greg

Not sure how “cutting edge” meta genomics still is, although it’s still not widespread. I worked on a project to provide free metagenomic analysis that was launched in 2017 and still going: https://czid.org/

I always keep metagenomics in mind now for friends and family who have mystery ailments.

I used EdgeDB 5.0 for a side project, and I loved it. It reminded me of the fun of developing an app with Django or Rails, but serverless with Typescript+React.

Thanks for the report. I’ll look into it tomorrow.

Engineer on the team here. Some of the interesting challenges of doing ChatGPT for circuit design were:

1) How to communicate the circuit connections to ChatGPT in the text prompt. We ended up just using the standard netlist format. Apparently it knows about netlists from its training data. It also knows about datasheets.

2) How to get the needed accuracy and precision for questions like "calculate the resistance needed between component A and B". For that, we adopted the popular langchain framework to integrate specific "tools" into the AI for specific recognizable problems.

I worked on meta.org for a year starting in 2017 soon after it was acquired by CZI. There was no sign that I saw that the domain was ever destined for Facebook.

Uninteresting as it may be, I take the reason for the shut down at face value. From what I saw, meta.org never did as well as was expected, and other competitive services were doing better, notably Semantic Scholar.

To be sure, the exact timing probably had something to do with FB’s announcement, and the shared ownership of the two organizations probably helped the domain sale go smoothly.

What are you using to synchronize state across users?

This is really cool. My first impression is an open-source replacement for Segment.

I got the chance to play with Datafold and I would have loved to have had it when I was working for Facebook on data pipelines.

There is one new statement specifically referring to start-ups:

"Second, pursuant to the "significant public benefit" parole authority under section 6 212(d)(5) ofthe INA, USCIS should propose a program that will permit DHS to grant parole status, on a case-by-case basis, to inventors, researchers, and founders ofstart-up enterprises who may not yet qualify for a national interest waiver, but who have been awarded substantial U.S. investor financing or otherwise hold the promise of innovation and job creation through the development of new technologies or the pursuit of cutting- edge research. Parole in this type of circumstance would allow theseindividuals to temporarily pursue research and development ofpromising new ideas and businesses in the United States, rather than abroad. This regulation will include income and resource thresholds to ensure that individuals eligible for parole under this program will not be eligible for federal public benefits or premium tax credits under the Health Insurance Marketplace of the Affordable Care Act."

From the linked document http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_...:

Code samples?

Get this thing on The Daly Show / Colbert Report.

Michael makes the excellent point that a truly live, synchronous experience is very hard to do on the web. It would be valuable to study how people "sync up" in the real-world so they can all share the same experience at the same time.

I worked on Facebook ads for the past year so I know that some of the claims in this article are just wrong, but I think the average reader can figure that out for themselves.

> People go to Facebook to interact with their friends. It is fundamentally different from the ad platform that is Google.

All true, all what Facebook tells its advertisers. www.facebook.com/ads

> They spend hundreds or thousands or more on Facebook ads. At the end of the first run, they see bad ROIs.

Because advertising on Facebook is not typically about buying something, it is often difficult to measure direct ROI in $. In this, it is like the majority of all advertising.

> ...Facebook ads are worthless. Everyone I've talked to who has actually bought Facebook ads knows this

Have you talked to Zynga? They make Facebook games. It is speculated they are making $300M+ a year. You can see their ads all the time on Facebook. Either they are incredibly incompetent, or FB Ads delivers positive ROI for them. Search google for "zynga revenue estimate".

Don't see it anymore :(

If you look into the demographics of book sales you'll find this difference is born out at large. I'd guess that it has more to do with the typical subject of matter of fiction than its fact quotient. Women are more interested in inter-personal relationships. I'd predict that science fiction is relatively more popular among men.

This doesn't read so much like click fraud to me as hijacking a user's browser to convert organic traffic into affiliate credit. The fraudulent clicks are merely a cover story.

So what generalizations can we make from these plots? Instance and rule based methods learn better? Random forest seems to be especially reliable.

Very interesting topic. A few checks on current comments:

The metaphor of the brain as a carefully portioned soup of chemicals should be retired. The brain is a modularized information processor. While you can pour in more "happy" molecules (try morphine), this still causes a cascade of other effects. Prozac doesn't start working for two weeks -- figure that one out!

Drawing a line between clinical depression and healthy sadness is easier said than done. Almost no one gets depressed without triggering life events. The difference is in depth and recovery. In any case, we still don't have a good idea what is "healthy" about sadness.

It is really hard to judge the long-term benefits of depression. Evolution plays out over generations. Modern society is not what we are adapted for anyway. Maybe we should study siblings of suicides to see if they are somehow more biologically successful on average.

This could have been really funny. It wasn't.

Appears that some people agree with me here. Email me if you ever want to discuss more.

Google analytics is installed on something like 40% of all sizable websites. What somebody should do with the API is link up the traffic flowing between those sites. Then you could tell how much value one site is delivering to another. You could create an affiliate network overnight.

Is it just me or do most of these seem like premature optimization? I would rather use one command for filtering lines (grep) and another for filtering columns (awk) than try to do both at once.

This is not pseudo-science. It is article reporting on real science. Suppose X is linked to Y... suppose male aggression is linked to reproductive competition. Wouldn't you expect to see a graph like: http://media.economist.com/images/20081220/CXM534.gif http://media.economist.com/images/20081220/CXM534.gif ? How else would you explain it? What are your Y, Z and Theta? Science is all about fitting theories to facts. You can have your doubts but you can't just write it all off as "fun".

Paul argues testing will be pushed aside by measurement of actual performance. He may be right but existing methods of testing are amazingly unsophisticated and open to improvement. For instance:

Most work in the real world is done in teams, but schools tend to grade on average team output, which is vulnerable to free riders. Why not rotate individuals through teams and measure independent contributions with some simple statistics? That's what coaches do for sports like rowing.

Knowledge in the real world is rarely all or nothing. It matters how confident you are in what you know. Will you risk your company's future on an algorithm? Why not adjust test results by student's own ratings of their confidence in their answers? Then we could see who can really be trusted with their knowledge.

Great work on a hard problem... maybe you could adapt it to make follow-me interactive tutorials... like a hostess who directs you to a site's most pertinent features.

FYI, I open-sourced the split-testing framework discussed on hacker news a couple weeks ago... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=376331

http://github.com/gregdingle/genetify/wikis'

I'd love to hear anyone's feedback.

This is a great list. It had my blood boiling all over again from MySQL's "quirks".

I have an apartment in SF with a room opening up in January. Email is in my profile.

Hey guys, I wrote something called Genetify that is designed to be a general-purpose, unobtrusive way to optimize any kind of content on a web page for any arbitrary goal. Check it out at http://demo.genetify.com .

Or read John Resig's (JQuery) nice intro: http://ejohn.org/blog/genetic-ab-testing-with-javascript/

I really do want to make this into an open-source project for everyone. There a lot of cool optimizations you could do with a web page once a goal has been defined. If you are interested, could you post something at least indicating your support on John's blog? I think it will be the de facto place to discuss the open-sourcing of Genetify.

I wrote the software behind SnapAds. Before that I wrote an optimizer service for web pages that operates on HTML, CSS or Javascript. Check it out at http://demo.genetify.com .

Let me know if there is any interest -- I'd like to open-source the project.