Hacker News Reader

this is also the insight that the bwa developer had, to use the burrows-wheeler transform which is part of bzip2 due to it's compression properties being particularly good for genomic sequences.

View on HN

I once had the distinct pleasure of hosting the author of BWA (R. Durbin) at Google, and pointing out "That's Mike Burrows, over there, next to Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat". That led to an interesting discussion between Durbin and Dean on DNA sequence compression. It's not the first time I've been in a room with a bunch of geniuses and simply kept my mouth shut so nobody would know I'm an idiot.

But you're the genius I keep my mouth shut around!

fwiw Heng Li was "the author." He was a postdoc under Durbin's professorship. I was around when bwa was developed and was working in a collaboration with Heng Li (I was working on SOLiD R&D). Any development emails were between Heng and our team, we never spoke with Durbin.

first author on a paper like this indicates the most significant contributions https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/25/14/1754/2...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com