Hacker News: evolarjun

New comment by evolarjun in "How to survive boiling water"

evolarjun — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:22:27 +0000

Loops are good for streaking. It's hard to get even coverage with a loop, so loops would make it hard to get accurate CFU/ml counts. Loops are more likely to get you single colonies even if you're inoculating from a high density culture, so loops are usually used when picking single colonies is the goal. Sterilized cheap flat toothpicks work pretty well for streaking too.

New comment by evolarjun in "Classification of amino acids"

evolarjun — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:10:37 +0000

I'm a geneticist, so it's nice to see, but it doesn't seem to belong on HN to me either. Maybe because someone thinks this information should influence their use of the hot-new pseudoscience cureall - "peptides"?

New comment by evolarjun in "Show HN: Smart email filters to unfuck your email"

evolarjun — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 14:55:41 +0000

The page says "open source", but I don't see links to the source anywhere so I can see what filters installing this would add. I'm sure it's fine, but I wouldn't add a set of email filters without knowing what they were first.

New comment by evolarjun in "Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?"

evolarjun — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 20:00:04 +0000

In my field (bio) it's fairly common not to publish code, but it's becoming more common. Biologist's code is generally crappy and I think everyone understands that. The better developers are often valued for producing tools that are reliable and people can use and get lots of attention and citations for their tool papers.

The mathematicians and computer scientists I've worked with generally wrote more complicated code, but from a bugginess and maintainability standpoint I'm not sure it was any better. I had a mentor with an applied math degree who was extremely fond of one and two character variable names.

Just publish it. Unless your paper is a _BIG_DEAL_ barely anybody is going to look at it, and some people (hopefully the right people) will respect you for showing your work. I think I'm one of the few reviewers that actually try to run and maybe glance at the code for papers I review. In the papers I've reviewed I've never seen a comment that indicated any of the other reviewers even looked at it.