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Comment by Metacelsus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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/...

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.

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