Viewing profile — bionerd

This is exactly why I find the field of epigenetics[1] absolutely fascinating -- we are so much more than just the sum of our genes. Everything in our lives matters: our childhood,…

If you’re looking specifically for an alternative to Go or chess then be sure to have a look at a list of the so-called abstract board games (Go and chess belong to this category t…

I'll watch this, thanks. Well, I have to admit that, after spending the last three years as a basically full-time intern in our lab, I have a bit of an idea how science is quite br…

My story is very similar. After high school I went to study computer science in college. Then, just before I got my bachelor's degree, I decided to apply to a programme in molecula…

> The early pioneers in genetics were all consummate hackers in the truest sense. For much of the work they were doing, the had very little information about the underlying process…

> It should be for the really "broken" people who are a danger to everyone no matter where they are. Gacy, Dalmer, etc. Yeah, but it's not. There are plenty of terrifying cases of …

> China should abolish the death penalty. Every country should, not only China. A murder is still a murder, no matter where and why it's been committed.

For anyone who hadn't read it yet, there is a relevant very short story by Isaac Asimov called Hell-Fire: http://www.tep-online.info/short/hell.htm “That these bombs are man’s deat…

Here’s a link to the original research article: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/41/16384.full

For a very long time I've regarded Racket as a purely educational Scheme dialect not particularly useful for real work. It was only a few months ago that I actually bothered to loo…

I know it's probably totally unnecessary but still, here's a link to the free download page of the book [1]. Together with Modern Perl (also free for download [2]) this book comple…

So many awesome things to try out and so little time... I'm really excited to see such great ideas of the past being resurrected like that. Things like Lisp machines and Smalltalk …

Not as impressive? Come on. Like we were all doing things like this on our backyards in 1995. Given historical context this is as much as impressive as what SpaceX are doing right …

This is incredible. Yes, it would be insanely cool to live in 2500s with all that privately affordable faster-than-light travel and everything but still... it's very exciting to se…

This is great news but will it really force certain agencies and powerful circles to stop what they've been doing all this time in secret? And if not, what could?

Well, the DNA itself probably wouldn't be enough because it doesn't really encode an algorithm or recipe describing how a (multicellular in this context) living organism is constru…

> Most life we eventually discover might be more exciting to entomologists. You say it like it wouldn't be fascinating just by itself. About 70% of Earth's surface is covered by wa…

I don't think it's going to explode. And I don't think it needs to. Even after decades there are still people who use Lisp-like languages and who find them fascinating and just rig…

> "But we all know essentially how this will end: Prism isn't going away and Edward Snowden's fate is grim." > "Stories on HN don't have to be about hacking [...] but they do have …

I don't know if it's just because I'm a biologist but I find this absolutely disgusting. Every living thing is valuable no matter how it looks or how "lowly" it is, even goddamn co…

You can't take seriously any kind of propaganda no matter what political extreme it comes from.