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melonyon BioModels

Be very very good at differential equations. Systems/synthetic biology primarily rely on dynamics to model behavior and side effects. AlphaFold is actually pretty different from the biomodel type of modeling.

This is a good intro to (non deep learning based) computational/synthetic biology. ML in biology is somewhat orthogonal but it is rapidly growing.

http://be150.caltech.edu/2020/content/index.html

Traditional bioinformatics is mostly text mining and string processing. Modern bioinformatics is heavily dominated by ML.

melonyon Argonne: Lithium-Air battery 1200 wh/kg, 1000 cycles

Nominative determinism strikes again!

melonyon Rerun OSS beta is released

I came across rerun from egui too. Egui is a very good marketing funnel.

melonyon Shoichiro Toyoda, who turned Toyota into global automaker, has died

They shouldn't have discontinued the Fusion. It could have used a revamp though, like what Toyota did for the Venza.

melonyon PyTorch at the Edge: Deploy 964 TIMM Models on Android with TorchScript

How does Snapchat do filters in real-time?

melonyon Thunderbird 115 Supernova Preview: The New Folder Pane

I want Outlook's sweep function. Anyone up to the challenge of sending a pull request?

melonyon Why I chose OpenAI over academia

Bioinformatician?

melonyon Some gut bacteria appear to communicate with the brain

Genome wide association studies are expensive and take time. Forward and reverse genetics take money and time. PhDs need to be paid.

Honestly if you have a typical software engineer's salary and no dependents, just fund some studies yourself. Do them in South America or some other place with lower compliance requirements.

melonyon Classifying Python virtual environment workflows

Go, Rust, and JS are unique in having package management solutions that prevents the diamond dependency problem. Most other languages suffer from the same problems as python in that they cannot have more than one version of the same package globally. The dependency resolution algorithms for Ruby/Dart/Julia are all NP class and require constraint solving which often fails to find a solution if your dependencies are complex.

melonyon Ask HN: Which are your favourite machine learning blogs?

https://anotherdatum.com/

https://yang-song.net/blog/

https://lilianweng.github.io/

melonyon US navy released worst rust photo to date

The C is rough. Rust Evangelism Strikeforce assemble!

melonyon I became a software engineer after 5 years in data science

People obsessed with protecting the term “engineer” are usually those who want to gatekeep their jobs and salary. In other words, they are worried about competition and want to keep the career “prestigious” and kick the ladder away.

melonyon Ask HN: Lightweight Authentication

You can implement this in about 10 lines with synced tab session management if you use Vercel's library.

https://authjs.dev/

Here is the token generation logic

https://github.com/nextauthjs/next-auth/blob/main/packages/n...

melonyon Golang disables Nagle's Algorithm by default

Does it matter from the server point of view?

melonyon Apple Sued Alleging Racial Bias Against Minorities on Watch's Blood Oximeter

There needs to be Slapp for frivolous trolls like him.

melonyon Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround

Here's the link if you want more details

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/books/booksupdate/indigo-...

melonyon PostgREST – Serve a RESTful API from any Postgres database

Have young'uns these days not heard of ajax?

melonyon Barnes and Noble's surprising turnaround

Up north, the Indigo bookstore chain did the exact opposite.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_Books_and_Music

They are a case study in business school that selling tchotchkes and trinkets is more profitable than books. I disagree with GP's article. It is the same myth in tech that "engineers make better founders" and "companies ran by execs with engineering backgrounds are more successful". It is feel-good masturbation for professionals without objective data backing it. In this case they are running with "booklovers run better bookstores". Not necessarily generalizable to all booksellers. The pandemic has shown that cheap rates play an oversized role in picking winners and losers.

melonyon Ask HN: Risk of unsafe software in automobiles?

In their defense, gdb is a pain in the ass to use if your editor doesn't come with integrated support. The debugger that comes with CLion/Visual Studio is perfectly adequate. Ada is useful for automotive. Lisp and Forth, not so much (especially since Lisp isn't usually used in hard real-time applications). This isn't the 1980s, MCUs aren't that memory constrained. Knowledge of obscure programming languages doesn't necessarily make you a better software engineer. I want my automotive embedded engineer to have a solid grasp of computer architecture, real-time safety protocols, and defensive programming. I don't see a problem with a Korean/Japanese car manufacturer having their documentation in a non-English language. As long as they do everything in-house and don't outsource to India like Boeing I have no problem with it.

melonyon Why hundreds of thousands of kids in the US dread their 21st birthdays

Foreigners go into graduate study for the green card, not because of some massive fascination with the field. Local kids have no need for academia where you are paid poverty wages unless they are truly interested (professional degrees and and MBAs being the exception) or are looking to obtain a tenureship.

melonyon Hydrochloric acid is more complicated than you think

Put it in a bell jar and pump the air out. Violà, vacuum tube.

melonyon Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

Discrete math is still math. A software engineer may not be able to do a Laplace transform without reaching for a book but your typical traditional engineer won't do well with data structure and algorithm questions without training either.

melonyon Tell HN: Thanks and hats off to all the non software engineers

Oh my sweet summer child, you think civil, electrical and mechanical engineering are clean, ethical businesses? You don't get started in any serious EE work without signing manufacturer NDAs. Half the reason why our devices are so locked down is because of the hardware manufacturers. Behind beautiful skyscrapers are legions of corruption, middlemen, and organized crime. The cloud may hold your data hostage but the pricing is at least somewhat transparent. Mechanical engineering have their own ways of enforcing lock-in. You can't easily swap out a supplier just because you can see what a part looks like. Be glad that software isn't as regulated, you would not like to work in a industry where trade groups decide everything, and where licensing and accreditation unions are used to keep engineers in line like cattle.

melonyon Numba: A High Performance Python Compiler

These days I have switched to

https://www.taichi-lang.org/

melonyon I have reached Vim nirvana

Evil, VsCodeVim, IdeaVim are all faithful reproductions with thorough coverage of the typical text editing use cases.

melonyon Ask HN: Products/Services you swear by – Dec. 2022

According to the government of SF, you are a liar. A good garbage can should cost 1.4 million, not $140.

melonyon The return of lazy imports for Python

Julia only does partial AOT, it still bundles the sysimage (~100MB+ of runtime, what I refer to in my above comment as the VM snapshot) c.f. https://docs.juliahub.com/PackageCompiler/MMV8C/1.2.7/devdoc...

Traditional AOT like you see in C/C++/Rust/Go/Zig would be able to treeshake and eliminate redundant codepaths, the binaries are all fairly small with minimal startup overhead.

melonyon APITable: open-source Airtable alternative

You can't deployed the apps generated in any useful business capacity so it is not truly free except for a minority of personal users (or if you are in a country where IP rights are not easily enforced).

These platforms' primary customers and audience are enterprises and companies. The open source part is a red herring. It is not "free" to use in any sense for most organizations unless you are a non-profit with a majority of network infrastructure being under copyleft software. Don't be disingenuous, there is a very big difference for a web application builder and PaaS under rigorous viral copyleft vs e.g. a generic web server that will never be seen or utilized directly by users.

melonyon The return of lazy imports for Python

It is, because the runtime is bundled with the OS (similar its counterpart the JVM is also extremely widely deployed) and its output is significantly lowered. C.f.

> (or even Java/.NET style lowered bytecode binaries).

melonyon The return of lazy imports for Python

For me it is AOT compilation and packaging. An application language should be able to pull in most of its dependencies and runtime and be packaged into a reasonably sized and performant binary. The reason why scripting languages (that are often dynamic) struggle with this is that too many of their dependencies have hotpaths written in third party languages like C which makes it hard to do easy cross compilation and linking. Some programming languages come from a culture that eschews AOT compilation. It is difficult to compile large dynamic languages with Lisp heritages (CL, Julia, Ruby etc., Scheme is an exception to this however). These languages always resort to using a stateful VM/interpreter snapshot in lieu of true AOT packaging (or even Java/.NET style lowered bytecode binaries). The existence of eval makes many things trivial but at the same time complicates deployment tremendously.

Personally I am betting on JavaScript being the first dynamic and JITted (or incrementally compiled) language that can attain the AOT compilation without massively bloated binaries.