Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

Nanopore is a different kind of instrument and absolute majority of cutting-edge protocols rely on Illumina chemistry. Just no way of escaping it if you're doing science.

It's a supply and demand issue, just like in nursing. There are a lot of bio undergrads out there in the US, and as such the wages are depressed.

That said, with higher degrees comes higher wages. And with 'outsider' skill sets comes higher wages. Things like programming, EE, and management-skills will get you a better job in bio. Honestly, most bio people don't have anything past Calculus 1, so if you even have Linear Algebra, you're much ahead of the group, let alone Diff. Eqs. or some real Stats classes.

Granted, these salaries not near SWE jobs, but you're not working on dog-walking-apps, you're working on heart conditions and health issues. The effort, inherently, is compensation to those doing it.

I wish there was a way to maintain git version control while still being able to send and receive files from attachments from people who struggle with the idea of reading or reviewing something in any way other than by getting an email attachment.

I used to work at a bank where we had to collaborate on Word documents stored in SharePoint. It was a nightmare. In SharePoint you are supposed to "check out" documents, edit them, and "check in" the document afterward. The problem was that SharePoint was slow, so it was more convenient to work from local copies. And many people couldn't resist the urge to send documents as attachments when requesting feedback from someone else, thus breaking the version control system. And if someone already had "checked out" the document, there was nothing stopping someone from just working from a local copy, making changes, emailing it to me, and saying "Incorporate these changes into the final version."

It was common for someone to work from an outdated version and accidentally overwrite someone else's changes. Even though SharePoint stored every version, it was still a lot of manual work on my part to be a human git, manually combine edits from multiple reviewers, and update revision history tables on the first few pages of every document because nobody else had the time to do that. There were a lot of manual, human errors introduced by me and others. Partly because sometimes people would make minor changes without updating the version of the document, and then you'd have no idea that you were looking at an older version.

I use git for docs version control now, and sometimes I think of ways to make documentation controlled by git while still making it user friendly for non-technical people to contribute to it. What if you could send someone a file as an attachment, they could edit it locally (perhaps in Markdown or similar, with a text editor that has a Markdown preview), then open it in a special text editor let them click a button that would make a pull request for them without them having to understand anything about git? Maybe the special text editor would also notify them as soon as the doc became outdated.

And if even that was too hard, maybe they could save changes, return it to the sender as an email attachment, then the recipient could quicky make a pull request.

It would be glorious.

Probably not quite what you're after, but LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) is pretty good, and is actively used.

https://www.lockss.org/

There's a poster out there of all the relevant chemistry of human mitochondria. It's a pretty big poster, about a square meter of paper. Every pore and protein's function is represented. The Kreb's Cycle is in a corner of this thing. All the chain reactions are there, with lines trying to vainly connect it all together. The font on it is ~9 pt., I think. And it's double sided. I can't find a good link on Google, but other biologists will know what I'm talking about.

That poster is the result of ~70 years of hardcore work and blood and sweat of ~10k+ people on the human mitochondria. That poster alone is worth billions of dollar of research and will likely save billions of lives. And it's just the normal functions of the human mitochondria. One of many organelles in a 'typical' human cell. I'm not aware of any attempts to produce such a thing for something as complicated as the ER or the nucleus.

Our understanding of bio is very much limited. But I want to stress that Bio is complicated much more beyond what anyone thinks it is. There is a good quote to help grok the ocean we are looking into:

Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make. This is biology.

–Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”