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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

This comments reads like the classic "dropbox is trivial, it's just rsync" except it's more like "dropbox is trivial, it's just rsync on kubernetes with a reactJS frontend and a backend written in Haskell"

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It's more like "We already have implemented dropbox for .jpg-files, also doing it for .png-files is trivial".

You won't be doing all this [PCR] from scratch at home McGyver-style (okay, maaaaaybe with a biochemical education) - but if you've got access to a biochemical lab that's doing RT-PCR anyway, has all the machines and all necessary chemicals (expect the COVID-specific markers) it's much more straightforward.

2d later, not that anyone still sees this. But: I know from a friend that their university lab is making plans to have their PCR-cabable equipment and staff on standby to run corona tests.

Maybe for someone with no bio background. But these are pretty standard techniques in molecular biology. The only tricky part is collecting the sample without exposing yourself to the virus.

Yeah, the Dropbox example doesn't make sense. Dropbox is hard to build because it needs to work at scale and for general enterprise purposes. Similarly, regional/state-sponsored testing is hard because it needs to work at scale and for a large population of people.

Running these kits out of your garage is like running a tweaked, existing file system for a home network. Not completely trivial, but it's not Dropbox, guys.

> Dropbox is hard to build because it needs to work at scale

And you don't think this test needs to scale, with the millions of people needing to be tested?

As far as I can read, this is literally the next sentence in my comment.

Whoops, so used to the "it's so easy" comments on here that I missed that part.

These are techniques high school students learn and practice in AP Bio... at least I did, 25 years ago.

Yes, and middle school students learn to write "Hello World!" HTML pages. So, by that logic, any web developer is interchangeable with a middle schooler.

Really? PCR was pretty new at that point.

Reading through some archived curricula, it was in a 1993 practice exam, at least. [0] I'm pretty surprised as well.

[0] http://www.csun.edu/science/biology/AP_biology/text%20files/...

no it isn't . there are lot of research labs that can do the test. the problem is safety, not the test itself.

...and to dig one layer deeper, the actual problem is diffusing blame in cases where the test is wrong or someone wants to blame the lab for the fact that they caught the bug, not safety. That's what certifications are for (in this case), and that's the real reason why running without one is risky.

risk tolerance changes in times of crisis though

Statutes of limitation run past the crisis when the lawsuits phrased, "you should have known" come out.

Yeah, imagine the janitor gets exposed to the virus, they then expose their entire family, those people then expose more, etc. You could easily kill someone.

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