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brinedew

41 karma · joined December 23, 2025

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brinedew··on Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle
After you finish the game, the "game over" screen will show you the "practice" button to try again with a different protein.

If you're interested to learn more about proteins, I suggest asking an in-browser LLM like Claude Chrome to play and explain its guesses at your preferred level of familiarity. https://claude.com/chrome

brinedew··on Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle
I'm glad you enjoyed it.

> I wonder if there's a way to ease the difficulty by filling in 'correct' features of the guesses

Rather than allowing players to guess individual features, I opted for the "highlight" system where all hidden features that match your guessed protein's features get auto-revealed. This way, if you suspect a transmembrane protein, you can just guess a known transmembrane protein and see which features auto-reveal.

> it would have been interesting to sift through classes or cell types

You're welcome to suggest databases with good coverage over the proteome that I could use for these.

> I presume you're showing even the 'low confidence' portions of the predicted structure?

Yes, any residues in the files I fetch get rendered. I rank by coverage before fetching.

> You could also show the primary amino acid sequence too

I'll consider it.

brinedew··on Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle
Thank you. I started the development with the interface first, basically making a mockup of how the finished game should look like, and then prodding LLMs with a stick to make a backend that would support this interface without crashing.

Making a nice-looking web GUI without knowing relevant vocabulary was a very clunky process in comparison to code pipelines, basically just pasting screenshots into the chat window and asking LLMs to "line up stuff properly", which they still couldn't manage to do in places.

brinedew··on Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle
That's the frontpage link, fixed it, thank you.
brinedew··on Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle
My dream is forming a team of Tetlock-style superbiologists who can identify gene names on sight like Rainbolt, beat prediction markets on shorting biotech stocks, and smell out pre-cancerous cells like it's the final round of amongus.
brinedew··on Show HN: GeneGuessr – a daily biology web puzzle
You can play more than once in the practice mode. It turns on after you complete the daily puzzle.

There's almost 20k entries in my human gene database. You can choose any of them as your guess, but the "gene of the day" is chosen from a subset that has decent 3D structure coverage (meaning, not falling back to alphafold2 for visualization).