splatterdash

Using the same setup and I've been loving it so far (almost 3 years now).

The package manager is just so sweet.

Depends on where you look. Last year (this year, actually) I saw several openings looking for Rails experience I think.

Besides, the projects are pretty open about it. You can approach a project and come up with your own ideas. Not only this makes you more noticeable, it gives you the flexibility to do what you really want.

That is one possibility. But with subtle things like that, the trick is to come up with an experiment that either supports or falsifies them. Until such data exist, it remains a mere hypothesis.

There has been a lot of buzz in the (scientific) twitter/blogo-sphere regarding this. The main point of contention is essentialy the % of functional element ENCODE annotates. As it turns out, their criteria of denoting a DNA element as 'functional' is debatable (i.e. a DNA sequence with biochemical activity). These elements when deleted from the genome often has no visible phenotypic change to the organism (us), which is why the % they put is believed to be way too much.

Here's a recent excellent blog post on the issue, in readable form to the layman: http://selab.janelia.org/people/eddys/blog/?p=683

As someone who uses YouTube a lot to listen to music: thanks for this!

I have some comments + questions, though:

Comments:

1.The video feels too small for such a large screen estate. Perhaps add an option to resize it? Or relocate it to the bottom of the screen or top of the playlist, instead of using the corner..

2. You should add an option to directly copy-paste the URL. As I see it now, I can't even highlight it.

EDIT: 3. How do you determine which video gets played? Sometimes the video I want is not the one as the top result, but #4 or even #5. Maybe add an option to use the next video in the search results?

Questions:

1. How did you create it? What do you use for the frontend and backend? Are you planning to release the code somehow? (just curious)

Again, thanks :)! It feels very slick and I like the color scheme.

Almost every part of the human body directly exposed to the environment is covered with microbes: the skin, the gut lining, your mouth, your nasal passage, etc. Only a small part isn't (as I recall your eyes are sterile). I don't have proper citation for this, but AFAIK if you disrupt the microbial balance on these surfaces it might result in health-related problems. So in a way, yes, we need them to live healthy.

Other parts have to be kept sterile. Your brain, your heart, your lymph nodes, are some examples. When these parts gets infected, you get sick.

On another note, microbes are fantastic creatures. The earth is covered in them and they've been around much longer than us. They can live off a myriad of different substances and even without the sun.

Yay microbes :p!

My initial impression is it's a little confusing.

Getting to the starred lists and to the watched lists require a considerably different navigation. (e.g. why is there a "Stars" tab beside the "Issues" tab but no "Watch" tabs? Why are my own repos starred instead of watched?)

I hope they'll make it easier.

Ah true, I take back that part of my argument then. Maybe Google does owe him something.

I still think he was being childish and over the top, though.

I feel 'meh'. I just fixed mine, and that's it. People shouldn't rely on Facebook for making new connections anyway. And my friends who are there know how to contact me better than to rely on Facebook only.

I mean, do people seriously expect these things not to happen? We don't have absolute control over these things. These companies only give us the illusion of control so we can make them some cash, at the end of the day.

The default was set to the first option, which (as much as I hate to say it), still gives his argument some grounds. Google should've set it as opt-in instead of opt-out.

But, man, talk about being over the top. It's Google's products that he's using for free. They don't owe anything to him. His rant does more damage to his character than to Google's profits, IMO.

EDIT: It goes without saying that I prefer Will Wheaton's post much more than Scoble's. And he's not 'freaking out' as Scoble claims.

How much are internships usually paid in the US? For some parts of the world (developing, especially) the GSoC stipend is ridiculously high.

Ah true. I meant explicit version control (e.g. you can tag/name a version and go back to it later).

How does this stack up against Google Docs or other similar collaborative document websites/apps? The only obvious difference I see is versioning support, but I doubt versioning works well with regular documents.

> I'm honestly not trying to be mean,

Hey, no problem :), I'm just here for the discussion.

> but I'm not sure you understand human psychology in this area. Humans are very consistently swayed by looks over intrinsic value.

I do understand that looks matter to a degree. Some website redesigns does make them much more appealing. But I feel like at best the effects are only temporary. It doesn't take long before the user gets bored and thinks about how ugly it looks, unless the redesign comes with added functionality/feature (which I fail to find in this case).

Moreover, I mentioned earlier that it doesn't seem beneficial for Bing that its redesign is a reminder of its competitor. So I still find their decision puzzling.

That seems plausible only if the search quality differs by a small margin. I haven't been using Bing extensively, but I remember trying some queries a while ago and Google was showing better results. Is this still the case now or have they improved considerably?

Forgive me for being too blatant, but I'm puzzled by their reason of doing this. Do people really switch search engines because of the UI? I understand that some people might prefer the less cluttered version, but when it comes down to it, the way it looks is secondary to its primary function: giving you good results. After a while, the look becomes less important.

I don't think it also serves their interest well, too, when their UI is a reminder of their competitor (the retro look of their competitor, to be precise). Google succeeded with a minimalistic UI because it made them look different from the rest and no one did it before. When Bing does it now, it makes them look like Google.

I agree with you and I just wanted to add something.

I'm purely speculating, but I think they are appealing to the wider audience because of the 'cool' factor. They've been successful because of the way Apple positions the device. It's just a cool toy made by a company with a cult following. You use it to impress your friends, your coworkers, and probably because you want everyone else to think you're a geek that's into the latest tech. In short, it's a status symbol.

It doesn't offer anything new in terms of functionality. Everything you want to do in an iPad, you can also do with a modern laptop. Ok, laptops can't do touch screens, but I'll argue that it's not really novel functionality. In fact, as Brydge's Kickstarter campaign has shown, it comes with reduced functionality.

Let me stress that I'm not belittling the device. I'm sure it also has a lot of great technological feats packed into it. Only that it's secondary to the social/marketing factor.

There's actually a slew of Python blogging engines out there. I was using Blogofile myself, until I decided to write my own out of desire to use Jinja2 and to have more flexibility. It's available here: http://github.com/bow/volt

It's still pretty new, I haven't got around to writing a proper documentation. But if you're curious, you can try the latest development version :).

Congratulations :)! The 'address a need' part is spot-on. I think the greatest feeling of all is knowing that somewhere out there, someone's life has just been made easier because of what you did.

Wouldn't that also requires access to industrial-grade chemicals & machines?

E.g. you need to purify your amino acids or carbs, and test the purity, check if any dangerous by-products are present, etc.

The DIY biotech movement has been going on for some time now. People are drawing parallels between the movement and the early days of the tech scene, predicting DIY bio will be as big and influential as today's DIY tech scene.

While I want to be optimistic about that, the comment from Declan Soden in the article seems pretty spot on.

Putting together genes into plasmids and bacteria is just the beginning. The main goal is to endow some organisms with new useful traits. The problem is, testing the trait becomes increasingly difficult for DIY biologists because it is rarely as easy as putting the genes together. How do you test if your bacteria has made the desired anticancer compound? You need to chemically analyze your product, and ultimately you need to try it on people.

This is different compared to software. Open source software can become what it is today, because testing the software itself is relatively easy. Want to write a new browser? Just use it yourself. How about a new media player? Use it to play your videos and see how it goes.

The course seems to be online. Here's the page containing video links: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/spring12/lectures/

Call me a skeptic, but I don't think those simulations can ever replace real-life situations.

The human body is bewilderingly complex that it it still a subject of thousands of researches worldwide. How can you simulate something you don't completely understand?

Plus, in the case of medicine, one needs to know also how to interact with a patient. Is he/she telling the truth about his/her symptoms? Is there something the person's not telling that might affect your diagnosis? What about educating the patient about the disease?

These are real day-to-day situations that can never be simulated.

I think this will highlight differences among fields of education (?).

Programming is a very pragmatic field. Your ability to code is at its core judged by whether you can program something that works. Don't have a formal education? Whip up several interesting programs / websites on your own, and less people will care about your degree. In addition to that, it's becoming increasingly easy to learn the subject on your own.

Not many other fields are like that. Medicine for example. Sure, you can learn the names of the bones in your body, understand the use cases of different drugs in the market, but can you diagnose a patient? To learn that, you need access to training in real hospitals which are only given to students enrolled offline.

Same thing with biochemistry (needs access to labs and direct mentorship), law (access to courtrooms? or certification from proper boards). Many of these other disciplines are based on initial trust. It takes time for a biochemist or a lawyer until their work results in something. Having an actual (offline) degree places some kind of 'proxy' for the work result, until they actually appear.

I'm not that certain that they can be replaced / revolutionized by online classes. I'm all for revolutionizing education, but I don't think this new approach is able to revolutionize all fields of education.

Well, you can check for 3 AND 5 first (or check for 15 altogether). This is if you have two subsequent checks for 3 and for 5.

FTA:"...it is based on Arch Linux, which is probably the least friendly Linux around..."

With a remark like that, I was hoping that the author provide the raw scores. Even so, on what grounds is Arch Linux not friendly? Their wiki is very easy to follow and understand for a new user. Not to mention their forum.

This was written in 2008. Have we got a confirmation whether it's real/fake?