Ask HN: Would a simple Computational Biology library be of any use to anyone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would a simple Computational Biology library be of any use to anyone?

4 pointshsikka5 comments

Hey folks, I've been learning JS pretty intensely recently. I'm a neuroscience graduate student, and for practice I thought I'd try my hand at making a small JavaScript Computational Biology library to make it easier to run simulations. Would that be of value to anyone? Thanks!

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I'm an undergrad doing some neuroscience research; I think the existence of such tools are essential to progress. As soon as you can start doing CompBio on the web, more people (i.e. students, non scientist programmers) will be encouraged to start playing around which will lead to more progress in our understanding of complex biology, and spur the people's excitement about recent progress in the field. The beautiful thing about code is that it is tremendously empowering – your writing a computational biology library for the web will empower individuals to get into computational biology. Furthermore, it will enable individuals to write blog posts with live JS examples, etc all to further broader progress. Lastly, I'm sure it will a learning experience for you too (albeit probably of much lower magnitude than a PhD). I say do it!

Awesome, thanks for the encouragement! I'll keep at it :)

Yes - absolutely!

I imagine you will find that lots of existing tools use python and the scientific stack (scipy, numpy, deep learning, scikit-learn etc) but more javascript tooling that will help with visualization, or controlling these backend technologies would be great.

Even if you decide to run the simulations themselves in javascript you'll learn valuable engineering skills and some tradeoffs that have to be made. As an employer I would love to see a student who took it upon themselves to build a tool once they'd learnt a language

My email is in my profile, don't hestiate to reach out if you need some help, or a bit of backend computing power

It would be of value to humanity as a whole to have access to better tools and libraries to further our knowledge in understanding the brain. So you should totally do it!

Awesome, thank you!

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