Ask HN: An HN for biology/medicine/biotech? Would you want one? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: An HN for biology/medicine/biotech? Would you want one?

46 pointskyro27 comments

Does such a site exist? Would you be interested in one?

Edit: If any of you want to help, email me at kyro@kyrobeshay.com, if you wish.

There were a number of sites that were launched shortly after arc came out based on the news.arc code. The arc language and code are under the Artistic License 2.0 [1]. (I admit that I thought they were public domain) See arclanguage.org for more on news.arc and arc the language.

Here are the news.arc sites that I remember:

[newmogul.com] - by nickb was HN for business. I always assumed it was news.arc. Maybe not. Still worth reading up on. There were a number of HNers that used it regularly and were looking for another similar site when it went down.

[pageonetimes.com] - it was HN applied to sports.

[ballerinc.com] - I don't remember what that site specialized in.

All of these were based on the news.arc code. I don't think any of these are still around. But the news.arc code has continued to improve and become more stable so it may be viable option. So if you wanted to set up something for biology or medicine you could use the HN code and just customize it as you see fit. (Oh and put it behind apache, nginx, etc please, I can help just email me or ask over at arclanguage.org)

Good luck. I agree that if you can build the community and figure out how to get rid of bad data - it's a great idea.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) [2] http://arclanguage.org/item?id=7564

EDIT: Formatting ~ Sometimes I wish HN had markdown or textile...

I've been trying to pick up some of the newmogul.com community with http://newsley.com. It's my startup. It's not built using arc.news, however, I rolled my own using Django. And, while it's not up to arc.news functionality yet, it should be there pretty soon, and I plan on adding a bunch of new features in the coming months.

There's also http://markenomics.com that I believe is using arc.news for an economics/financial news site. The community isn't quite as active as it was a few months ago, however.

Count me in if you make it. Happy to help moderate too - contact details in my profile.

I want that and a stackoverflow for the same. Thanks!

SO for medicine would be super interesting. If done correctly, it could be a really useful resource for physicians/biologists/etc.

A stackoverflow for medicine could have enormous benefits, but considering how much "blind leading the blind" goes on there I'd be terrified if this is applied to a field with immediate consequences to people's well-being.

Yeah, that's definitely the risk, but I'd imagine community feedback + academic/clinical education/training would somewhat mitigate that, although not fully. A good verification system would help too (for physicians), but then it'd feel more like an invite-only community, which could be good or bad - I'm not sure.

How about you can sort answers by total vote count OR only by verified account votes?

Agreed. Just looking at Yahoo! answers for any health related questions you can see that most people online don't know what they are talking about (but are more than happy to share) when it comes to health related issues.

Somehow the same people manage to stay off of programming sites thankfully and don't just go respond to everything saying, "Its probably a heart attack, get to your doctor!"

A stackoverflow for researchers in biotech/medicine/biology would be extremely useful. In biological research, if someone wants to do an experiment that they are not experienced in, they can review peer-reviewed published materials, but many important details are left out. There are many matters of technique, and many decisions about which protocol/solution/tool/etc to use for the experiment that may not be easily accessible via published sources. In these situations, a well-connected biological researcher would ask a colleague who is experienced in the particular experiment. This is not always so easy though, and much time can be wasted re-discovering a simple issue that many others already knew.

In software, this kind of knowledge has been available online for years. In other technology fields, this is not the case. A easy-to-use, well designed forum like stackoverflow for biology research could be a real boon for the field. The only problem I see is getting people to use it.

Graduate student neuroengineer here. Very yes.

I'd love to see a website like this, especially if there's bioinformatics and computational biology there.

As a student of bioinformatics, I would be interested in this.

Perhaps it could be a more fitting venue for those in the DIYBio scene.[1]

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/diybio/topics

If you want to get something up quick, you could use http://slinkset.com (aquired by Posterous in June 2009). It lets you create a social news site in seconds.

Sounds like a great idea - I'd be happy to help out too if you need it.

I would love this. Many times there are articles that would be more appropriate for that kind of forum, but I post them here to catch the hacker/biotech crossover crowd.

Graduate student biophysicist, I'd be interested.

I'd be interested. I have a background in healthcare, so stuff in bioinformatics/biotech/medicine would be of interest to me.

Though it's not one of my major interest I'd look like to hang around. But I got few friends who are well interested.

Kudos

As a bioinformatics/molec bio student, I would be interested in a bio HN.

Would be cool to see, not sure how accessible it would be to me though.

I'm a student of bioinformatics and I support this idea. Count me in.

would definitely be interested and would be interested to help out.

That sounds terrific. I'll send an email later.

Great idea if executed on the same level as HN.

sounds like it would work better in the midwest, where are you going to host it?

definitely a great idea

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