Nice job. I particularly like that the Church lab's Personal Genome project is currently topping the charts. They spurred (re)sequencing-by-synthesis with their own padlock sequencing method; if Lander hadn't got a wild hair up his ass to do the comparative genomics project with chimps, that probably would have been my PhD thesis. They're awesome, and Church 'gets it' as well as anyone in the field regarding the potential of open, collaborative collection of information.
I think Helicos' product will probably win, but the point is that this shift in methodology is going to change science. Again. And it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between genetic, epigenetic, and environmental influences on, for lack of a better word, destiny. In addition to higher-resolution understanding of our history as a species and as carbon-based life.
I think I would like to subscribe to your newsletter ;-)
Apathy, this is a good comment, and I've just submitted a video about how Helico's sequencer works. Could you add this comment it to the news.thinkgene submission? :)
Done. With some edits to avoid the wrath of Lander, just in case. At least ESL isn't a vindictive bible thumper like some people in the field. Ahem.
Anyways, I wanted to say 2 things about your site.
1) the registration is painless and fast. Yay.
2) the font size in the textarea is too big. Boo.
Nonetheless, I find this educational and will use or reimplement-the-facade-of this slinknews package for my own use. It seems terrific. It feels like reddit but it sounds a lot easier to set up.
You need more traffic (data) so that you can start mining it :-)
I think the description is an interesting functionality on slinkset. It's much better implemented than description on digg and the like because it doesn't take up much space and it is optional.
I got this installed and running behind Apache but, long story short: this system is to be administered via an Arc Lisp prompt. No other tools exist. If you're Paul Graham, that's great, but most communities will have difficulty justifying Lisp and Unix expertise qualification to moderate a simple forum. Further, Slicehost started baulking about "suspicious memory use," suggesting that we had misconfigured MySQL. Finally, the system was simply not as stable as I would have needed it to be. Everytime a new directory or file? had to be created, the application would simply return a blank screen, for example.
Update: Also, sometimes while writing long comments (like this one), I'll get the "unknown link" error when submitting.
news.arc would have earned us a fist full of nerd dollars, but I understand that sometimes nerd dollars are simply not acceptable tender in all circumstances.
Drigg is a collection of Drupal modules to recreate Drupal. The installation and configuration was such a hassle, the effort to strip all the unneeded features was too much, and worse of all, I got a Javascript error when trying to vote. I was not pleased by this precedent of needing to debug complex software to do a simple task.
Pligg is a very close clone of Digg in PHP/MySQL. I installed this system without trouble, but the required configuration / feature stripping left me open to other suggestions.
Kevin (rms) suggested both this and Slinkset three days ago. He showed me http://www.linkherd.com/science/, which I liked better than slinkset.com, but at the time, Linkherd.com was broken. Fail.
Had all the features I needed to get started, founders were responsive and obviously working on the site, killer auto-submit RSS feature, let us use our own domain, no configuration.
Brett Gibson of Slinkset has been very responsive, and he tells us that more features like CSS and HTML templates are coming soon.
Yes, linkherd.com is broken and abandoned due to me focusing on my real startup. It has the auto-submit RSS feature, and a cool cross-site auto-submit feature too.
If anyone wants my ugly baby, write to linkherd@gmail.com
I think Helicos' product will probably win, but the point is that this shift in methodology is going to change science. Again. And it allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay between genetic, epigenetic, and environmental influences on, for lack of a better word, destiny. In addition to higher-resolution understanding of our history as a species and as carbon-based life.
I think I would like to subscribe to your newsletter ;-)