[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.