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

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.

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

Thank you! I think the circular property of that matrix is the key.

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.

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

oopsie :D

Haha thank you, headlamp seems pretty cool too!

Thanks!

The problem is that your playgrounds, and https://www.podsnacks.org/, and the restaurant notifier https://try-something-new.web.app/ got submitted today and I find them all really appealing.

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

Cool, thanks!

Nitpick: On page 7, it says

   Create a file called large_order.tsv that outputs the largest order of Bottled Water...

But then, under "Solution Criteria":

   File largest_order.tsv exists

Different filenames, "large_order" vs "largest_order".

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 :)

Can you just compile arbitrary programs to work in web assembly now? This is super cool!

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.

Yes please!