

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

Does such a site exist? Would you be interested in one?<p>Edit: If any of you want to help, email me at kyro@kyrobeshay.com, if you wish.
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jmatt
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...

~~~
iamelgringo
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.

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

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

~~~
CoreDumpling
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.

~~~
kyro
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.

~~~
bh23ha
How about you can sort answers by total vote count OR only by verified account
votes?

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joeyo
Graduate student neuroengineer here. Very yes.

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

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tomkinstinch
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>

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nathanh
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.

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

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JunkDNA
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.

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cing
Graduate student biophysicist, I'd be interested.

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

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chanux
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

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

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

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

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

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

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kgosser
Great idea if executed on the same level as HN.

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

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edge17
definitely a great idea

