Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in a Hacker News for biology?
I have a life science and computer science background. Given the increasing interest in biotechnology, synthetic biology, and life extension research on this site, I am considering building out a hacker news style discussion board for biology, with an emphasis on biotechnology and bioengineering.
I have noticed a lot of discussions related to life science topics on HN tend to be overly speculative, poorly grounded in empirical research, or simply pseudoscientific. The level of biochemical knowledge here is rather inconsistent compared to say, CS or physics. Most of the time the conversation is merely parroting existing popular science buzzwords, with no real understanding of scale, difficulty, or time to market. I hope by making a new platform that is life science focused rather than on software (yes I am aware HN isn't exclusively for software discussions only), there can be greater agglomeration effects for biotechnology research, akin to what hacker news have done for promoting internet startups.
29 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 70.3 ms ] threadI think plenty of people would be happy to have a HN type platform for whatever their area of interest is, given it's moderated well and has a healthy, invested community.
Good luck with 1 and 1000x Good luck with 2.
In general, the more, the better. https://lobste.rs/ and https://www.designernews.co/ are still active after several years, their community is just smaller.
If you get that down, I think that many people would be interested in a biology-focused HN-like site. Getting the right people to join is important, too. HN started out with some high-level folk, who set the tone for what this site is.
Good luck!
The structure then could be just a news feed of important bio stories and there is expert discussion locally then you click and it links to HNs copy with discussion.
Linking to other sites with a discussions is good. Every time there is airplane accident some link to an specialized forum (I don't remember which) and it's a good addition.
So linking to discussions with a lot of comments may fly under the radar. Even linking to a discussion with a single good comment may be welcome, but the comment must be really good. Perhaps it's even better to link to the good comment, instead of the whole discussion, unless most of the discussion is good. Anyway, except the first idea, the others look difficult to automate.
There are various science subreddits with large readerships but quality there is also mixed. Although you do see some high quality discussions.
I think you will have a challenge incentivizing high quality scientific discussion because the people with the acumen to have them are busy actually doing science.
https://xkcd.com/435/
But that's also good because it hasn't be done yet and needs doing.
If the post has less than 20 or 30 comments, it is possible to reply to the interesting comments that are wrong or are asking for more information. Sometimes the article has big mistakes, and it is still possible to make a toplevel comment explaining the errors.
When the post already has 100 comment, usually the conversation derrailed and the main discussion is if it's possible to use an Em-Drive inside a Warp-Drive bubble to make a Start Treck teleporter, or something like that.
I'm not an specialist in Biology, so repliying in biologial threads is more difficult. Please ramian here and answer questions in your area of knowdledge.
I really need to sit down and be thorough about this, but off the top of my head, here are some things I frequently see misunderstood:
1) not all diseases can be cured by changing the genome, even in principle
2) delivery is an unsolved problem! we can't get CRISPR into every cell, or necessarily any arbitrary tissue. This is probably the main roadblock right now for CRISPR therapeutics. For some genetic diseases this is fine. For example, there are some conditions where fixing only 20% of cells is enough to get a clinically-meaningful improvement, but for others this won't work. There are ex vivo techniques, where you remove some cells, modify them in vitro, and transplant them back, but that can't be done with all (most?) cell types.
3) Most traits aren't controlled by a single gene, and those interactions can get very complicated.
4) We don't know what every gene does
5) Even when a gene has been thoroughly characterized, we don't necessarily know what effect a particular modification will have
6) Biology is complicated af. Every change could potentially have unanticipated side effects.
7) Even if God descended from the clouds and granted us the ability to modify any genome in any and all cells of our choosing without any negative side effects, we wouldn't be able to cure every disease even when there's clearly a genetic component. Aging comes up on HN a lot but it's probably the least tractable disease I can think of.
I could go on, but I'm going to stop here and save it for the blog. To be sure, the technology is being developed rapidly, but there are some problems where it's just a matter of iterative engineering, and others where it's going to take a century of dedicated effort.
(For some reason people is not so happy with explanations that break the conservation of energy.)