jonrimmer

The article mentions performing myriad assays as a rate-limiting step in drug discovery. My employer https://www.synthace.com is trying to accelerate this process through software. We’ve created a platform to easily program liquid handling robots to perform complex protocols, and to do so using a Design-of-Experiments[1] approach to investigate multiple factors simultaneously. It’s early days for this approach but we’ve already had pharma customers using it to significantly accelerate their drug discovery process.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments

I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.

He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].

In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.

He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker.js [2] https://opencollective.com/fakerjs/expenses/3972

I don't think your analogy is valid.

It's more akin to Best Buy telling me I need to visit the house of every customer who bought my widget and slightly break it, otherwise they'll stop selling said widget. And if I try to tell my customer "Best Buy is making me do this", that's "irrelevant".

There is a separate, co-operative effort by a consortium of manufacturers to improve and mass produce an existing ventilator design.

But with a project of this importance, while it makes sense to pool resources, you can't realistically have every company and every engineer co-operating on the same project. So it also makes sense to have several, independent efforts running in parallel.

Sadly latency makes this almost impossible. However, the guy who made Winamp came up with an interesting solution to this: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

The idea is, everyone's playing is delayed by one measure, so they are playing along with people from the past, while everyone else is playing along with a past version of them. Kind of crazy.

The price advantages of globalised supply chains vs. the relative rarity of an event like this means that, during normal periods, firms using them will enjoy a significant advantage over those doing the "right" thing and market forces will weed out the latter. So I don't expect management to be taking a lead on this.

This doesn't mean that many of those who were younger and without pre-existing illnesses weren't in a serious condition and in danger of dying, just that, with the help of intensive care, they were able to survive.

If and when heath services become completely overwhelmed and there are no longer enough hospital bed/ventilators/doctors and nurses to provide the assistance they need, then we'll likely see a lot of younger and otherwise healthy people start to die as well.

Tracking and testing doesn't destroy economic activity. Complete lock-downs, as we're seeing in China, Italy, Spain and soon elsewhere do. But it does let you get a grip on the situation when you have millions infected.

However you're right that you can't maintain that long term, so what's the off-ramp? South Korea has proved you can do mass testing and tracking which, combined with voluntary and state-enforced control of movement, lets you keep infections at a low level. What I'm contending is that, if the situation is bad enough, all countries that can will implement similar controls, and those controls will a permanent situation, not a temporary one. People will still be able to go to work, just not if they're potentially sick or infectious.

In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the streets.

If you run your CSS files through Autoprefixer[1], it's possible to use the latest syntax, and have it automatically converted to all necessary older ones.

[1] https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer

To be clear, the caniuse.com stats are sourced from StatCounter Global Stats[1], not from the site itself, so they should be fairly reliable, albeit averaged across the world. Obviously, nothing beats measuring for your own site and audience.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/

Depends on where you source your browser usage statistics, but IE9's share is smaller than IE8's. For example, caniuse.com[1] has IE8 on 3.18%, and IE9 on 2.13%. Later versions of IE (and Windows) are better at auto-updating, and people using them seem to be more willing to upgrade.

I'm lucky enough to work for a company with a last-2-versions support policy for IE, meaning IE10 and 11 are all I have to worry about. I can't understate how much nicer it makes web development. So much of the bad reputation of web technologies stems from wrestling bugs in old versions of IE and the lack of proper layout capabilities in CSS.

[1] http://caniuse.com/#search=flex

Well, I added a reminder into my Google Calendar. Whatever happens in AI, if I make it to 1/1/2045 I'll be freaked out at midnight by a long-forgotten "Future Arrives" notification popping up in my ocular implant or whatever.

Does Nadella really deserve credit for Azure though, or Scott Guthrie? Azure was a joke until Guthrie took over, even MS employees couldn't figure out how to use it, and he turned it around in a matter of months.

The Taipei metro began operating in 1996, whereas the London Underground began operating in 1863. You can't really compare the two. The newest parts of the Underground, such as the Jubilee Line Extension that opened in 1999 are very clean, modern and spacious, but it's impossible to retroactively improve the rest of the network to the same standards while it's being constantly used by millions of people every day.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. This announcement is specifically about the deep-level lines. Read the details: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/campaign/new-tube-for-london

The new trains, platform-edge doors, and air-cooling are being introduced for the Central, Bakerloo, Waterloo & City, and Piccadilly lines. The tunnels and trains will still be small, there's not much that can be done about that, but they will be cooler, safer and hopefully a little less cramped, due to the extra capacity provided by walk-through carriages.

If it mutates and becomes airborne, it might be. That's why containment is so important, even if it doesn't seem so threatening in its current form. Viruses constantly mutate, and every extra person they infect gives them a million more opportunities to do so. All it takes is one of those mutations to make the virus airborne, and we're in big trouble.

The government being a lucrative market isn't the same as single mothers being a lucrative market.

And yes, you can make money from an underclass by exploiting people's weaknesses for sugar, fast food, gambling, alcohol, drugs etc. But then you're not solving their problems, you're adding to them.

So who is the target audience? How many web designers are capable of writing the HTML and CSS necessary to create animated tabs, accordions and overlays, but can't figure out the few lines of JavaScript/jQuery necessary to toggle classes on elements? I've never met a single person who would fit that description.

No, I'll repeat what I already said: You don't regulate what people can eat, you regulate what food companies can sell. You don't allow them to sell dangerous food. That isn't draconian statism, it's sensible regulation.

Regulation is the reason you can buy food and feel safe that it won't poison you. It's why you can buy a house and feel safe that the ceiling won't collapse on top of you. It's why you can visit a cinema and feel safe that there are enough fire exits and alarms and a sensible evacuation plan.

All of these regulations aren't in place just because officious bureaucrats wanted to clog up the smooth workings of a free, capitalist society, they exist because historically, when they weren't, people died. For proof, go and read about some of the nightclub and theatre fires that happened a hundred years ago, in which hundreds of people burned to death.

When there's a immediate link between malfeasance and harm, it's easy to see that the government should step in, introducing building codes and hygiene standards to ensure it can't happen again. When the harm is delayed, the link feels more tenuous, even if it's really not. Companies that pollute are contributing to potentially catastrophic disruption of the biosphere and global warming, but it doesn't happen overnight, so people treat it as less wrong than building a nightclub with no fire exits. It isn't.

Likewise, food companies who aggressively promote nutritionally dangerous foodstuffs cereals at children, while promoting them as healthy, are doing harm. They're doing it knowingly, and they're paying to distort scientific and political processes in order to keep doing it.

It's easy to trumpet individual choice as all important, but reality is not an individualist pipe dream. The average person is not well informed about dietary science and never will be, and many children cannot make a choice at all, let alone an informed one. In the face of the wealth and marketing power of large food companies, people have no chance on their own, and they levels of obesity in modern societies are clear proof of that.

Food regulation isn't about the government telling people what they can eat. It's about the government telling food companies that they can't produce food that's dangerous, in the long term as well as the short term. Just like the government tells companies they can't produce cars that fly apart on the highway, or buildings that fall down in a strong wind.

Regulation of dangerous business practices is exactly what government should be doing it. It's the reason why all the other nonsense governments do is worth putting up with. It protects people from irresponsible companies, and it protects responsible companies from being undercut by irresponsible companies.

Um, the "people writing HTML" have done a lot of work to prevent XSS, by introducing Content-Security-Policy and other HTTP headers: http://ibuildings.nl/blog/2013/03/4-http-security-headers-yo...

The main problem is backwards compatibility, as older browsers don't support them, but the idea that people have their head in the sand re. XSS is complete nonsense.

Can't believe they didn't call this "MITcoin".

People have complained in the past[1] and only received the same vague BS that the blocking notice gives. The Daily Mail ran an attack piece when BBC Future launched[2], but it didn't prompt them to change anything. Whether due to incompetence or apathy, BBC Worldwide seem incapable or unwilling to improve their communications.

[1] http://halfblog.net/2013/01/16/why-is-this-bbc-website-not-a... [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208251/Global-BBC-w...

What's idiotic is that nowhere do they actually explain that's the reason they block access, instead they just give a meaningless non-answer about it being a commercial venture, ignoring the fact that plenty of other BBC Worldwide run commercial things, such as http://www.bbcshop.com/, are available in the UK.

All it would take is a slightly more apologetic page that spells out the actual legal reasons they can't make the content available, and people would probably get a lot less annoyed. Instead, every time a link is posted to BBC Future, people have the same reaction and ask the same questions. And if you search, you'll find plenty of blog posts and articles with people complaining and trying to figure out why the content is blocked in the UK, with absolutely no effort on the part of BBC Worldwide to clear things up.

It really seems to be a case of total incompetence on behalf of BBC Worldwide. The licence fee is already controversial, and stuff like this only serves to toxify their brand and give ammunition to their enemies. It's baffling.

If "games people" are irritated, then it's only because they are so short-sighted that games are all they can think about. The evolution of Oculus' position is a reflection of the fact that VR is poised to be an incredibly important technology in every field, not just games.

Games will still be a hugely important part of VR, just like they're a hugely important part of computing in general, but it isn't a zero-sum game: The application of computers to non-gaming tasks drives improvements that feed back into gaming, and vice versa. Imagine if computers had only ever been used for games, and not for science, business, communication, etc. Do you think you would have anything like the kinds of games we have now? We wouldn't. We probably wouldn't have progressed much past Pong.

Hell, the entire resurgence of interest in VR was only made possible by technology developed for mobile phones, which weren't intended as a gaming platform, and whose "casual" games are generally viewed with disdain by hardcore gamers. Yet without this non-gaming platform, VR would still be in the doldrums.

And if you think Sony are going to forgo an opportunity to make billions in profit from general-purpose VR in order to please "games people", then you're either crazy or extremely susceptible to marketing.

Why do you think all these silicon valley CEOs are throwing their weight behind schemes to get kids and adults learning how to code? It isn't because they really believe there's some social or personal value in being able to program, it's because they want to flood the job market with developers and so crash wages. What's sad is that many programmers are actually buying it, and volunteering their time to help support and evangelize these schemes.

"Men tend to organise the way they fuck - one big rush and then that "wham, slam, thank you maam", as it were. Women should be building our movement the way we make love - gradually, with sustained involvement, limitless endurance - and of course, multiple orgasms."

I reached this bit and gave up.

This is also wrapped up with the notion of cargo-culting, which is common in tech. If you examine a successful company or team to try and work out why they're successful, you tend to focus on the most obvious factors: Their structure (or lack of it) and the tools and processes they use. But there is no way to know which if any of these factors are key to their success, or incidental, and getting a different team to use the same structure, or to apply the same tools and processes may produce a very different result.

Discussions about software development methodologies, programming languages and frameworks often fall into this trap. A developer will advocate a particular approach based on anecdotal experience where it has been effective for a different company or team. A mass of these anecdotes, strongly influenced by survivor bias, becomes the macro dev culture in which different ideological "movements" rise and fall. But there's very little attempt to thoroughly and scientifically research the effect of varying factors independent of others with the mainstream.

Because writing controllers, services, directives, etc. with various dependencies is something you do all the time, and the DI reflection lets you do so in a quicker, friendlier, and non-duplicated way, whereas setting up the ng-min step is something you only have to do once, then you can forget about it.

You already need to set up a build pipeline to get your minification, concatenation, etc. in the first place. It's hardly a terrible burden to have to stick an ng-min step in there as well. It seems like you're trying to justify an instinctive distaste for this feature by exaggerating how problematic it is, when in reality it isn't problematic at all.