pak

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121.
by pak 13y ago
I remapped my Caps Lock key to switch into a "Greek" mode for typing, since I frequently need to type Greek letters interspersed with English. (Anybody in STEM classes should know how awkward it is to do this normally.) If you h
122.
by pak 13y ago
You are right that no biotech is required to find terrible viruses from history. Access to those viruses is pretty well controlled though: you can get a stern letter from the CDC if you try to order DNA that looks like smallpox or RNA that
123.
by pak 13y ago
Viruses are only one potential cause of cancer, and there are several known tumorigenic viruses (HPV, adenovirus, EBV, polyomavirus, etc.). There are still researchers that believe that all remaining cancers are caused by yet undiscovered
124.
by pak 13y ago
You realize that SNPedia is basically the equivalent of Wikipedia for SNPs, and I can edit it to say whatever I want? Would you want a physician picking your drug regimen based off of what Wikipedia says on some particular day? Would you l
125.
by pak 13y ago
If Valley folks created this, it would be the holy grail that NIH-funded bioinformatics researchers have been pursuing for the last 20 years. I wish them the best! In all seriousness, this is exactly the point of most federally funded rese
126.
by pak 13y ago
If you think 23andMe is getting singled out in comparison to homeopathy, that's not correct. The FDA has long considered how to handle homeopathic remedies, and they do regulate them and the conditions under which they can be marketed
127.
by pak 13y ago
> the risk of people maybe finding out something inaccurate and going crazy with it is higher than the reward of people finding out something accurate and taking action to preserve their health based on this information I don't thin
128.
by pak 13y ago
To which I say, what is the point of words like "only" and "all", if they do not mean what they are supposed to? I'm not trying to be a stickler. Granted, I work mostly in science research, where broad claims are d
129.
by pak 13y ago
The controversy penalty would be perfect for an article like this that features and builds off a linkbait title, which I now feel a little duped for reacting to. But after finding out Sam Altman is a YC partner, and reading more about how t
130.
by pak 13y ago
> In this case the most common misunderstanding seems to be not to realize that present day big companies were once small. You could have pre-empted that by reminding readers that once companies reach a certain size they don't have
131.
by pak 13y ago
> All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. This is a bad opening premise. Time Warner and Comcast are huge and they don't seem like word of mouth companies t
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by pak 13y ago
It draws my interest because of the obvious parallels to the millions of backscatter pictures taken by the TSA over the past decade, many of which are naked pictures of children and the elderly. The overwhelming majority of Americans conse
133.
by pak 13y ago
So the machine takes the same picture, but simply pre-processes it into a cartoon image using "Advanced Imaging Technology" (now there's a hilarious non-description) before throwing it up on the monitor? Where do the origina
134.
by pak 13y ago
Whoa old man quarterto, who said the word ever belonged to math people in the first place? I could argue that math people have a bad habit of squeezing English words into strange contexts that corrupt the original meaning. Take "mani
135.
by pak 13y ago
Hey, it seems to work now. The problem is that it relies on the HNSearch API ( https://www.hnsearch.com/api ) which seems to lag behind the official site by a few hours or more. I'd be interested in a Jekyll plugin tha
136.
Publish Anki flashcards to the web using Python + Sinatra(tedpak.com)
1 points by pak 13y ago|2 comments
137.
by pak 13y ago
Not really. Unlike a water treatment plant, tunnel, power station, etc. that provides benefit to many residents, flying RC aircraft only provides benefits to the users and come with a host of externalities for everybody else. You might
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by pak 13y ago
Your emotions are coloring your ability to seriously consider how the 99% of urban dwellers who couldn't care less about being able to fly RC aircraft would feel about them being ubiquitous. I don't need to anticipate a bike hitt
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by pak 13y ago
A great example of why you shouldn't, in fact, ever try doing this for JSON parsing within something important.
140.
by pak 13y ago
You're not quantifying correctly. Car accidents and bicycle accidents are currently more common than RC aircraft accidents partly because RC use is so uncommon. If you throw in a denominator of operator-hours, the picture likely chan
141.
by pak 13y ago
No, thank you. And this is coming from someone that read the OP years ago. The fact that short-term reposts gain so much volume on here indicates that front paging is incredibly stochastic. It's been this way for a while; submit a l
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by pak 13y ago
> Using "natural states of being", however defined, to articulate rights in unnatural states of being (i.e. modern society) is a fallacy. You're absolutely right, I'm muddling the concept of natural rights by doing th
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by pak 13y ago
> From the natural right to free speech. Hmm, I like where you started with this, particularly in suggesting that a free press requires anonymous sources and authors. It is really interesting to see how the Supreme Court has historicall
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by pak 13y ago
Both of your points are hyperbolic claims with no warrant. > Communication mediums are the safest thing in the whole wide world. Even though this is a strawman, since my arguing to the contrary does nothing to support that anonymity is o
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by pak 13y ago
Here's a question for the techno-libertarians stepping up to say the government has no right to shut down sites like Silk Road. Where do you derive this supposed natural right for anonymity on the internet? Life, liberty, freedom fro
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by pak 13y ago
Anytime where you are trying to "collect" features of an array into one final value, and the collection function can be sensibly applied to the elements in any order as long as some interim value is passed along (e.g. summing, max
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by pak 13y ago
Cool project, but all the warnings on that page about the edge cases make me concerned about trying to exuberantly move to ES5, and so I just stick with Underscore and the same level of JavaScript syntax I've been writing since 2005. (
148.
by pak 13y ago
It's problems like 5 that make me sad that IE <9 doesn't have Array.prototype.reduce. return i.reduce(function(prev, next) { if (typeof(next) == "object" && next.length) { return arraySum(next) +
149.
by pak 13y ago
I've played some FPS games with a trackpad for lack of having a mouse available, and on a larger, higher precision one (e.g., Macbook size) it was not a bad experience at all. You can move a finger a lot faster than a whole arm. Refl
150.
by pak 13y ago
Too many unsynched traffic lights in a grid formation often results in you sitting at a red light with no traffic moving in front of you, which is infuriating and inefficient. (Case in point, besides LA, is Toronto which seems to be design

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