Comments moved to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248858" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248858</a>, which looks like it was the first submission of the paper and/or associated blog post.<p>I've re-upped that thread, which adjusts the timestamp (confusingly, sorry) but you can always tell from the item ID which was earliest.
I've a hypothesis for this.<p>Science is now largely confined to the stuffy halls of academia, reliant totally on corporate sponsorship.<p>If you want to do much of anything in academia, you need grant funding. Which means your work often has to conform to someone's agenda.<p>This leaves fuck all space for fucking about and finding out.<p>There is no place left in modern society for independent scientists to tinker away at stuff for the most part - even when finance isn't an issue, laws tend to get in the way.<p>The combination of the war on drugs and the war on terror have made the independent chemist or hobbyist largely an extinct beast, with a few remaining, constantly running the risk of being snatched up by the police on some trumped up charge due to concerns about public safety.<p>As to biology? The same thing, really. Once you get beyond the kinda lame finger magnets and RFID implants side of biohacking, and skirt around the Bay Area nutjobs talking shit about injecting themselves with recombinant DNA, there are a bunch of folks doing a lot of really interesting gene editing work with very poor resources and no institutional backing.<p>Unfortunately, the DIY Bio people also tend to get harassed periodically on the grounds of public safety.<p>Physics? Again, without institutional backing, the scopes pretty thin. Again due to laws that supposedly protect the public.<p>I could go on, but I'm just making myself depressed typing this tbh. We need to bring back the possibility of doing hard scientific work outside of the stranglehold of industry and academia.