Computational biologist with a focus on predicting individual human health at a startup, but I have ended up managing software engineers. (Scientist explore and engineers make the science work in production.)
Readit Newsbiomcgary commented on Ask HN: Who here is not working on web apps/server code? · Posted by u/ex-aws-dude
This explains the Scotch-Irish settling in Appalachia. It felt like home, but without the overbearing Brits nearby.
biomcgary commented on Show HN: Gotui – a modern Go terminal dashboard library github.com/metaspartan/go... · Posted by u/carsenk
The Readme for a UI library benefits enormously from screenshots, even terminal based UIs.
biomcgary commented on Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score” josepheverettwil.substack... · Posted by u/adityaathalye
I really disliked The Body Keeps the Score. But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.
I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution. Somatic experiences might help them.
To be honest, reading the book was more helpful than critiquing whether or not my testosterone levels were too low as a 11-year-old, or if I had elevated inflammation because of my diet. Perhaps I'm biased.
The mind-body link is too important to get the causality wrong and The Body Keeps Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.
I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.
For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.
biomcgary commented on Language Agnostic Programming: Why you may still need code joaquimrocha.com/2025/08/... · Posted by u/kimr
When I was naive and young I dreamed about some day make a programming language that was just english…
The I learned about y2k, there was such a thing (more or less) from Apple. It implied knowing a strict subset of english and the correct words and constructs… it was a pain to program that (at least for me)
More or less at that time, I started understanding that programming languages limitations, although at the beginning a necessity, were a feature. Indeed it was already a very small subset of English, with very specific, succinct, small grammar, that was easy to learn (well, C++ stoped being learnable some years ago… but you get the point)
The idea of LLM eliminating good designed languages is hard for me to believe, just as stated in the article.
I think you are getting at the need for tiered layers of abstraction and constraint. Simultaneously considering all possible ways to solve a problem doesn't work for humans or the LLMs derived from our use of language. The repeated use of Domain Specific Languages (DSL) in the context of a general purpose programming language gets at this same need to constrain solution spaces within a reasonable boundary.
Once we have quantum LLMs, the need for intermediate abstraction layers might change, but that's very [insert magic here].
biomcgary commented on Any level of alcohol consumption increases risk of dementia ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09-24-... · Posted by u/amichail
Available data makes causality hard to get right. This paper is trying to get around known constraints with observational data (e.g., some people stop drinking when they start having noticeable problems). Mendelian randomization tries to infer how much a person drinks from their genetic variants. However, the genetic tendency to drink might be associated with the same variants related to dementia. The summary doesn't make it clear if this was addressed.
biomcgary commented on Xeres: Uncensorable Peer-to-Peer Communications xeres.io/... · Posted by u/thunderbong
Looks interesting. I've been using https://keet.io/ for a good while now, which has similar motivations.
I didn't see a public source repository for keet, just compiled releases. Why would you trust closed source for a privacy app?
biomcgary commented on Xeres: Uncensorable Peer-to-Peer Communications xeres.io/... · Posted by u/thunderbong
How does this avoid carrier grade NAT if everyone is on a cellphone?
biomcgary commented on All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair terriblesoftware.org/2025... · Posted by u/matheusml
The book referenced is not wrong, but it is too narrow. Repair isn't the core attribute of parenting. It's the core attribute of human relationships. This is generally accepted as common knowledge - it's not about the rupture, it's about the repair.
Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships. However, you sit comfortably in the minority. Most people carry the human aspect of their work relationships into work. Ignoring that is step 1 of being a really bad manager.
This doesn't mean we don't set appropriate boundaries or avoid giving feedback. It does mean that a great manager navigates the nuances of work relationships and work itself. It also means a great manager will adjust their approach depending on the personal needs of each employee. For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
* And I don't. From my experience most people who take this stance have been conditioned that emotions are bad. We are big emotional bags of meat. The people I've managed with this mindset tend to be the hardest to manage. Eventually something hits their feels, they can't handle it, and the erratic behavior begins. I much prefer people who are forward with their emotions. When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it. When they have feelings about feedback received, making a mistake, or doing something bad I can easily acknowledge and validate those feelings while maintain the feedback & boundaries.
The language around emotion often obscures the underlying reality that needs to be addressed. Emotions are the physiological manifestations of expectations and desires. (Emotion is etymologically related to motive.)
The person your responding to clearly has a desire to do productive work with minimal roadblocks. In one person the roadblock to that desire/expectation might manifest physiologically as depression, in another person as anger, and in another as detachment. Getting rid of the roadblock is what needs to happen regardless of how the emotion manifests.
This does not mean that emotions are not addressed, but that they are addressed primarily as signifiers of a mismatch between the world and one's underlying desires/expectations, not the thing itself.
Sometimes, the desire/expectation of an individual is counter to the good of the overall system and group of people. In this case, a good manager might start by explaining the larger situation so that an individual can update their desires and expectations through the additional knowledge. Then new thinking/perception shifts the physiological experience of those desires (i.e., emotions).
In other cases, the gap between desires/expectations and reality is too big to bridge, which means emotions cannot be resolved in the current context.