Hacker News: iafiaf

New comment by iafiaf in "Some things just take time"

iafiaf — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:32:53 +0000

shouldnt it be the other way around?

New comment by iafiaf in "How to sequence your DNA for <$2k"

iafiaf — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:44:21 +0000

These guys didn't do their homework correctly. Keeping aside commercial vendors; their own garage setup for doomed to fail with their coverage (or lack thereof). Garbage in, garbage out.

New comment by iafiaf in "Pfeilstorch"

iafiaf — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 18:17:25 +0000

I "smell" a bias there. Keep your politics out please.

New comment by iafiaf in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)"

iafiaf — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 05:56:16 +0000

Seems useful, why isn't this more popular?

New comment by iafiaf in "Extreme poverty in India has dropped to negligible levels"

iafiaf — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 10:11:00 +0000

I would urge you to watch a statistical debunking of these so-called "global goodness" metrics. Sanjeev Sanyal does a good job of it [1],[2],[3] Multiple organization(s) that manage such indices are, turns out, funded by the same cabal who want to concoct a narrative. They are not unbiased.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lgf2WHstBY

[2] [PDF] https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Reversing-Ga...

[3] https://www.businesstoday.in/india/story/sanjeev-sanyal-blas...

New comment by iafiaf in "India cuts internet for 27M people amid search for fugitive"

iafiaf — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:38:55 +0000

The fugitive is the leader of the Khalistan-independance movement, eventho the majority lies in Pakistan. Yet, they want to secede from India. There are numerous reports he's terrorist being financed by Pakistan. I hope India adopts doesn't go easy on these terrorists.

New comment by iafiaf in "The Vindication of Ask Jeeves"

iafiaf — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 20:59:08 +0000

HotBot represent!

New comment by iafiaf in "Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)"

iafiaf — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 14:23:55 +0000

While we are at it, a small shout-out to PDF X-Change Viewer/Editor. Best part for me is that it works on Linux (via Wine) and Windows.

New comment by iafiaf in "Show HN: I made an early 2000s-inspired internet forum"

iafiaf — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 01:34:17 +0000

Didn't think I'd see EJ mentioned here. I distinctly recall planning and reading raiding strategies in there fur hours. I think there largest Onyxia thread was started by me. Glorious times.

New comment by iafiaf in "BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout"

iafiaf — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 15:15:34 +0000

I saw the video the day it came out. Its an OK video, but I question the timing in wake of the upcoming elections and Modi leading the G20. Typically I don't call out "ejection e manipulation" or "external interference", but I'm increasingly starting to suspect the intentions of the BBC (and other media)

The metrics you mention are not poor, but our data is poor. Furthermore, numerous research shows HDI and GDP are flawed (but legacy) metrics - this is exasperated by the poor quality data available in a chaotic country like India

New comment by iafiaf in "BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout"

iafiaf — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 14:04:42 +0000

There is a sampling bias at play right here in HN with the Modi-bashing comments. Indians, and India, is doing great overall. Modi's leadership has played a big role in this. Indians are (generally) emotionally people, and by no means is it an authoritarian state. In fact, we need wise leaders with vision to manage this population.

New comment by iafiaf in "Tell HN: Confluent laying off 8% of staff"

iafiaf — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 16:02:19 +0000

I am not joining this pity-party.

Companies hire tech workers to stifle their competition; whilst keeping their workers 'sedated' on fake projects (i.e. projects that are paraded as important, but the 'inner-circle' knows well its just to keep the nerds happy). During tough times, its not unreasonable for a company to trim their fat. Personally, tech and academia has been bloated for over a decade now. So no foul here.

New comment by iafiaf in "Advanced Scientific Data Format"

iafiaf — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 08:33:13 +0000

FASTQ is not for Excel, obviously - although you can still explore it in the shell. Nonetheless operating directly on FASTA/FASTQ files is often a "one-time" preprocessing task. You then serialize the preprocessed data and continue on from there.

FASTA (and its various incantations) are not going anywhere anytime soon.

New comment by iafiaf in "Advanced Scientific Data Format"

iafiaf — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 06:42:06 +0000

The "bioinformatics formats" might be terrible, but they work. In fact, they are meant to be Excel-readable which keeps my collaborators (and me) happy. Coming from a CS /programming background, it is natural to feel the urge to "fix" the formats (), until you realise that there are a libraries that easily handle serialization/parsing.

Besides, "bioinformatic formats" is a meaningless word anyway. FASTQ, VCFs, BCL, AIRR-seq -- all different and it just works.

New comment by iafiaf in "Ask HN: How to Stop Caring (Professionally)?"

iafiaf — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 12:09:47 +0000

I will bite. I dont think you care as much as you claim (or think) you do. Its likely you are not respected amongst your peers (for whatever reason) and you feel alienated. I've seen too many employees cite "lack of autonomy" because they want re-write code in Julia (for example) instead of prioritizing tasks they were hired to do. They think management doesn't "get it".

> But my personality finds it difficult to ignore things that are wrong

That's what you think. Maybe you are a man-child throwing a tantrum? The tech world is filled with such folks.

Even if everything you said is accurate, you will be happier if you dont play the victim card.

New comment by iafiaf in "Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six"

iafiaf — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 17:15:06 +0000

Early in my career, I took to heart such books and articles and often felt guilty and lessor-programmer when I cut corners. Here's my 2 cents now:

- Some of this is the coding equivalent of "6 rules for financial freedom" or "6 ways to find your dream soulmate". Generic advice that doesn't reflect highly nuanced reality.

- These rules are guidelines at best. There are justifiable reasons to break them; which I do often. Albeit this requires experience (and dare I say, wisdom). For example, refactoring code into a separate function levies a cost (of indirection) on the reader. Therefore copy-paste is sometimes fine.

- Clode "cleanliness" is a moving target. For a coder's mental health and value proposition for his project, he/she should know what code can afford to stay dirty.

PS: I love Jonathan Blow's opinions on coding/programming. Here are a few: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21JlBOxgGwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubWB_ResHwM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcP1fXQv0iU

New comment by iafiaf in "Show HN: AutoHotkey for Linux"

iafiaf — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 22:59:08 +0000

AHK is excellent; created a fishing bot during the hardcore WoW raiding days (Stonescale eel for Flask of Titans, anyone?)

New comment by iafiaf in "Ask HN: What is something exciting you're working on?"

iafiaf — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 21:21:50 +0000

I started my own bioinformatics+AI services firm that specializes in cell-type specific biomarker discovery and immune-repertoire profiling (i.e. we use single-cell and NGS technologies). I have developed a pipeline that integrates/automates state-of-the-art algorithms, which I use to serve clients (biotech and academic labs).

My clients are mostly local (i.e. Switzerland) acquired through word-of-mouth. Client acquisition is a challenge because I have to juggle sales and execution. However I am super excited to be in this field because I believe this is exactly what precision medicine is.

The company is called YugaCell (http://www.yugacell.com)

New comment by iafiaf in "The new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed"

iafiaf — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 19:13:56 +0000

My first job out of college was at a J2ME mobile startup (circa ~2005). Startup was the baby of a rich Arab, and I was the first actual technical hire in the team (the prototype was outsourced). I hired 3 engineers within the first month. A couple weeks into the project, I realised that one of the juniors was a bozo at programming and I had made a severe hiring mistake. The guy spent time re-writing Java classes as objects, making superfluous inheritance hierarchies, installing and re-installed the J2ME emulator, etc. I would have to fire the guy soon and explain it to my Arab boss ...

Fortunately, new hire was sending sexually explicit SMSes to the cute Filipino receptionist. Arab boss threw him out the next day.

New comment by iafiaf in "Radian: A 21 century R console"

iafiaf — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 02:34:23 +0000

R is overwhelmingly used in bioinformatics. There is nothing quite like bioconductor. Most new tools/methods (for ex, in the scRNA-seq) release R packages first.