
HackerMed - My HN-like Site for Hackers Interested in Bio/Med - kyro
http://www.hackermed.com
======
kyro
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>.

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

~~~
kyro
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!

~~~
mikexstudios
Can you convince him to put the project on github?

~~~
Rust
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).

~~~
mikexstudios
Awesome, thanks!

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kgosser
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!

~~~
DLarsen
+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.

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pg
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?

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

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dryicerx
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.

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rjett
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.

~~~
kyro
Sounds good, I'll give it a try.

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djb_hackernews
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.

~~~
kyro
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.

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jayliew
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!

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

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

~~~
nfnaaron
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? :)

~~~
nfnaaron
"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.

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pavs
At least HackerMed is faster than Hacker News. :)

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

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

~~~
kyro
RSS feed should be out tonight or early tomorrow.

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fabiandesimone
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.

~~~
tocomment
Sounds interesting. Anything you can share?

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ihodes
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!

~~~
kyro
Definitely, I'll change that shortly. Thanks!

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trickjarrett
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?

~~~
eavc
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.

~~~
mahipal
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.

~~~
eavc
Yeah, that's a good idea.

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nfnaaron
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.

~~~
liedra
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 :)

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nollidge
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 :)

------
jmillerinc
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.

~~~
Rust
<http://twitter.com/noostr/> :)

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

~~~
cj
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.

~~~
fgimenez
Sounds almost exactly like Reddit.

~~~
jgg
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. (:

~~~
petercooper
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
;-)

~~~
jgg
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.

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

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

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

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

------
savrajsingh
any reason you didn't use slinkset.com?

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mkramlich
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.

