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mfld

754 karma · joined October 25, 2022

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mfld··on Show HN: Ledge.sh – Runnable Markdown Notes
Great idea! During my time as a researcher, I heavily used org-babel. I used it to put code for data wrangling, plots, and notes into a single document. The notes would often contain formulas to describe what was done. I would regularly export that to PDF using pdflatex to send it to collaborators. Maybe this is an avenue worth considering for Ledge.
mfld··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
> For now, this is mostly a story about how AI can be used to parse existing data to discover new biology (which is fantastic!).

I'd like to expand that: in my view, this is also a story of how agentic AI systems can come up with bioinformatics strategies to discover novel features. One would think such a task would be the ideal domain of the genome language models, which have learned the structure and functional relationships of DNA/RNA sequences. The agents instead relied on classical bioinformatics methods such as HMMs to make their discovery.

Note: I could not find the Supplementary Note 1 that was supposed to describe how exactly agents came to their solution, but I assume it was autonomous.

mfld··on Emacs 31: An unofficial guide to Markdown-ts-mode
Not tested this myself, but there are ways to improve markdown/org-mode interop, like in https://youtu.be/RJqRwlVvB3E
mfld··on Hister – A private, full content search index that you control
What would be a typical size of the search index, let's say after 5 years of intense browsing?
mfld··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Remember when Google acquired YouTube for $1.6B in 2006? That amount seemed ridiculous at the time. Its now peanuts compared to YouTube's yearly revenue.
mfld··on I Built a Private Genomics Study with Stoffel MPC
Very interesting project! I can imagine usefulness even beyond the intended use case, namely in joining the information from multiple large genomics studies. The sharing and access of such data becomes increasingly difficult, and by this approach one could increase the effective sample size while keeping the data private.
mfld··on How to sequence your own DNA at home
YSeq, TellMeGen - or reaching out to local sequencing labs
mfld··on Emacs 31 Is Around the Corner: The Changes I'm Daily Driving
Very cool! Looking forward to try out the xref and markdown features. The latter becomes increasingly important since the developer community at large seems to disagree with org-mode being the superior syntax...
mfld··on EU fines Temu €200M for allowing sale of illegal products
Maybe for marketplace articles shipped from outside the EU. It's not legal, so Amazon will surely have a close look (for directly sold items), as well as any company shipping from within the EU.
mfld··on Rosalind: A genomics toolkit in Rust running whole-genome pipelines on a laptop
I guess the author refers to the fact that many well-known tools have some randomness built-in. The most obvious one is differences due to the order of parallel processing. But these differences are often small and have no significant downstream effects. They are mostly inconvenient for regression testing.
mfld··on Childhood Computing
Does anyone remember the art of optimising MSDOS startup to have enough free memory for games? And inspecting gorillas.bas? For me, this probably contributed to an interest to learn more and experiment. In fact, I'd like to encourage my son to a similar creative exploration, but don't how this is going to happen when pulled into the current generation of games and videos.
mfld··on UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub
This is the right mindset. Securing huge piles of heterogeneous data while giving PhD students the freedom to "play" with it are quite conflicting goals.
mfld··on Vibe Genomics: Sequencing Your Whole Genome at Home
From a bioinformatics perspective, the general approach is fine. Here is another post from today where someone landed on the similar technologies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47825381
mfld··on macOS Tahoe windows have different corner radiuses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
mfld··on Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
Maybe a future direction will be the submission of detailed research, specifications and change plans for feature requests. Something that can be assessed by a human and turned into working code by both slides.
mfld··on A Visual Guide to DNA Sequencing
Yes, they are only mentioned in the last section. Other notable misses would be Ion Torrent and MGI. Still a nice article with a focus on the key technologies.
mfld··on I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard
Agree. I used a color e-ink to display my son's school timetable (previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42408546), and it has been running reliably for 18 months, with charging needed every 4-5 months. I note that the author (cool project!) also earlier took the route of displaying websites as PNGs.
mfld··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
Using it for both transactional and marketing emails (but "only" for thousands of recipients) for some years. Could need some polish IMO, but the core offering is solid. Support is helpful, too.
mfld··on OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III
This looks great! Shout out to FreeCol, a reimagined Colonization, that has the same isometric look and is a lot of fun.
mfld··on Prism
I'd like to hypothesize a little bit about the strategy of OpenAI. Obviously, it is nice for academic users that there is a new option for collaborative LaTeX editing plus LLM integration for free. At the same time, I don't think there is much added revenue expected here, for example, from Pro features or additional LLM usage plans. My theory is that the value lies in the training data received from highly skilled academics in the form of accepted and declined suggestions.
mfld··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
It's a good price because the yearly statements for an LLC/GmbH are costly. We pay about 200/mo for accounting - with some more invoices :) -, 100/mo for payrolls but also the yearly statement alone is more than 2k. You can save that by not having an LLC - I personally think the risk in many software businesses is quite low. And some risks must be accepted as an entrepreneur...
mfld··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Agreed. In case you do not have big investors, just register as an individual entrepreneur, get a bank account and get going! It can be turned into a LLC/GmbH later if business goes well.

Also taxes will be much easier. Just get one of the countless apps where you add invoices, and they generate tax reports for you. With an LLC or when employing other people, getting a tax consultant is advised. IMO, they are not expensive - how many hours of your time are you willing to spend on this topic instead of paying e.g. 200 EUR/mo?

mfld··on Radboud University selects Fairphone as standard smartphone for employees
My wife has a Fairphone 4, released 2021. The earpiece broke. I ordered a replacement; it arrived within 3 days and was very easy to replace. So a good experience with that.
mfld··on East Germany balloon escape
You can compare them with the original calculations that can be found at https://www.ballonflucht.de/en/ballonrechner.html !
mfld··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://mfasold.net/
mfld··on Parental controls aren't for parents
Similarly, the Play Store cannot be limited and so for a kid it's easy to spend time on promotional app videos there. So the app limits are mostly useless, since you have to fully lock the phone to disable this.
mfld··on Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice
Yes, but note the mutation rate of germline cells - that are passed to your offspring and hence influence evolution - is estimated to be two orders of magnitude lower than other (somatic) cells.
mfld··on Python is not a great language for data science
This really calls for an A/B speed programming test of Python vs. R practitioners.
mfld··on Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits
The given example is from GitLab - thanks for pointing out that Gitea follows a different OSS strategy.
mfld··on Meeting notes between Forgejo and the Dutch government via Git commits
Based on those meeting notes, the conflict of interest that arises when attempting to add features that compete with paid ones is real. So its that ideology that it is actually needed for a Government user/contributor.
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