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mattsouth

88 karma · joined November 15, 2008

UK based digital health research software engineer
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mattsouth··on CQL: Categorical Databases
Not to be confused with https://cql.hl7.org/ which is the CQL I know of.
mattsouth··on Display any CSV file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table
Nice. Its interesting to me that searching and filtering isnt something that http://csvbase.com has.
mattsouth··on Ask HN: What Problem Would You Solve with Unlimited Time and Money? [Apr 2025]
Honestly I cant really imagine a world with unlimited time and money - it would be so different from the present world that has shaped us all. But that aside, I would work on assembling a team that could build and support a widely available tricorder.
mattsouth··on Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
It looks great - nice work. I tried the french example and found it challenging and useful - a great addition to my duo lingo practice. So much so that I signed up. But in doing so I lost the credits that Id apparently acquired by completing the example which was a little disappointing. I hadnt seen the Easy French videos before - they look nice too.
mattsouth··on What I've learned about writing AI apps so far
I cant explain the similarity of my comment to others around the same time. My reaction was a quick yay! to what I thought was a sane take on the capabilities and limitations of LLMS.
mattsouth··on What I've learned about writing AI apps so far
Great article that contains some pithy aphorisms that I expect to see again and again.
mattsouth··on Show HN: Scipress.io – a Markdown writing platform like Notion Medium MkDocs
hackmd but branded for science and with a monetisation angle - that's cool. You are missing terms and privacy - I need to know who Im trusting and where Im operating before I sign up to something like this. These are the most concise I know of: https://simplenote.com/terms/
mattsouth··on Ask HN: Why do people use password managers?
Your strategy was proposed by joel spolsky some time ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/11/password-managemen...
mattsouth··on Finding services companies via their TXT records
Is it good hygiene to delete these records once they've served their purpose (i.e. validating control of the domain in question)? Or do these records server more than that use?
mattsouth··on The Algorithm for Precision Medicine, talk by Matthew Might [video]
Its a talk at a programming languages conference by a programming languages professor who moved into medicine to help diagnose and treat his son with a genetic condition. Its a great talk which simultaneously provides an introduction to biomedical research and knowledge based systems and provides some compelling cases for the benefit of combining the two. It also takes you through a journey that includes starting a company, working with the white house and being recruited to be the director of a university research institute.
mattsouth··on Realistic computer-generated handwriting
Good find. Im loving that the README of this project includes a Rick Roll
mattsouth··on The Maintenance Race
Great read. Its one of those articles I wish I could "double star" on HN.
mattsouth··on We need a flowchart editor that doesn't give you carpal tunnel
tiny thing: typo in one of the Example's title: algroithm -> algorithm
mattsouth··on Sunsetting Atom
This makes me sad as I very much prefer the atom approach to the git and github panels than the vscode approach. vscode is much faster for typescript development though.
mattsouth··on Science needs more research software engineers
in the uk, https://www.jobs.ac.uk/search/?keywords=RSE&location= gets you five hits today and I expect you would find more similar posts that werent currently branded research software engineer if you looked - the term is still quite new for many academic depts. One thing you'll need is patience if you want one of these positions - I remember being offerred an academic post three months after interviewing for the position and when I queried how on earth it could have taken so long to offer the post I was met with incredulity that there was an issue at all.
mattsouth··on Songdata
I hadnt heard of the camelot song feature before. Seems its a code to indicate the compatible key: https://www.quora.com/What-does-Camelot-mean-in-musical-term...
mattsouth··on The King William’s College quiz 2021
Thanks for the correction.
mattsouth··on The King William’s College quiz 2021
The King William's College quiz is set by a particular fee paying English school for its pupils every Christmas and published by the Guardian. Its full of English cultural references and designed to be hard. I assume the idea is that the pupils take it home for the holidays and work on it with their families. Each section has a theme that connects the answers in that section. My partner's family love wrangling out the odd answer or three between christmas and new year.
mattsouth··on Tldraw – a tiny little drawing app
Ah, I hadnt looked at the issues. Saw this in ubuntu firefox and android chrome.
mattsouth··on Tldraw – a tiny little drawing app
Really nice app. So much finesse. Similar but seemingly simpler than the excellent https://excalidraw.com/. Tiny thing: I think it would be clearer if the alt tags and menu items showed keyboard shortcuts as "[ctrl][G]" instead of "c t r l G".
mattsouth··on FSL: A programming language to make complex finite state machines easy to create
https://twitter.com/happyautomata explores this space quite nicely
mattsouth··on FSL: A programming language to make complex finite state machines easy to create
This library seems quite a lot quicker at runtime (20x) than https://thisrobot.life/, at least for the red->green->yellow->red example in my very quick superficial test that follows the README.
mattsouth··on The Italian Covid contact-tracing app is now developed in open source
One reference: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/31/privacy-campai...
mattsouth··on The Power of Prolog
This is what Im looking for in this thread - accessible critiques of prolog. Could your first issue be solved by a i8ln framework? Im not sure I accept your second issue - why would someone who doesnt know anything about medicine build a prolog program about medicine? But further to this, is there value in articulating the results of a machine learning algorithm as a prolog program?
mattsouth··on The Power of Prolog
snap, but mine is in javascript and references a couple of predecessor javascript mini-prolog interpreters: https://github.com/mattsouth/dprolog. I still need to read that WAM book. But I tell that to myself everytime it comes up here.
mattsouth··on Epidemic Calculator
I would consider entering this to the scipy plotting comp: https://forms.gle/SrexmkDwiAmDc7ej7
mattsouth··on Documentation – Your Secret Weapon
I have a lot of sympathy with this argument. Ive seen some projects recently that were heavily influenced by the agile manfesto with very little documentation where I particularly miss the high level stuff and justifications for some key decisions. I cant helping thinking that this was not the intention of the authors. I loved Django for the quality of its documentation from the get go.
mattsouth··on Doctors and decision fatigue
There's talk of doing away with it in Europe: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/26/when-do-the-...
mattsouth··on Mozilla – Devil Incarnate
or https://brave.com/ ?
mattsouth··on Microsoft CTO on the future of software engineering [audio]
Well not all TV programs. The BBC in the uk is one exception to this rule.
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