jsarch

While I completely agree that these questions need to be asked, the public doesn't appear to have issues giving out social data everywhere. E.g., what if we took your questions and replaced "genetic" with "social"?

I admire and applaud your endeavor and hope that we see more disease-specific communities sprout in the near future.

I attended the Consumer Genetics Conference last year (http://www.consumergeneticsshow.com/CGC2010.html) and heard Rolf Benirschke speak. His short speech was inspiring and further encouraged me to pursue my startup.

Ping me offline archuleta(at)seqcentral and I'd be happy to further discuss how I can help and who I might be able to get you in touch with.

(FWIW: I recently became an advisor for a cystic fibrosis non-profit with a similar e-community to the one you are pursuing.)

Disclaimer: my father is a seismologist.

It is near 0% likely that the Colorado earthquake and Virginia earthquake are related as VA and CO are on different faults. It's not 0% because, quite frankly, it's hard to model the earth.

This wikipedia article on plate tectonics explains how the Earth crust is composed of different sections all sliding past/under each other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics Since the earthquakes occur at the friction points between the plates, this should help explain why Japan and California has a lot, and Virginia and Colorado not so much.

One of the major problems humans have with earthquakes is the assumption that we should/can predict them. As such, whenever there are earthquakes close in time to one another, the first assumption is that the first earthquake caused the second. Aftershocks are such an example where this assumption holds because the primary earthquake causes secondary earthquakes. However, in the general case, this assumption does not hold.

The gravity of this situation is clear in Italy where seismologists are on trial for manslaughter for not predicting the L’Aquila earthquake: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110526/full/news.2011.325.ht...

The open letter in support of these seismologists is here (I'm #4580): http://www.mi.ingv.it/open_letter/

Feel free to ping me after August 5 if you still have questions.

Depends on "affordable". Current bulk prices are about $5000 per genome though the coverage can vary.

Here's the price per genome for the last decade: http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/

and an explanation: http://singularityhub.com/2011/03/05/costs-of-dna-sequencing...

Nope. At least one claim was rejected.

* The appeals court ruled against Myriad in another part of the case, however. The court said that Myriad’s patent claims on the process of analyzing whether a patient’s genes had mutations that raised the risk of cancer was not patentable because it involved only “patent-ineligible abstract mental steps.” *

The result that the gene is patentable but that the test is not patentable is intriguing.

From the standpoint of genetic research, I may not care whether I have the gene itself, but I do care whether I can test for the gene and its mutations. For example, if my methodology needs to isolate the gene in order to test for it (e.g. exome sequencing), then the "isolation patent" prevents me from using this methodology but allows me to find another methodology that does not require isolation (e.g. whole-genome sequencing).

Daniel MacArthur will probably have a compelling blog post shortly: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/geneticfuture/

Correct title should have been: Why I would have left twitter if I were Biz Stone.

The article has no sources, only mentions Biz by name twice in the content, and uses "he" (as a reference to Biz) only twice in the closing paragraph.

The most benefit I got from this article was knowing that Biz left at all.

@andywood,

Can you take a moment tomorrow and add an edit to your post giving a summary of whether you felt the comments answered your questions?

I ask simply because my first read of your post focused on "How do I get there?" and not "what was your path?" As such, I was surprised to be reading life stories of fellow HN'ers. Since we all absorb info differently, I'm curious to know if the stories helped and what you gleaned from them.

All the best in your endeavor. -- A fellow large-scale enthusiast.

Expanding on your advice: when diversifying it helps to not throw darts. It may be best to not have investments only in tech, auto, health, etc., but it's quite another to randomly choose a company or two in different sectors.

Unsolicited advice ;-):

* Tech: ARMH over MSFT over FB (phones/tablets need to be low, low power and P/E of FB seems egregious)

* Auto: VLKAY over F over GM (100MPG TDI trumps "made in USA" trumps bankruptcy)

* Health: ILMN (NGS is the next $100BB market http://bit.ly/fYehBI )

(OP: I'd be more than happy to be a "trial run" for your angel investing. ha! ;-)

FWIW, this comment:

"The api design functions on the simple idea of having a "GET" request act as a discovery mechanism while "POST" requests perform operations and searches -- much like how most websites function."

should make its way into your blog post or final documentation. I was thoroughly confused because there's no mention that GET and POST are actually different in the blog post. Best of luck with the API creation.

Since the Twitter service is free, the "only" money to be made is in the displaying of the content. I believe this is recognized by UberMedia and also by Twitter and the cause for the "kill-switch."

IMO, Twitter should charge $0.001 per tweet and make $2M+ per month (http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/08/twitter-now-2-billion-tw...). They could also charge API users at $0.01 per sent tweet and $0.001 per received tweet and let the ad- or fee-based 3rd party twitter clients compete with a free Twitter(tm) client.

I'll go one step further and emphatically state "this isn't his entire genome."

Additionally, this data could be radically improved if his phenotype was also included. Just because we know that the marker says "AA" without the correlating information of "blond hair" doesn't tell us whether "AA" is important for hair color.

What you can mine with this type of information is the correlation between the markers themselves: if rs1001 = AA, then rs2002 = {GG(85%), TT(10%), GT(5%)}. This is where community software could definitely benefit from more data.

If you are interested in helping create a "Google for DNA", drop us a line at SeqCentral.com

Can you clarify what you mean by "70-90% of the speed of generated C++"?

Suppose that the generated C++ takes 1.0 seconds. Does your implementation take 0.7-0.9s or 1.7-1.9s or something else?

Three tries seems about right. FWIW: the second version has an actual name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

The problem I've been running into is that my second version took 1 month to reach 80% "complete" and is taking 3 more months to finish that last 20%.

If you separate the syntax from the semantics, you'll see that the GET request (syntax) is merely the mechanism of accessing the appropriate function (semantics). If you reread the short article after deleting all the junk about REST and CouchDB, and ignore the presumption that this is a RESTful API, then the article is clearer: Webdis is an HTTP interface to Redis.

FWIW: I created an AppEngine-based webapp (http://www.gnaught.com) to keep track of blacklisted domains and uses Google's "-site:" options in the search query. It was a weekend-project to learn about AppEngine and Python.

Update: fixed the Google account sign in link.

* System Prefs -> Security -> Disable auto login (to secure your computer)

* System Prefs -> Expose -> Expose (create your "switcher" layout)

* System Prefs -> Keyboard -> Keyboard -> move "Key Repeat Rate" all the way to the right (to have your cursor move faster than a snail)

* System Prefs -> Processor -> Show in Menu bar (so that you can set to 1 CPU when on a plane)

* System Prefs -> Sharing -> Check "Remote Login" (so that you can SSH into your machine)

* System Prefs -> Network -> Show AirPort status in Menu bad (so that you can see when you're connected)

Additionally: MacOS is case-INsensitive. Therefore, "this_file.txt" and "THIS_FILE.txt" and "This_File.txt" are all the same. You can set the file-system to be case-sensitive by Disk Utility, but at the chance that you break a binary (like MS Office) that assumes case-insensitive filenames on a Mac.

MacOS is also BSD-based, so you won't get some of the nice GNU options to "ls", "find", and others.

Install the XCode Developer Tools to get GCC and such. And I don't believe that these will be found by the Software Updater, so you'll have to keep them updated yourself.

If I understand correctly, your basic assumption is that a developer only needs access to the configuration options. Essentially, a developer isn't going to hack the code, they just modify the package configuration as needed. I think this would be a fair assumption and targets a huge number of users looking to leverage the cloud.

As for pricing, looking back, I realize that my question may have been a bit blunt and offensive. What I was really curious to know was whether you were going to be charging "per instance", "per hour", "per instance-hour", "per package", etc. For example, is Apache+MySQL on a single machine (if that's possible) less expensive than Apache on one machine and MySQL on another? What about compared to Nginx+Cassandra? (FWIW: You don't have to answer this directly if you want to keep the cards close while in testing...)

None the less, I wish you the best. (signed up for a beta.)

Fantastic idea; wish I had thought of it. I'm very curious to see how efficient your "glue" code is between the components. It's one thing to have a modular hands-off system, it's often another to have that system perform reasonably well. What level of system administration do you expose/hide to the developer? How do you plan to make money?

Another option is the use of API keys that are separated into two types -- partners and end-users. The partner API keys would be bound to a particular end-point (e.g., the IP address of the web server) while the end-user API key could be used from anywhere (e.g., from a mobile device).

I would find it very helpful to have a little blurb on the "Submit" page detailing how to submit to the different subpages (e.g., "ask", "jobs", "offers"). From what I can tell, submissions are automagically placed into the different subpages; one can help this sorting by adding "ASK HN" "SHOW HN" etc. to the title.

From what I can tell, I think it depends on if you want to be able to access the project later. If you don't, then I would recommend using DELETE /project/1234 with { archived: true} as an option. If you want to view the project later, then I think you should do a PUT to create the "archive" resource as in PUT /project/1234/archive or do a POST if you don't know the actual archive URI.

This makes sense. When I used elance, I set up milestones and even added payouts to early milestones in the hopes of enticing early and often deliverables. Alas, everything slipped.

One thing I've noticed about my own management philosophy is that I am hesitant to step in and dictate terms forcefully when things start to slide. There surely isn't a one size-fits-all solution, but it's clear I need to work on identifying and resolving issues earlier on.

Happened across this just now too: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/12/the-risk...

It discusses how WikiLeaks got kicked off of AWS, PayPal, and other providers for violating the ToS.

IANAL, but here's what I did for SeqCentral.

1) Look around the web for the Terms and Policies from similar companies. (Since SeqCentral is SaaS provider, I looked at GitHub, 37 Signals, and our competitors.)

2) Look at the Wikipedia pages for more "official" references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_policy and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service

3) Draft your own terms such that if you were a user, that you would be comfortable with them. (I'm an idealist, and as such, the SeqCentral ToS centers around the right of the consumer rather than the tyranny of the provider.)

4) Iterate with a lawyer who will tell you what you need at a minimum. (e.g. Refunds, children (COPPA), health (HIPAA), EU or CA rules, etc.)

5) Sleep on it.

6) Post as a "draft", issue an RFC, and be ready to make changes as needed.

Best of luck.

Yes. They would complement my tech-heavy skills. Send me email 'archuleta (at) seqcentral.com' for more info.

Send me your resume. archuleta (at) seqcentral.com

SeqCentral is looking to hire remote contractors in any/all of the following areas:

- Web Developer (php/js/codeigniter)

- DBA (MySQL)

- UX/UI Designer

- REST API Developer

I've been developing a new REST API and am in the process of converting the website to use the new API as a sort of "eat your own dogfood" approach. Help in this endeavor is much appreciated.

Contact: info@seqcentral.com

This is something I've been thinking about for awhile now that I'm pursuing my own startup. Coming from a background in HPC, my papers were published using prototypes and proof-of-concepts. On the other hand, a product needs to work at all times. Hence, the idea of an MVP from a systems standpoint is rather fanciful -- if an MVP works for 1TB of data (or worse, 5TB of data), but doesn't work for 10TB or 100TB, then re-normalizing after the fact is a huge issue.

As a question to other startups based on novel systems, did you feel that an MVP was the right way to go? If not, what did you do differently so as to not labor in "almost, but not quite ready" limbo.