irollboozers

Surely someone at WSJ is wondering "Hey, this article is doing really well in organic search. Our numbers are up, great job everyone."

The fact that exciting scientific discoveries like this are being presented on WSJ behind a paywall is absurd. Science on the internet is going to be dramatically different in 10 years than it is right now...

Makes you think about the sheer amount of traffic. Incredible.

That's what I immediately noticed - his grammar and processing speed is pretty slow and steady but his vocabulary is incredible. I mean, he's been studying for what, 2-3 years? I wouldn't be surprised if he was in like the top 1% of people studying Chinese, on top of the fact that he has a small company to run.

This is incredible. Wish more organizations and institutions took this approach of beautiful and striking science, then perhaps more scientists would start the value other new ways to communicate science.

Unfortunately, there just aren't many good metrics for future potential scientific value. It's not like you can just give NSA / DARPA / NIH one impact factor, as weird as that sounds.

Curious, what do large scale companies in the cloud currently do for this?

You can't really blame them, Kickstarter is composed of artists, not scientists.

Should be noted that the original authors are the founders of the SciFund Challenge, and they've gathered tons of great empirical data.

It's funny that most of the jokes tend to revolve around becoming some sort of super hero. The stranger thing is that no one has pondered the potential cons having the ability to see beyond the spectrum. Or maybe I don't read enough comic books?

a lengthy discussion over on reddit about this: http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2e5wry/biohacker...

Sorry, but in this case, it's actually N^x. Even running PCR and gel analysis requires steps where the time is dependent on the number of samples (e.g. pipetting, walking to the centrifuge, making multiple gels)

I wonder what the equivalent of MacBasic would be today?

Experiment is working on that. :)

There are probably others much more familiar with cloud infrastructure who can chime in, but the AWS of science and the Heroku of science are two very different challenges, and I feel the analogies probably cross over pretty well.

Definitely having the infrastructure 'warehouse' layer that Transcriptic is building (with a real API! wow!) will be valuable. And like you hint at, power users won't need hand-holding, but 99% of the market of users will. That's where packaging, ease of use, and limited configuration seem to be the difference maker (Heroku starting exclusively with Rails).

The startup equivalent would be "it's easy to build the app, it's hard to get users". Not all apps can yield users, but lowering the bar to launch will certainly yield more opportunities for successful apps.

There's been quite a few efforts in this. See Transcriptic and Emerald Therapeutics (http://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/), while there's the more traditional suppliers for things like short oligos or expression vectors (https://www.dna20.com/ and http://www.idt.com/).

I think there's also been a lot of independent academic attempts at this (see: http://klavinslab.org/ which is CS/BioE at UWash), but all kind of waded around in the shallow water.

The reason why I think this is compelling because I think almost every synthetic biologist has an existing workflow. It's basically design using some sort of CAD software, order from IDT, receive materials next day, run test by hand, ship to Genewiz for sequencing, etc. That's just one example of a workflow involving 4-5 specialized 'steps'. As the steps get cheaper/faster/better, consolidating and automating this is just a no brainer.

Experiment (YC W13) started off as a Show HN, but back then we were called Microryza. It was a very modest thing, and after somehow getting near the top of the front page, we were flooded with traffic [http://i.imgur.com/miMyx7x.png]. That traffic spike is what convinced us to quit our jobs and go all out. Show HN is definitely my favorite part of hacker news.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833393

You would think someone at Facebook is already looking at this question...

Check out Experiment (http://experiment.com).

Even in 'research', there are different types and different motivations. I believe the Science that we see today is more a reflection of the past decades' focus on commercial innovation. As opposed to the previous few centuries, where science was the product of exploration and curiosity. How we do science today will not be the same as how we do science in 10 years.

Will there ever by a YC recipe book? Pretty please? I want to know all of PG's culinary secrets.

I guess I was more hoping for some old facebook photo of some semi-famous Japanese PI.

I would really love to see proof of this claim.

I was actually thinking a new game AI competition.

A lot of really fantastic points from Steve Ballmer that go counter to a lot traditional startup advice - e.g. fail fast, time to success, what brands mean. Hope others find this useful.

The crowdsourced part is where this could really have a big impact, otherwise the technology is pretty standard. Crowdsourcing legitimate and replicable protocols is something others have tried (OpenWetWare, etc) but not quite scaled to Github like levels. Still, this seems to run into the same challenges that others before it faced.

I'll gladly pitch in some funds!

The question is - would you continue to do science if you could remove all of the current broken system? Is doing science what you love? Is it possible that there can be a way to continue doing science without being a part of that machine?

Congratulations Sam! Here's to a very exciting future, and looking forward to see how you help shape it.

Agreed! We've had so much demand for international projects, however we just can't handle it right now. This is on our horizon, and hopefully soon!

Thanks for pointing this out, we're looking into it right now!