Hacker News: willpearse

New comment by willpearse in "Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study"

willpearse — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 21:33:52 +0000

Senior author here, any questions please ask! As a long-time lurker, it's wonderful to see biodiversity is so popular here!

New comment by willpearse in "Encyclopedia of Life"

willpearse — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 13:28:46 +0000

If you like Subtree of Life, you're going to love 'Onezoom' (https://www.onezoom.org/) which is a very attractive 'Google Maps of life' sort of site, and TimeTree (http://www.timetree.org/) which is similar but the visualisation is much more traditional (not fractals) in comparison with the first.

New comment by willpearse in "Open Sourcing My Personal Medical Record"

willpearse — Thu, 04 May 2017 17:05:07 +0000

This is a risky thing to do when the patient's name is attached to it. Insurance companies, salesmen, etc., could do quite a lot with such information.

I whole-heartedly support the general idea, and making a centralised database of things like this would be great. Such a database would probably make it easier to anonymise the data as well.

New comment by willpearse in "Comparison – R vs. Python: head to head data analysis"

willpearse — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 13:48:30 +0000

Very picky, but beware constantly using "set.seed" throughout your R scripts. Always using the same random number is not necessarily helpful for stats, and makes the R code look a lot trickier than it need be

New comment by willpearse in "Heim – A real-time community platform"

willpearse — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 21:28:02 +0000

...not anymore. Thanks!

New comment by willpearse in "Heim – A real-time community platform"

willpearse — Sun, 16 Aug 2015 19:42:04 +0000

I get a message saying it's not ready for Hacker News yet, so I can't even see what's going on :-(

New comment by willpearse in "The Thermodynamic Theory of Ecology"

willpearse — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 18:12:57 +0000

I'm an ecologist: if you're really interested in this, his book (http://www.amazon.com/Maximum-Entropy-Ecology-Distribution-E...) gives a good background to (macro)ecology and works through the maths involved in this.

New comment by willpearse in "The peculiar status of PhD-employees"

willpearse — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 15:53:10 +0000

I can't comment on much of this article, but it doesn't apply to the UK (as is implied), where essentially every student has full funding for their 3-4 years. Sometimes people hang around for an extra six months, but it's nothing like the US system.

New comment by willpearse in "Ask HN: How did you get your scientific computing job?"

willpearse — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 18:45:21 +0000

I'm a post-doc at a university. I asked around at conferences, and emailed people whose work I liked. I'd be surprised if the process is very HPC-specific; you'd be trying to make scientific job-hunting more efficient. But please do that if you can :D

New comment by willpearse in "Computer Science PhD trends"

willpearse — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:18:50 +0000

Points 2 and 3 make no reference to previous years' data, so aren't really talking about trends. Point 1 ignores the (trend that they state) that there are more post-doc positions.

Post-docs are safer jobs, because you know what will happen at the end of them (you get kicked out and find another job). Fewer people going straight into tenure-track means fewer people spending years at an institution, not getting a job (because they lost the race) and starting elsewhere. Sounds very healthy to me!

Google Maps for life on Earth

willpearse — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:38:33 +0000

Article URL: http://www.onezoom.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4664906

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by willpearse in "Peak Chrome? Google's browser falls as Firefox, Internet Explorer stay flat"

willpearse — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 08:46:10 +0000

Some confidence intervals on these graphs would really make this a lot more useful...

New comment by willpearse in "Ask President Barack Obama anything on Reddit (seriously)"

willpearse — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 21:44:08 +0000

I can't even load the page, so... "was bubble sort the wrong way to go?" ...I hate myself a little.

Fixing peer review with an idea inspired by Reddit

willpearse — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:07:38 +0000

Article URL: http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/08/03/openly-streamlining-peer-review/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4345719

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by willpearse in "Against live-tweeting at conferences"

willpearse — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:23:12 +0000

Good points. I also feel people tend to tweet that they are enjoying everything, simply to make themselves look like they are always going to interesting things and thus worth following. Similarly, no one can say anything negative, since they are essentially going behind the speaker's back (...in public...)

New comment by willpearse in "What makes one appear smarter and more sociable? "

willpearse — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:54:40 +0000

I'm sorry, but there's no 'unsexy data crunching' here - just a series of ratios compared against one another. There is a whole body of statistical literature about how to do anything of this kind, and they haven't done any of it. I'd quite happily believe that none of these differences have any kind of significance in the statistical sense (i.e., it's due to background variation). But then again, I wasn't given any information to know whether they've even looked. So I can't say...

Baby name trends in the UK

willpearse — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:12:28 +0000

Article URL: http://names.darkgreener.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3889422

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by willpearse in "SciRuby"

willpearse — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 08:01:23 +0000

Great idea and something that will definitely be highly used (I'm downloading it now!), but I really would be cautious attempting to provide what R provides, 'but better'.

R's power comes from the fact that hundreds of scientists have written packages for it when they have a new method - you won't be able to get that overnight. Also, R has strong links with other languages like C.

Finally, while I agree that sometimes R's syntax can be slightly obfusicated, I don't really think the examples on their site are fair... You can 'plot(y~x)' guys :p

New comment by willpearse in "Your DNA may carry a ‘memory’ of your living conditions in childhood"

willpearse — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:33:28 +0000

I too work in biology, and while this is interesting, that there are differences between people is not that surprising, and attempting to link socio-economic conditions to such widely different methylation patterns when you've got a sample size of 40 isn't very convincing. That said, nice work!