brfox

755 karma · joined April 1, 2008

I work at a biotech company in Seattle.

contact me: ''.join(['b', 'andrew' , 'fox', '@', 'gmail.com'])

brfoxon I'm a pregnant hacker. Please review my side project.

We should team up or something... I made this baby names website a couple years ago when my wife and I were looking for baby names. I didn't like the sites out there too much and made this to help search. (since then I've been so busy with the kids and main job that I have neglected my baby names site).

http://www.babynameclusters.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=370745

brfoxon Nexus S

Mine did the same thing, I sent it in for a replacement and HTC was easy to deal with and shipped me a phone right away.

brfoxon Comcast demands Level 3 pay fee to deliver online movies to their subscribers

I watch 1 hr of Netflix every evening in Seattle with Qwest and it is very reliable.

brfoxon Microsoft "embraces" (doesn't prohibit) windows phone 7 jailbreaking

Windows is not open source so it is probably harder for the carriers to just lock it down (unless they require something in the business deal). With Android, being open source, then the carriers can change it however they want.

brfoxon Siblings Share Genes, But Rarely Personalities

My two kids had a completely different personality when they were each 2 months old. Their personalities have hardly changed in 4 years. So, none of these 3 theories account for this - I think genetics is a much bigger deal.

brfoxon How I filled two dumpsters and went paperless

Buy a used one, scan everything, then sell it. That's what I was going to do, but I liked the scanner so much I just kept it.

brfoxon Morris Worm Decompiled (1988)

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm

brfoxon Google URL shortener available to the public

I tired about 10 random ones and 3 were real links. So are they approx 30% full already of the 4 character urls? I guess you better not shorten a url to a page you don't want to be public, because then the address will be easy to guess.

brfoxon Study About IP On The Human Genome Shows That Patents Hindered Innovation

The patents are for the use of these molecules as drugs in order to treat a disease. That is a very non-obvious and inventive process to figure out which of the 25000 genes in the human body will be useful as a drug - and what the exact composition of that drug should be and how to make it, administer it, etc.

brfoxon Study About IP On The Human Genome Shows That Patents Hindered Innovation

I haven't read the actual study - just the presentation in this link.

However, I would be REALLY hesitant to conclude anything from this other than Celera chose uninteresting things to make patent applications on. The "outcome" for innovation in this study was whether or not a gene test exists, and that is not what Celera was trying to get IP on. They were trying to find drugs or drug targets - and that is a difficult process.

The fraction of good drug targets in the human genome compared to the total number of genes is very, very small.

brfoxon Poyozo - Make Life Make Sense

I just tried it out and it is not what I hoped it would be. It only stores a little bit of gmail - subject plus a little text from the unread mails (maybe IMAP works better). It didn't seem to get any of my facebook posts... so I'm going to uninstall from Firefox. :(

brfoxon Poyozo - Make Life Make Sense

I haven't tried it out yet but I really, really like the idea of saving all my online activities to my computer. I put a lot of effort and I actually spend time worrying about how to make sure these things will not get lost when these companies go out of business or decide to delete old entries, etc. So, I look forward to trying this out!

And, I agree with another post here which says you need to emphasize that it is open source (and with local storage) vs. a startup which will fail/get purchased and then all my data is gone.

brfoxon WeinbergAlpha: DuckDuckGoes opensource with its WolframAlpha integration

That seems like it would be worthwhile (to cut down the number of queries): http://products.wolframalpha.com/api/pricing.html

brfoxon PasswordCard

SuperGenPass is a bookmarklet which seems really nice - it has a different password for each website and 1 password that you use to create the different passwords.

brfoxon Knuth's 'Earthshaking Announcement' due tomorrow

This thread has too many one-line jokes like reddit.

brfoxon The worst graph in a decade?

I have always disliked this type of graph. But some people think they are the coolest thing. Like this baby name website is really popular and it is based on a graph like that: http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager

(A couple years ago I made a competing baby names website, so that's why I bring it up. This type a graph is a little pet peeve of mine.)

brfoxon _why: A Tale Of A Post-Modern Genius

http://www.scribd.com/documents/8545174/Whys-Poignant-Guide-...

brfoxon Why doesn't Windows include native PDF reader support?

Here it is for Office 2007: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d9...

brfoxon Bumptop acquired by Google

The download is really slow right now, does anyone have an alternate download location?

brfoxon The almost-magical "content aware fill" plugin from a few days ago...on gimp.

This dust removal GIMP tool seems nice, too: http://registry.gimp.org/node/13289

Does anyone have experience with it or something better to suggest?

brfoxon Photoshop CS5's new "Content-aware Fill"

Lens flare is kind of nice sometimes. I like how CG movies add it in to make it look more realistic.

brfoxon Ever Notice How Often the Cities on Google Maps Change?

Notice how the labels never overlap? This includes the highway labels. I bet they just randomly start placing labels and once you have a few of them on the map, then there is no way to have the same labels all the time... especially if the edges of the view are slightly different than when it was accessed before.

brfoxon Why you should start a company in.... Seattle

Yes, the weather is terrible, stay away. (that's the story we like to tell people in order to keep it from growing too much).

brfoxon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

Not really for a procedure, but for more complicated, long-term disease: multiple sclerosis, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, etc. Knowing your genome will likely allow you to predict how you might respond to certain therapies.

brfoxon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

It already only costs $4000 for a full genome. (Complete Genomics)

brfoxon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

No biomedical predictions yet...

1. Everyone will have their full genome sequenced if they need some sort of medical treatment.

2. Healthcare will start to become cheaper due to personalized medicine and more data based decision-making.

3. Traditional drug discovery will be begin to be replaced by something: complex drug combinations, nanotech, ??

4. Some gene-therapy will be more commonplace.

5. End of cancer? infections? probably not

brfoxon [dead]

The private insurance industry, as currently constituted, would collapse if the government allowed real competition. The companies offer no real value and so instead must create a regulatory system that virtually mandates their existence and will soon actually do so.
And yet no innovating entrepreneurs have emerged to compete with these profitable enterprises.

Insurance is an information business, and as technology makes information-management cheaper, technological barriers to entry will fall, and competition will increase.

Any ideas for a startup?

brfoxon Eliezer Yudkowsky: That Alien Message

I agree that dupes can be annoying, but even after being on HN for a fairly long time (almost 2 years) and visiting a little too often, this is the first time I have seen this piece of writing and I found it very worthwhile. For some odd reason, I had never really read fully about Overcoming Bias or the new Less Wrong blog and wiki with all that it has to offer and I think I will spend a lot of time reading that in the next few weeks.

Thus, thank you for the dupe.

brfoxon The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell

Paying someone a minimal amount to write about something for which they have no in-depth knowledge (i.e. they only scraped it from other online sources) is probably not much different from just having an algorithm write an article. In fact, an algorithm might do a better job.

brfoxon Burn Baby Burn

Agreed! Most of my real ah-ha insights came after struggling for many hours of doing physics problem sets with a small group of classmates. I think that this is one of the most difficult-to-recreate parts of college.