In 15 hours 10 questions and still below the threshold of 5 questions per day :\

@Llopis Dunno how often they refresh the area51 stats. At least there does seem to be more activity today.

Poc a poc.

I made a stickied announcement on the bioinformatics subreddit. Hopefully that will drive some more active users to the site.

reddit.com/r/bioinformatics/comments/6efi9l/…

Nice. However, I think the problem is fundamentally that people that already have access (because they are committers) don’t frequent the site. And the main reason for this is, I guess, that it isn’t public.

@BioGeek Cool, thanks! And thanks for the self-answered post as well!

@KonradRudolph Yes, I think you made a very good point on that meta thread. Dunno if SE would be open to the idea of unlocking the beta though. Let's see. If Robert doesn't answer, I'll bug someone in the secret mod room.

On the other hand, I doubt they'd be willing to treat one beta any different from the rest.

OK, so I went also through the list of top users for the [bioinformatics] and [biopython] tags, looked if I could find an email adres on their profile page (or linked accounts) and if so I sent them a n invite to this private beta. I hope that helps!

@terdon Great, now it’s not secret any more ;-)

@KonradRudolph Ah, but you don't know where it is, do you? :P

@terdon Probably not, but I guess this is simply necessary here, for the reasons mentioned.

@terdon I probably still have the link somewhere actually ;-) I used to be a mod

Yeah, I thought I remembered as much. Which site?

Skeptics

Was it Skeptics?

Jinx! :)

…

Hi people. After having @terdon point out the site to me yesterday, I joined. I also set around a link to people at work, and at least one colleague signed up. One of the managers were also very enthusiastic. I'll make a new push tomorrow.

@Kusalananda Ooh, an EBI/Sanger alumnus. Wel(l)come :)

Being someone who supports bioinformaticians (but not really a bioinformatician myself), I don't know how helpful I can be. But anything that smells of ordinary Unix tools I can handle.

@KonradRudolph Thanks!

@KonradRudolph Yeah, I was in the Ensembl group for 11 years (9 + 2 at Sanger).

Nice! Thanks @Kusalananda!

The closest I got to something that may label me a bioinformatician was to doing the genebuild of the cat genome for one of the releases. Otherwise I worked on the API and pipeline code.

@Kusalananda use v5.10; say("nice");

I'm more of a puts("nice"); type of person nowadays.

@KonradRudolph Ha! I thought you were a python person. Nice to know you have broad horizons! :P

@terdon Mostly R these days, actually. But I’ve done a bit of everything.

Well, everything meaning all the languages common in bioinformatics

R is excellent. I do wish the syntax could be simpler though.

@KonradRudolph Oh, so you're fluent in Excel? :P

Ex…what?

I was asked to give a class for a bioinformatics masters course in Greece. Would you believe they were all using Windows?

As in the whole masters program was done on Windows machines. And then they expected to get jobs as bioinformaticians, poor kids.

@terdon Ouch.

Yeah.

I made the poor kids use a live Linux distro.

Can't we - committers - all come up with 1 good question a day (including questions we know the answers for)?

Also, with relevant context, bash, unix, regex, R, etc, posts will be welcome in this SE.

@zx8754 in the relevant meta post we were told that simply asking more questions is not a solution.

@IakovDavydov Of course it is not, the problem is committers usually answer, not ask. So for this SE to work, we need to get it public. Quick peek at biostar first page will prove this point, all posts are from new users.

@IakovDavydov simply asking more might not be a solution, but both spreading the word and asking more questions might be!