ganonm

I would highly recommend reading 'A brief history of everyone who ever lived' by Adam Rutherford. IIRC it contains a whole chapter on GWASs (pronounced jee-wazzes).

There are some phenotypes (characteristics) which clearly can be associated with a small number of genes (e.g. autosomal recessive disorders) , however for many phenotypes such as intelligence, it takes a lot more effort to correlate them with underlying genotypes. The fact that intelligence is approximately normally distributed is an indicator that there are many individual effects at play.

I just deleted the app and moved several of my smaller group conversations over to WhatsApp (yes, the irony that this is also owned by Facebook is not lost on me). Been contemplating this for a while but you have provided the necessary impetus, thanks.

I have played piano and guitar (piano for almost my entire life and guitar for several years) and have used both tabular sheet music and traditional sheet music.

Tabular sheet music is much easier to read initially as it provides a one to one mapping between the visual representation and the physical location of the notes - i.e. 5 frets along on this string. However, from my experience there is a cap on the 'bandwidth' at which you can sight read this. It is just too hard to mentally parse a bunch of numbers on lines and turn that into notes when playing at speed. (For non musicians, 'sight reading' means to read the notes and play fluently at the same time)

Traditional sheet music has a steeper learning curve, however, I've found that reading this music becomes much more subconscious with practice and the bandwidth at which you can parse the notes is much higher. Also, it is much easier to notice patterns in sheet music - i.e. a major 7th chord in the key of the song is visually obvious no matter what the key.

> I can get a small web site serving JSON REST requests and memcache up in ten minutes with a simple Maven/Gradle build and full IDE integration.

Dropwizard is a great example of this. It's an opinionated (convention over configuration) Java framework for building REST web services. You can get a 'Hello World' web service up and running in literally 10 minutes following this tutorial http://www.dropwizard.io/1.0.0/docs/getting-started.html

Quotas for procedures is a very interesting topic. Doctors (in the UK at least) carrying out appendectomies consider a negative appendectomy rate (NAR) of around 20% to be optimum. The NAR being the proportion of appendectomies where it turns out the appendix wasn't the cause of the symptoms.

The reason this is considered optimum is that a doctor hitting 0% NAR (which you might naively assume is best) is most likely being overly conservative and missing some genuine cases of appendicitis, which as we all know can be life threatening if left untreated.

I have a directory ~/Documents/TODO/ inside which I have single file for each feature I'm working on. These files simply contain a list of items marked as completed or not completed using a tick/cross. It's simple, non-proprietary and is easy to put under source control.

For long-term note taking I use Evernote. This is for things like obscure git commands and 'how-to's.

Yes, and the fact that a relational model is such a convenient way to represent lots of data problems means that even if SQL disappeared, the concept and usefulness of a relational database would long outlive it.

> Everyday I'm holding onto the shares is the same as if I made the decision to buy that many shares on that day

This is a great way to think about holding investments. I remember using this argument to try and convince a family member that they should sell what I considered to be a bad investment. I phrased it as 'If you were forced to sell your shares right now would you use the money from the sale to immediately buy back your shares?'. He responded that no, he wouldn't. Obviously this ignores brokerage fees, but it is a useful thought experiment nonetheless.

'A Powerful MacBo...' would be a more accurate title - there are actually a few more options out there such as the Dell XPS Developer Edition or System76 offerings.

I used a Dell XPS 13 (2013 model) Developer Edition at my last job and use a 2015 MacBook Pro 15" at my current job. The Dell was superb and served me well for 2 and a half years of work with no significant issues. However, my colleague had issues with overheating and resulting unintended shutdowns. If Dell continue their 'Project Sputnik' work I think they will be able to really challenge Apple's dominance as the go to developer machine. I'm definitely not the only person who thinks it's mad that in 2017 the developer community, which relies so heavily upon open source software, is effectively held hostage by the whims and machinations of Apple when it comes to their development OS (and thus, currently hardware too).

My current experience with the MacBook Pro is very good (once I installed several add-ons like TotalSpaces 2 to emulate Ubuntu workflow) but I feel the real reason dev teams are going for this option is the safety in numbers you get from everyone using the same machine which is also used by millions of other developers. It's a bit of a tired expression but the MacBooks do just work.