For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less than $1000 and enable anyone to be able to do so. While I’m handling the other bits elsewhere, DNA synthesis is a key technology primed for open source disruption.

_____

How to make DNA synthesis affordable

https://keonigandall.com/posts/affordable_dna_2.html

I encourage him to continue explore new ways of making DNA, but understanding the market is very different from building off an expired patent.

I would like to know what specifically you think I am wrong about, though. Always happy to improve my thinking.

I am pretty new to chip design but know the DNA space quite well - I would love to do a call, if possible, because I have lots of noob questions about chip design and chip design tools. Happy to share anything about the biological side in exchange!

It is a bit dead when it comes to a git, since I am trying to get the first machine needed, which is a DNA synthesizer (asked about that here https://groups.google.com/g/diybio/c/V3OYVBxaH04 for example).

The idea is that with a traditional DNA synthesizer I can have positive controls of the chemistry, and develop a chip that can fit inside the flow cell of the existing synthesizer. In biotech, everything goes wrong a bit more often than in computer science, so the focus lately has been getting my hands on a working synthesizer. This is a tried and true method of getting chip synthesis working.

If that works, I'd like to provide the chip at cost for integrators, as well as develop a functioning full product for integration with some bots I'm building for my official work.

Personal website is here - http://keonigandall.com

Will the output of your product add a suicide timer to a cell?

Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying?

Will the output of your product prevent pathogen creation?

Will the output of your product require a specific, unnatural energy source that can only be man made?

Professionals take great care in thinking about those problems, and sometimes still fail. (IIRC, a synthesized breed of mosquitos that were released in Brazil failed to die off and are now a part of the biosystem).

[0] https://www.dw.com/en/genetically-modified-mosquitoes-breed-...

> Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying?

Why would this matter? We have immortal cell lines like hela cells that have been alive for decades.

> Will the output of your product prevent pathogen creation?

No, but no one is going to "accidentally" create a new pathogen (you'd need this as well as some expensive labware and a lot of expertise), and the people with the incentive can already do so in labs.

> Will the output of your product require a specific, unnatural energy source that can only be man made?

What lol

It's super hard, but until novel bioweapons are discovered, it is at least a tractable problem.

Absolutely not.

> Will the output of your product prevent the cells from procreating/multiplying?

Absolutely not.

> Will the output of your product prevent pathogen creation?

Strictly defined as the output being a chip, absolutely does not.

> Will the output of your product require a specific, unnatural energy source that can only be man made?

Absolutely not.

> Professionals take great care in thinking about those problems

I am a professional in this field, and have been thinking about these problems quite deeply (if you check on my website, my first time writing about my concern for these problems was back in 2014). I have developed opinions on this over the years, but roughly they come down to the fact that many folks have a gross misunderstanding of the field in general, but quite like to think that they understand what is going on.

For example, I mentioned I wanted to do oligo pool synthesis - how the hell would the output of an oligo pool synth run add a suicide timer? Or prevent replication? Or require a certain kind of energy source? In the context of the stated goal, these objections really don't make any sense. It is roughly equivalent to someone wanting to run a mining company and getting countered by "will the output of your product stop school shootings?". Perhaps better questions are along the lines of - how are oligos matching biohazard sequences prevented from being synthesized? Well, this is a question of both governmental policy (what IS a biohazardous sequence?) and of the integrated device (does it phone home for each synthesized sequence? What about hardware hacking?).

Perhaps part of the disconnect here is not realising how vast the applications are for synthesizing DNA oligos are. It's a very basic thing, and anybody can already basically order them online for a very affordable amount. It's like being worried about someone open sourcing a way to make printer ink.

It’s interesting how people revise their arguments, or omit words from it, to make their interlocutor’s response appear more absurd.

How would unicellular organisms procreate exactly?!

I am not being pedantic here but procreation usually entails sexual reproduction and I don't see how this is possible for these organisms.

1) Multiplying: Asexual reproduction only.

2) Reproduction: Sexual and asexual reproduction.

3) Procreation: Sexual reproduction only.

BTW: I don't see how 'multiplying' could refer to just asexual reproduction. People often use it in sentences like 'the deer population near here multiplied the last couple years'.

As you can see, getting terminology right is challenging and not always straightforward.

Any resources and books you'd recommend?

Efabless's chip ignite program is also great - check it out! https://efabless.com

https://www.zerotoasiccourse.com

And also:

https://www.udemy.com/user/anagha/

Suppose nuclear weapons did not exist and someone was concerned about the Manhattan project — would you say that chairs enable people to build regular bombs, so we shouldn't worry about nuclear bombs?

“Harmful” can also be seen the other way. From my view within the industry, it is harmful that the tech does not exist, and the idea of harmfulness is, largely, propaganda perpetuated by elites to maintain the status quo.

One day, I will do it just because I can and because you argued I shouldn't. Then your actions will be a proximate cause of the existence of the thing.

Ideally, I would not be so controllable but a deep part of me loves the transgressive nature of fighting a puritan.

Upvotes for the bants

Is it something like a 3D printer where you can get a rough but usable finished product, or is it more like a "if you want to make bacterium X produce Y product, you need to do X, Y, Z, W, etc." and the chip is used to do one of the steps.

If so, why would one want to do that versus taking an existing cell and injecting custom DNA?

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).

The former tends to stop all progress, while the latter considers that negative outcomes are real, but that we can productively reduce risk.

Kind of like how OpenAI removed racist, sexist, and other troubling images from their AI training pool and then released it in pieces (to a small group of subjects) to remove as many issues as possible. With that said, they definitely still made mistakes.

In any case, blatant sarcasm is also out of the spirit of hackernew’s “ Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation”

It’s very easy to come up with answers to that question if you don’t know what is actually possible. Not very useful answers, though.

That is untrue. If you mean by "...it requires knowledge and expertise to answer" domain knowledge.

It is possible to understand the implications of technology without mastering it.

The experts in the field have huge incentives to say it is safe.

If we are to make decisions about releasing novel self replicating organisms into the environment, we should not task the people who will profit (scientists) to decide if it is a good idea or not.

Chisel for programming it (great little lang/project) https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Design-Chisel-Martin-Schoeber...

Efabless PDKs - https://efabless.com/

Other than that, lots of trial and error. Hardware people are brutal with their acronyms, so it really comes down to a lot of stumbling around and reading whatever I can.

Body doubling is known within the ADHD community and entails performing a task in the presence of another. More details here: https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/body-double-adhd

It helps to engage motivation by using another person as the proxy. I wrote a bit about how I think it works here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/body-doubling-proxy

The technique goes way beyond just ADHD applications for executive functions and is something we tend to do anyways, e.g., running with a friend, studying in a group, etc.

It solves an issue for myself and I truly want to help others with the approach by making a way to stay accountable through the help of others.

Ever since school where I was wholly unable to revise or do homework anywhere but the library (where others would be doing the same), and all the way to today where I tell my partner "I'll do the washing up if you stay in the kitchen"! Doesn't really matter if she talks to me, the task is just hugely more bearable in her physical presence.

https://youtu.be/vEqJAReXiN4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RGEo2Kohb8

(4 Hours of Asian Mum to Help You Focus on Practising/Studying/Working)

What really was happening was that I respond well to body doubling. (Never diagnosed with any sort of executive functioning disorder, but I suspect that's more because I never went and got diagnosed than me lacking one).

Cool idea.

I've never had luck actually doing a "lets get together and do X chore" event though. Well aside from homework and study sessions in university. It'd be awesome if this app helps with actually doing that for everyday life tasks.

I've also noticed that weekly accountability meetings don't seem to work well for me. I joined a group where we would meet once a week to share our progress and discuss goals for the next week. I realized that this didn't seem to help with procrastination or focus, and I was just feeling additional pressure and guilt when I wasn't able to achieve my goals. Working with (or next to) someone in real time is a very different experience.

You make a great point about the real-time experience. We think the key component for why body doubling works is because of that real-time aspect. I've tried a variety of journals, to-do lists, calendar reminders, etc. all for naught. But once someone is there, a switch flips and it's almost effortless.

I also find pair work to be very special on many levels (intellectually, emotionally,. logistically). I wish there was more theory on this

- do you consider the friendly competition aspect (seeing someone do a task revives inspiration, desire, confidence, motivation to do it, when the other is tired you feel happy to fill the role)

- the emotional bond from sharing: sharing any task is often a strong bond (even just carrying a load), pain and success

- the intellectual benefits: a bit like the first point but searching for solutions gets much much cheaper with a peer. You can validate point of view / theories, feel less emotional pain from doubts it the other doesn't know too

I had more topics but I forgot

In my opinion, they all fall under the category of a body doubling effect. Your second and third points strike a particular chord for me as well. I wrote a bit about why my cofounder and I are creating Double rather than doing it alone. In essence, we are cofounding because seeing the other person also trying their best and going through the rough parts with me drives me to keep going. (It's a quick read here: https://doubleapp.xyz/blog/dont-sleep-in-the-mud ).

I see so much misery that could be replaced by joy, insight, friendship..

I wrote about an approach called “Bold Boast” in my book on coping with my particular mentality (which led me to quit high school, but also led, a few years later, to managing a team at Apple). I feel like everyone else has a powerboat, but I am forced to sail by the wind.

Anyway Bold Boast means you publicly commit to achieving a learning or teaching goal that involves a presentation or visible product.

(see Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar, which I believe you find pirated online here and there)

I think that's superegoic, you're doing something because you should, and you'll beat yourself up morally if you don't. Rather than egoic, doing it because you want to for your own gratification.

My girlfriend is always working next to me, and that doesn't prevent me from getting distracted every few minutes.

The only thing it helps is for stuff like cleaning the house where the problem is not focus but motivation, and we will be doing the same thing together.

I’m in the same boat that house chores need someone there doing the same thing, rather than just their presence.

One of the things we’re playing around with is different user experiences for different tasks (e.g., computer work vs house chores). It’d be great to hear what you’ve tried when it comes to focusing on work and how it went!

ADHD is a disastrously wrong name for the disorder. There is no deficit in attention, and hyperactivity is only as common as inattentiveness, and neither of the two is a primary symptom.

Executive dysfunction is the primary aspect of ADHD. Poor working (short term) memory is the second.

We get distracted because we can't choose where to put our focus. We miss important details in conversations because we tried to listen while also thinking about something else, and lost both details to a mental stack overflow. We get hyperactive because we are understimulated and can't be intentionally calm. We don't do homework or wash dishes or finish projects because we can't intentionally get started on anything.

Focusmate is a great product centered around virtual co-working and work productivity, whereas Double will not be centered around co-working, but for everyday tasks (which can include co-working). As a result, we are designing the experience to be tailored towards the everyday experiences rather than a co-working product used for everyday task.

Essentially, we want to expand the scope of tasks you can double up to do together and provide a better UX for those diverse tasks.

Additionally, we are building Double with the ethos that you don't need to always "crush it", but doing a little bit is okay too. We want to help you build the habits you'd like to see a little step at a time (one of our key inspirations is Tiny Habits).

I can see how this can set you apart from the competition as you have already an active and enthusiastic members among the community doing their best to help each other since they share the same background and life experience.

Down the line, we do have ideas on incorporating “hosting” a Double to help give a sense of service and further reinforce the community aspect as well.

Can you tell me please why opted for this esoteric and non mainstream term and not for a more common one like "companion" and the likes?

I guess it's pretty common practice for corporations or private equity to snatch up smaller independent practices and then run them like a sweat shop. Her current CEO's resume is a list of Starbucks, Walmart, and a few other corporate roles that are totally unrelated to the medical industry.

We're tinkering with a platform that can somehow disrupt this cycle and add some transparency to the practice structure for the would-be employee.

The current form is kind of a niche Glassdoor, or we've been thinking of it as the "online dating between veterinarians & practices." Still playing with the concept.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to take out these massive PE firms that are plaguing the Vet Med industry?

Here's some more info on the problem: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/06/...

I'm convinced Vetmed will follow human medicine's history. Currently, the future of human medicine is small clinic subscription medicine without insurance. Apps like Roo could help with temporary staffing issues.

Let's talk: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholascgilpin

Investors can only invest in scalable, replicable businesses. Veterinary practices are intensely personal, often specialize in different species and breeds, and can develop unique experimental treatments. The cost of labor is ridiculously cheap (people become Vet Tech's for love, not money), and buildings need not be in commercial centers, so capital costs are minimal.

Honestly, veterinarians are really in the best possible profession for maintaining independent practices. If they can't resist investor takeover, who can?

This is absolutely not true and it's a big issue in the field currently (my wife is a Veterinarian). This kind of thinking is also what is causing a lot of mental health issues in the field.

That is what burns the labour out

I guess the question is then whether labour is abundant/available. Even if there are people willing to work for little, are there anywhere near enough?

Have you considered forming / joining a union?

Also curious on what your source is for their high margins since you mentioned you're an outsider?

Perhaps they should start a union, like the rest of us?

(Backstory: Started a Twitter account in July (twitter.com/@betterstreetsai) posting DALL-E-generated street transformations, it immediately took off, got lots of press, etc. and made me realize how huge the demand for this stuff is.)

Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter if you're interested in helping!

You're right that these problems are political—in fact, they're entirely political!—but the reason they're so political is because there's no existing platform for capturing latent + kinetic demand, so electeds (even the ones who want better streets—we've heard from many of them on Twitter) have absolutely no idea how much political support they have—and they need that support to take bold action. We're solving that problem!

[1] https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/24/grassroots-push-emerges-..., https://bikeportland.org/2020/05/20/its-official-pbot-consid..., https://bikeportland.org/2021/02/02/support-builds-for-bike-...

https://aixd.substack.com

Search itself is a fractal of interesting problems. Haven't had much time to write about it lately, but I've pretty much doubled the size of the index and re-written a lot of the query logic to make it much better, faster, and more accurate. Will do a write-up eventually, since it may be relatively explainable without getting too into the weeds that the audience dwindles entirely.

I keep having breakthroughs that make it in one way or another better, but as soon as I do I find something new that could be improved.

Kinda bonkers it's been possible to build this alone and run the entire thing on what amounts to a souped up PC :P

The crawler itself is aware of 470 million URLs.

I've actually had it up to 50 million before, but that was a lot noisier data with fewer keywords per document. The current 60 million is significantly "bigger" than the old 50 million. Index size is not actually a great metric for how comprehensive a search engine is. A small index with good signal-to-noise ratio is much more useful than a large one where 95% is chaff.

100 million is my current goal. I think that's about what's doable on my current hardware. It also gets increasingly unwieldy to deal with the data. I've already got processes that require several days non-stop computation.

Also curious now, why you say half a 470m URLs? :)

I accidentally a word while editing the sentence.

You would think that this is a well established field. But then I found claims in online discussions (including at the W3C) that were obviously wrong on a mathematical level. The more I looked, the more the arguments fell apart. So instead of reading online discussions I concentrated on reading the actual formulas as well as research on the topic. I now belive that the reasons people cite for choosing one algorithm over another are often completely bogus.

I tried to bring this up at the W3C, but the response was anything but friendly. Not sure what I did wrong. I still think that I have something valuable to contribute, but I am not sure how.

If you are interested in more details: http://tobib.spline.de/xi/posts/2022-09-10-contrast-algorith...

But all that is irrelevant in the context of WCAG (and most other contexts). It literally only cares about thresholds.

To put it simply, I think the trend towards no-code/low-code is misguided. The assumption behind these products is that code is slow, difficult, and expensive. I disagree - I think that "code" is merely a formalized written expression of what you want. It's actually the most efficient, easiest, and cheapest means to solving digital problems.

I believe anyone can write code if it's specific enough to a domain that they understand, so what I'm trying to do is create a hyper-domain-specific language around designing UI components. The goal is to have a platform agnostic base syntax, with "dialects" that can extend the language for any current or future platforms.

The idea is that designers could write in this language, and developers could build tools that will transpile this code into a consumable format for whatever system they're building for.

I have a very rudimentary demo site that's like halfway built: https://matry.design

edit - here is a simple example of what a component might look like in this language:

  component Button
    variants
      color bg: #007BFF
      text label: Click Me
      
    elements
      shape ButtonContainer
        text ButtonLabel

    style ButtonContainer
      fill: $bg
      padding: 10px

    style ButtonLabel
      content: $label
      font-size: 16px

It was a eureka moment for me. Why was UI design such a mess? It’s because the UI vocabulary came from publishing and graphic design, but UIs are not static and describing them in that way will always fall short.

I’m convinced that any UI language needs to incorporate a visual state diagram editor to really make a dent in the space.

UIs are not fixed objects, but responsive object reacting to user intent.

Does your language incorporate anything like this?

The difference, however, between Matry and something like xstate is that the actual state is intended to be left to developers, because I’m trying to create an interface that allows designers to just focus on what they need to focus on.

So take something like dark mode. A designer might allow for a Boolean parameter that determines whether a component render in dark or light mode.

But as to whether the browser supports it, or whether the user has that mode set in their system preferences - that’s the developers responsibility.

That doesn’t fully answer your question but it’s a complex topic so hopefully that gives you an idea as to where my thoughts are going.

There’s language, locale, time of day (which you mention), accessibility, screen resolution and those are just things off the top of my head that are implicitly exist as state in a designers head.

Then there’s the whole idea of transitions which are explicitly about state and in designers domains.

You can’t tell me designers don’t care about transitions. It’s developers who usually don’t care about that state.

And that last bit is my point. Let designers handle the state they care about. UIs will get better as a whole with it.

There’s a difference between determining the state, and deciding how that state affects the pixels on the screen. The former is the domain of engineering, and the latter is the domain of design. I’m not saying at all that designers don’t care about state.

The developer wouldn’t need to implement yet another boolean for something trivial and the designer wouldn’t need to waste time prodding a dev to finally get around to implementing it.

That state has nothing to do with logic or state about the functionality of the program. It’s state who’s entire purpose it to control a bit of the UI.

I hear you though, it’s definitely more of a chore for devs to have to define all that stuff. But on the other hand, the UI would otherwise just be done by the time of handoff, which IMO would outweigh those cons.

I think most event models are conflating things much more than they need to be. By having clear point where the data model interacts with the UI model both sides have better clarity. Yes there are complex interactions, but designers also need to understand the model interactions to design the UI correctly.

If you have teams working on a single project and not communicating you’ll have problems no matter what tools you’re using.

The sour spot is things like Bubble, which while being a fine product suffer from “ok now am really coding but with a clunky UI instead of a text editor” which is a problem inherent in making universal nocode solutions.

With this in mind I think layouts and connected components should be provided to non coding users as templates. E.g. a site where you log in and can show notifications etc. is a single template. You then extend and style that.

My favored approach is to use what I’m calling a “this goes here, that goes there” syntax.

The idea is to give designers a conceptual framework that mimics how they understand layout, and allows them to describe positioning using a syntax that feels as close to natural language as possible.

Much easier said than done, of course. And there are good arguments for allowing the platform dialects to handle those more complex features (in addition to things like scrolling and animation).

The language syntax is in fact inspired by Python; mostly because I tried to remove as many extraneous characters as possible.

The hardest part of it is actually deciding what do I want from the time I spend working. Many of the folks I know who do interesting work are either woefully underpaid or chronically overworked.

I'm hoping I can thread the needle on that one.

Good luck!

p.s. In the off chance that you are interested in the education space, you might find my post in this thread of interest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32870101

Could be fun to connect sometime, even just to make a community of devs in this space!

I took a bit of time off, then started exploring how people use their time on sabbatical to learn new skills, work on personal projects, raise kids, travel, etc.

After talking with a bunch of people about their experiences, the high-stakes feeling you observed is pretty common - I think people tend to underestimate the emotional aspects of taking a break from work.

My current transition plan is to spend a bit more time studying sabbaticals and turn that into something concrete (a book/guide and coaching) before doing some part-time consulting with my professional skills (marketing analytics) to cover my living expenses ala CoastFIRE.

I think there's a gap in part-time professional work - it's really hard to find long-term, part-time positions that take advantage of professional skills and offer benefits.

If you want to bounce ideas off someone who is also trying to thread the needle I'd love to chat more.

I imagine that if I was doing what you are describing, I'd enjoy keeping busy while still having most of my day to pursue something new. And having my side job (that pays or not, who cares?) help push me forward into learning something I couldn't easily do on my own.

I would be very open to an apprenticeship/internship if it allowed me a more direct entry into an exciting position (I have the freedom to do so, certainly); however, the internship pipeline seems almost exclusively focused on undergraduate age young people.

I spent about five years working on feature films, commercials, music videos, etc. as a Local 600 Loader and Second Assistant Cameraman. I loved the work, but the travel and lifestyle wasn't a sustainable fit for a healthy life (for me).

Before film work, I studied comparative literature in a strong undergraduate program and made a shift into teaching high school English. I taught in rural, urban, and suburban school districts in the upper midwest until June of this year. The work was Good, and I was good at it. I didn't burn bridges or burn out; I just had a belly full and want to open a new door.

I know a handful of people that work in tech sales, PM, infrastructure that have been willing to talk about their work and employers (for which I am very grateful). An important part of these conversations has been noting which paths are inaccessible/poor fit/rough culture.

I'm in talks to accept a position at a small local tech consultancy in a role that is a mix between Customer Success/Training/Project Management - but it's more of an entry point and stepping stone than final target.

All that said - if anyone works in product management, experience strategy, or simply would be open for a chat, please send me an email. I would love to schedule a short phone call.

The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into the early 1900s. But then it got privatized. Now there are tens of thousands of academic journals, 80% of them charge a fee for access, and most of the remainder charge a fee to publish. Often thousands of dollars.

Given that science works in the aggregate and you can't know if you have the real answer to your question until you've accessed all of the literature on the topic, this structure is now making it impossible for people not in the institution to even figure out what we know on a topic. And hard even for people in the institution.

The ultimate decider of policy in a democracy is the average citizen. The people who decide our government policy don't have access to the primary source material of science. In the US, a lot of really important policy is set at the municipal level (city, county), and in that case the people actually writing and implementing the policy also don't have access.

If we can develop a web platform that does all the journals do (match papers to qualified reviewers, maintain literature integrity by filtering out bad work, and dole out reputation), then I think it's possible we could draw publishing out of the journals and into the open where it belongs.

I've got an idea for a platform that does all that by crowdsourcing it (the journals are already crowdsourcing it - just manually using an editor). It's basically Github+StackExchange for academic publishing. It works by tying the reputation system to academic fields, so papers are tagged with fields and then reputation is gained and lost in those fields.

I'm building it now, I'm month or two out from beginning a closed beta. (Aiming for end of October, beginning of November.)

I wrote up a detailed description here: https://blog.peer-review.io/we-might-have-a-way-to-fix-scien...

Since we're on HN, we get to take off our technical hat and put on our product hat -- not the fit-to-customer product, but disrupt-the-industry product.

What are the incentive structures that would destroy this or make it work?

Consider the scenarios today...

- What's wrong with the thousands of similar-sounding journals popping up on China publishing research that is either unvetted or copied from other journals, so researchers can satisfy their publish-or-perish needs?

- How do you deal with reviewer networks?

- How do you get the best of the best, people with no time and plenty of opportunities and money, to provide effective feedback on an avalanche of articles?

- How do you get the support of, without being dominated by, the big research companies and universities?

- Look at the history of reputation systems, from quora to stackexchange to games, on a matrix with the difficulty of determining correctness of questions:

-- Who won the game?

-- Does this code work?

-- Which library should I use?

-- Is this paper correct and valuable?

- What about prediction markets, which try to use money/investment as a measure of seriousness: how would that help or hurt? (and isn't that what we're doing by insisting academics publish for tenure?)

In the spirit of MVP, you might consider a pivot to a much smaller problem: how to professional groups establish and document their standard of care? A team wiki? (gets stale, disconnected from operations) Run books? (too stepwise to convey meaning needed to transform the system) Slack-capture? email? documentation?

What about capturing the benefit in a change of format, from opaque text/pdf to something like a per-domain semantic web, with connections to empirical methods and findings? That could provide incentives for everyone. Like the professional-group scenario, the killer feature would be something that grows incrementally with multiple authors (as code does for developers).

Often they do - quite a lot of stuff is open access. The biggest issue with getting people to read scientific papers is the demonization of those who actually do it. A lot of papers are terribly misleading so the moment outsiders start engaging with the literature they conclude a lot of science is junk, and when they act on that they're immediately attacked as "science deniers" ... by the sort of people who don't read papers, because they are convinced they don't need to.

Getting more stuff as open access will only accelerate the decline in trust in science, by allowing more people to see what's going on behind the curtain. That is not necessarily an issue, but just so you're aware of that - it isn't going to lead to lots of people suddenly basing policy on scientific papers. It's going to lead to a lot of scientists getting defunded.

Automated reviewer matching won’t be good enough to find decent reviewers.

I would suggest partnering with people in very specific disciplines who want to break away and establish open access journals, but want to focus on the editor and review process rather than the logistics (which you provide).

If the authors disagree with the journals team, or just get tired of waiting, they can still publish at any time just like with community review. For authors who choose both, the journal's team and community reviewers can interact with each other just as in normal community review.

I think it's a way to provide a stepping stone for people from the existing system towards full community review and would provide logistics to those organizing open journals with teams of high quality reviewers.

The plan is to implement it during the closed beta period. I would welcome feedback on this concept as well :)

I suck at naming - Peer Review was a working title intended to be somewhat tongue in cheek (similar to StackOverflow). But... because I suck at naming, it is, of course, a little on the nose. So far I haven't come up with anything better.

To toss a few names in the hat, off the top of my head: - openresearch - colab - openjournal - stud.io

Probably collect a few ideas and run a small survey for the initial audience

May I also suggest you consider the network layer centralization. When you mentioned Github+Stackoverflow, I got the point even before I visited your site.

However, even as you think about an alternative on how we publish, consider that technical questions can have significant political consequences. I am of the view that centralized networks are a major contribution to the situation we find ourselves in today. Distributed/Decentralized/Federated options like ActivityPub may help in your journey in what surely is a great idea. Check Lemmy, for example, on a real stackoverflow option - https://join-lemmy.org/ and Gitea already working on a federated "Github".

They operate mostly in the computer science academic community, last time I checked.

For example, there are several attempts to overlay review on pre-prints and open repositories (like Zenodo), but they aren't identifying qualified reviewers and matching them to papers in any way. There are the repositories and pre-prints themselves, but they aren't providing review. There are attempts to build open journals, but they're still taking the journal form, which means they still have lots of manual overhead.

Most of them have varying amounts of traction, but few seem to actually be on a course to replace the whole system.

...it remains to be seen whether peer-review.io will fare any better. I think it has a chance because it does provide an alternative system for each of the services the journals provide. Well -- except one, which is the moderator role the editor sometimes plays. That may prove fatal, but only time will tell.

Like if a major paper is withdrawn, or a theory disproven, could you get a list of significantly impacted papers?

(Although, the first contribution would probably need to be getting the local working again in a new context... I've been going fast and taking on some techdebt that will need to be paid down soon.)

Why aren't there more employee-owned companies? And I don't mean solely shareholder programs, I mean actually owned by every employee and they are paid dividends of profit after all planned R&D costs. Similar to the Alaska oil pipeline bonus. Even interns.

All studies show that the companies structured this way that do exist (they seem few) have much higher output, quality, and happiness among staff.

After more research I found that this exists: https://esca.us/ - Wawa is a member, pretty cool.

Talking more to others about the idea I've heard interesting stories. Some machine tooling shops have an actual employee-owned setup. All employees are incentivized to make every product output great and keep profits high, because they all share the profits.

Anyway, I'm not actively working on this. But wanting to shape this idea more in the future. It feels like it could help the current state of America. But perhaps I'm too hopeful and naive :-)

---

Hobo Johnson - My Therapist:

"The idea's about equity, it's about wealth

Most think that it's dumb, you should think for yourself

If I buy a pizza place that makes a definite profit

Yeah, let's say yearly, the owners make $100,000 off it

And if I buy this pizza place for, let's say, $300k

And when the workers recoup in three years, I'll sign it over that day

And wouldn't everybody not see

They should buy their pies from me?

You'd rather have a boss

When you can work democratically?"

---

"Incentives are the strongest force in the world. They explain why good people do awful things, why smart people do stupid things, and why ordinary people do amazing things."

- Quote I have pinned from @morganhousel

How do you fundraise outside of the small pool of employee-owners?

There's actually a bill in congress right now that would, among other things, provide technical assistance and outreach for employees who might be able to use the program: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4141...

We are hiring software engineers, in case anyone is curious. https://www.teamshares.com/careers

My fear in that situation would be 'lazy investors' who donate some money but do no work to grow or manage the company.

so regular investors then xD

If the capital comes from the employees, this loss would be very hard for them and probably would not appropriate for more workers.

If the capital comes from a bank, is there collateral? If so, where did the capital for that collateral come from? If not, does the bank need to lend to you at an extremely high interest rate for it to be worth the investment?

If the capital comes from investors who have an equity stake in this, how is it different than any other VC? Who keeps the profits when the business is up and running (the employees or the investors)? If the employees, why would the investors invest?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15nberWl0EU

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia

As poster above mentioned fundraising is a major challenge. Seems like debt is your only option if you want to keep the thing 100% employee owned. Bootstrapped businesses are of course a thing and can scale to Unicorn level but at a much slower pace than a VC backed startup.

TL;DR There are many pieces to our culture and capitalist economy that make this difficult, but somewhat surprisingly to me, also many legal hurdles to formalized democratic corporate structures.

I've taken a few steps to talk to lawyers and contact advocacy/support groups for worker-owned co-ops and things, and there are a number of surprising hurdles for this type of formalized corporate structure.

In particular, whether a member is considered an "employee", an "investor", an "owner", or some combination of the three differs in jurisdictions, often at the _county_ level, not just the state and country level (experience primarily in the US).

US law gives a massive number of very specific rights to investors, making it difficult to pull someone's ownership shares if they leave the organization in some jurisdictions. Additionally, the tax implications for individuals can be extremely complicated.

Talking to a lawyer, they said one of their clients had been working for ~10 years to hire someone across state lines and hasn't managed to do it yet because of the legal complexity (some kind of employee-owned construction company in Northern California that wants workers from Oregon I think).

For the time being, my own structure is on hold, but I'm thinking of simply formalizing the structure in the equivalent of an employee handbook and putting legal ownership into some kind of blind trust then paying members at a rate tied to net income without formally specifying that it's a dividend, but I have no idea how many laws that might be inadvertently breaking.

In any case, Mondragon is an interesting case study, as they are (to my knowledge) the largest worker-owned cooperative in existence at the moment, but workers outside of their home country (France, I believe?) are not able to participate in ownership and profit sharing for legal reasons.

Another user posted about Teamshares (https://www.teamshares.com/). It appears to operate similarly: investors buy up companies and give them to the employees. I'm assuming some level of fee is given to Teamshares to continue operating.

Oddly enough.. one of the backers of Teamshares is Collab Fund, where my second quote is pulled from on one of their most recent posts. Small world.

Technically a co-op is usually "member-owned" whereas they were talking about employee owned. A substantial difference in some ways but not in others.

We're not building a huge machine to try to suck the atmosphere through a straw; we're doing chemistry in the open atmosphere. Plan to have a pilot running within the next year and within five years be removing up to 100 Mt per year.

The reactions over the ocean are largely Cl, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has ever visited the seaside. It’s also quite reactive, but the CH4 oxidation is a little more complex.

There are people who pay for GHG removal and we have plans on how to expand that. We think it can be self-sustaining.

The issue I see with carbon sequestration is how the unit economics add up. Whether the cost of raw materials, labour, facilities, and scaling R&D all add up. My sense is that the he price of carbon credits is still too low for this. Would be interested in hearing more about your ideas.

I couldn’t imagine writing that “I am passionate about transforming the atmospheric methane sector through an exciting and innovating GaaS (GHG-elimination as a Service.”

Had a cycling accident years ago, became much more sitting intolerant afterward, probably made me quit coding as a career.

Have been testing prototypes for a year, people have done hours long stretches on a 2-3 min interval feeling no pain or stiffness at the end. A study showed the same strong results.

Website: https://www.movably.com/ Early user review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUjkbMc_xBw&t=1s

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119282/

I went the ‘standing as much as possible’ route and am thankful to have made the move from a health standpoint.

The spasm would take 10-30 seconds to fade, but it left behind a discomfort in my back, and the discomfort wouldn't go. especially when I approached work. if I was gaming or having fun, the pain would go.

it was chronic, stayed with me for 3-4 years, until I couldn't sit for longer than 5 minutes without my back killing me.

I tried posture exercises, sitting straight for long periods of time with a good posture, shoulders back and down, 90 degree elbows, 90 degree knees, monitor right infront of my eyes instead of looking down on a laptop.

But the pain only got worse, and I got depressed, then had to quit coding for 1.5 years.

until someone here I think mentioned a book called "Heal your back", I thought it was BS but read it anyway, and I found a cure to my back there. Turns out its in a totally another place.

I was extremely stressed, and I was not taking care of my psychology, and my perfectionism was contributing lots to the stress and therefore more pain.

It's called TMS "tension myositis syndrome", basically when stress becomes real pain that you feel in your body. and now I'm seeing more and more therapists for it, search Pain Reprocessing Therapy on youtube

I hope this helps someone :)

The architecture allows any value to be mapped to one or more keys and any key to be mapped to one or more values (unless an attribute on the data object prevents it). These KV stores can be used to attach tags to other objects. They can be used to form columns in relational tables (i.e. a columnar store). It can be used to create indexes into file contents.

Each object is designed for parallel access by multiple threads. Only a single block needs to be locked to update any value or key so multiple writes can occur at the same time. The data in each object is organized to find values or keys without inspecting every block. It is very fast and allows both OLTP and OLAP operations on the same data set.

So far, I have used them to attach tags to millions of files and do searches. I have created relational tables that I can query much faster than the same table in Postgres (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVICKCkWMZE). I have created 3D relational tables that can be queried the same way 2D tables have traditionally been queried (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXqvWMmoL1M).

The software is currently in an open beta and anyone can download and try it out on their own data set. https://www.Didgets.com

If the KV store is a 'state' column in a DB table of US customer addresses for example, the number of unique values is limited to 50 (if you ignore D.C., Puerto Rico, etc.). The table might have 100M customers, each mapped to at least one state. Each state (except less populated ones like Wyoming) might have millions of rows mapped to it. Many customers might have addresses in more than one state.

The system has to do things like: "Find every key mapped to a state that starts with the letter 'M'" or "Find every value that is mapped to this set of keys". These are the kinds of things a normal SQL query has to do.

"pet":"cat" and "program":"cat" have different semantics.

So some typical queries might be: Find all the photos where "Event" = "Wedding" Find all rows where "State" = "California"

The keys in this case would be the IDs of the photos or the row keys in the relational table.

This style of building compilers is called the Nanopass style (https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/nano-jfp.pdf), making it much easier to teach.

Source: I was a TA for the earlier iteration of the class.

https://painfullynormal.substack.com/

It's a niche type of store (dispensary) and essentially a state blessed monopoly since they limited it to 40 store licenses total. But I'm hopeful being able to show people the data will help with some of it... or maybe I get my door kicked in.

The same product is carried at the other stores, each has it at a price of $20 exact...then this one bounces between $30 and $50 all day.

I mean, maybe they are getting suckers to buy it at the inflated prices for both, but I'd be shocked if so. They also carry other products from the same line, and they are all priced normally at $20.

As for your idea, you do hear about hacks like that in this industry all the time. We're operating a little bit downstream of those decisions, working with construction companies after the site has already been chosen.

Do you have a PhD? Would you advise getting one (in robotics)?