HN user

rubidium

5,256 karma

Physics, system design, lab automation, magnetic microfluidics, cell culture, genomics. These are a few of my favorite things.

Posts29
Comments1,198
View on HN
news.ycombinator.com 11mo ago

Ask HN: Bay Area biotech and life science tools. Who wants to meet?

rubidium
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 1y ago

Ask HN: Year in Bay Area Biotech?

rubidium
2pts1
www.honest-broker.com 2y ago

What happened to my search engine?

rubidium
4pts3
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Full stack for hardware touch screen device

rubidium
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: State of autonomous car tech in 2022?

rubidium
3pts1
fr.linkedin.com 5y ago

Thanks open source Recognizing Sweet Home 3D open source main contributor

rubidium
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: China shill vs. legit user thought

rubidium
7pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Duckduckgo Is Advertising?

rubidium
9pts9
www.nap.edu 6y ago

Rapid Expert Consultation on Potential for Seasonality for the Covid-19 Pandemic

rubidium
2pts0
fivethirtyeight.com 6y ago

Why It’s So Freaking Hard to Make a Good Covid-19 Model

rubidium
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: What physical product do you make?

rubidium
53pts42
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Trends HN helped you see

rubidium
5pts1
medium.com 6y ago

Coronavirus: Hammer and the Dance

rubidium
50pts2
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Tax, utility, mortgage and interest holiday?

rubidium
2pts0
gowaterfalling.com 6y ago

Waterfalls of the Great Lakes Region and Beyond

rubidium
106pts45
www.purdue.edu 6y ago

Annual Open Letter to the People of Purdue from Mitch Daniels

rubidium
1pts1
www.gumbopages.com 6y ago

Cocktails and Other Beverages

rubidium
3pts1
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Getting started with local (non-cloud) movie and music collection?

rubidium
2pts1
www.forbes.com 9y ago

Musk Initiates Climbdown from Tesla's High Horse, Production Rev Postponed

rubidium
1pts0
www.ft.com 9y ago

Xi Jinping’s guide to the Chinese way of globalisation

rubidium
1pts0
www.theatlantic.com 9y ago

America is still making things (advanced manufacturing)

rubidium
1pts0
www.politico.com 9y ago

American Growth Has Slowed Down. Get Used to It

rubidium
3pts2
www.edn.com 9y ago

Teardown: A tiny camera drone for $15

rubidium
3pts0
sense.com 10y ago

Sense: Home energy monitoring product

rubidium
2pts1
ind.ie 10y ago

Ind.ie: Ethical Design

rubidium
1pts0
journals.plos.org 10y ago

PLOS ONE journal retracts paper for Creator reference

rubidium
1pts0
reviews.cnet.com 14y ago

Ideal resolution of displays ("Why 4K TVs are stupid")

rubidium
2pts6
online.wsj.com 15y ago

How Egyptians Organized: Clever Web and Traditional Communcations

rubidium
7pts1
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

American Physical Society reconsidering stance on global warming

rubidium
6pts1
Transcribe.cpp 3 days ago

Yea I’m looking local hosted transcription and translation with diarization of 2 (or more ) speakers. This is to speed up collaborative technical work between two teams who speak different languages where want all local processing (assume no cloud access).

Transcribe.cpp 4 days ago

Any that also support translation? How much harder/ easier of a problem is local translation compared to transcription?

OpenPrinter 17 days ago

99% of this is the printhead and the ink formulation. Assuming you use generic off the shelf solutions for those two components you’re set. All the printer companies do their lock in at the firmware and software layer.

I did when I was in academia. Would open each day and check what new papers were in my field. It was fun, and I learned a ton.

I kept it up out of habit for a year after grad school. Then moved on.

I do agree my skepticism level rises extremely high in any experimental psychology experiment. There’s just so many ways to bias results, in addition to “do enough experiments and one of them will get a statistically unlikely result” problem.

This group does a lot like this https://www.dpg.unipd.it/en/compcog/publications … so that’s tempting to think they keep trying things until something odd happens (kind of like physicists who look for 5th forces… eventually they find something odd but often it’s just an experimental issue they need to understand further).

It’s great place for grad school. Very little to do other than study and lab work. Play soccer with the grad students, float on the river in the summer, shoot potato gun cannons in corn fields, but otherwise there’s nothing better to do than work on a PhD.

I’d recommend it for grad school. But then yea time to move on.

This is the attitude of someone who uses hand tools when power tools are available. Yes you loose the personal touch but also loose the potential efficiency. Still need to measure twice and cut once though.

Make a list of the most interesting companies / areas you want to work in from a scientific perspective

Cold call or get introductions to their R&D leaders (principal researcher /director / VP). While connecting to something they or their company did, ask for a coffee meeting or phone call to learn more about their company and how it works.

Use this to Network network network. At some point a job will appear with interviews. Chances are good it’s with a good manager as they’re the ones taking time to build good teams and talent.

It’s pretty much always who you know… at least to get a showing. It’s rare in history to find counter examples. And in a LLM fueled world it’s going to be more important.

Companies can improve by ensuring they don’t hire _because_ of whom someone knows. It should only ever let you get in the room to interview.

So practical advice of what to do: be human. Get to know people. Care. Your time to do this is not when you’re looking for a job, but when you’re in a job.

You have experience in 2 very different places demographically. High altitude may be on the list of factors but I would guess it’s pretty far down.

Boulder is a small college town of mostly affluent younger people. Memphis is an urban city in a hot climate that is older, poorer, and in the middle of the section of the US that has some of the worst health overall.

This is an engineering management hot take on how to motivate a team. It’s not realistically covering burnout, human psychology, or what makes us human and tick. It’s just giving management advice with a flashy title.

It’s not necessarily bad advice (setting and celebrating milestone goals on a long project is good). But it’s also not applicable to most cases of disengagement from the important things in life (aka burnout).

When you become a good enough IC, “ As an engineer, I prefer to be managed and guided by someone who actually knows what I work on, preferably better than I know it.” is no longer reasonable. Then your managers role is to maximize your ability to make an impact by putting you in the right place/project.

As a manager of people who know far more about the things they do than I do, my goal is to assist and ensure in the right place (for them and the org). It’d be foolish for me to hire peons who know less than me.

For people I talk, it is the end of ZIRP that caused it. ZIRP ended in April 2022.

Even as interest rates went up the VCs still had committed funds to distribute for a year to 18 months. Then the biotechs had runway for 1-2 years from that. Now that’s all gone, and they can’t raise their next series. In the meantime, C&GT plus synbio is recently having a lower win rate than hoped for.

That plus all the money that is there is all going to AI companies due to the shorter time to return / higher potential roic / hype.

The overlap of statisticians and baseball fans is high (anecdotal).

Hypothesis 1: statisticians love good data sources, and with its many games, innings, and types of hits / pitches it’s a great source.

Hypothesis 2: makes you seem more interesting at dinner parties

hypothesis 3: a natural overlap of preferences

You’ve taken a very small slice of the total workflow to develop cas9 crispr edits. Yes some components are “not crazy expensive”, but that’s not therapeutic production levels. And no sequencing. And no bioinformatics. And then zero tissue targeting/ delivery or safety studies.

So $5k is a massive stretch. I do think costs are coming down. But don’t want to oversell current state of “garage hacking” either.

More or less, yes.

An interesting part of the study was determining what a clinical dose _should_ be. You need enough to edit enough liver cells. But don’t really want to completely overdo it to limit potentially negative side effects. Seems like they got it right enough here, with the first dose having some effect and the subsequent dose having more.

It can make “bad edits” eg off target effects. But in this case there were, as far as is known, none. It’s aided that this was a single nucleotide defect.

They specifically tested for off target edits in the mouse study and found no harmful edits (and very rare off target ones). That plus the specific targeting of the liver cells (no germ line effect expected), makes this a low risk approach and certainly better than doing nothing.