I can see it's a hard problem for lobste.rs to keep the level of discourse high if they let in everyone, but then, yeah, it generally sucks if you would like to add to a conversation and their attitude is "Well, get an invite from one of your friends of course". Because of course I'd be friends with one of the exceedingly modest number of people who have accounts there. It probably seems like a good marketing attitude to them to assume hugeness or the destiny of hugeness, but attitude puts me off somewhat.

But, yes, what you said about not being connected with the whole startup thing which definely draws a certain amount of...amorality to HN.

I'm falling for a bit of forum bikeshedding here of commenting on something very important :) but...it's one thing to say "I imagined it was like this, but it was like that. And here's what my friends imagined" and another to start the thing like "man, c.s.l. sure tricked everyone with his weird, weird candy!"

I can't remember whether I tried to imagine it or allowed it to be intriguing-but-unknown in my mind.

To be fair, delusions about a magic sky monster are infantile.

To be fair, delusions about climate change are infantile.

I could be wrong because what do I know about guns, but when I see these I-made-a-gun stories, I'm really irritated because 1. it seems like the action of someone who began with "What is the easiest thing that I could do that would get the most media attention?" 2. when an important technology is young, it is so irresponsible to stoke fears for selfish reasons in the populace or abet politicians and pundits doing the same.

A lot of 3D printing is like JavaScript: See, I can do 'X' with JavaScript, where 'X' in JavaScript is not better or even a proper application of the technology, but it is new to the maker and it is new to their audience.

Making a gun from plastic was doable for many years (various epoxys, simple casts) so no news there, in principle.

But making a gun (or a whole bunch of them!) with a push of a button and without skills is definitely new and that's the reason why it is newsworthy.

So even if the tech is wrong, the product crap and the workmanship shoddy there is something new here: a lethal weapon that can pass through a metal detector can be manufactured by anybody without skills. They still need ammo, they are manufacturing guns (which in many places can get you into a very large amount of trouble), they're showing that 3D printing is an enabling technology.

As noted below there are better ways of making guns, but they require a little bit more in terms of skills (but less in terms of investment, and the guns will be much better).

Guns are easily obtained on the black market in any country in the world. I'd be much more concerned about 3-D printed nuclear bombs or 3-D printed surface-to-air missiles or, in the not-too-distant future, nanotech 3-D printed tailored viruses :(

Maybe the confusion here is that prices are sometimes spoken of as 'a [currency unit] a [item]' which can be understood as 'one [currency unit] per [item]'.

Stable/lego-brick phenotypes: Is this about coming up with something akin to 0 and 1 and then building from the ground up? Or is this about something that's closer to familiar biology but with some fiendishly clever compartmentalization somehow?

Well, given our tremendous struggle with rational design of novel protein nanostructures, my point was that we should avoid that difficulty by designing some ligand-binding proteins only once, then assemble those into the larger structures that we desire.

Of course, knowing all protein (structural) phenotypes for all amino acid sequences up to length=100 would also be nice... but seems unlikely something we can work towards due to constraints of scarce universe.

I tried 10.0, and I had a few really irritating problems. My connection didn't stay up well with freebsd, and freebsd-update was not behaving robustly in the face of that. And pkg was frequently having problems with upgrades to itself where you had to follow the lists to know when to do something carefully by hand rather than letting the tool do its thing.

If it's a friendly lunch, I would advise to treat it mostly as a friendly lunch and not too much as an interview.

So his way to take care of the hen is to track its efficiency, give it a book telling it to be humble, and to fire it?

Well, possibly that was the semi-subtle point of the article -- that he says one thing, but here's a read-between-the-lines lack of evidence that it's more than talk.

I've sometimes wondered what would happen if a very careful and serious look were taken at what biological systems do for homeostasis. We might still be at the point where we don't feel--don't recognize the value yet--that we can spare the cycles, since in some sense you get parallelism for free in bio.

You might be interested in this: https://www.cs.unm.edu/~forrest/publications/ieee-sp-96-unix...

It's a scheme for Unix process intrusion detection based on principles of a biological immune system.