Owl Posting
owlposting.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2024
Writing on biology and machine learning, covering cancer vaccines, drug discovery startups, biosecurity, and AI in pathology.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend it as a biology and ML blog and cite its cancer vaccine and pathology AI posts as good, detailed reads.
19HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
149stories submitted
1.9Kstory points
2 months agolast shared
2024people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time5 people · 15 points · first shared 2026 · 1 comments on HN
- 2The ML drug discovery startup trying really, really hard to not cheat5 people · 13 points · first shared 2025 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Reasons to be pessimistic (and optimistic) on the future of biosecurity5 people · 12 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 4Ask not why would you work in biology, but rather: why wouldn't you?4 people · 15 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Creating 'new knobs of control' in biology4 people · 6 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 6There aren't enough smart people in biology doing something boring3 people · 73 points · first shared 2024 · 61 comments on HN
- 7The unreasonable effectiveness of plasmid sequencing as a service3 people · 55 points · first shared 2024 · 20 comments on HN
- 8Why do drugs work at all?3 people · 19 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 9What happened to pathology AI companies?3 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 10Generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by synthesis3 people · 10 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 11How to Design a Cancer Vaccine3 people · 8 points · first shared 2026 · discussion on HN
- 12Mapping the off-target effects of every FDA-approved drug in existence2 people · 168 points · first shared 2025 · 37 comments on HN
- 13Why Recursion Pharmaceuticals abandoned cell painting for brightfield imaging2 people · 72 points · first shared 2024 · 11 comments on HN
- 14Will protein design tools solve the snake antivenom shortage?2 people · 66 points · first shared 2025 · 28 comments on HN
- 15Fictional parasites different from our own2 people · 19 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
abhishaike · 2024-08-25
A biology/machine-learning blog!
https://www.owlposting.com/
Rediscovering an old love for writing that I thought had left me after highschool, now applied in the field I work in! Recommend starting your own blog if you're on the fence + being consistent about posting, it's extremely worth it
HedonicEscal8r · 2026-08-19
Yes, mRNA vaccines are promising for many but not all cancer types, and there are many ongoing clinical trials. There's also a lot we yet don't know about how to design them.
Here's a great blog post on this, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time": https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-to-build-a-cancer-vaccine-and
Here's the blog post I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-really-use-…
barrenko · 2025-12-11
Monsieur, if I may offer a vaaaguely similar story on how things may progress https://www.owlposting.com/p/a-body-most-amenable-to-experimentation
epistasis · 2025-05-14
For a more technical dive into startups that have been chugging along with AI in pathology for ~decade, check out this:
https://www.owlposting.com/p/what-happened-to-pathology-ai-companies
> One pathology AI founder told me that it wasn’t hospitals or diagnostic labs that showed the most promise. It was R&D groups within Big Pharma. Those scientists and executives wanted new tooling. They were often sitting on massive internal datasets, had real budget allocated to experimental tech, and — critically — had a clear ROI if your model helped shave months off a study or more precisely target the right patient cohort. Most importantly, pharma didn’t care as much about the regulatory headaches, as they weren’t using your model to diagnose patients