davi

I'm swinging for the fences, no point in doing otherwise; this is my shot.

If anybody is curious: http://www.hhmi.org/research/fellows/bock.html

Browse big data: http://openconnectomeproject.org/catmaid/?pid=4&zp=0&...

Papers: http://reid.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Bock-Lee-etal-Reid-2011-Natu..., http://reid.med.harvard.edu/pdf/Bock-Lee-etal-Reid-2011-Natu...

And (last but not least) I am hiring: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2504657

Agreed it's distancing language but my guess is that he doesn't want to undercut Ballmer's authority.

I'm hiring a software developer for my group at Janelia Farm Research Campus, in Ashburn, VA. The goal will be to develop workflow for extracting wiring diagrams of neuronal circuits from large-scale serial electron microscopy of brain tissue (10 TB+ image volumes). You can read about what I'm doing at http://www.hhmi.org/research/fellows/bock.html, and browse data at http://bit.ly/ga3Cfk. A detailed writeup of the approach was published last month in an article at Nature.

I think the ideal candidate could come from a variety of backgrounds -- someone who had previously written or contributed significantly to the development of a game engine could be good, for example. Looking for strong quantitative chops, creativity, and a willingness to do some plumbing in order to make an elegant solution.

Lots of other good suggestions in this thread but I don't see this one.

I hope you can turn it around, I've gotten a lot of value from this site.

I think the ideal candidate could come from a variety of backgrounds -- someone who had previously written or contributed significantly to the development of a game engine could be good, for example. Looking for strong quantitative chops, creativity, and a willingness to do some plumbing in order to make an elegant solution.

and S/N for jokes is frequently low

and jokes are frequently divisive

and lots of people will give a quick upvote to something that gives them a reward for reading (i.e. makes them laugh)

and evaporative cooling

and yadda yadda yadda

- interactive refinement of results as I type

- ability to restrict results to only papers that have been commented upon

- ability to restrict visibility of my comments to friends/colleagues

- ability to get notified if a particular abstract gets a threshold number of comments

As it stands, this is not a minimum viable product I will return to (though perhaps it would be if everyone else in my field used it). Nice try though, hopefully it will improve with iteration.

This brings to mind Fred Wilson's recent call for content shifting tools (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/01/content-shifting.html, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2085455).

I particularly agree with the ending:

    Oh you’re saying I’m a dreamer, and that simply never 
    happens? Well what about those thousands of internet 
    start-up companies? They waste their time as well, trying 
    to become another Facebook or another Google. Yet they 
    still do it, because it’s their dream to pursue.

    And so is academic career ours.

Anyway, enough HN procrastination, I need to practice my talk!

Why did the people working on Instant persevere despite their coworkers' reactions? Was it because they had a clear end-vision of awesomeness, and they knew they just hadn't implemented to that point yet? Or was it more intuitive, a sense that there was awesomeness somewhere in parameter space, and that they could get there with continued iteration?

(Can't resist pedantry in this case; my grandfather taught me what a googol and a googolplex are way back in the dark ages and I have some affection for the terms)

I wonder if the HN guidelines could use a line or two on criteria to use when deciding whether or not to submit a science story.

This gave me an image of a large mass of pack ice floating on polar seas -- it occupies a vast area, you don't want to mess with it, but when conditions turn, the whole thing can very quickly break apart and dissolve. (http://www.igsoc.org/annals/44/a44a057.pdf)

Here, look, patio11 just said the following: "Trust me on this: no. I used to have ABingo [yadda yadda]" [1]. Because it's patio11, I do trust him more, at least on this topic. And when he mentions ABingo, yeah, that's right, he has an A/B testing package he made for himself, that he opened sourced to people.

When someone I know is a maker talks about the domain in which they make things, they have more credibility to me. This is not celebrity worship (I have my own gig, thanks), it's just paying more attention to the people I find interesting.

Hiding names and points with a Chrome extension is a cool hack, but there's no way I'd ever want to use it myself.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996587