I am really convinced that every advancement is connected somehow and the collective improvement in efficiency and livings standards makes it possible to commit more resources and train even more students to work on hard problems.
Even the work on something unrelated like React might somehow help if you observe humanity as a whole.
Also f*ck cancer (i read the guidelines and i found no statue against insulting cancer, if there is a user named cancer its a misunderstanding and you should really consider changing your username)
ADAM (Big Data Genomics, code-base I think worked currently by UC Berkeley AMPLab and Microsoft Research group focused on cancer research) https://github.com/bigdatagenomics/adam/labels/pick%20me%20u...
BioConductor (R package that is very popular for crunching different genomic analysis, RNA-Seq)https://www.bioconductor.org/developers/
Galaxy (Platform for reproducible genomics workflows in the cloud)https://wiki.galaxyproject.org/Support
Public Available Data Sets:
Cancer Genome Atlas (contains expression data for different kinds of cancer) http://cancergenome.nih.gov/
NCBI Short Reads Archive (contains the genome assembly of a lot of published papers): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra
European Nucleotide Archive: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena, e.g.,
For a recent major paper, "The Simons Genome Diversity Project: 300 genomes from 142 diverse populations"; you can grep for "accession code"(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...), follow the link and download the whole raw assemblies of all samples here: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB9586
MOOC:
https://www.edx.org/xseries/genomics-data-analysis
https://www.coursera.org/specializations/bioinformatics
StackOverflow:
Jobs:
NYGC, JCVI, CRB, Sanger, BGI, Broad, NIH, NCBI, Janelia Farm; any research group in universities; any informatics job at pharmaceutical or pharma startups.
Hm. I wonder your age. Young folk seem to think death impossibly foreign, and fear it / ignore it all equally. Older folk, that have had more first-hand experience with the decline of the flesh in themselves and those they grew up with, have more an appreciation for the difference between an abrupt death in a car accident, and a slow dissolution like cancer. Quite a lot of people fear dying more than they do death.
I am 100% confident that within the next two hundred years (baring some massive war, dark age, etc.) We will be able to use gene therapy to reduce cancer risk to negligible levels. We will probably even master the ability to program cells to do what we want... At which point all diseases where the body breaks down will likely be gone. That's not to say, we won't have issues regarding illness - just our bodies won't break down as quickly if at all.
Obviously you can't live your life in fear like that, but I think there's good reason to be more fearful or at least angry about cancer than something like a stroke/wreck.
Well. We evolved to be a collection of cells. Before, we were unicellular organisms, fighting against other organisms for resources and ultimately, survival.
Some cells just decide to revert back to the old ways. I'd say it's a form of evolution, one that's pruned by natural selection, when the host organism dies.
I somehow ended up in a academic Genetics lab, writing software. We use a lot of languages here (Php, python, perl, java, R, javascript and even some C) and various web frameworks to let people use our tools to do science. I don't know if the creators of these tools imagined they'd be used for science, but they put the tools out there in the public and they were used.
You contribute, because its the right thing todo, that makes you significant. You never know how significant what you put out there will end up being, but it helps you grow too. The open source community inspires and you by contributing are part of that. Every little bit helps.
"Bioinformatics" is a general term of the use of computing in Biology. Its an interesting field.
Personally, I find it much likelier that the current service providers screw up the process than that in the future we could not somehow bring people back to life.
The current actual scientific state of the art in cryopreservation deals with something far more simple than a human being http://www.nature.com/articles/srep18816
I'm all up for it once it gets some scientific credibility.
Cryonics is a very risky, and, with current technology, likely unreversable procedure, so relying on it to tie up your loose ends someday is silly. It’s almost religious in the unreasonable belief that someone higher – here "future humanity" – will be able to help you.
In the past few months I have been almost obsessed with consuming everything he wrote and published. It is exactly my way of thinking. Of questioning reality and turning it upside down so it works even better.
I will miss him. And I will continue to learn from him. We all knew this was going to happen, he was most transparent in keeping us informed about it. So I am sad, yes. But I am also immensely grateful and positive.
Pieter, it was an honour and a privilege to have shared time with you. Peace for you.
His writing is just what I needed right now, at this time in my life. Particularly about how to be happy.
I think when you've lived such a prolific life, you don't need any last words. His life's work speaks for itself.
This is the particular blog post in which he talks about 'how to be happy'
>His life's work speaks for itself.
Very much this! A loss to all - but a life well lived.
Society isn't used to this notion, and we don't really have any handholds to fall back to. Do you mourn with the person while he is still alive? Go on as if nothing really changed? Celebrate life with them while you still can? Euthanasia is becoming widely accepted; at least at the abstract levels of law and medicine, so we'll probably figure it out eventually.
Perhaps the Hallmarks of the world can introduce a nice line of cards for the occasion?
Perhaps it's the productization of death?
I received this news as a retweet in my Twitter feed. Next to it was a bit.ly link about Configuration Management tools, the announcement of a speaker at a conference, and a famous quote from Einstein.
Right now on HN it's #4. Next to it is a blog post about tools and frameworks and a post about a PostgreSQL extension. The response to Pieter's tweet is lengthy and very kind. It would be a privilege to hear those thoughts in my own life before I leave. But the thoughts will still keep coming, probably long after he's gone.
I met a nice lady three years ago. She was a "social media consultant" in the local area, which basically consisted of teaching small business owners how to navigate the web. We met for lunch several times when I was in town.
Soon, though, she learned she had stage 4 lung cancer. I had lunch with her one more time. I'll never forget how weary she looked.
She held on for almost a year, then she passed.
For many weeks after that, however, Facebook was full of her many friends offering their condolences. Facebook would remind me that she liked certain things as a way to sell me on things. Every so often people would think of her and post on her wall. These posts appeared in my feed.
Last week I finally had to unfriend her. She was dead. But it didn't stop the computerized social network that Facebook to stop trying to monetize as much of her presence as they could. Even if somebody had set her account to deceased, Facebook will always own some part of her existence.
It feels like turning a tender, emotional, precious thing into a bucket of bits. I find that repugnant.
Although this is a poor comparison for a million reasons, I just put my beloved dog down a week ago. Helpless is the word here. Its incredible how many game-enders we casually flirt with everyday, how powerful illness can be, how illness makes us make tough decisions, how poorly we handle end of life issues, and how badly grief hits us. We purposely avoid thinking about this stuff, consider it taboo, and engage in gallow's humor for a reason.
Death is difficult. It never gets easier.
Never think your comparison isn't apt because it's "just a pet" :)
Time does help.
Maybe you can't do something about one particular person today but millions of more future deaths can be prevented.
Some of the people here will be dying "early" deaths in 10 or 20 years. You won't be saying: "well, you've gotta go someday when you have a couple of kids", for example.
You see, cancer was a tiny spot on radar just 50 years ago. Or 100 even more. So the question is - what happened? Have we somehow changed overnight as a spices? No we haven't. Perhaps what we intake changed because after all cancer has to come from something - yes! our water get polluted, our food get packed with chemistry (Dupont produces your tires as well as ingredients for your breakfast bread and is more into food business than ever), and also our air got more polluted than ever.
So before you feel good writing check to a non profit or think that adding a $1 to your bill in food market helps fight cancer, do any of the following:
- call your local officials and complain. while your complain might be a blimp on radar, the more complains then more your officials will notices. at the end they want to know what people like/hate about their community -- not to help you, but rather to help themselves win next election. - sign petitions for better oversight into companies like Monsato who are in business to sterilize you and force your friend-farmer to suicide through dropping their attorney's fees on them. - buy a water filter but also check with your local water supply they run statistics on water pollution. make sting if they are out of chart (most counties, they are) - educate friends on food quality. Have them stop looking at price but more on ingredients. just because something is 40cents cheaper, doesnt mean its okay. - educate your friends and family on high corn fructose syrup and sugar substitutes. - promote and make your friends aware of non-gmo organic movement - research and educate yourself and your family on list of ingredients and products that EU bans. EU is the last bastion of common sense when it comes to your family's health safety but with laws like TPP in place, Monstato will be able to sue EU countries and force them to sell products with ingredients that EU had good reasons to ban in the first place.
But when these things start looking more imminent, I hope I have the courage to do what he has just done, I really do.
Incredibly brave decision.
[1]:http://www.glasgowcomascale.org/
Edited to Add: Added link to the Glasgow Coma Scale, shouldn't have assumed knowledge of it.
if you have the trust of your client, and s/he has real power, you have done half the work already.
don't make stuff and then try to sell it unless you are growing an existing client base.
breaking into markets you don't know is probably impossible.
Build up trust with the client and sometimes they will reward you for it.
When you've paid for all the mistakes, you should know how to do it right the next time.
A good specification lets diverse people work together without confusion or conflict.
If you can test each piece alone, and you have reliable ways of putting them together, the whole should work.
Don't be afraid to charge the real cost.
be aware of your expenditure and manage your losses. You can survive a long time with less income if you are in tight control of what you spend.
What's good software? Good software is used by people to solve real problems. Good software saves people money, or makes them a profit. It can be buggy, incomplete, undocumented, slow. Yet it can also be good. You can always make good software better yet it's only worth doing when it's already good.
It's presumably the parent's tribute to him, which I can appreciate.
The world is losing another great hacker.
Would a black bar be considered?
As on top of HN? I guess somone would have to e-mail admins for that.
When he had chemo, he looked like he was dying any second now. A week after he looked like a normal healthy person.
Last time I saw him was a few weeks before he died, we were partying like he wasn't even sick and suddendly he was dead.
But it's generally a strange feeling to lose people around you.
In the last two years I lost about 4 people. One to old age, two to cancer and one was even murdered. I still have the last moments with them in my memories. We were like "yeah lets go do XYZ together in a few weeks/months" and now they are simply gone and won't come back.
I just hope that when it comes time for me or my loved ones to go, that they will be able to do it on their terms.
Thanks for the your contributions and sharing the journey.
To fellow HN users: Please check out "Think of the Children" and donate if possible. thanks!
Please use this article to add your stories. If you have them elsewhere, or you emailed me, copy/paste as a comment. Feel free to write in Dutch or French if that's your language. I'd really like a single place where my kids can come and read what other people say about their dad.
Many people have asked my PayPal address ph@imatix.com, to send a donation for my children.
Same thing at funeral. I'm always trying to convince others to remember good things, not go into depression. You can't do much after it happened.
I'm a geek, I sort of get it, but aren't the people talking about themselves and their choices and their views even slightly ashamed? Could we have a fucking moment to just honor this guy? I don't even know him, I'm just cringing.
Take your post as an example.
I'd feel that I let down my children and couldn't give them a happy and careless childhood without having to deal with the cruelty of reality.
So, may his kids have the strength to deal with it without losing their light-heartedness.
And now we have this tweet from someone I respect very much, someone who took part of his time too tell his feelings on how you could/should treat someone that is having his final moments.
(This really hits me, since my brother in law may be about to do the same in a few weeks.. days perhaps.)
Thank you. For everything. I'm sure the rest of the community shares my opinion that you've contributed so much to the field.
For all that it matters, I wish you a pleasant departure.
It's sad seeing Bob and Alice used in such a morbid context but at least we know we'll be thinking in terms of protocol, complexity, and CS even on our death beds. It's something that will never leave us.
I've read very little of his work. I think I'll change that.
I enjoyed his writings on community building most. He himself being a very approachable person, taught me everything we do is about people, not software. I'll definitely miss him in the days to come.
Peace Peter.
Thank you for being transparent about your condition. It makes me to remind about death. I am sorry. Thank you for contributing everything what you have done for people in the world.
Peace Pieter. You will be missed.
R.I.P. Pieter Hintjens. For more about Pieter Hintjens check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Hintjens
Heart-wrenching.
He finished his book Confessions of a Necromancer recently. It's well worth a read:
https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/confessions-of-a-necro...
I don't really know what to say anymore. I will always admire him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApqI9XLRk4k
Thank you for the journey, Pieter.
Thank you HN for exposing me to worlds I would never otherwise discover.
On a personal note, I definitely will be using 0MQ in all my future projects. As a matter of fact, I'm glad I found it exactly this moment.
Thank you Pieter and rest in peace.
I don't know you, and I don't even know who you are, but my heart goes out to you. Nobody should have to suffer in pain, and I deeply respect you for taking control of your last moments.
Fare thee well.
Farewell Pieter and may you live on in our memories.
Black bar on Hacker News, please.
