HackerMed - My HN-like Site for Hackers Interested in Bio/Med | Hacker News Reader

HackerMed - My HN-like Site for Hackers Interested in Bio/Med

hackermed.com

165 pointskyro64 comments

So a few months ago, I posted a submission asking the community whether they'd be interested in an HN-type site for hackers interested in bio/med, and received a good amount of replies expressing interest and enthusiasm. And so I finally got round to getting one up. There's not too much, but hopefully enough to grab your attention and even compel you to engage and contribute. It's for anyone interested in the intersection of hacking and life science, from the role of social networks and mobile devices in healthcare to new ways to hack your body.

Many many thanks to Rust who provided the actual code for the site and used it as an opportunity to develop his own open source project for HN-type sites, which can be found at http://www.noostr.com.

Looks good. The only thing difficult in the bio/med community is actually gather some audience. Let's hope to get something, it would be a good resource.

I'm interested in a wide variety of medical subjects, both general and health care IT related. After checking the site, it has a good selection of articles, which should allow a growing community.

question of curiosity: why did you use noostr (php) and not the HN code (lisp/arc) up on github?

I'm not a hacker by any means and so I didn't really want to get knee-deep in lisp/arc as I wanted to get something up quickly. Met Rust in #startups who approached me because he wanted to do some open source work and decided doing an HN-type thing would be cool. The language was entirely his choice. I just needed a working site. :P And he did a great job!

Can you convince him to put the project on github?

Absolutely.

Noostr will be on GitHub as soon as we reach a stable release. This is expected to be v0.7 (current is 0.5, with 0.6 in the next 24 hours). I'll certainly remember to post here when it officially goes on GitHub (the source is downloadable from http://noostr.com/ already).

Awesome, thanks!

This is awesome. I've been hoping to find a curated bio/med related news site. This looks like it is just that. I would echo the other commenters and suggest toning down on the use of bold type.

The lack of rounding on the query time on noostr is driving my OCD crazy, LOL

(but otherwise the code is pretty decent)

Yeah, that'll get fixed.

The articles and comments need time stamps. Otherwise, you can't tell what was posted today and what was posted last year.

Anyone know if there's a rails open source HN-type project?

Good stuff. Don't make the text bold, but bump of the font size a pixel or two. Increase the margin between the list items, and make the smaller meta data a color like #777. Good stuff!

Will do! Rushing off to work at the moment, so I'll start implementing a lot of these changes in a few hours.

+1 If you're asking people to come back frequently, you've got to improve readability. Simple is great, but the contrast hurts my eyes.

This doesn't look like it's built on news.arc. What language is it written in? How many LOC did it turn out to be?

It's written in PHP. Not sure about LOC; it was written by a friend from #startups. It's open sourced at Noostr.com.

sloccount says 2,131 lines of PHP.

Excellent work, I like the HNish simplicity.

One suggestion I do have is with the name... personally, I love it, but I am not sure how well it will fly with your primary target audience, which may not take the term 'Hacker' well.

Looks cool... When I first checked out slinkset about a year back, one of their biggest users was a site called news.thinkgene.com that delt with many of the same issues of your site. It appears that they've since required a slinkset UN and PW to even view the site though. If you have that, then that forum might be a good place to announce hackermed also.

Sounds good, I'll give it a try.

Stumped. Why not just make a sub-reddit and point people to it? It'd have the same features and editorial control, and a much larger potential audience than a niche website.

Nevermind the cost savings in hosting, development, maintenance, etc.

That's definitely an option, but I wanted something extremely simple to play around with, and I have future plans to expand it once it starts growing. I also like the concentrated community we have here and hope to mirror that with HM. I think having a separate site serves as somewhat of a filter.

Any thoughts onto providing a friction-less signup? E.g. Twitter OAuth, Facebook Connect, Clickpass? I want to post something and vote up something, but this is just yet another site on the internets that I don't know yet if I will keep coming back to (thus I don't want to sign up).

Over time if I see myself coming back to read stuff, vote stuff, submit stuff, then I'd be more willing to sign up and register; but right now it doesn't yet pass my threshold for wanting to sign up. However, if there was those one-click options, it'd be painless for me to do so and I would do it.

Which is kind of a paradox, because I can't submit or vote unless I'm already signed up. The only thing I can do without signing in is read. So I'd have to find myself constantly coming back for good stuff, and then decide that I do want to associate myself with the site, and want to get some good karma on it, to sign up and vote/submit. And right now it's to early to tell.

Keep up the good work!

Yeah, this has been suggested a few other times. We'll get to it!

For those who saw it earlier, how do you like the look now?

Much better.

I strongly recommend you continue to focus on user experience in the short run. Objective no. 1 has to be getting folks to keep coming back, and if there's some small improvement to how the site behaves each time a user visits, you're much more likely to keep the user, get him/her recommending you to others, etc.

Much better. I might make the text a bit larger. My eyes are probably older than yours. Flipping back and forth between HN and HM it feels like less work to scan HN.

I wonder if you can predict the age of a site's creator based on text size? :)

"bigger text"

And, see the display of this article's headline on the aggregation page (front page or wherever it drops to)

http://www.livly.org/ Silicon Valley nonprofit startup: "Certain humans appear to possess natural cancer immunity. We attempt to harness this imm

The headline wraps, and the wrapped text is smashed up into the text above it.

So, size and spacing needs some work.

At least HackerMed is faster than Hacker News. :)

Having very low traffic relatively speaking helps like that. :) Hopefully that will change though.

rss feed please. feel free to contact me if you need a basic php one.

RSS feed should be out tonight or early tomorrow.

Looks very good! I'm very interested in this as we are developing a Start-up in the Bio/Med category and a community like this can be great. Thanks for doing this.

Sounds interesting. Anything you can share?

Looks nice: one thing I'd change right away is the color of visited links. That's HUGE for me on HN, and would encourage me to continue using HM.

Cheers, and nice work!

Definitely, I'll change that shortly. Thanks!

I guess my only thought is, is this the beginning of a need for sub-HN on the mothership? Or is it preferable to shard them off into their own sites?

If it's that easy to create a separate site, it'll be easier to reach the relevant audience with distinctive branding and naming and without the clutter of peripheral sites with limited interest.

I emailed a few medically-minded friends, but if I'd said, "Here's a section on this site which might interest you," vs, "Here's a site that might interest you," it seems less relevant.

That makes sense as a reason for keeping them as separate sites.

But I know a few others like these have popped up (one for education, one for papers, maybe more?) so at least a master list somewhere would be really helpful.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Good idea, congrats on executing.

I don't know why, but it makes my eyes tired to look at it, as if I was looking at red text on green. Other than that it's great.

Yes, I'm having the same problem. I think perhaps it's because of the contrast. The bold black on white is perhaps a bit too contrasty? Maybe make the background slightly off-white (like HN does)?

Otherwise, looks awesome! I'll add it to my bookmarks :)

I just looked this morning. It looks much better, "easy on the eyes" as they say.

I'm soon starting a new job as a programmer in genetic research, so hopefully I will find some items of direct or tangential relevance to biomedical research computing. Especially since I have little idea what I'm getting myself into :)

This is awesome.

You guys should set up a Twitter feed or something for noostr so we can stay up to date on when it gets released to github.

http://twitter.com/noostr/ :)

Someone should do something like this for hackers interested in math...or does such a site already exist?

A lot of math is related to computer science, and thus would be perfectly suitable for Hacker News (but obviously in less concentration).

How about splitting HN into categories, while still having a main page that displays articles from all categories? It'll never happen, but we can always ask.

Sounds almost exactly like Reddit.

Even just a simple tagging system would suffice. One to two tags attached to the submitted link would be great. One could use Reddit for this, but I prefer the average comment/article on Hacker News to the average comment/article on Reddit. (:

I agree. While I like Reddit, I think they've missed a trick by not just using tags. It'd much rather see all posts in the Reddit ecosystem tagged "Ruby" than just those that were directly submitted to the Ruby subreddit, for example. That's a bit like Delicious, though, I guess.. just with commenting ;-)

I guess the only problem there is that it makes it harder for one community focused on a certain topic to "branch" to another when things get rough, whereas now you can just start "/r/ruby_two" or whatever if /r/ruby makes you mad. It's definitely a trade-off, but I think Hacker News is still high-quality enough that tagging would work.

Wouldn't that be Reddit?

At the risk of over-tooting, categories and control over which are displayed on which pages are features that will be in Noostr in the next week or two. Sub-domains are also slated for a future version - probably 0.9.

There's http://www.mathoverflow.net -- I can't vouch for whether it's good or not, as my math sucks, but it seems like it might be useful and I stumbled across it on a usually reliable site.

Nice site, I sent the link to some of my friends in the medical sciences. Hope it takes off.

Nice. I am a partner in an upcoming Med startup and I will follow this site.

Great! I just bookmarked you. (Do you mind adding a favicon to the site?)

Yeah, favicon is coming! I was so concerned with making the apple webclip icon that i completely forgot about the favicon. :P

any reason you didn't use slinkset.com?

good job. looks good. thanks for doing this. I'll definitely be tracking it. I like HN's style and structure and glad to see somebody emulating it but with a different topic focus, while still being hacker/tech/geek/entrepreneur material.

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