willpearse
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2 years ago
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on: Encyclopedia of Life
If you like Subtree of Life, you're going to love 'Onezoom' (
https://www.onezoom.org/) which is a very attractive 'Google Maps of life' sort of site, and TimeTree (
http://www.timetree.org/) which is similar but the visualisation is much more traditional (not fractals) in comparison with the first.
willpearse
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8 years ago
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on: Open Sourcing My Personal Medical Record
This is a risky thing to do when the patient's name is attached to it. Insurance companies, salesmen, etc., could do quite a lot with such information.
I whole-heartedly support the general idea, and making a centralised database of things like this would be great. Such a database would probably make it easier to anonymise the data as well.
willpearse
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10 years ago
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on: Comparison – R vs. Python: head to head data analysis
Very picky, but beware constantly using "set.seed" throughout your R scripts. Always using the same random number is not necessarily helpful for stats, and makes the R code look a lot trickier than it need be
willpearse
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10 years ago
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on: Heim – A real-time community platform
...not anymore. Thanks!
willpearse
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10 years ago
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on: Heim – A real-time community platform
I get a message saying it's not ready for Hacker News yet, so I can't even see what's going on :-(
willpearse
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11 years ago
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on: The Thermodynamic Theory of Ecology
willpearse
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11 years ago
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on: The peculiar status of PhD-employees
I can't comment on much of this article, but it doesn't apply to the UK (as is implied), where essentially every student has full funding for their 3-4 years. Sometimes people hang around for an extra six months, but it's nothing like the US system.
willpearse
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11 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How did you get your scientific computing job?
I'm a post-doc at a university. I asked around at conferences, and emailed people whose work I liked. I'd be surprised if the process is very HPC-specific; you'd be trying to make scientific job-hunting more efficient. But please do that if you can :D
willpearse
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13 years ago
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on: Computer Science PhD trends
Points 2 and 3 make no reference to previous years' data, so aren't really talking about trends. Point 1 ignores the (trend that they state) that there are more post-doc positions.
Post-docs are safer jobs, because you know what will happen at the end of them (you get kicked out and find another job). Fewer people going straight into tenure-track means fewer people spending years at an institution, not getting a job (because they lost the race) and starting elsewhere. Sounds very healthy to me!
willpearse
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13 years ago
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on: Peak Chrome? Google's browser falls as Firefox, Internet Explorer stay flat
Some confidence intervals on these graphs would really make this a lot more useful...
willpearse
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13 years ago
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on: Ask President Barack Obama anything on Reddit (seriously)
I can't even load the page, so...
"was bubble sort the wrong way to go?"
...I hate myself a little.
willpearse
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13 years ago
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on: Against live-tweeting at conferences
Good points. I also feel people tend to tweet that they are enjoying everything, simply to make themselves look like they are always going to interesting things and thus worth following. Similarly, no one can say anything negative, since they are essentially going behind the speaker's back (...in public...)
willpearse
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14 years ago
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on: What makes one appear smarter and more sociable?
I'm sorry, but there's no 'unsexy data crunching' here - just a series of ratios compared against one another. There is a whole body of statistical literature about how to do anything of this kind, and they haven't done any of it. I'd quite happily believe that none of these differences have any kind of significance in the statistical sense (i.e., it's due to background variation). But then again, I wasn't given any information to know whether they've even looked. So I can't say...
willpearse
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14 years ago
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on: SciRuby
Great idea and something that will definitely be highly used (I'm downloading it now!), but I really would be cautious attempting to provide what R provides, 'but better'.
R's power comes from the fact that hundreds of scientists have written packages for it when they have a new method - you won't be able to get that overnight. Also, R has strong links with other languages like C.
Finally, while I agree that sometimes R's syntax can be slightly obfusicated, I don't really think the examples on their site are fair... You can 'plot(y~x)' guys :p
willpearse
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14 years ago
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on: Your DNA may carry a ‘memory’ of your living conditions in childhood
I too work in biology, and while this is interesting, that there are differences between people is not that surprising, and attempting to link socio-economic conditions to such widely different methylation patterns when you've got a sample size of 40 isn't very convincing. That said, nice work!
