- A month-long collaborative web-app sprint was proposed with four candidate projects: a longevity-paper organizer for diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/longevity/, a crowdsourced “industrial-infrastructure mapper” that geotags factory photos, an open peer-review platform with Reddit-style reputation, and a nootropics price-scraper that aggregates listings from smart-drugs.net, eBay, and Alibaba.  
- Participants debated open-access publishing models; consensus held that technical infrastructure (e.g., Open Journal System) already exists and the real barrier is cultural/political buy-in, while klafka sketched an experimental reputation-weighted peer-review economy and bdesk argued for simply cloning existing editorial workflows but making them free.  
- A 1.1 GB scrape of the chemical-inventory site Quartzy was released at http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/quartzy/ (index.txt 28 MB, quartzy_files.tar 924 MB), offering raw data for DIY lab-supply analytics.  
- Practical lab-automation ideas included bench-top miniprep-to-gel-electrophoresis workflows affordable to individual grad students, an Android lab-notebook/photo-documentation tool for hackerspaces, and a curated “science apps” marketplace; discussion noted that most current science apps are low-impact and legacy lab hardware hampers phone integration.  
- Life Technologies’ “Grand Challenges” were highlighted as hackable targets: halving sequencing-machine prep time and improving base-calling accuracy, both framed as tractable for software or hardware interventions.  
- Job-seeking advice emphasized circulating pitches through Aubrey de Grey and other network contacts rather than cold-mailing PIs, removing compensation lines from initial e-mails, and leveraging Y Combinator’s “Who’s Hiring” thread (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831646) to find data-mining and bio-startup roles.