Top all-time · #5331
Cyrille Rossant
Personal blog · cyrille.rossant.net · on HN as rossantscienceprogramming
Cyrille Rossant's personal blog at cyrille.rossant.net covers science and programming. Since 2014, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Moving Away from HDF5 (2016)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Cyrille Rossant's blog covers data storage and file formats for scientific computing, especially moving away from HDF5. HN commenters link "Moving away from HDF5" as support for their own points about HDF5.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Moving Away from HDF5 (2016)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-10-13
- Moving away from HDF52 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-07
- Should You Use HDF52 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-09
- NumPy in the browser2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-02-18
- New book on the scientific controversy surrounding Shaken Baby Syndrome2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-31
What Hacker News says?
Actually, even the question to know whether the blood in the brain and behind the eyes can be explained with violent shaking (without impact) is debated as the scientific evidence is still lacking. I said "without impact" because the answer is clearly yes when there is an impact -- but there will also be additional markers of trauma in those cases. So, it's not only to know whether it's the only cause , but even mor…
Comment linking /introduction-shaken-baby-syndrome-controversy/
on “Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?”Submitted Moving away from HDF5 as a story · 116 points
HN discussionInternational Brain Laboratory | Software Developer | US, Europe, or remote | Full-time | http://cyrille.rossant.net/hiring/ We're looking for an outstanding Python programmer to help us develop data sharing platforms and software for neuroscience data. This is a large collaboration between ~50 neuroscientists from 20 labs around the world. Required skills: Django, Django REST framework, PostgreSQL, MySQL, front-end…
Comment linking /hiring/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2017)”Submitted Moving Away from HDF5 (2016) as a story · 27 points
HN discussionInternational Brain Laboratory | Scientific Software Developer | US, Europe, or remote | Full-time | http://cyrille.rossant.net/hiring/ We're looking for an outstanding scientific developer to help us develop data sharing platforms and software for neuroscience data. This is a large collaboration between ~50 neuroscientists from 20 labs around the world. Required skills: scientific Python/NumPy, MATLAB, parallel com…
Comment linking /hiring/
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2017)”Submitted NumPy in the browser as a story · 6 points
HN discussionAnyone else feel let down by all the existing container formats out there, and feel this itch to like, write their own ? I know, I know, that's like the worst possible idea, xkcd #927 "now there are 15 standards", but like, what if ? What I'm looking for is basically something that ticks all the boxes of LOC's 7 Sustainability Factors. Is able to store arbitrary binary data, along with metadata, in a single file. Ea…
Comment linking /should-you-use-hdf5/
on “Fun with File Formats”Submitted Should You Use HDF5 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHDF5 is a clunky file format and dependency. There's a whole host of usual complaints, many of which have already been mentioned: http://cyrille.rossant.net/moving-away-hdf5/ My biggest personal annoyance is that HDF5 isn't thread safe^, so it only supports parallel reading and writing via multiple processes. This makes parallel computing a pain. This is especially annoying when using HDF5's built-in compression, wh…
Comment linking /moving-away-hdf5/
on “Feather: A Fast On-Disk Format for Data Frames for R and Python”Submitted Should you use HDF5? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is good info. I've been wary of hdf5 for some time. Nothing concrete (until this bug) but from my research it just consistently smelled fishy. The main turnoff for me was the possibility of data corruption bricking the entire dataset. Pity, as it has on paper a lot of great concepts and features. Maybe it'll be mature enough someday, though my money is on something better from the ground up coming along. Honest…
Comment linking /moving-away-hdf5/
on “Loading NumPy arrays from disk: mmap() vs. Zarr/HDF5”Submitted IPython Cookbook released as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAnother way to do this would be to use numba package to generate LLVM IR from Python bytecode (it supports a rich set of instructions including numpy stuff, has type inference, etc), and then run it in the browser via emscripten, with some adjustments to the IR if required. Quick googling yields a related blog post: http://cyrille.rossant.net/numpy-browser-llvm/
Comment linking /numpy-browser-llvm/
on “Run Python Bytecode in Your Browser”Submitted What's wrong with scientific python? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYes, here are further links for those interested: - HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 - Blog post https://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-sha... - Scientific introduction https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom...
Comment linking /introduction-shaken-baby-syndrome-controversy/
on “Nevada parents wrongfully accused of child abuse file lawsuit against hospital”Submitted Scientific Python in the Browser: it’s coming as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSome context: - A blog post I wrote last year: https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-... - HN discussion on this blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37650402 - A scientific introduction to SBS: https://cyrille.rossant.net/introduction-shaken-baby-syndrom... To be clear, what has been discredited is not the fact that babies are shaken (studies have consistently shown a high incidence…
Comment linking /introduction-shaken-baby-syndrome-controversy/
on “Shaken Baby Syndrome Has Been Discredited. Why Is Roberson Still on Death Row?”Submitted An Introduction to the Scientific Controversy over Shaken Baby Syndrome (2022) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBefore moving to HDF5: https://cyrille.rossant.net/moving-away-hdf5/
Comment linking /moving-away-hdf5/
on “HDF5eis: Storage IO solution for big multidimensional time series sensor data”Submitted New book on the scientific controversy surrounding Shaken Baby Syndrome as a story · 1 points
HN discussionInteresting article, thanks. This is about the legal aspects of Shaken Baby Syndrome, and how Robert Roberson's was sentenced to death in Texas on the basis of now-obsolete science. It's almost impossible for the medical profession to admit that mistakes were made, especially when the mistake takes on a life of its own. I guess the judicial system has a similar problem. I visited /u/rossant's profile, and found a bl…
Comment linking /sbsbook/
on “Robert Roberson's Going to Die Because Courts Aren't Built for Science Questions”This article has a significant backstory. A highly influential study by Chadwick et al. in 1991 [1] asserted that reports of fatal short falls in children are invariably falsified and actually stem from violence. They reached this conclusion by noting a significantly higher (7 times more in their data) hospital patient fatality rate after short falls (< 1.20 m) compared to long falls (> 3 m). They interpreted this a…
Comment linking /introduction-shaken-baby-syndrome-controversy/
on “Statistical models of hospital fatality rates after accidental falls in children”Nice, much better than the old website which was basically unusable. I've been strongly attracted to Vulkan since it was announced in 2015. Being annoyed by the limitations of OpenGL for scientific visualizations, it seemed like a significant improvement. When the specification was released, I was both fascinated and terrified by its extreme complexity. I understood mostly nothing at first. I took it as a personal c…
Comment linking /datoviz/
on “New Vulkan Documentation Website”The one potential requirement I'll caution you on is resilience against write failures, in case you're collecting time-series data and can't afford to lose a "session" or spend time messing with recovery options. HDF5 is not made for that. Binary and SQLite are better in that respect. SQLite wins on usability against binary and HDF5. https://cyrille.rossant.net/moving-away-hdf5/
Comment linking /moving-away-hdf5/
on “Why SQLite is so great for the edge”Congrats for a serious engineering achievement! I had experimented with a similar idea in an infinitely more primitive way more than ten years ago ( https://cyrille.rossant.net/numpy-browser-llvm/ ). I'm glad to see so much progress since then.
Comment linking /numpy-browser-llvm/
on “Numba in the Browser: Unlocking a New Scientific Python Stack in JupyterLite”"Junk science" doesn't really capture the nuance associated with this diagnosis. Although SBS is a highly disputed and contested diagnosis, most medical authorities (Mayo Clinic, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC...) do not recognize any legitimate controversy associated with it. The most notable exception is the Swedish Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Assessment of Social Services which publis…
Comment linking /introduction-shaken-baby-syndrome-controversy/
on “Texas death row inmate at mercy of Supreme Court – and junk science”Shaking and child abuse are obviously real things. However, the way to diagnose shaken baby syndrome has been the subject of an ongoing scientific controversy for decades. With several colleagues, we have just published a textbook about this sensitive issue [1]. I've also written about how I, as a neuroscience researcher and software engineer, came into this diagnosis [2]. Finally, an introduction to this fascinatin…
Comment linking /introduction-shaken-baby-syndrome-controversy/
on “Texas death row inmate at mercy of Supreme Court – and junk science”
