At DigitalOcean, our vision has always been to build a platform that allows developers to run their infrastructure at scale without getting in their way. To date, the top feature request from our community has been to have the ability to add additional disk space to their Droplets. Today, we are excited to introduce Block Storage to make that possible.

Source: Block Storage: More Space to Scale | DigitalOcean

Well, we’d just been crawling around the floor — with help from some other people — trying to use meter rules to measure some feature of a giant printout of it. And Feynman took me aside, rather conspiratorially, and said, “Look, I just want to ask you one thing: how did you know rule 30 would do all this crazy stuff?” “You know me,” I said. “I didn’t. I just had a computer try all the possible rules. And I found it.” “Ah,” he said, “now I feel much better. I was worried you had some way to figure it out.”

Source: My Time with Richard Feynman — Backchannel

A scientist recently pointed me out to his colleagues. “That is not Carl Zimmer,” he declared.

The scientist was Mark Gerstein. He was sitting at a table in his office at Yale University, flanked by two members of his lab. “Really,” Gerstein said, pointing to a slim hard drive on the table, “this is Carl Zimmer.”

By “this,” he meant the sequence of my genome, which was being transferred from the drive onto a MacBook.

“I’m quite serious,” Gerstein said. “In about five minutes, he will be in this computer.”

I had come to Yale to give Gerstein and his colleagues my genome to explore. I wanted them to help me find out what was in there.

I was doing something far different — and far more exciting — than getting a conventional genetic test from a doctor or sending my spit to a genealogy company. Those tests typically only determine snippets of a person’s DNA, providing the sequence of less than 1 percent of the genome. Instead, I had gotten my entire genome sequenced and had then managed to get hold of all the raw data — the information that scientists use to understand how people’s genes help make them who they are.

Source: Game of Genomes: A quest to crack the mysteries of our DNA

If you take a look at the title of this post and instantly think it’s a trap or bait – let me prove you wrong. This is not going to be one of these catchy titles, so “what kind of bs am I going to read here” has little use in this place. Actually, this is 100% true that contributing to the open source community might greatly affect your life – and it goes far beyond daily activities related to the coding. Therefore, let me tell you a short story about a guy, typical .NET developer, who not so long ago also thought that being an open source developer literally means wasting your time.

The genesis

Everything started 4 months ago. It was beginning of the March and I’ve decided to participate in the sort of programming & blogging competition named Daj Się Poznać (Get To Know). There were 2 main requirements – develop an open source project using GitHub repository and write at least 2 posts per week for next 10 consecutive weeks. Eventually, I’ve won the overall competition – you can read my summary and another article about feelings after winning the finals. Yet, it’s not the main point here – what I’ve realized within just a few weeks since I’ve started working on my open source project called Warden was that I really enjoyed doing this and back then I was already sure that this is something that I’ll keep on developing for a long, long time.

Source: Open source is a life changer | Piotr Gankiewicz

Source: So Are You • Dub FX [ Official Video ] – YouTube

Before there was R, there was S. R was modeled on a language developed at AT&T Bell Labs starting in 1976 by Rick Becker and John Chambers (and, later, Alan Wilks) along with Doug Dunn, Jean McRae, and Judy Schilling.

For more on the history of S, see this interview with another of the creators of S, John Chambers.

Source: The history of R’s predecessor, S, from co-creator Rick Becker

Peer review is touted as a demonstration of the self-critical nature of science. But it is a human system. Everybody involved brings prejudices, misunderstandings and gaps in knowledge, so no one should be surprised that peer review is often biased and inefficient. It is occasionally corrupt, sometimes a charade, an open temptation to plagiarists. Even with the best of intentions, how and whether peer review identifies high-quality science is unknown. It is, in short, unscientific.

A long time ago, scientists moved from alchemy to chemistry, from astrology to astronomy. But our reverence for peer review still often borders on mysticism. For the past three decades, I have advocated for research to improve peer review and thus the quality of the scientific literature. Here are some reflections on that winding, rocky path, and some thoughts about the road ahead.

I trained as a physician, studying the pathophysiology of exposure to high altitudes. In 1977, I became deputy editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), working with what I assumed was a smoothly oiled peer-review system. I found myself driving an enormous machine whose operation was sometimes interrupted by startling hiccups. The first big one occurred a year after I arrived. An author who had submitted a paper to our journal accused one of our reviewers, who worked at a competing lab, of plagiarizing parts of her paper. She sent us a manuscript that her lab chief had been sent to assess for another journal, one that I could see had been typed on the same typewriter that the reviewer had used to write his review. I was told to sort it out.

Source: Let’s make peer review scientific : Nature News & Comment

Less than two years after my presentation titled “Open source for the government”, and almost exactly one year after I became advisor to the deputy prime minister of Bulgaria, with the efforts of my colleagues and the deputy prime minister, the amendments to the Electronic Governance Act were voted in parliament and are now in effect. The amendments require all software written for the government to be open-source and to be developed as such in a public repository.

Source: Bulgaria Got a Law Requiring Open Source — Medium

.
”Going Dutch: why the country is leading the way on sustainable business. There are enthusiastic noises from Havenbedrijf Rotterdam, the harbour organisation, which has various innovative schemes including the Merwe-Vierhavens project where the floating farm is planned. There are also ideas for floating forests and solar panels.

Source: Do cows get seasick? Welcome to Rotterdam’s floating dairy farm | Guardian Sustainable Business | The Guardian