xaa

19 ms·

151.
by xaa 10y ago
Bioinformatician here. All my formal training is in biology, but I've spent most of my research hours learning CS, statistics, etc, rather than biology. > An astonishing amount of biology is rather mechanistic, systematic, and logic
152.
by xaa 10y ago
Well, I learned to code in order to do bioinformatics. I didn't start out as a programmer looking to specialize. I agree that it seems that programming + X is often a much more powerful combination than programming or X alone. But I wo
153.
by xaa 10y ago
I'm in bioinformatics. R is huge, Python is a distant second. So I am forced to use both. R is a terrible programming language. It's slow and syntactically inconsistent. For interactive statistical analysis it can be OK, but anyth
154.
by xaa 10y ago
Apply this logic to clothes. If we all wore the same minimalistic clothes, it would allow our individuality to shine through more because the clothes wouldn't "distract" from our personalities? It's possible, I suppose,
155.
by xaa 10y ago
Anything by Charlie Stross, especially Accelerando (great futurism) Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz (reading this book WILL make you feel like you're on drugs)
156.
by xaa 10y ago
18 papers now (bioinformatics & molecular biology) and I have never seen a single authorship dispute. If you are a middle author, complaining about position is biting the hand that feeds you. Most people know better than that. Also, it
157.
by xaa 10y ago
> At least at the undergraduate and masters level, there is a strong incentive to select students that are LIKELY to graduate from the program. Is there? It affects their attrition rate, but I am not sure that is a big factor in which sc
158.
by xaa 11y ago
True, but any false negative rate below 100% would cause the answer to be lower than 2%. The problem they were focusing on was the subset of people who overestimated.
159.
by xaa 11y ago
Nope, PhD in bioinformatics here and never took a single (formal) statistics course. There was Statistics I required for my undergrad, which I AP'ed out of by reading the book for a few hours. Nothing whatsoever in grad school. It&#x27
160.
by xaa 11y ago
Isn't it interesting how "people of color" is a common self-designation for (most frequently) black people, whereas "colored people", literally synonymous, is considered offensive? Of course there are valid historic
161.
by xaa 11y ago
Where is the money supposed to come from for this? Keeping basic research labs afloat in the current funding environment is hard enough -- clinical trials etc are orders of magnitude more expensive, and not practical for most academics, eve
162.
by xaa 11y ago
What a shame. With that kind of CV, you could easily have jumped straight to staff scientist or possibly assistant prof by looking outside the Ivies, as informatics skills are heavily in demand now. Also, if you're willing to collabora
163.
by xaa 11y ago
It's too bad that this is for sparse data only. ML datasets have differing degrees of sparsity, and when the sparsity gets low enough, it's more efficient to use dense matrices, even when there are still missing values. Also if yo
164.
by xaa 11y ago
It is a good idea in general, but the idea of infosec for genetic data is a minefield. I deal with similar limitations daily -- one of my areas is large-scale meta-analysis of expression data, which was dandy when that data was collected us
165.
by xaa 11y ago
Cool, I am looking forward to an improved version. I would be interested in your rationale behind how the public would/could use this kind of data. I think the infino.me/health seems to be an example, pointing out major risk facto
166.
by xaa 11y ago
Very cool. I think if you added a few more ways of slicing and dicing this data, you would have a decent chance at getting it accepted to a bioinformatics journal. For example, Oxford Journals Bioinformatics has an "Application Note&qu
167.
by xaa 11y ago
Apparently Reddit has exactly 2 board members: Alexis and Sam Altman [1]. Why would Sam Altman, and by extension YC, have thought that Ellen Pao would make a good ("interim") CEO for Reddit? This scenario should really be causing
168.
by xaa 11y ago
Out of curiosity, an example? The only programs I've compiled that remotely approach an hour are the Linux kernel, GCC, and ATLAS. The first two are so fundamental that there's no point in recompiling for security reasons (if your
169.
by xaa 11y ago
Well, they don't allow interventions that require daily injections, etc, but the implication seems to be that something that requires a once-a-month injection, such as senescent cell clearance, would likely be allowed. Some of the &q
170.
by xaa 11y ago
Does SENS get NIA funding? Have they put forward any candidates to NIA's ITP?
171.
by xaa 11y ago
Smart. I will see for myself in a minute how much space such an approach takes; I would imagine the compressor size gets nontrivially large on big files. Well, my exact use case, which I imagine I'm not alone in, is indexing a tab-deli
172.
by xaa 11y ago
I have been wanting this for a long time, although my primary use case would be indexing a particular field. It is nice that you were able to make it work with ordinary gzip files. In bioinformatics, an approach to this problem has been to
173.
by xaa 11y ago
The question of whether the officer had reasonable suspicion here seems to be in dispute. The lower courts found there was no reasonable suspicion, and the majority assumed that in their response. Alito and Thomas' dissents cite some f
174.
by xaa 11y ago
Nope. I've tried my fair share of different drugs but wouldn't dare touch opioids: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Drug_danger_and_depen...
175.
by xaa 12y ago
I also read the ESA's brief, and I think the reason the EFF didn't mention many of these arguments is that explaining and then rebutting each of these arguments, many of them utterly specious, and some mutually exclusive, would re
176.
by xaa 12y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong (my Java's rusty), but isn't the most common NPE scenario when a class has a member variable that's a class and has to be initialized in the ctor or elsewhere, but the programmer forgets to. The a
177.
by xaa 12y ago
Most plastic surgery is not drug-based, so there is a lot less research that needs to be done on the molecular level to get it through. Much like nootropics, plastic surgery also has a use-case for "diseased" people: people born d
178.
by xaa 12y ago
Almighty Wikipedia: nootropics are "drugs, supplements, nutraceuticals, and functional foods that improve one or more aspects of mental function, such as working memory, motivation, and attention" Potentially a very broad category
179.
by xaa 12y ago
Sure. I get great results from Adderall and have heard good things about Modafinil. Tried it once with little effect, but it was from an Indian pharmacy and who knows how pure it was. I can't draw any conclusions whatsoever from this.
180.
by xaa 12y ago
A much better overview: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics I am a bit torn about this subject. So, in my day job as a biomedical researcher, we would like to have a lot of evidence that something works before giving it to peop

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