chrisamiller

So you're not wrong, but my point is that humans are awful drivers, prone to distraction and fatal crashes. (32,719 in 2013 alone). If anything else (terrorists, sharks, aliens) were causing 30k deaths a year, we'd wouldn't be blithely accepting it as the status quo and acting fearful of measures that could dramatically ameliorate the problem.

Payback time on the 10kWh battery would be around 26 years, and on the 7kWh battery would be 33 years.

So, at least in the midwest, I think you'd have to be either using a ton of peak energy or coupling the battery pack with solar to make the investment worth it.

I wonder if the kids these days are using snapchat to complain about how we're all dinosaurs. :)

There are several flaws in your argument: 1) There is no known polymerase that has a fidelity of 100%. There will always be some number of replication errors when DNA is synthesized. 2) There are lots of mutagens in the environment. UV light, mutagenic chemicals, hell, even radioactive decay of mostly-stable elements will occasionally hit a base and cause a mutation.

So, no, there is certainly no species that meets your criteria for non-evolving.

Things may look messy in science, and they often are, but I'm optimistic about the future.

There's lots of room for improvement in the code, but it's in the same vein as what this guy did and helped us quite a bit.

The vast majority of these lurkers originally hit the ask.metafilter site by searching for a specific question and landing on a thread where a MeFi member has asked the same thing. Those users were the ones being targeted by ads. So yes, it's pretty easy for a google algorithm change to reduce traffic by that much.

They aren't optimizing the site for search traffic or for growth. They're optimizing it for fantastic discussion and community. I realize that's a foreign concept here on HN, where growth and monetization are king, but I believe it's why Metafilter has remained a popular and influential site for over 15 years. (That's like 100 in internet-years...)

Their goal is not to optimize for Google, it's to optimize for users on the site. (This is one of the reasons that makes metafilter such a special community)

While I won't argue that R is an awful name for a programming language, it's a legitimate tag: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r

On the other end of the scale are things like automobile accidents, where incidence peaks in teenage years and decreases thereafter (with a possible second peak as vision and reflexes deteriorate in the elderly). My point is that neither of these fit the neat curve drawn by the author. When everything is lumped together, the curve fits, but trying to draw broad conclusions about mechanisms from that kind of aggregate data is foolish.

While I agree that these plots are interesting, it's dangerous to read too much into these without thinking more deeply about the vast number of ways that there are to die, many of which will have strikingly different age distributions.

(see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412...)

If your immune system works fine, there's less to worry about. The most urgent danger is to the very young, old, or immunocompromised because of illness or therapy. (That said, MRSA infections do happen in otherwise healthy people from time to time)

If you've been avoiding meat raised with antibiotics, you're part of the solution, because you're pushing the market away from the cheap short-term fix (antibiotics) towards more sustainable solutions without the societal consequences.

- This guy clearly has a limited understanding of the field. This quote is laughable: "There are only two computationally difficult problems in bioinformatics, sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction."

- As a bioinformatician, I feel sorry for this guy. Just like any other field, there are shitty places to work. If I was stuck in a lab where a demanding PI with no computer skills kept throwing the results of poorly designed experiments at me and asking for miracles, I'd be a little bitter too.

- Just like any other field, there are also lots of places that are great places to work and are churning out some pretty goddamn amazing code and science. I'm working in cancer genomics, and we've already done work where the results of our bioinformatic analyses have saved people's lives. Here's one high-profile example that got a lot of good press. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing-...)

- I'm in the field of bioinformatics to improve human health and understand deep biological questions. I care about reproducibility and accuracy in my code, but 90% of the time, I could give a rat's ass about performance. I'm trying to find the answer to a question, and if I can get that answer in a reasonable amount of time, then the code is good enough. This is especially true when you consider that 3/4 of the things I do are one-off analyses with code that will never be used again. (largely because 3/4 of experiments fail - science is messy and hard like that). If given a choice between dicking around for two weeks to make my code perfect, or cranking out something that works in 2 hours, I'll pretty much always choose the latter. ("Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." --Donald Knuth)

- That said, when we do come up with some useful and widely applicable code, we do our best to optimize it, put it into pipelines with robust testing, and open-source it, so that the community can use it. If his lab never did that, they're rapidly falling behind the rest of the field.

- As for his assertion that bad code and obscure file formats are job security through obscurity, I'm going to call bullshit. For many years, the field lacked people with real CS training, so you got a lot of biologists reading a perl book in their spare time and hacking together some ugly, but functional solutions. Sure, in some ways that was less than optimal, but hell, it got us the human genome. The field is beginning to mature, and you're starting to see better code and standard formats as more computationally-savvy people move in. No one will argue that things couldn't be improved, but attributing it to unethical behavior or malice is just ridiculous.

tl;dr: Bitter guy with some kind of bone to pick doesn't really understand or accurately depict the state of the field.

This is indeed the case for most mutations that we're finding in cancer genomes. (That's the bad news).

The good news is that many cancers do have "druggable" genes that are altered, and even though the cells have many mutations, attacking just the druggable gene is often enough to prolong life and improve outcomes.

The other good news is that even though many different genes can be mutated, there are a much smaller number of pathways that are altered. (those for cell cycle control, apoptosis, etc). By targeting key points in those pathways, one drug may be effective against dozens of different mutations.

The other product that 23andMe is starting to offer is exome sequencing, where they analyze just the coding regions of the genome (around 1% of the total content). This sort of analysis can be enormously useful and can provide much information, but will miss variations in non-coding regions. It also has limited ability to detect structural variations, where a chunk of DNA gets moved around, deleted, or duplicated.

What they did here was whole genome analysis, coupled with sequencing the RNA products of gene expression. This turned out to be enormously important, because the main driver of his cancer turned out to be over-expression of a gene.