• A Hacker News post argued that biology does not need a “Grothendieck” but rather cheaper, higher-quality data; it compared current biological research to reverse-engineering an alien architecture over a noisy, low-bandwidth line and cited CRISPR, optogenetics, and AAV vectors as the “clever hacks” that are actually advancing the field.  
• Discussion of Crapify, a proxy that simulates slow or unreliable HTTP connections, led to a debate on whether developers should test network-layer failures in real environments or rely on simulated ones; participants noted that most code does not exhaustively handle network errors.  
• A GitHub project called Gitchain was shared as “Git meets Bitcoin,” aiming to decentralize Git repositories peer-to-peer; reaction in the channel was skeptical.  
• A low-cost 3-D scanning technique was highlighted (https://will-forfang.squarespace.com/3d-scanning-digitizing-on-the-cheap-2/), but its code was noted to be unavailable, limiting reproducibility.  
• The alpha release of the Language Engine Objective-C SDK for conversational AI was announced via Twitter; the framework wraps Haskell code and was initially distributed only as a zipped Xcode project rather than version-controlled source, prompting criticism and a promise to improve packaging.