
Genomics, genetics, and biology news (made using brett of News.YC's slinkset software) - rms
http://news.thinkgene.com/
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apathy
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 ;-)

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motoko
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? :)

[http://news.thinkgene.com/links/The_Personal_Genome_Project_...](http://news.thinkgene.com/links/The_Personal_Genome_Project_aims_to_recruit_100_000_volunteer)

~~~
apathy
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 :-)

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rms
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.

[http://news.thinkgene.com/links/Al_Gore_Helps_Navigenics_Lau...](http://news.thinkgene.com/links/Al_Gore_Helps_Navigenics_Launch_Personal_Genomics_Service)

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motoko
We actually tried using other systems, here's what I thought and why I
eventually chose Slinkset.com:

\- News.Arc [<http://arclanguage.org/install>]

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.

\- [<http://reddit.com/reddits/create>]

Has all the features we want, but is a part of Reddit: Reddit domain, Reddit
users, Reddit ads, etc.

\- Create Your Reddit [<http://reddit.com/reddits/create>]

Has all the features we want, but is a part of Reddit: Reddit domain, Reddit
users, Reddit ads, etc.

\- Drigg [<http://www.drigg-code.org/>]

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 [<http://pligg.com/>]

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.

\- Linkherd [<http://www.linkherd.com/>]

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.

\- Slinkset [<http://www.slinkset.com>]

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.

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rms
> killer auto-submit RSS feature

Definitely a killer feature, check out the new page on the site, it
autosubmits things at zero points.

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Novash
The idea is good. I will add that to my favorities, but you realy ought to
work on the layout. It is ugly, in my sincere opinion.

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motoko
I agree. It's not our layout, this is Slicehost. They are working on it. They
don't have a custom CSS feature yet.

~~~
motoko
oops, I mean slinkset, not slicehost.

