Bioinformatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioinformatics
Health informatics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_informatics
If you're an engineer and early in your career and feel there's something missing from your intellectual space, I encourage you to go back and get a graduate degree in something totally different. Humans live a very long time so don't feel like you're wasting time.
Work for a company that will pay for it.
I encourage people to look into it, it's a benefit a lot of people have but don't use and it's leaving money on the table.
1. Masters degree only, they won't pay for anyone to get a bachelor's or associates
2. Must maintain a B average or better
3. Cannot take any time off, it has to be entirely on nights and weekends
4. Reimbursement after the fact, so you're taking on the initial financial risk up front.
Whether or not broad support for training scientists holds up during and after the current administration remains to be seen.
I decided to purse a double major in biochemistry and evolutionary biology and it was one of the best decisions I've made in my life. The perspective you gain from understanding all life in terms of both networks and population dynamics of atoms, molecules, cells, tissue, organisms and populations -- and how every layer reflects the layer both underneath and above it in a fractal pattern -- is mind-expanding in a way I think you just don't and can't get designing software systems alone.
I work as a software engineer / founder now, but always reflect wistfully on my time as a biologist. I hope to get back to it some day in some way, and think what the Arc Institute team is doing is inspirational [0].
This was early days of the internet, the book(s) were largely the only resource. The instructors were folks who just understood coding in C naturally and had no idea how to communicate with those who did not. No joy in anything, just raw code.
I dropped out.
Decades later after age 40 I was at a career crossroads and took a web development class. I loved it, I could make things quickly, the instructor actually understood how to teach / introduce concepts. I've been happily coding professionally and personally since then.
How things are presented sometimes makes all the difference.
> Genetic algorithms are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions to optimization and search problems via biologically inspired operators such as selection, crossover, and mutation.
AP®/College Biology: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology
AP®/College Biology > Unit 7: Natural selection: https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selec...
Rosalind.info has free CS algorithms applied bioinformatics exercises in Python; in a tree or a list; including genetic combinatorics. https://rosalind.info/problems/list-view/
FWICS there is not a "GA with code exercise" in the AP Bio or Rosalind curricula.
YouTube has videos of simulated humanoids learning to walk with mujoco and genetic algorithms that demonstrate goal-based genetic programming with Cost / Error / Fitness / Survival functions.
Mutating source code AST is a bit different from mutating to optimize a defined optimization problem with specific parameters; though the task is basically the same: minimize error between input and output, and then XAI.
You have to become comfortable with the fact that there is uncertainy and there are parts of it you can't control. So instead you have to be obsessed with introducing order where you can. It is so refreshing to see a beautiful experiment that can wrestle a clear signal from the endless noise.
Depends where in math, in things like particle physics things get all wibbly wobbly is my cat dead or alive. In things like engineering quite often what you're dealing with is probability based, but you just stack the deck so far in your favor the probability is 1.
As they say, building a bridge that doesn't fall down is easy. Building a bridge that barely doesn't fall down is much harder.
I have seen molecular biologists (jokingly) shake the voodoo "molecular biology maracas" over the PCR machine to try and replicate their result.
It's a human thing.
Surely Feynman made jested comments before running experiments. I'm sure some digging in his wonderful books and letters will find many examples.
In fact, just finished listening to a talk where a experimentalist was talking about how to get the fabrication yields of superconducting qubits from currently low double digit to 99.99+.
Biology is messy at a macro level is all I'm saying. I don't need a hundred people butting in saying "butt aschully phsyix and code is also messy and harder at a quantum level." I know. We know.
A title like "I wish I had enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology, I now find pop biology interesting" may have had less impact, though.
Computer scientists and programmers are very intelligent people who often have grossly unrealistic projections of their competency in other fields, and this is a fine example of the phenomenon.
Secondly, fields really do need cross-discipline collaboration. Finding passionate CS people is fantastic because they bring a different skill set. I have often found that when we get diverse experts together, we can have everyone do the "easy part" and get results which would be otherwise unobtainable.
Yes, some people have 'engineers disease' and fail to appreciate the depth of knowledge and skills of folks who have spent their life in another domain... But the author doesn't seem to be one of these. Many of their favorite stories appreciate the combination of insight and hard work in the history of the field.
It does, indeed, suck that people working in biology get paid less than computer engineers. Blame capitalism...
I feel bad for them, but I can assure you, as someone who did the research in the exact same field, they're curing nothing and are more likely to make cures slower by sucking away funding from more pertinent projects.
Also relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/
Do you have any advice for how to not be that kind of problem? For now I'm just focusing on my coursework, but at some point I'll be biologist-enough to help out with research. How do I approach it without being that guy?
The post is simply about what you call enough attention to get through the boring parts of high school biology — should biology in school be only for those who have that ability? Even if being a professional biologist requires those attributes, shouldn't the teaching of the science of life—which is full of wonder—have a bit of something for everyone else too? Even people who don't become biologists ought to love biology, surely?
That's what the post (like the earlier one by Somers) is about; it's not about “I could have become a biologist” (as you seem to be implying). You can call it pop biology, but it's missing from school where “astonishing facts were presented without astonishment”. I see nothing self-entitled about this.
It's the same in mathematics, say: even if being a professional mathematician requires (say) thinking long and hard and being willing to struggle with difficult problems, manipulating things in one's head, etc — surely there is value in exposing more students to pop mathematics / beautiful results (enjoying which is very different from actually doing mathematics, sure), so that more people could love mathematics recreationally, whether or not they become professional ones?
The other top-level thread that talks about how this happens in CS education too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43764315) seems to get the point of the post: it's the equivalent of Lockhart's A Mathematician’s Lament (https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician'... ).
Not the only sequence model that exhibits stutters on repetitive inputs...
while creatures:
c = get_random_creature()
if c.is_dead():
creatures.pop(c)
else:
creatures.add(c.mutate())Critiquing my own code, though, it should really be a check against 'can_reproduce()' rather than 'is_dead()'.
You don't need to go into nature to get this curiosity except for the possibility that it makes you more meditative. You can look at your arm and think what the hell happens in there at a molecular level to make you move the muscles. Or when someone says nerves conduct electricity what the hell does that mean?
I revisit this feynman video of him explaining (or not) magnets every few months and I think it's relevant to this question. https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=CkWYfiGoGCgAANwP
When I think like that I'm just curious why OP and others blame teachers or whoever else for not inducting the curiosity in them. Like it's someone else's job to make you curious? In my opinion you're either born that way or you're not. Some airport store book isn't gonna make you the next whatever scientist you adulate.
To be proficient in biology you need to have "Extra" skills: extra ability to work with ambiguity,ability to memorize enormous amounts of descriptive information, and highly abstract representations. Digital biology often loses many aspects of biological reality, and then fails to make useful predictions.
Over the years, I've come to realize I know less and less about biology- that I greatly underestimated the complexity and subtlety of biological processes, and have come to admit that my own intelligence is too limited to work on some problems that I originally thought would be "easy engineering problems".
A great example of the rabbit hole that is modern biology is summed up here: what is the nature of junk DNA? To what extents are digital readouts like ENCODE representative of true biology, rather than just measuring noise? What is the nature of gene and protein evolution?
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)... (note that while I disagree strongly with Eddy in many ways, I've come to recognize that I simply don't understand the modern view of evolution outside the perspective of molecular biology (IE, what geneticists like Eddy think).
Also, recently, Demis Hassabis postulated that if he is successful, we will come up with silver bullet cures in 10 years time simply using machine learning. It's amazing how many computer scientists (I call him that rather than a biologist, although he has worked into neuro) make this conclusion.
It's one of the reasons why I work in visualization for life sciences education: I think we're missing out on people who might otherwise make massive contributions to the field because they failed to memorize what the "endoplasmic reticulum" does. Much of biology you don't have to actually remember what things are called in order to understand the processes (at least at a basic level like what a middle schooler might be taught). Once you're exposed to the fascinating complexity of life at that level, for many people it can be interesting enough to build the motivation for the memorization/etc.
But even that's besides the point of the fact that all these things are nothing more than abstractions created by humans, and ultimately it's all one giant soup of interacting molecules.
I do find the author's point weird. "I thought high school biology was just memorizing facts, but I began to appreciate it when I read some pop science books and went scuba diving." So the only problem for the author was the topic of the classes, not the style. Why shouldn't one have the same problem with high school physics ("it's just about boring ramps and pulleys"), etc.? Personally I find the style to be a more important distinguishing factor, in that biology is much less quantitative than other science disciplines. Instead the author's problem is that biology should be even less quantitative and more literary or poetic...?
Ultimately science journalism/popularization is not the same thing as science. High school science classes (try to) teach the latter not the former.
I'm a classic INTJ but left school and built biology-online.org 25ish years ago. I think it's had a couple of thousand years of reading hours. I sold it on thinking I lack the expertise the topic deserves (it ranked well on Google for lots of biological terms)
I love the lack of agency about biology/evolution, it found a way to create ourselves as well as the huge tree of life around us purely through biological/ecological pressures. And here we are. We owe a lot to how biology has expressed things over the past 4 billion years and will likely find out a whole lot more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
> Despite its popularity, the MBTI has been widely regarded as pseudoscience by the scientific community.[1][3][2] The validity (statistical validity and test validity) of the MBTI as a psychometric instrument has been the subject of much criticism.
> Many of the studies that endorse MBTI are methodologically weak or unscientific.[13] A 1996 review by Gardner and Martinko concluded: "It is clear that efforts to detect simplistic linkages between type preferences and managerial effectiveness have been disappointing. Indeed, given the mixed quality of research and the inconsistent findings, no definitive conclusion regarding these relationships can be drawn."[13][72]
>The test has been likened to horoscopes, as both rely on the Barnum effect, flattery, and confirmation bias, leading participants to personally identify with descriptions that are somewhat desirable, vague, and widely applicable.[10][73] MBTI is not recommended in counseling.[74]
Look for:
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher
The Youngest Science
...and a couple of thers.
So I pushed myself a little out of my comfort zone and ordered a textbook and enrolled in a course. It made me realize how I've forgotten how to learn without it being entertainment. But, after some acclimation, I also realized that I don't really need an engaging presentation, because I really do just enjoy learning. So in a way my journey has been kinda the opposite of the author's - the 'fluff' around the information made it less appealing, not more. Though I suppose I might not have taken the leap to delve deeper into these topics in the first place if it weren't for the accessible versions.
Either way though, I think the real takeaway isn't that there's a right way to be interested in a topic - whether through stories and history or otherwise - but rather that school isn't the best environment for figuring out if something interests you, and it's worth re-visiting topics you might have written off with a fresh approach.
I think a different perspective can sometimes illuminate though, it's not just about the person - it's them having an epiphany that motivates them to do something, like learn more.
>pop educational stuff,
I watch a lot of that as lazy entertainment, so much of it is factually incorrect (on YouTube etc). But I know better I guess.
Yes, it’s pop science, but last be year I read through Philipp Dettmer’s “Immune”, and the description of how the immune system continuously generates random/arbitrary sequences of nucleotides, builds the proteins that those sequences encode, and then subjects the resulting proteins to a “is this a ‘me’ protein or an ‘other’ protein?” gauntlet, the latter path of which allows the body to create antibodies for completely novel proteins... is just incredible.
I have an idle fantasy that, in the afterlife, I’ll be able to ask God questions like “so what are quarks made of?”, “why is the speed of light what it is and not any faster/slower? What would the universe have been like if the speed of light were several orders of magnitude faster/slower?”, “is there a single force that unifies all the ones that humans know about? What would the universe have been like if the weak nuclear force were just a tiny bit weaker?”, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
esp. when physicists use things like the anthropic principle to describe our own universe.
It's like real-life Pokémon GO and field mycology has a "collect 'em all" vibe. You get out into nature, identify and catalog fungi — it scratches the same itch as exploring an open-world game.
Fungi are discrete, classifiable entities with tons of metadata: GPS location, substrate, time of year, morphology, spore prints, photos, microscopic features. Perfect for structured data nerds.
Unlike many branches of biology, you don’t need to go to the Amazon. You can walk into your backyard or a nearby forest and find species newly known for your country and sometimes even new for science.
Microscopes, macro lenses, chemicals, even DNA sequencing. There’s a hacker spirit in mycology.
Projects like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and FungiMap are full of real scientific contributions from everyday people. The barrier to entry is low, the impact can be surprisingly high, and the community is genuinely welcoming. Many leading contributors — even those publishing in cutting-edge scientific journals — are passionate autodidacts rather than formally trained biologists.
High intra-species variance, subtle features — perfect playground for machine learning wich is not nearly "solved" here.
Cordyceps that zombify insects. Giant underground networks that share nutrients between trees. Bioluminescent mushrooms. Many weird stories.
Hey, a lot of fellow biologists here! A few questions:
Is there a 'hacker news' for biology that I'm missing out on?
Where do you get your biology news from?
Where do you think the field/s are going?
Is bio harder than other STEMs?
I'm a neuroscientist/bioengineer by training and profession. I followed the path that a lot of commenters here did too, in that I came back to bio after a harder STEM career (physics). Glad to know I'm not alone in this!
1) Sadly there isn't really. There are a few good blogs like Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline" that centralize news, but no anonymous online forum like this.
2) Google scholar alerts, Twitter, Bluesky, and word of mouth.
3) I think our understanding of biological processes at the mesoscale is about to hit an inflection point, largely through advances in electron microscopy (cryo-ET) and the ability to perform simulations at this scale.
4) Not harder but definitely more messy and progress is less linear.
It took me a while to shed that view.
1. There's an inherent charm and beauty to biology, and the ability to memorise is a skill.
2. The many different sub-disciplines of biology demonstrate the level of complexity that the field demands. And, even if it isn't as 'rigorous' as physics, do we denounce experimentalists because theoretical physicists exist? They simply serve as distinct, but crucial, parts of a chain.
I should have loved biology (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 - April 2024 (253 comments)
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32035054 - July 2022 (271 comments)
I should have loved biology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25136422 - Nov 2020 (298 comments)
I have loved history since I was six and my parents got me my first adult history book. I love how all stories fit together, understanding why things happened the way they did, how and why people in the past thought differently than we do today, all of it. If you read a textbook, though, history is just memorizing one thing happening after another.
Part of that might be my (American) education system's fear of controversy: explaining what motivated abolitionists and slave-holders in the 1850, the actual stakes over which they were fighting, would not be popular in many states, and some parents would no doubt object. But also, it's complicated because the past is a different country- all of a sudden you are having to explain the way that the economics of the Industrial Revolution changed the demand for complimentary goods (1), the Curse of Ham (2), the way that printing presses functioned in antebellum American democracy (3), and the pre-Civil Service patronage system (4). Basically, you have to teach a college level course to understand how things were different then and why they happened. And really good teachers can simplify the details down to an age-appropriate level, but most teachers are, well, average, and so memorization is a lot easier path to follow.
1: The beginning of the industrial revolution mechanized looms and spinning wheels, and mechanized cleaning raw cotton. As basic microeconomics suggests, those improvements suddenly massively increased the demand for cotton. Those demand spikes transformed large slave owners from people who understood that slavery was bad and wanted to see it ended but not quite yet to people who thought that slavery was a positive boon for the enslaved people they owned. You can actually see this in their writing, in 1800 most slave-owners think that slavery is on its way out and will not spread much, and in 1830 slavery is the best thing that God gave people anywhere.
2: The Southern Baptist Convention created itself in 1845 because so many didn't think that National Baptists in the General Missionary Convention were committed to defending slavery and the Curse of Ham, and they wanted to be part of a religion dedicated to the idea that White people should rule over Black people.
3: Before the secret ballot each party would provide its own ballots, pre-marked, and you just turned in the ballot of the party you supported. This naturally meant that each party had its own printing press in each town, which meant that they also had newspapers, pamphlets, and the like, and the press-owner was almost always one of the most committed political partisans in an area. Then when their party won they would get the contract for printing all documents the government needed in that area. This is a major driver for political polarization in the 1840's and 1850s.
4: Before the existence of Civil Service protections, basically all of the staff of the government would change over with a new Administration, every postmaster in every town would be appointed by the President and would change with every election. The fear that a Northern President committed to abolition would use this patronage- and printing contracts to printing press owners- to build a large segment of white southerners committed to abolition- who would in turn spark a slave revolt- that was why so many Southern states tried to leave the Union at the election of the first Republican President, before he was even inaugurated or had a chance to do anything. Because if they waited, he would appoint abolitionists to every town in the country, so they had to get ahead of him.
He mentions reading Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and finding archaeology, as described by Thor, to be incredibly fascinating and exciting (which I agree with having read Kon-Tiki as well).
Card goes on to say that when he tried ACTUAL archaeology he found it incredibly boring. e.g. it was mostly sitting out in the hot sun dusting off rocks hoping to find some bones.
It's a reminder of two facts:
1. EVERY activity has exciting and boring pars
2. A good writer can make even dull and boring activities comes alive
kleiba•4h ago
As a matter of fact, I gave up after just one year. It wasn't any fun for anyone, not for the students, not for me.
hfgjbcgjbvg•3h ago
moffkalast•3h ago
internet_rand0•2h ago
imagine that!? an historically informed populace???
you'd need more expensive lies and higher quality fakes... the government would be costlier to run.
ideally, in the long term this would make the national currency's value in the international money market rise up. but why wait for that when one can directly manipulate money through trade fraud and covert military ploys?
RogerL•2h ago
PicassoCTs•3h ago
I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.
mlinhares•3h ago
Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment, because the disdain for everything that made them great places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.
immibis•2h ago
But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.
fads_go•2h ago
tqi•17m ago
slicktux•3h ago
SoftTalker•2h ago
You must understand these things at least conceptually if you want to really understand how to write efficient programs. Maybe not at the level of how memory can electronically "remember" a 1 or a zero, or how a hard drive can magnetically do it, but at least the relative speeds e.g. register vs. cache vs. RAM vs. disk.
0_gravitas•2h ago
nightpool•1h ago
alnwlsn•59m ago