xaa

39 ms·

271.
by xaa 13y ago
My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it. When we, as a society, take words such as &quo
272.
by xaa 13y ago
Spot on. The ascendence of the "data scientist" in the last few years is largely due to the proliferation of prepackaged, easy-to-use machine learning toolkits like Weka/scikits-learn/RapidMiner/vowpal wabbit/l
273.
by xaa 13y ago
From the original study: The children of parents who are more involved in school activities, like parent-teacher meetings or volunteering in the school, also show poorer reading performance. This is probably because parents of children who
274.
by xaa 13y ago
Go is a good example. It does variable declaration quite concisely while avoiding parsing ambiguity (although it falls into the same trap as Nimrod on function declaration with its "func" keyword). Type inference can be useful, bu
275.
by xaa 13y ago
In Nimrod, when you are declaring a variable with an explicit type, the syntax is: var x, y: int as opposed to the more concise C family way of doing it: int x, y; In C, there is no keyword needed to signal that this is a variable declarati
276.
by xaa 13y ago
Obviously, I have no perfect solution. I was initially harboring the vague hope that Nimrod would be able to avoid this problem by virtue of compiling to C. But I do still assert that this is a "fatal flaw" for a systems programm
277.
by xaa 13y ago
This reminds me a lot of D. It's low-level, GCed, essentially intended as a nicer C/C++. But I think it suffers from the same fatal flaw that D does: you have to semi-manually translate C headers that you want to use. Like D, it p
278.
by xaa 13y ago
As increasing automation concentrates capital in the hands of fewer and fewer during the coming century, that viewpoint will become increasingly untenable.
279.
by xaa 13y ago
I agree that there are boundless opportunities for skilled developers in bioinformatics --- IF they are willing to work for free or a substantial pay cut. The problem is that there is a big mismatch in expectations between developers and
280.
by xaa 13y ago
HTML and JS are the most irrelevant parts of a nontrivial web app -- all the important stuff is done server-side.
281.
by xaa 13y ago
I don't think anyone would seriously advocate using awk for complex projects these days, but the idea of keeping data really close to the OS/shell is a very powerful one. Take Python, which is supposedly a "scripting" language, but requires
282.
by xaa 13y ago
If you're interested in biomedical papers, I'd be willing to set up a proxy for you to share my institutional subscription.
283.
by xaa 14y ago
It isn't quite so simple -- usually you pay for the flexibility and freedom of FOSS with a significantly less polished UX. In an ideal world, everyone would pool their resources toward free software and all would benefit. In reality, it is
284.
by xaa 14y ago
The finalists were I, Librarian, Zotero, or roll-our-own.
285.
by xaa 14y ago
God damn it. After the recent MySQL/OpenOffice/Java and Google Reader fiascos, my lab had a huge internal debate about whether to continue using Mendeley or choose a FLOSS alternative that wouldn't bite us later. Obviously we miscalculated.
286.
by xaa 14y ago
Search, which provides the majority of Google's revenue, is precarious because there are very low costs for someone to switch to another service. To combat this problem, Google started providing all these associated services -- Finance, Rea
287.
by xaa 14y ago
No, because JVM numeric libraries are awful, and, because the Clojure community leans toward things like web development instead of scientific computing, there are seldom Clojure wrappers available for them. Incanter, for example, isn't eve
288.
by xaa 14y ago
Something like this is sorely needed. Google Docs is the best compromise between simplicity and collaboration that my group has come up with, but of course it doesn't have reference support. It is very visually appealing and has good featur
289.
by xaa 14y ago
http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/hg19/bigZips/ ~800MB for human genome
290.
by xaa 14y ago
20 years ago, a skeptic might have said, "People don't make phone calls often enough to need to carry around phones with them." The technology can affect usage patterns as well as the reverse.
291.
by xaa 14y ago
Learning Haskell taught me that mutation and state are good things, present both in the fundamental nature of computers and the real world. Haskell's attempts to eliminate state entirely results in a profound increase in complexity. For m
292.
by xaa 14y ago
Right now, "I published in Nature" is simply a proxy for "I published an important paper." or "I am a productive faculty member." I certainly agree that these are valuable messages to signal. My entire point was that better and more objecti
293.
by xaa 14y ago
I'd argue that the open-access model is not much better than the traditional model, because as you point out, it incurs basically the same expenses, but simply charges the author more to recoup the lost institutional subscription. Now that
294.
by xaa 14y ago
As a scientist, it is so funny to read about the "valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides". The scientific publishing industry does not write, review, or edit any of the content it publishes -- volunteer scie
295.
by xaa 14y ago
Java applets, Native Client, and ActiveX all (imperfectly) address this problem. We have long had trouble agreeing on a standard for web-based native code. But that doesn't mean that it's a senseless request. The exalted status of Javascrip
296.
by xaa 14y ago
Personally, I agree with you, but the NIH does not. So far, "stupidity" is not a disease (nor is aging, for that matter).
297.
by xaa 14y ago
If they find specific genes or non-coding RNAs with relatively strong associations (a big if), drugs could be designed to alter the expression levels of those transcripts. Since it is unclear how much of IQ is determined by the "macro" stru
298.
by xaa 14y ago
To me, this suggests that the trait is highly combinatorial, involving potentially large combinations of polymorphisms instead of individual loci acting relatively independently (in an "additive" fashion). Of course, such combinatorial trai
299.
by xaa 14y ago
Er, because the White House works for us and is theoretically accountable to us for the decisions it makes?
300.
by xaa 14y ago
Many journals allow this; less commonly funding agencies. But most of my collaborators are not programmers and do not know LaTeX, and for a non-programmer it is very difficult to learn. Besides, I don't love LaTeX. It is a very heavyweight

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