jamesjporter

23 ms·

61.
Open access science news is mostly good, with a bit of ugly(arstechnica.com)
1 points by jamesjporter 13y ago|0 comments
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by jamesjporter 13y ago
Now that I know this I am _very_ angry that 'ahoy' and 'that is all' didn't carry the day.
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by jamesjporter 13y ago
Thank you! The amount of people who hate on _why around here for silly reasons is absurd. I often see people judge him by the standards you would use to judge an engineer (by which he fails miserably), but the correct standards are those yo
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by jamesjporter 13y ago
It also comes in handy when I'm trying to install something finicky that has a million dependencies, each of which also might be finicky (e.g. numba) and I screw something up and just want to start over clean and not muck around uninstallin
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by jamesjporter 13y ago
A funny story about "cd -". When I first started learning the command line during a programming course, they basically told us just enough to get by in order to complete the assignments. Somehow, "cd -" was mentioned but not "cd ..", so for
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Video is hilarious and worth watching the whole thing as others have mentioned, but there's some great stuff in the paper also. He mentions some really interesting future directions, e.g. obviating the need for the training data set of a hu
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Ask HN: how do/would you teach programming?
9 points by jamesjporter 14y ago|9 comments
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
I agree, this would not be too out of the ordinary at my institution; although I usually would take the approach of going to a different class each day for the first week of classes.
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
+1 for Zotero, its the bees knees.
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
FWIW I prefer Zotero because I find downloading the pdf to actually be rather annoying. I just save the citation and double click on it to open the article in my browser whenever I need it. No metadata extraction necessary b/c Zotero pulls
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
I've used both and found Zotero to be miles better.
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
For my fellow emacs users, our version (by Magnar Sveen) is here: https://github.com/magnars/expand-region.el
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
The metaphor I use to explain R is that most programming languages are like different varieties of swiss army knife: general tools that can do a lot of different stuff with relative ease. R, on the other hand, is like a fillet knife: its to
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Supposedly you can get this functionality from emacs jedi mode[0], although its a pain to set up; I have never gotten it to work properly. [0]: http://tkf.github.com/emacs-jedi/
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Whiteboards are my preferred method for this sort of thing. The building I work in is actually awesome for this; the safety shields (mol bio lab) at the end of everyone's desks double as whiteboards and the windows are write-on-able as well
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Wow looks great! One little piece of advice: the "disabled" button doesn't look quite inactive enough to me; if I saw it on a webpage I might try to click on it. Maybe make it a bit lighter/more transparent?
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Excellent, thanks! Here's to hoping I can get it to work with nyan-mode, the most important emacs plugin :P
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
His point about touchpads is spot on though. I often find myself jumping around by clicking when I code with my laptop and no peripherals (there's no "combo breaker" since my hands are sitter so close to the trackpad anyway), but when I get
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Woah how do you get your status bar to have the > shapes like that? Looks very nice :)
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Of course an advantage of python over ruby (speed-wise) is that you can leverage numpy if you need to do fast matrix operations, whereas ruby has no such library (that I'm aware of).
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
I'm continually impressed that Wizards manages to keep Magic as balanced and fun as they do, especially considering that they don't have the resources to really playtest formats other than standard. It always makes me angry seeing people in
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Haha I work in the life sciences and I thought the GP was referring to the National Institutes of Health, which was confusing!
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
The cutthroat attitude may be good for businesses, but this arrangement sounds miserable for users: >Platform-to-platform in China is war, and it is fought viciously and bitterly. If you have a Gmail account and send an email to, for ex
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
This absolutely, best way to learn is to have a specific goal in mind. I got started with emacs because I was using an IDE called RStudio ( http://www.rstudio.com/ ) which I really liked, and I wanted something similar for python but couldn
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
My favorite thing about DDG is that at this point there are so many bang syntaxes defined that if I don't know the syntax for something, I can often just guess and half the time I get it right!
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
Less Wrong ( http://lesswrong.com/ ) is another topically focused online community with civil and interesting discussion.
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
I'm personally very excited about the prospects for NumPy in PyPy, as this is my main use case for python. Relatedly, on the PyPy homepage, you can give money to help grease the wheels on development of specific PyPy features: http://pypy.
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
This is true for EE, but that's an engineering degree. Sciences PhDs have a much harder time, even in industry (e.g. biotech is languishing).
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
I think the programming industry is interesting because my impression (I have no idea if this is backed up by data) is that there's much more mixing between academia and the private sector (i.e. people move from academic to industry jobs an
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by jamesjporter 14y ago
I use zotero to manage my paper library and its wonderful. One of my favorite features is tag search. If I find a paper where they measure, say, the strength of a particular protein-DNA interaction that I'm interested in, but I know I'm nev

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