but I want to caution people that characteristic equations and root finding are complex and far from useless. Numerical computati
94.
by east2west 12y ago
I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I cannot agree with determining the cost of a drug based on potential loss of income/productivity. Should the CEOs therefore get first dips on life saving treatment because they have big impa
95.
by east2west 12y ago
I understand your strong opinion and since I am no sysadmin I have no technical problem with arguments. But I am not sure I totally agree with your characterization of slow pace of change by Apple or the wonderful state of Unix/Linux.
96.
by east2west 12y ago
Fantastic paper. I wonder what "irrelevant theory, questionable conclusions" he had in mind.
97.
by east2west 12y ago
>It's a dataframe attached to ranges. This design extends lower classes like IRanges, and all the accessors, setters, etc are consistent. You can manipulate the range part with integer range operations and manipulate the dataframe p
98.
by east2west 12y ago
I suspect money is a big motivation behind all the hand-wringing by statisticians. It is about jobs, grants, prestige. I don't blame them; people want these things. I defintively see a competition between computer scientists and statis
99.
by east2west 12y ago
OK, to be fair, R is a reasonable language for statisticians and others. I guess R and S are different enough from usual programming languages that I may be biased against them. But I did spent five years working on bioinformatics and stati
100.
by east2west 12y ago
The following quote is from "Matrix analysis and applied linear algebra" by Carl D Meyer, p 423-424. "Generalized inverses are useful in formulating theoretical statements as those above, ut, just as in the case of the ordina
101.
by east2west 12y ago
Talk about head in the sand. CS is subsuming stats (not really) because computers are a, if not the, major driving force begind statistical advances. L1 regulation became a fad in stats because computational optimization could efficiently s
102.
by east2west 12y ago
Yes, but Jefferson's nephew in South America, let's say, post-Civil war hardly can be called well known or powerful. It is no given that every Roman noble had nothing to fear from pirates. Caesar's contemporary Claudius fared
103.
by east2west 12y ago
As much as I hate that sceintific papers don't give good introductions to the public, specialists do have their values. An educated, intelligent reader has limits when it comes to frontline research. It is like asking someone flying a
104.
by east2west 12y ago
This is a rather short piece covering big areas. I half expected her to explain her precise role and her projects at Intel after reading the first paragraph. She is a good publicist, the way she pivots questions.
105.
by east2west 12y ago
This covers all issues surrounding reproducability pretty well. It is astounding that scientists want to hide behind their expertises when their results and conclusions are being tested. Biologists who are under a similar cloud tried the sa
106.
by east2west 13y ago
If multiply operator weren't such a big issue, the creators of Numpy wouldn't have attempted to insert a new operator for matrix multiplication into Python. For a dynamic language such as Python operator overloading for such close
107.
by east2west 13y ago
You know academy is not infallible and scientists are no saints. And boy, are scientists no saints. Passionate about science, please. Go to Science Career forum (hosted by Science magazine) and see how urgent the need is to cull Ph.D. crowd
108.
by east2west 13y ago
Modern war is more destructive than previous ones. Even fifty years ago genocide was a laborious task, now it is done with a press of button. There is nothing more deadly than total war.
109.
by east2west 13y ago
I understand where you are coming from, but your facts are not not all correct. > I no longer die from the flu and most of the common diseases have been all but wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of people die from seasonal flu every year,
110.
by east2west 14y ago
I wonder if anyone knows why subtlety exists in Python. Is it because reference semantics and HOF are fundamentally incompatible, or could it have been avoided somehow but still retaining reference semantics. The most common complain about
111.
by east2west 14y ago
I have been eying F# for bioinformatics work for a year, but a dearth of bioinformatics library, difficulty linking existing libraries, and flaky tools on Linus have held me back. Right now I am stuck with Python and R, which are good langu
112.
by east2west 14y ago
HN is understandably filled with programmers who value programming above all else and believe domain knowledge can be picked up quickly. It would be true for someone hired as a programmer who implement a published algorithm or port existing
113.
by east2west 14y ago
A few things in this pierce struck a cord with me. I am a computer science Ph.D. doing a postdoc in statistics department, working on biostatistics, and as I am recently looking for a job and did a few interviews, some observations may be h
114.
by east2west 14y ago
Did you mean Roman public education only taught basic literacy? For aristocrats, pupils were taught Greek and Greek literature early on since later republic era. Julia Caesar's mother went so far as to have a Greek slave accompanying Caesar
115.
by east2west 14y ago
samtools is among the better software in sequencing-data analysis. It is also great in defining formally the file format it uses. The same cannot be said of many other tools. For my recent work in RNA-Seq, samtools is the most robust and tr
116.
by east2west 14y ago
Nothing. It is bad to not parse files but still changing content because you assume the file format mandates something when it doesn't.
117.
by east2west 14y ago
Interestingly, the fraudsters were caught because of a false claim on a CV, and that finally destroyed their creditability. It is intentional fraud, no doubt about it; they restarted halted clinical trials. I was just pointing out they did
118.
by east2west 14y ago
That was a tongue-in-cheek thingy. I write extensive tests for all my code. But when I look for a job, people counts papers not weight software quality. It is not easy.
119.
by east2west 14y ago
I wasn't appalled by AWK language but the blind switching of two lines which were assumed to be paired reads when many reads are not paired. It is precisely lack of checking that is a problem. I have nothing against AWK, although personally
120.
by east2west 14y ago
It was initially a programming error but the Duke researchers refused to acknowledge it and reanalyze their data, because that might mean retracting their prominent paper. From there it just snowballed. It was certainly fraud after the erro

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