Sounds like you're doing great - you're miles ahead of where I was at 15, that's for sure. I think you need a mentor. Look to open source, local universities, etc. I've heard good things about the google summer of code.
1,351 karma · joined June 12, 2007
The author of the article mentions "a million different proteins" - The human genome contains about 20,000 genes, each coding for a different protein. Some small fraction of these genes would be involved in cancer, although the exact proportion is an interesting question which we're not entirely sure of. Perhaps with splice variants we're getting into the millions, but obviously you can't consider splice variants to be unique proteins. In any case, the problem is at least 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the author is thinking. Currently, there are 10s of thousands of cancer researchers worldwide, and hundreds of millions of patients, so the studies he talks about are quite feasible.
More troubling is the fact that with the huge amounts of money available, cancer biology attracts a gigantic number of researchers, many of whom are not doing especially great science. There are many, many different pathways in the body that can drive cancer generation, so you can study almost any of them and call yourself a cancer researcher, even though the chances are that most of that work won't lead directly to a cure.
My opinion: cancer is impossible to cure - people will always get cancer. There are deep, fundamental connections between our ability to evolve and adapt to our environment and the inevitability of getting cancer. My opinion on how to beat the disease: genomic profiling of an individual's propensity to develop cancer, early detection, anti-metastasis drugs and improved surgical procedures.
For anyone interested, there is a fantastic review called "The Hallmarks of Cancer", published in Cell that you should check out.
More importantly, are we actually at the point where blogs in which a guy is admittedly just making things up about Groupon makes it to the front page?
Edit: The approach here is to create a virus that carries a gene coding for the protein they want to overexpress. The virus inserts the gene into the host cell's dna, which in this case is in the rat's neocortex. They say that expression of this protein is under control of a cytomegalovirus promoter, but I'm not sure if they need to use an additional drug to induce expression.
In any case, the HN title is incorrect.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows–Wheeler_transform or http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2009/...
I imagine a big effect on a child's cognitive development comes from the amount of time they spend with their parent. If wealthier families have fewer children, and therefore have more parental attention per child, that could explain the disparity.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Thaler & Sunstein
Factorization Methods for Discrete Sequential Estimation - Bierman
This suprised me. It is what I did, as well as several other people in my year. The difference in maturity and competency between the people who have worked in industry and those who haven't is night and day. In my experience, people who have spent time in industry are much stronger PhD candidates.
"Moving a message needs to move all of the message's comments, and all of the comments' files, and all of the comments' files' versions."
Why can't you just change some top level reference in the database? I'm imagining a Projects table and a TodoLists table. Each TodoList has something like a projectID foreign key right? Why can't you just change that and automatically have all of the messages, etc, come along with the TodoList?
"But I hope you will see that sometimes even the simplest feature can be much more complicated than it looks from the outside."
I agree there, just wondering why the simple solution doesn't work in this case.
It'd also be interesting to know how often close calls happen on important points, and how often those are challenged. My guess would be that challenges are almost always used when the point matters, and the low challenge rate is because most controversial calls happen in routine situations like 40-love.
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvg&chs=500&c...
I put 500k for the < 1 million people. I didn't know what to do with JFK, so I put him as 500k too. I duplicated Grover Cleveland so that the count would be correct. When I tried to add axis labels google said the url was too big.
1) It is really tempting to try to understand ourselves based on the assumed lives of our evolutionary ancestors, but the fact is we know almost nothing about their lives, and conclusions we draw from what we can guess are unlikely to be accurate.
2) There is not one citation in this entire article. This is all opinion, no matter how true it sounds.
3) He offers medical advice based solely on his personal experience. Sleep apnea may not be the same to all people.
Maybe "Basing a conclusion on too little information."
As an example, I recently read an article (possibly on Hacker News?) in which a guy was working on his free-throw. He tried adding more backspin to his shot and made 4/4. He then tried 400 free throws using his old and new technique and found that in comparison, his old shot was better.