raboukhalil

Yes it's powered by v86! I just wanted it to be easier to embed and come pre-built with lots of bioinformatics tools. You don't actually have to exclude the bioinformatics tools because v86 doesn't actually load tools unless you call them on the command-line. But when you embed, you can also preload the tools you will use so they load faster the first time they're called.

A few weeks ago, I came across a blog post with 5 git tips. I would have loved having an embedded terminal with some mock repos preloaded with the exact situation. That's the kind of use case I'm aiming at, not just the basic commands!

Wow tough crowd, can you expand on why it looks broken and low quality?

The use case is for tutorials and documentation pages. sandbox.bio embeds that terminal in all its bioinformatics tutorials and people find it useful to have an environment where you don't need to set anything up before you start learning. So I wanted to make it easy for others to embed a similar environment in their training materials.

I added more details about how the decoding works here: https://sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt#intuition-decoding , I'd love to hear if that is more clear now

I just added a section about the intuition behind the decoding: https://sandbox.bio/concepts/bwt#intuition-decoding , hope it helps!

Author here, nice to see the article posted here! I'm currently looking for ideas for other interactive articles, so let me know if think of other interesting/weird algorithms that are hard to wrap your head around.

Good point, thanks! I'll add a subsection about the intuition for that.

This is a podcast we recorded about the promise and perils of AI in biology, where we dive into a case where AI was used to predict enzyme function and gave results that looked really promising, but were not quite right.

We reviewed 10 of our subscribers' CVs and came across the same issues over and over again. The CVs were all bioinformatics focused, but a lot of the advice also applies to software engineering.

Aha, I was wondering why the biowasm CDN suddenly spiked in usage today! :D

Haha thank you, headlamp seems pretty cool too!

Good morning HN! This tool lets you play with awk, grep, sed, and jq commands right in your browser. Start from the examples and explore from there!

To get these tools running in the browser, I compiled them to WebAssembly (see https://github.com/biowasm/biowasm for details). That way, the commands you type run instantaneously, and it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to host servers that execute arbitrary commands from users :)

Hello HN, this is an interactive awk tutorial that features a terminal in the browser to simulate the real experience.

To get it running in the browser, I compiled gawk from C to WebAssembly! If you're interested in how that was done, check out the biowasm project: https://github.com/biowasm/biowasm/tree/main/tools/gawk

Thanks! It's generally easiest to do for C/C++/Rust/AssemblyScript code (other languages often need to ship things like garbage collection or an interpreter alongside it). But even with those languages, it's not always trivial to support features in the browser like file systems, threads, SIMD, etc.

Hey HN, I recently came across a very useful tutorial about jq (https://earthly.dev/blog/jq-select/) and created an interactive tutorial based on it. It features a command-line sandbox where you can safely explore and run arbitrary jq commands (it runs jq in your browser using WebAssembly).

Check it out if you want to learn how to filter, process, and wrangle JSON data. And if you happen to be getting started in bioinformatics, check out the rest of the tutorials on sandbox.bio :)