Ask HN: Would anyone be interested in a Hacker News for biology?

[darwinian]

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.

[gus_massa]

Try to remain here. As a self appointed Em-Drive denier, I can ensure that the level of discussion in Physics and Math is sometimes not so high.

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.

[jryb]

I've been mulling writing a general "Common misunderstandings HN has about CRISPR" blog post. I'd like to see if confronting everything head-on can change the general nature of conversations here. Maybe you could try something similar for Em-Drives.

[gus_massa]

I prefer to adapt the explanation for each thread. The main problem is that people is not too attached to the conservation of momentum, so each thread has a different excuse to explain why it is broken and why it doesn't break the current laws of Physics.

(For some reason people is not so happy with explanations that break the conservation of energy.)

[pretzell]

I'm definitely your target audience. For the past few months ive been super curious about crispr and just enrolled in OChem to try to really understand this stuff. I probably have all those misunderstandings. Any pointers?

[jryb]

First, ochem is good and there are aspects of cas proteins that you need ochem to understand, but you'll probably want to take biochemistry as well since it deals directly with proteins and nucleic acids (though I assume ochem is a pre-req wherever you are anyway).

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.

[jrhouston]

I would love to see a site like HN but focused more on scientific discussion. The level of scientific literacy in the software startup community is definitely inconsistent and at times disappointing.

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.

[darwinian]

I think another challenge would be balancing moderation between scientific accuracy and general discussion/speculation. Posts on reddit r/science usually become a sea of deleted off-topic comments. The Eternal September problem aside, a bio-focused site would have to be seeded with people of life science backgrounds. It is tempting to just do a Show HN and hope for cross pollination. I suspect, however, the discourse would quickly get dominated by data science/bioinformatics and machine learning on healthcare topics if HN users are the earliest users. Finding a large core group of users with strong biotechnology backgrounds to set the initial tone will be the foremost priority. Life science is ultimately grounded in the wet lab, pure computational hype and speculation without theoretical rigor would just bring about another Theranos.

[vulcan01]

The key to building a HN-type website is really the moderation. I seriously doubt that HN would be this successful without the hard work from dang et al.

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!

[thatcat]

Yea let's do it. It would be cool to integrate discussions back into HN. Maybe a bio site could cross pollinate, as others called it, by submitting the stories to HN automatically and using HN for moderation and discussion. Then auto comment a link to expert discussion. This would improve discoverability.

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.

[gus_massa]

Autoposting the links to the article and to the discussion in other site is heavily discouraged here. In general, bots are discouraged here. I's almost sure it will be downvoted heavily.

[thatcat]

It doesn't say that explicitly in the guidelines, but I could see the spirit of that violating the norms of this site. OTOH, if the content was quality maybe it would be ok say if you only auto post top stories of the day / week with > a min# comments. Then the other site could have slow nuanced discussion and this site could build off that. What do you think?

[gus_massa]

IIRC is one of these implicit rules, you (or the OP) can ask the mods for more recommendations [e-mail]

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.

[aurizon]

We now have sites for all manner of organic molecules, and methods of attaching them. This is an analog for the expansion of electronics at the dawn of the radio age - mid 20's which accompanied the global electronics growth of the 20th century. All manner of parts, tools etc were developed and sold in shops and via mail order. A similar molecular creativity phase dawned a few years ago and now you can acquire all these molecules and tools online and there is fierce competition. A regulatory overlay is now rising to limit the abilities of molecular terrorists like the Aum Shinrikyo of 1995 Sarin attacks. I think we are getting well into this phase now, with the online market replacing mail order. https://hacklab.to/ has a well equipped bio lab.

[pvaldes]

You would lose the cross pollination effect then

[netizen-9748]

Unless it was similar to HN, where HN is focused on tech. The other site could focus on bio sciences with other stuff sprinkled in. I think it would be interesting

[jryb]

Sure, but only if you require commenters to provably have some kind of background in biology. I know that’s problematic for a number of reasons, but it’s just too much work to “fight the good fight” and explain why everyone is wrong on every single post.

[jryb]

To be clear, I think the comments should be readable by anyone. Maybe there could be some way for laypeople to submit questions that were subject to more strict moderation. Maybe there's too much overlap with /r/askscience - but as long as I can read about biology without running into any "will mRNA vaccines make my DNA give away my GPS coordinates?"-style questions, it would be worth subscribing to.

[polka_haunts_us]

This is the 2nd "Hacker News for X" post that I've seen today.

I 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.

[mtmail]

Related "Ask HN: Alternatives to HN for non-Hacker News?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25318880

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.

[babs56]

I would love to see this! Pharma, Life Science and the hybrid between tech would be great.

[Overtonwindow]

Only if it doesn’t have politics.

[ignoranceprior]

Yeah, I would definitely like to see more HN-like sites for different fields.

[SwEEpCollidE]

Definitely a great idea. I would love to see this discussion here.

[type0]

How would you make sure not to end up like Labrats subreddit?

[aaron695]

This is roughly true for the difficulty of having an analytical community -

https://xkcd.com/435/

But that's also good because it hasn't be done yet and needs doing.

[JabavuAdams]

Yes, do it!

[iancmceachern]

Yeah!