I am afraid what we need are new users though, not just new posts from already active users. That's what Robert's meta post said.
> Fair warning: Simply having the same people ask more questions is not sustainable and not a solution for giving the appearance of organic growth. You need more users.
I think what the site is missing at the moment is ironically softball questions
So far, most/all? active members seem to be relatively experienced in the field, and consequently the questions are mostly quite hard, and research-level
What the site needs is a few questions on undergrad/masters level that are tricky to answer on one’s own but can be answered authoritatively by “working bioinformaticians”
@terdon Yeah, maybe, although this raises the problem at what point questions are too basic for the site. PWM for instance has its own Wikipedia article
And yes, some programming questions would be nice.
@KamilSJaron Heh, I guess although we probably won't want things quite as simple as that if/when we graduate.
By the way, I would think that basic *nix questions that would be faced by a bioinformatician should also be on topic (like how can I count the no of sequences in a fasta file).
Even "How can I install $bioinfoToolX on $*nixSystemY" etc
Or Windows, I guess, if people are actually using that.
@terdon it is not that long time ago when I graduated... These too simple questions could be easily translated into questions with non-trivial answers by adding "What is the most efficient ..." at the beginning.
@Kusalananda I definitely agree that using standard Unix tools is better / wiser / more reliable solution. I was just not entirely sure if it is the fastest solution...
@KonradRudolph Ah, yes, I was wondering about that. I could see no reason why the format would be limited to short reads, but I assumed they'd enforce very long lines instead.
@IakovDavydov Yes, because the sequence and the quality need to follow the same “shape”, i.e. if the sequence is broken into lines after 5, 10, and 5 characters, then so must the quality score.
Wait, in fact I’m not even sure about what I just said. But the lengths of the sequence and the quality must obviously be the same
So what the script does is record the sequence length, and read that many characters in the quality string. What this means, though, is that the FASTQ format is not a regular language.