Hacker News Reader

gpurkinson Chef, Puppet, Salt, Ansible. What do you use for server setup and deployment?

"oh no I have so many amazing tools to choose from?", I use puppet at the moment.

Any of them will make your deploy/config life great.

gpurkinson Smart Air

Nice! I had read something similar for a wood workshop here: http://woodgears.ca/dust/air_cleaner.html

Seems to be quite effective.

Also, if you're into woodworking, woodgears is probably one of the best, if not the best on the net.

gpurkinson Two dozen mathematicians wrote a 600 page book in 6 months on GitHub

https://banyan.co/ collaboration for scientists on OSX

gpurkinson Layoffs at EA Today

A good version exists here: http://www.planetmule.com/

gpurkinson If you've hired a PR agency, make sure to get the most bang for your buck

http://prserve.com is quite good.

gpurkinson How to run an Arduino clone on a 9V battery for weeks or even months

Sparkfun also has an exceptional write up on how to get into the microamp ballpark: http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/309

The article's try and see approach is very detailed and a great read for anyone looking to get into prototyping with AVR for battery based projects.

gpurkinson Dell’s bold plan to reinvent itself: A USB-sized PC

Thin clients ride again. How much will Dell charge to run your instances?

gpurkinson iPad mini

Use an open format and learn to love the bomb?

Districts probably aren't going to care, as they are looking for a cheaper way to stay current. I recognize the prices are not as good as they should be, but realize the logistics are removed from the situation. The monster of having to manage all those books goes away with a keypress, but lands them squarely on a treadmill with the publishers controlling the dial.

Open school books? Maybe teachers will collaborate and make their own material? There's a lot of room in there...

gpurkinson 200 TB of 1000 genomes data on Amazon S3 as a public dataset

The point is to look at genomic variations across the entirety of the human genome, not so much to match genomic variation to phenotype. What you're saying makes sense, but I think that is more a next step.

gpurkinson 200 TB of 1000 genomes data on Amazon S3 as a public dataset

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Genomes_Project

Here's the project explanation, but the data itself is 1000 complete (hopefully!) genome sequences. The hope is to find the variants, be it single nucleotide differences, copy number difference, etc. Where I work we use it to help figure out SNP (single nucleotide polymorphisms) to see if something we sequenced is a mutation or just a variant with no effect.

gpurkinson 200 TB of 1000 genomes data on Amazon S3 as a public dataset

Depends, there are several sequencing technologies and they all have strengths/weaknesses. At my job, we use 454 sequencing from Roche and since it relies on PCR it has problems with tandem repeats and homopolymers that might not trip up other methods. (Sanger for example)

gpurkinson 200 TB of 1000 genomes data on Amazon S3 as a public dataset

The real reason for a lot of this is personalized medicine, or rather more specific medicine. A gene translocation or even a SNP may be able to differentiate cancer types and change the course of treatment.