Hacker News: waiquoo

New comment by waiquoo in "Craig Venter has died"

waiquoo — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 20:06:25 +0000

I'm in lab automation, we've come a long way from paper schedules (although those still get plenty of use :) )

New comment by waiquoo in "Death rates rose in hospital ERs after private equity firms took over"

waiquoo — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 17:06:05 +0000

US residency funding has not increased since 1997, and residency spots is the real chokepoint

New comment by waiquoo in "Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock"

waiquoo — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 13:42:16 +0000

Faraday did a whole series of lectures about a single candle, essentially covering a surprising amount of physics and chemistry. Super simple and fascinating: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14474

New comment by waiquoo in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

waiquoo — Fri, 16 May 2025 12:57:06 +0000

Mark Behlke's group at IDT is the force behind a LOT of the development of CRISPR, but they are relatively unknown

New comment by waiquoo in "On loyalty to your employer (2018)"

waiquoo — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 15:28:06 +0000

There's a level where institutions are separate from the people that make them move. If your boss can get replaced without destroying your department, then that institutional layer exists.

New comment by waiquoo in "Egoless Engineering"

waiquoo — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 21:37:55 +0000

What I have been thinking a lot about lately is that the focus should not be on the work. The focus should be on the handoff. If you build something, the goal is to have someone else use it. The work should focus on easing that transition. If it's a technology, what do you need to characterize so that the product people can work with it? If it's a product, how do you make it easy for your customers to get it? If it's an internal tool, what context and familiarity does the user group have?

New comment by waiquoo in "Show HN: Bluetooth USB Peripheral Relay – Bridge Bluetooth Devices to USB"

waiquoo — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 13:47:28 +0000

This is awesome! I have some serial devices (RS 232) that I've wished I could make wireless. Are there any similar projects to bluetooth serial comms?

New comment by waiquoo in "Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization"

waiquoo — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 19:49:27 +0000

'Gift' vs 'give' also rustles my jimmies. The phrase 'he gifted it to her' doesn't mean anything different from 'he gave it to her'. As a Calvinite, my stance is that 'verbing weirds language'.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25

New comment by waiquoo in "Human brain organoid bioprocessors now available to rent for $500 per month"

waiquoo — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:06:01 +0000

It's like you guys have never even heard of 'body on a chip' https://school.wakehealth.edu/research/institutes-and-center....

New comment by waiquoo in "310-mile automated cargo conveyor will replace 25,000 trucks in Japan"

waiquoo — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:04:29 +0000

dropping packets would be a much bigger deal...

New comment by waiquoo in "You Can Thank Private Equity for That Enormous Doctor's Bill"

waiquoo — Thu, 30 May 2024 12:59:21 +0000

Also Congress caps the number of available residency slots, and that feeds back to med school admissions, etc. (https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/senators-introduc...)

New comment by waiquoo in "Disney's robots use rockets to stick the landing"

waiquoo — Tue, 14 May 2024 12:45:08 +0000

It does happen like that, lot's of departments within big companies have R&D focus with time dedicated to development/discovery. The problem is that the output is captured. If it doesn't end up in a product, the general public will never know

New comment by waiquoo in "Launch HN: Volta Labs (YC W19) – Easier sample prep for genomics"

waiquoo — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:59:50 +0000

How does your technology compare to Nuclera's chip based system?https://www.nuclera.com/technology/

New comment by waiquoo in "Martello Tower"

waiquoo — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 16:31:47 +0000

I grew up in the Fort Johnson neighborhood in Charleston, so I was surprised to see that it was listed as a martello. The magazine is definitely still there, a little brick building with very thick walls (especially for the size of the building). It looks like several forts were built and destroyed on the site (https://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/mrri/ftjohnson.html) but the only trace I've ever seen are the earthwork battlements along the harbor side. The location is better known for the point (right by the magazine) where the first shot of the civil war was fired towards Fort Sumter.

New comment by waiquoo in "Light can make water evaporate without heat"

waiquoo — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 14:03:49 +0000

'All light causes evaporation' is not really true. IR heating works because the wavelength resonates with the vibration modes of the intramolecular bonds. Water has low absorption of visible wavelengths, so you would not expect light absorption in the visible spectrum to provide enough energy to knock individual water molecules free. Water is an interesting substance and a lot of the properties of water come from intermolecular hydrogen bonding and polarity. Even though it's a liquid, there are transient molecular structures that spontaneously occur in bulk due to hydrogen bonding between water molecules. The polarity of water causes interesting effect at interfaces (surface tension, electrical double layer, etc). It's possible that the water in the hydrogel is forming some hydrogen bonded structure that interacts with green light. Where the individual water molecules won't strongly interact, the larger structure does. That could lead to the ejection of 'packets' of water molecules as discussed in the paper. Why and what these multi-molecular structures are? No idea. But this is a very interesting effect.

New comment by waiquoo in "Nanofluidic device generates power with saltwater"

waiquoo — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:02:41 +0000

Their setup looks remarkably similar to my PhD work [0][1] (that included a PoC and simulation). We didn't do power generation, but there was significant electrical activity (nanoamps and millivolts per pore). If I remember right, even at the time there was ongoing research to use porous films to generate power from saltwater, but the ongoing issue was biofouling. Turns out it's really easy to clog a pore that is nanometer-scale.

[0]https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h... [1]https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=M-Zy8lkAAAAJ&hl=en...

New comment by waiquoo in "Telling the Bees"

waiquoo — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:03:43 +0000

Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination

New comment by waiquoo in "Thin Film Patterns"

waiquoo — Thu, 25 May 2023 12:58:25 +0000

Oh wow, this is really cool. I've seen the exact patterns under 'thin film buckling' (Ziebert et al., “Strongly buckled square micromachined membranes,” J MEMS 8 423-432, 1999) when fabricating ~25nm x50umx50um thick, edge-supported, square membranes of SiN. It always seemed a little crazy that something so delicate could distort that much and remain intact.

New comment by waiquoo in "Wronger Than Wrong"

waiquoo — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 13:11:26 +0000

I'm going to drop a link to this blog: https://profmattstrassler.com/about/about-this-site-and-how-...

I am not a particle physicist, but the explanations of quantum mechanics and particle physics here have been sufficiently detailed to let me get past the hand-wavy, paradox laden pop-sci descriptions you see elsewhere.

New comment by waiquoo in "Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?"

waiquoo — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 17:03:26 +0000

Having worked at the largest synthetic DNA manufacturer (at least they were, I think they still are)... a lot of his information is just wrong. There is a huge incentive to lowering the cost of producing oligos and synthetic genes. This is actually a very interesting time in the space (shoutout AnsaBio).

I encourage him to continue explore new ways of making DNA, but understanding the market is very different from building off an expired patent.