Yes!

Kudos to Jakob (is he on here?) and to all the groups who do the important work of independently benchmarking tools in bioinformatics and other computational fields. It is too often underfunded and underappreciated, but I think it's just as critical as developing novel methods.

Peer review is supposed to mitigate such issues, but even then the biases can be so subtle that only the most diligent reviewer would catch them all.

Our tendency is to just look at these headline, accept it at face value, and hit reskeet/tweet/toot.

The incentive to overlook one's own bias is proportional to the degree of financial incentive. It's difficult to get someone to understand their benchmarks are wrong when their salary depends on their not understanding it.

Even when someone is trying to be fair and unbiased in evaluating their own work, they are likely to fail: bias is often unconscious, and humans (especially smart ones) tend towards laziness, hubris, and impatience (to paraphrase Larry Wall).

Sounds like there's still some exciting stuff that will actually be announced at the conference...let's wait to see.

Generally agree, but some poisons kill you while others can arguably, under the right circumstances, provide some benefit (e.g., alcohol).

VC money is a poisoned chalice, avoid until unavoidable

A) Any. God please I just need enough to survive until the market improves.
B) Only if the terms are really good.
C) B, plus they’re a follow-on investor you won’t have to talk to much.
D) None. Their advice and connections will be unhelpful at best, and likely detrimental.

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They also make some nice Amaro derivatives. And gin. Basically everything they make is great.