I am one of the creators of the first "synthetic" bacterial cell. AMA | Hacker News Reader

I am one of the creators of the first "synthetic" bacterial cell. AMA

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188 pointstomerico35 comments

This is how science should be done. Allowing lay people to understand true significance of work by having an open exchange. Wish it were true for most of the discoveries/inventions.

Notice the "discussion" devolved into nonsense almost immediately. Reddit....

I thought it was pretty good. If you don't like the silliness, you don't have to keep reading the silly threads. They aren't hard to identify, especially in an AMA post where the submitter's name is highlighted.

This is why I love threaded comments, especially in reddit's style. You can just hit that little [-] button to collapse and ignore the noisy threads, and find the valuable discussion much easier. Even if half of a topic there is just terrible puns, usually there's some actual discussion further down the page. Actually, one place I've found is very good to find discussion on reddit and HN is in response to the greatly downvoted trolls. Usually the trolls don't have much of a point or terribly flawed arguments, but the people responding to them actually seem to do a decent job of being serious most times.

I noticed some, I also noticed a lot of real questions. I don't see complaining about it as much different than just having some level of nonsense.

Sorry, didn't notice I was complaining. Thought I was making an observation on the state of open discussion on the net. I guess that makes your post "complaining about complaining", and this one ...

You did: wget http://opendna.org/dna/mycoides.txt then emailed it as an attachment from your hotmail account to DNASyth LLC and they sent you back a vial, you pulled up a bacteria, put a needle in it, squirted your lols into it, and then wrote a paper. What parts are inaccurate? Was it a yahoo email address?

hahaha

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/c6kd6/i_am_one_of_the_...

How much of the work is Hamilton Smith's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_O._Smith compared to Mr. Venter's? I know he's not the type, but I'm really surprised that at least his name isn't mentioned more often.

A question to those in the know: what kind of education / experience schedule would one need to even think about doing work like this?

What do you mean? You mean reproducing something like this in another lab? Any MSc can do it, under the supervision of a PhD. The bottleneck factor in this kind of experiments is money. I think they spent $1m only on the raw DNA production and Venter got something like $40m funding from Exxon.

I have no idea how he convinced exxon that this stuff is any useful technically speaking. It's very interesting scientifically, for sure, but technically? Meh. I suppose exxon went for publicity.

I suspect their goal is engineeting bacterium that will produce crude oil, or something of that nature.

The are talking about biofuel. The point is that no matter what you want to do, there is no point in doing it by artificial synthesis. You can always engineer one of the many bacteria/algae/whatever already present in nature, modifying something that already does what you want to achieve, just making it better.

Or produce an organism that can eat spilled oil.

If you listen to the TEd talk, he also mentions federal funding.

Unless it's DARPA money, it's probably just an NIH grant. I doubt it's over 1 or 2m.

He admits he's an atheist! :D let's hope FOX News doesn't see that

we need an outlet, a website, where this can be done more frequently..

On an unrelated note, I hate it that reddit (where content is not localized) defaults the interface language to that of my OS (why would I need that?), while most websites of multinational corporations (where all content is localized and country-specific) make me manually select my country. Country != desired language, but both can be easily determined with comparable precision (although by different means).</rant>

Web sites need to just look at what your browser says is the prefered language. Google still shows me german because I'm in a german speaking country even though my settings are english. Drives me mad.

A lot of users run on misconfigured operating systems. I expect that Google has done some homework on whether language-by-GeoIP makes sense for the general case. They probably don't do it just to annoy you.

I know they're not singling me out, but I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy. Ideally, they would have a button that says "not your language? Click here to set the language and find out why sites keep showing you the wrong one".

EDIT: Actually, thinking about this more I don't think your point holds. Nearly everyone who buys a PC in a given country will buy one set up for their locale. Do you think that e.g. Germany is selling a bunch of computers configured with english as the prefered language? I seriously doubt that.

I'm in a non-English speaking country.

My best guess is that all normal users buy a computer with the local language, but all technologically-minded users buy an English Windows (like me, for example). It drives me mad whenever I visit Google on a browser whose cookies I just cleared.

"I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy."

Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel.

>Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do.

And this is exactly what should not be catered to. Especially when it's simple to show users how to fix this. By jumping through such hoops to guess what is correct they basically force everyone else to do the same thing or else appear to be less "friendly" than google.

This kind of thinking is exactly what got us the HTML/CSS misery we have today.

Do you have some statistics on that? Google probably does, and that probably factored into their decision to not trust use the Accept-Language header as their sole mechanism for deciding what language to serve content in.

Most computers with Windows sold in large markets like Germany probably send the right Accept-Language headers, but there's a lot of localities where this isn't the case.

Small countries like Iceland just use the stock English version of Windows, then there's stuff like mobile devices which may not send Accept-Language at all to think about.

Or rather they do it even though you are annoyed by it because in general they minimize the number of annoyed people.

The problem with Reddit is that it does not localize content, only the interface. It should be either both or none.

Google, on the other hand, not only shows you German interface, but also significantly adjusts search results depending on your chosen language.

> The problem with Reddit is that it does not localize content, only the interface. It should be either both or none.

That's not true. It has localized interfaces and content. The non-english content just isn't very popular.

Your browser is mis-configured. reddit gives you the language that your browser says you prefer.

Does not seem to be the case. I have Russian Win XP at work and English OS X at home. Both are running Opera in which 1) preferred language is set to English and 2) navigator.language = "en". Yet at work reddit's interface defaults to Russian and at home - to English, following OS preference. Just cleared all cookies and checked all this again.

But that's not the point. The point is that there's no sense in localizing interface when content is not localized. I'm going mad seeing pages in mixed languages for no reason.

// Sorry for starting this off-topic discussion, today's not my best day by any measure.

Interesting answers, but redditors are fucking morons.

Every time I go back there it's worse. Sometimes I read a thread on the main reddit and it's virtually incomprehensible.

You need to not read the default list. I don't.

Well somebody there needs to fix the problem that arises if you subscribe to subreddits that don't have many stories on them.

I unsubscribed from all of them, then started over...currently I'm subscribed to machinelearning, linguistics, and datasets. Often when I load the page, there are only 2-3 stories on it...other times it will say "there is nothing here".

I'm sure it's trying to just show me the newest stuff, but it would be nice if it showed me enough of the newest stuff to actually fill the page.

In your preferences, do you have it set to hide things that you've upvoted?

No.

The default options is also the least desirable... That is an interesting and also likely necessary condition for a service.

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