evolarjun

Wow, that takes me back...

Now I feel old.

The photography is also beautifully done. Although mid-century and earlier industrial spaces are usually beautiful on their own, the photography really highlights that. I highly doubt I would be able to capture it the way this photographer has.

I agree, this is a cool result, but not something far out or extremely novel. It's discovering a new class of things that is different from other similar things we already knew about. One of those similar things we already knew about (CRISPER) turned out to be better than other tools we have for editing DNA in vivo, so that makes it potentially more exciting, but others haven't had the same application. It's interesting because the function is unknown, and you're right there's a lot of followup to figure out just exactly what is going on and why, much less to come up with an idea for how to use it to do something cool.

To me this strikes me as an incremental discovery that would have taken someone with time, interest, and expertise to make before. It could have cool applications or it could just be interesting biology. Molecular biology has progressed through many years and many rounds of automation and new tools, but the problems are still hard. This just strikes me as one more way we may be able to speed up one part of the process.

The study results themselves aren't really dangerous in any way I can see. This is basic microbiology, and not necessarily some kind of major breakthrough that will change the world on its own. It's possible this leads to something big like CRISPR, but most likely not. The work is more the case of noticing something that someone hasn't noticed yet. It would have gotten noticed eventually, they just did it before someone else did (assuming they didn't get a hint somehow).

A lot of molecular biology is noticing something that you can't explain or that seems weird and might be interesting. Once it's noticed the followup is often fairly straightforward and it either pans out or it doesn't. The exciting/scary/unlikely part is that the LLM on its own recognized something as being important to follow up.

From my skim of the paper, the work could only be done by someone with a pretty good understanding of the biology and an extremely good understanding of how to use LLMs and agents. LLMs are not going to take over biology yet.

It is odd (or maybe not) that they decided to publish a marketing whitepaper rather than a more traditional journal submission + preprint. The work does appear to be sufficient for a publication, though there's a good chance a reviewer will rip into them for some of the assertions they make, but given the topic I'm sure the paper will be accepted regardless.

The market for entry-level programmers has already declined, but at least they were somewhat in demand and made reasonable salaries. Now what happens to post-docs who already make almost nothing and often get treated like crap?

I thought it was fairly obvious the author was trying to point out the issue with quantitative rankings by setting up the stats to juice his score. It would be fun to play with the stats and figure out how to make yourself come out on top though. Unfortunately I'm not in political science, so it's not much good to me.

Loops are good for streaking. It's hard to get even coverage with a loop, so loops would make it hard to get accurate CFU/ml counts. Loops are more likely to get you single colonies even if you're inoculating from a high density culture, so loops are usually used when picking single colonies is the goal. Sterilized cheap flat toothpicks work pretty well for streaking too.

I'm a geneticist, so it's nice to see, but it doesn't seem to belong on HN to me either. Maybe because someone thinks this information should influence their use of the hot-new pseudoscience cureall - "peptides"?

The page says "open source", but I don't see links to the source anywhere so I can see what filters installing this would add. I'm sure it's fine, but I wouldn't add a set of email filters without knowing what they were first.

In my field (bio) it's fairly common not to publish code, but it's becoming more common. Biologist's code is generally crappy and I think everyone understands that. The better developers are often valued for producing tools that are reliable and people can use and get lots of attention and citations for their tool papers.

The mathematicians and computer scientists I've worked with generally wrote more complicated code, but from a bugginess and maintainability standpoint I'm not sure it was any better. I had a mentor with an applied math degree who was extremely fond of one and two character variable names.

Just publish it. Unless your paper is a _BIG_DEAL_ barely anybody is going to look at it, and some people (hopefully the right people) will respect you for showing your work. I think I'm one of the few reviewers that actually try to run and maybe glance at the code for papers I review. In the papers I've reviewed I've never seen a comment that indicated any of the other reviewers even looked at it.