"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
> In the past... I started Jelly, worked with Seth Godin to start ChangeThis, brought BarCamp to NYC, started a co-op called House 2.0, contributed to a WSJ best-seller with Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki and others, and started a venture-backed company called The Daily Jolt while in college. I enjoy camping.
Downvote me to oblivion if necessary, but this really is a genuine question which, by the looks of things, has the answer of: His life is more important than everyone else on the transplant list.
Don't do this. Please read: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ("Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.")
To answer your question, nobody is suggesting his life is more important. In fact, as is mentioned towards the end of the article, by getting more people registered through this relatively high profile campaign he is increasing the chances of finding a match for others in need of a bone marrow transplant.
He is not more important in an objective sense. Most people would agree in an abstract sense that all lives are equally valuable, but would readily save their child rather than another if it came down to it. Why? Because they value the life of their child more than the life of another's child, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Amit, as a member of the startup community, is our child, as it were. Due to this commonality, we feel closer to him than 'faceless' people on the list. So your last sentence might read: "His life is more important than everyone else on the transplant list to us."
What makes you say the community is ignoring the faceless sufferers? Registering as a marrow donor isn't exclusive to one person, you could potentially save the life of a stranger decades from now. For the awareness he's raised Amit may potentially be saving many lives besides his own.
To me it's incredible that helping one person evokes so much shrieking about how many others that aren't being helped, what about those who never help anyone?
I've never seen ONE "help so-and-so (who is not from our community) with money/bone marrow/whatever" thread on here. Only when it effects someone in this community does this community give a shit, and you can't deny that. And the irony, as I pointed out before, is that it's going to take someone most likely not from this community to save Amit. I really can't make it any more clear.
And I disagree, the whole point of this drive is that the magic donor most likely will be someone mobilized by this community since there are so few potential matches as it currently stands.
I guess what's upsetting you is that a community member makes people care enough to get involved, while faceless strangers don't make us care enough to get involved. This seems like the sort of position people realize is incoherent and unsustainable, once they analyze it.
1. Amit's friends have been using current technology to campaign for the cause (e.g.: https://twitter.com /#!/search?q=%23ISwabbedForAmit) and this news proves the success of the campaign
2. Amit himself is a Hacker. He is one of us! Many people die each year, we don't discuss all of them like we discussed Steve Jobs.
3. He is helping build the database for future transplants
But there is a very reasonable answer - he is bringing to light a gap in the availability of bone marrow for his particular ethnicity. It is not that he is personally more important than anyone else... it is that he, and others like him, are under-served. Using his connections to raise this issue not only helps him, but should help anyone in his same situation.
I'd bet that your friends, family, and coworkers take a bit of an interest in your personal life. Amit's friends and coworkers just happen to be a very very large group.
Does it matter? His situation is bringing attention to this, and getting more people to add themselves to the registry. Whether or not he is personally saved, it's likely that several other matches will be made as a result, so I'd say it's a good thing overall.
By my understanding, this isn't a matter of supply and demand, or him trying to "jump the line" by making a direct appeal to people - it's a matter of sheer volume, it's relatively difficult to find donors for anyone that match well, so having more people in the system is a good thing for everyone.
Right. I guess the thing that bothers me about the entire thing is that this is done at such a bigger scale than other similar requests, especially from the past.
Requesting help from a small group, like family is one thing, but requesting help from the internet doesn't settle right for some reason.
Just skip over the link if you dont want to read it. WTF. Its not hard.
It's certainly one of the factors in my decision to sign up with the registry.
[http://marrow.org could use the touch of a UX designer, but the signup process is straightforward enough.]
"Why should I care about this person, and how is it relevant to startups, hacking, technology, etc.?"
I see it this way: He is a part of the start up community to which we belong to. If something affects one of us, we should try to help. We do not live in a vacuum where only code and startups are important and not the people who help make them.