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vapemaster

366 karma · joined January 28, 2017

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vapemaster··on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
i'm a phd scientist and manage a team of 50 brilliant scientists in drug discovery.

this is with out a doubt the saddest excuse for "scientific discovery" i've ever read. even if there is novelty and eventual value from this line of inquiry, the excruciating lack of rigor, methods, or disclosure has francis bacon rolling in his grave.

grow up anthropic.

vapemaster··on Microscale Thermite Reaction
wow I hadn't heard of this but it's quite cool. aka Nano-Thermite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano-thermite

vapemaster··on Verizon Is Down
Thought I was going insane today.
vapemaster··on Collaboration sucks
You guys need to work on harder problems.
vapemaster··on Ask HN: Weirdest Computer Architecture?
since this is a bit of a catch-all thread, i'll toss Anton into the ring: a whole bunch of custom ASICs to do Molecular Dynamics simulations from D.E. Shaw Research

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)

vapemaster··on Leap – Chemistry Through a Computational Lens
not hating on the great amber - but why LEaP on the front page of HN with no context...?

happy to see some light shown on the grim state of comp chem file formats and their shockingly lossy interconversion but I'm not sure that was the OP's intent?

vapemaster··on Ask HN: Why does Apple refuse to add window snapping to macOS?
long time windows user that switched to mac due to Apple Silicon dominance on the laptop experience.

This, 1000x this.

It's utterly bizarre that the window management paradigm is "let 'em all stack up and make it easy to spread 'em all out"

At first I thought I didn't get the paradigm. Now I get that I don't get the idea behind the paradigm.

Rectangle (pro version) fixes some of this and adds some really cool features. And because of the Apple app hegemony, it does work nearly OS level good. But why, oh why does this have to be 3rd party?

It's like some any UX pattern baked in since Lisa?

vapemaster··on Zrok: Open-source peer to peer
this was an awesome, non-snarky, explanatory comment. thanks for this.
vapemaster··on Mac's command key is worse than Window's ctrl
touché
vapemaster··on Mac's command key is worse than Window's ctrl
except that you still use command to copy and paste in the terminal
vapemaster··on Mac's command key is worse than Window's ctrl
agreed, the fold under makes me use the side of my thumb on command which is much less natural or tactile than stretching my pinky to use the pad.
vapemaster··on Mac's command key is worse than Window's ctrl
I immediately had to get Karibiner to at least give me my home and end keys back on a external keyboard.

I've been to aggressively remapping that I don't then create a similar problem when using another machine I don't own but maybe I'll give in and go the more custom route

vapemaster··on Mac's command key is worse than Window's ctrl
well [ctrl] + <down arrow, F4, F5> are used for window management by default
vapemaster··on Mac's command key is worse than Window's ctrl
agreed, I'm almost to muscle memory with it so it's not the "i have to think about it" annoyance, it's that my whole hand has to move to make it work... noticeably slower than my windows workflows..
vapemaster··on Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
just me typing too quickly for my own brain, thanks for the correction!
vapemaster··on Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
cool i'll check out raindrop, thanks for the tip!

but i just wish there were some talented engineering teams at the leading browser creators (cough couch google, mozilla, MS, apple, etc) that would integrate this as a first class feature. a design goal, not a supported extension.

vapemaster··on Ask HN: Why are bookmarks second class citizens in browsers?
savage. but case and point!
vapemaster··on Preparedness Paradox
i always heard it called the birthday problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

[weirdly, someone discovered an birthday overlap today at work and i just re-google/wiki'd this today]

vapemaster··on Why does science news suck so much?
> If someone criticizes your paper, and it gets pulled from publication, then thats the same as having never published anything in the first place. Therefore, the technique to survival is to write your paper in such a way that repels criticism as much as possible.

Not trying to be snarky, but that's not how publishing works.. you don't get a paper retracted for criticism, you get it retracted if there was scientific malfeasance. And retractions are actually exceedingly rare.

In fact having criticism / debate around your paper is a great way to get more citations, the real publication currency in academia...

vapemaster··on Tea – the toolkit that builds the Internet
When I read web3 co.'s product/ tech description it almost always feels like some form of tech. literacy gaslighting. I always feel initially like there's something elusive that I'm not grokking b/c I'm not a blockchain zealot.

Then I sit back and realize that it's usually because most of the examples I read are trying to solve non-technical problem (attribution, trust, etc.) with a buzzy tech solution all wrapped in a serious bit of speculation.

I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the tech of our law, banking, and logistics systems (COBOL--> anything else?), but the kneejerk to some "decentralized" system that needs total but in from it's participants to work actually seems more fragmented and fragile than our current institutions...

vapemaster··on Hard Startups
So where is the geographic location that does fund hard problems?

SV $ is far from perfect but it is surprisingly audacious and fault tolerant.

A few examples old and young:

Genentech

SpaceX

Joby

TAE Technologies

vapemaster··on GitHub Enterprise is now free through Microsoft for Startups
Seems a bit alarmist..
vapemaster··on The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures
That's like saying the single hardest problem in AI is having a beyond human intelligent general AI.

Sorry not trying to be pedantic but predicting what xenobiotics (ie foreign molecules) will do in the human body, much less a diverse sample of them is a really really really hard problem. One that will only be approximated and poorly at that. I'm sure there will continue to be approaches to reduce risk but clinical trials only exist because they have to. The only way we can evaluate safety and efficacy is empirically.

Predicting things like hERG toxicity is somewhat doable. And I think the realistic bright future of AI in medicine will include better on target tox prediction and some off target effects. But it's hard enough to design the drug to bind the target, imagine predicting it's affinity for all other proteins and their isoforms in the population...

vapemaster··on The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures
Custom ASIC hardware for running molecular dynamics. check out Anton [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)

vapemaster··on The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures
interesting point. though this ignores the (surprisingly) successful re-purposing strategies to reduce future regulatory burden and and reduce or even eliminate high throughput screening campaigns. that well will dry up sooner or later but other discovery platforms ie phage display etc. have become commoditized and robust enough that they are pretty accessible to even low capitalized startups if finding a ligand is what you need to get off the ground.
vapemaster··on The Quant King, the Drug Hunter, and the Quest to Unlock New Cures
Yup. And judging by their team and strategy they are likely using a highly empirical ligand discovery platform (ie DEL) and using the (admittedly best in class) MD for guiding med chem. Taking the hard problem of drug discovery and then saying you are going to do rational design (a road riddled with dead bodies) on dynamic alloseteric sites of challenging targets is a lofty goal to put it mildly..
vapemaster··on Requests-HTML: HTML Parsing for Humans
So stoked this popped up. Literally woke up this morning debating about moving away from bs4 and wrapping the functionality I needed in lxml. I was just thinking I wish there was a requests equivalent for parsing...
vapemaster··on Why Create a New Unix Shell?
Use xonsh!

Xonsh is an awesome fishy she'll that's a Python superset. $() is built right in.

vapemaster··on Livepython: Visually trace your Python code in real time
Cue the "Python is so slow" jokes now...
vapemaster··on Better management of discarded produce could help forests regrow
this is a ridiculous title.
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