News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco by dekhn on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @12:58PM (#30857839)
I solved the computational problem for genomics already, since it's a mostly-embarassingly-parallel problem (in paticular, I made an idle cycle harvester at Google that applied 1+M xeon cores to science problems, one of which was genomic assembly).

I don't know that creating super-accurate species trees is really the most important problem to solve in biology, though. Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a really mixed bag.

Re:Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco by xipho on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @01:13PM (#30858039)
Nice work with that solution! I did similar! I solved the earth's hunger issues, funny thing is we produce enough food, we just can't deploy it to the people who need it. Problem is I can't figure out the logistics of how to make it work... I think maybe you have the same problem? We should compare notes.
Re:Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco by t_serpico on Thursday March 31, 2022 @11:03PM (#30874774)
lol
Re:Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco by xipho on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @01:51PM (#30858503)
> Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a really mixed bag.

Ah, the old why bother since it's a "mixed bag" argument. If it wasn't a mixed bag I'd be really worried, as someone has some pretty good snake oil.

I vaguely recall something about sequencing and its role in creating a vaciine that turned out to be pretty useful, something recent maybe?

Re:Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco by dekhn on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @02:57PM (#30859378)
I don't have a complaint about sequencing that leads to vaccines. That's what sequencing is for.

What i'm troubled by is the projects that sequence a million people, using $1B to do so, and then just dump a bunch of genomes with some hand-wavy claims about how it's going to cure cancer. The costs here are rathre significant, but the health outcomes are not.