maxander · HackerTrans

It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you ~arbitrarily cold, as long as you’re giving up enough fluids. I don’t know whether you freeze over or dry out first, but I’m sure someone at NASA has done the math.

maxander

작년discuss

This is the basic concept of my favorite computer game back in the 90s (!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(video_game_series...

maxander

작년discuss

The interesting thing about this blog post isn’t the point it makes (which was endlessly made about cafes in all blue-state U.S. cities in the 00s) but that it’s an Iranian writing in English, and thus for an Western audience, about Iranian culture.

What is going on with that? I don’t even dare to speculate. But something more interesting than bougie coffeeshops, certainly.

maxander

2년 전discuss

Sadly, I think the modern alternative for ncurses-based interfaces is javascript.

maxander

2년 전discuss

Yeah I was unclear there - I meant the other use of the & operator, 'foo & bar' where bar starts after foo completes. AFAIK, if you ran foo by itself, there's no way to make bar automatically run after foo completes.

maxander

2년 전discuss

My primary project the past couple weeks has been applying the AI interpretability technique from Anthropic's famous paper this past summer (you know, the Golden Gate Claude one) to single-cell RNA-seq data. What works on one huge, inscrutible vector space ought to work on another, right? In either case, a fun way to keep in practice, both for comp bio and deep learning.

My side-project, in essence, the bash '&' operator for cases where the first process is already running. It took me months of searching before I could believe that this doesn't already exist, but there you go. I gave in to feature creep, of course, so it's a bit more than that now (I made a ncurses-based dashboard? Why??) but someday soon I'll make it public.

maxander

2년 전discuss

Location: Boston, MA

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Unlikely

Technologies: Python, R, Javascript, AWS, GCS, Azure, SQL, pandas, numpy, scipy, Tensorflow, Keras, [Py]Torch, SQL, Nextflow, many others

Resume/CV: http://alexander.bio/resume_2024.pdf

Email: [email protected]

Data scientist and engineer with over a decade of experience centering around biological data analysis and pipeline development. I am equally at home discussing pathway enrichment analysis results from an RNA-seq dataset, as debugging the loss function in a deep learning model, or as architecting a multi-stage processing pipeline on any of the major cloud service providers.

maxander

2년 전discuss

SEEKING WORK | Boston, MA | Remote or on-site

I am Max Alexander, experienced data scientist and bioinformatics engineer, available for short- or long-term contracts. My background is primarily in data analysis and pipeline development for biological data (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics) and I also hold a Master's in artificial intelligence.

--

Email: [email protected]

Site: https://alexander.bio

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/w-max-alexander/

Github: https://github.com/maxalex

maxander

2년 전discuss

I don’t know whether this is a provocative or tedious thing to say, but the quintessential ‘enlightenmentware’ to have come out of the past several years is ChatGPT. Name anything that brings as much functionality with so simple an interface and so elegant a core!

(It’s simply a pity that we can’t install it locally or tinker with the internals. :) )

maxander

2년 전discuss

The avenue towards making this a viable, routine cure for HIV is by performing a “transplant” of the patient’s own immune stem cells that have been genetically modified to carry the anti-HIV genes. That avoids (if done right) the horrific autoimmune challenges you describe, but like everything else it comes with its own technical challenges that are still being worked out. (I think https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4935568/ is a good review of the whole idea.) To me (though I’m not an HIV researcher by any means!) this sounds like the most promising shot we have at regularly curing the disease.

maxander

3년 전discuss

I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.)

An app, though, not a website.

maxander

3년 전discuss

It’s not news to anyone that NATO could win a (conventional) war with Russia. The important result is that any sizable chunk of military force in Russia itself stands a good chance of it.

maxander

3년 전discuss

SEEKING WORK | Boston, MA or remote

Open to freelance/consulting work in bioinformatics. 8 years of experience in various areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, with particular expertise in the analysis of LC-MS proteomics and transcriptomics data. Well-versed in taking a problem in the language of biology and finding the appropriate computational solution.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/w-max-alexander/

Email: [email protected]

maxander

4년 전discuss

Is this true? Flat rectangles pack more efficiently than tubes. With mattresses, afaik, the big difference was vacuum-packing reducing overall volume, not shape.

maxander

4년 전discuss

It’s definitely not too old for anything, if you want to do it. Source: I transferred from local college to better college at 20 myself.

There will be plenty of 20-year-olds where you transfer, and no one will care what year you technically are. Don’t worry about that. College is not like high school.

As other commenters have noted, the big question is whether you want to spend the extra time in school (and spend the extra money for the extra time - college debt is serious business!) But you know your own situation best, and an extra couple years of classes can be spent profitably if you’re thoughtful about how you use them.

But, here’s another possibility to consider- finish undergrad at your current place, and then go for a Master’s degree at the more prestigious school? It’s an extra two years in either case, and then you have a whole postgraduate degree as well.

maxander

4년 전discuss

I recommend Matt Levine’s blog Money Stuff [0] for analysis of just how bizarre Musk’s twitter saga is relative to usual day-to-day corporate acquisitions. I also recommend his twitter thread just now breaking down his reaction to today’s news [1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...

[1] https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545519476707319808?s...

maxander

4년 전discuss

Respectfully, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s entirely reasonable to publish what you have now. If later you make further improvements, you can simply publish again.

maxander

4년 전discuss

A bit of black electrical tape, carefully applied, is pretty discreet on a typical black casing

maxander

4년 전discuss

There’s no sign that you’ll be able to turn it off in the car ahead of you, though.

maxander

4년 전discuss

Energy consumption would be limited by supply and energy dissipation, and energy dissipation (roughly speaking) depends on surface area and thermal conductivity. So, yes, for all devices made with a given shape and given materials, there is such an equation.

In theory, I guess, there’s also such an equation for the “upper limit” of heat dissipation for size, for a computer using the optimal shape and optimal materials. But since that probably concerns several-atom-thick devices made of diamond or something, that’s probably not practically useful anytime soon. :)

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