danielecook

This thing is not over, and the US per capita death rate is not good. In fact it is one of the worst, and you cannot ignore the fact that we still have a huge number of active cases whereas much of the rest of the industrialized world has reduced their case numbers significantly to manageable levels that allow contact tracing and fast turnarounds on testing. The US is still adding to our death rate and case numbers aggressively. Other countries are not. This is what makes the U.S. a disasterous outlier.

And don't ignore the long term impacts either. Just because you the U.S. has a low mortaility rate does not mean the disease will not have long term effects. People may die sooner, or suffer significant health effects later on that leave a lasting mark on the economy.

You suggestion that this is because the US is so interconnected is a foolish one. Europe is quite interconnected, has had similarly bad initial outbreaks, but has subsequently been able to address those outbreaks much better than the U.S.. What would you say about the politicization of preventative measures that we know work - wearing masks and social distancing?

A side hustle would be great but I hate websites that throw a pop up in the users face and ask them to subscribe. The quality of these sites is often quite low, but they often rank near the top because they have good SEO. I wouldn’t feel great about putting out a site like this, especially if I was pushing products I had not personally used, which I think you would have to do if you were going to write dozens of articles on a niche topic.

I think a SaaS is a be a better way to go, but it’s probably a lot harder.

I'd love to see a better alternative to Excel geared more towards scientists. While it is true that R and python should be used for analysis, its often hard to escape a tool like Excel for data entry or browsing datasets. It would be nice if there was something out there that was faster and could handle larger datasets, and had features designed to help with data entry and browsing.

I am envisioning something with double-entry data checking, enforcement of data types, and rules to check validity. Equally important would be the features it would lack - no tools to color or format text, no variable font sizes, no embedded images, etc.

I don’t get it. So when you see a listing on amazon it’s not as though one seller created it?

Does anyone know why the top bar sometimes has a thick black line underneath it?

I have a stack of about 30 Moleskine notebooks I've gone through over the past 10 years. I mostly work at the computer, so I keep the notebook open in front of me while I work and I usually wind up creating a checklist each day of what I intend to do, then use the pages to draw out ideas or sketch thoughts. Sometimes I find myself writing something to try to remember it. I try to look at the previous day for continuity but otherwise rarely need to look back. I also use it for meeting notes.

I put a unique sticker on the front of each one so I can sort of associate the time / topics with the notebook. Otherwise they all look identical.

It's not really that organized, but it helps me keep focused on tasks each day and sketch out ideas.

Reminds me of early 2000s. What city is it?

What sorts of web pages do you do this for? What if the pdf version is difficult to read?

Looks great! I did something similar with hugo and tried to automate the process as much as possible.

I use a utility called jhead to resize, fix rotation issues, and rename photos by date - then I tied this to a folder action on macos so I can just drop photos in a folder and they get renamed and resized.

Then Hugo has this cool 'smart' cropping feature which tries to crop based on content [1] - and the end result is now all I do is drop photos in a folder and publish and it comes out looking pretty good [2].

1. https://gohugo.io/content-management/image-processing/#image...

2. https://www.danielecook.com/photos/

I would not classify it as “a lot” even in the wrong places. And, even when paths do exist they are far from adequate.

I had a similar idea. The search aspect of your service covers it but I think it would still be worth considering.

I work in science so we are often talking about specific samples Or entities with unique identifiers. I wanted a way to construct a database of all the conversations surrounding a given sample name - so I could browse through it or lookup the history of the conversations surrounding a specific sample.

The idea would be to supply a regex pattern to match all of the sample names and construct the database using that.

Similar situations exist in most industries I imagine - so having a way of recognizing patterns and classifying/organizing/browsing them might be worth considering for your service.

Also slack and similar services should be integratable.

How do you hide them? I see an option for that.

> Safe and easy to use separated continuous paths. Not just paint strips but actual physical separation.

I think this is such a critical point. A lot of people are not interested in getting on a busy road, but would definitely get on a bike only path.

I will also add that I think cities should be creative and try to develop more bike infrastructure that is independent of the roadways altogether. The lakefront trail in Chicago is a good example. Many cities could develop similar infrastructure along rivers, through parks, through repurposed streets, etc. having a separate network is not only safer but if done right can often be faster for commuters than driving or public transport.

If you are working on an HPC cluster:

[1] The ssh package for vscode is great

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

[2] Also check out rsub which allows you to open a file in your terminal locally

https://github.com/henrikpersson/rsub

If you are looking for a faster, more concise alternative I highly recommend data.table.

I agree that people have finite bandwidth but we are talking about people investing in skills that are useful for the primary function of their job. It’s the first thing to consider if you want to improve your productivity at work.

Wow. This is incredibly helpful. You can use it to see how someone may have used a function with named parameters:

  my_function(label=x, option_1=2)
  my_function.*option_1 # search

It’s a great site and greatly accelerated my learning of programming.

The form of learning which I call “problem based” learning is a great format for me. You learn from reading up on a topic. You learn from trying different solutions. Finally, you learn from seeing other people’s answers once you’ve solved it.

Also check out:

Hackerrank.com - all around focus Project Euler- math focus Leetcode - more oriented towards interview training but still useful and fun.

Coming to London was a real eye opener. Biking to work in London I get a myriad of smells, all petroleum based I am guessing and each distinct... and I am entirely unsure what they are or where they come from.

This is on top of diesel pollution which is much more apparent then gasoline pollution in the states. If enough cars are idling you can taste it!

R is the right tool in many cases but I've observed several cases where people have become overreliant on it and hacked together things that would be better written in bash, python, or other languages.

Yes!

Besides the advantage of an already established network - what are facebooks other advantages?

I suppose money is the biggest. are there others?

Previously someone mentioned the idea of a $1/mo. social network.

I think if someone were to make facebook in it's first ~2 years and keep it very basic it we would be good to go. The only features you need are: a profile picture, a wall, chat, and events.

In other words - a photo of yourself, a way of publicly messaging, a way of privately messaging, and a way to coordinate social events.

What else do you need for a 'social network?'

I would pay $1/mo for that. The simpler the better.

So maybe this is a crazy thought but I think it would be cool if peloton introduced bikes with steering and buttons and developed games for their platform. I Wonder if people would be receptive - it’s certainly something I would like to try.

I’ve thought about this a lot having lived in Chicago and now London and seen two very different types of infrastructure.

Chicago arguably has a true “cycle superhighway” with its 23 miles of continuous bike lane on the lakefront I was able to commute 10 miles to work very fast and with little exposure to cars.

London is a work in progress, with lots of infrastructure slotted in.

What I’ve come away with being a pretty committed bike commuter is that a good bike network should incorporate routes that are disassociated with the road network where possible. Like the lake path in Chicago, these routes are much safer, accessible to new cyclists, And fast (with few intersections). Also see Chicago’s elevated bike path the 606 for another example.

London could develop something similar along the river Thames (it does exist in parts, but it needs to be continuous, wider, and better developed), and improve routes along its canals. London could also develop and allow more routes through its parks. This in particular is low hanging fruit as routes through many parks are limited and have just been added to roads that cut through parks in many cases (another issue worth debating is whether roads should be cutting through parks to begin with).

I had heard this was a thing at places like MIT and Stanford. Very rich kids come in every fall, buy everything they need for the year, then throw it all out when summer hits... brand new TVs, clothes, furniture, etc.

It seems like dockerhub requires a lot of bandwidth...lots of people being able to pull gigabytes worth of images everyday. Does anyone know anything behind the economics behind this? How can they offer it for free?

These are both works in progress! But here is the first one for working with sequencing data:

https://github.com/danielecook/seq-collection

And the second:

https://github.com/danielecook/tut

The second one has a really useful utility called "stack" that you can use to concatenate datasets where one might lack some columns or the columns come in a different order. It glues it all together and has an option to include the filename. It's useful for data analysis.

Both of these lack 'polish' at this point but a few of the subcommands work quite well.

I have only used python (check out cyvcf2 by brentp!), R, and bash previously - so nothing else really compiled (its faster than these in general). But my guess is that you will have an easier time writing nim than the alternatives, and after that it is easy to optimize once you have basic functionality.

I've used it to develop command-line based utilities. The binaries tend to be small and fast.