HN user

bede

469 karma

Computational biologist. Oxford, UK https://bede.im b@bede.im

Posts2
Comments86
View on HN

Thanks for publicising. I recently decided not to renew my Backblaze in favour of 'self hosting' encrypted backups outside the US. But I was horrified to learn that my git repos may not have been backed up, nor my Dropbox, whose subscription I also recently cancelled. Good riddance.

My experience using restic has been excellent so far, snapshots take 5 mins rather than 30 mins with backblaze's Mac client. I just hope I can trust it…

Probably obvious for many, but I didn't realize ACs don't transport any air into the room, but just moves it around

I had the same epiphany as you days after acquiring a CO2 monitor. Most people notice poor indoor air quality from proxies such as humidity and temperature. AC (without ventilation) eliminates these and tricks our senses very effectively, giving us cool and fresh feeling indoor spaces full of CO2 and devoid of oxygen.

There’s another distance limit at work here, and that is the speed of light. It takes milliseconds for the signal in your phone to reach the hotel above ground and be handed over to the mobile network.

It takes roughly 100us for light to travel 30km – Can you explain how the speed of light is relevant here?

Yes, when doing anything intensive with lots of sequences it generally makes sense to liberate them from FASTA as early as possible and index them somehow. But as an interchange format FASTA seems quite sticky. I find the pervasiveness of fastq.gz particularly unfortunate with Gzip being as slow as it is.

Took me a while to realize that Grace Blackwell refers to a person and not an Nvidia chip :)

I even confused myself about this while writing :-)

I also lost faith in certain scientists (and many more politicians) during the pandemic. But be wary of generalising about a such a large and interdisciplinary group of people. Voices amplified by the media (indeed like Robert Malone on Rogan's podcast) often grossly misrepresent scientific consensus.

Depth and breadth of electronic music catalogue and switching cost. Former is probably narrowing rapidly. What would you recommend? Building Apple's future streaming monopoly isn't particularly appealing. Small perhaps, but pausing a sub with explanation sends a clear signal.

As a scientist working in public health, this decision burned my faith in Spotify. They were taking down conspiracy theory podcasts daily while bankrolling Rogan to provide a platform with insane reach for cranks like Robert Malone. I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.

Thanks for this, I'm currently using both Duo to Microsoft authenticator, and the lack of firm reassurance about the backup mechanisms in each of these makes me uneasy. I'd frankly prefer a vault with a model similar to BitWarden's, where I can export my private keys.

The seatbelt is an excellent example since there are multiple mechanisms with varying observability contributing to its effectiveness. Even after discovering the dynamic locking behaviour, a naive yet inquisitive passenger remains blind to the pretensioning feature that is observable only during a collision.

I do editable installs every day with setup.py – what is your point? Poetry is a very interesting third party solution to these issues, but not a best practice. Best practices matter in packaging.