41–50 of 59 posts
Beautiful Chris. Thanks for the hard work, I am proud to be a backer of light table. If any of y'all wanna use light table to work more directly on defeating cancer, we are looking for more hackers at Ion Torrent http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/devices/the-gene-machine...
The Life Sciences desperately needs computer scientists to learn their workflow and build the tooling for better more replicable science.
Concrete example: there is a paper in Nature that just came out where some discoveries were made on the genetic causes of congenital heart defects. Our team did all the data integration work to create a resource those researchers could use to do their work. I'm proud of what we have done, but there is so much more we could be doing for them if we could only move faster.... If our tools were better. We haven't switched to using Light Table yet, but we will if it lets us do more with so few people.
I often wonder if the creators of the open source tools we use ever imagined their stuff being used the way we use it. Did the Postgres team ever think someone would try to shove 100's of millions of DNA variants of folks looking for a cause for their disease into their database? Did the JavaScript library teams think someone would be using their stuff to show radiology images to people studying hearing impairment? Did the Django team ever image someone would build a biomedical data integration framework on top of their web framework so biomedical researchers don't have to reinvent their particular wheel every time?
If you build great stuff that is useful, it will have an impact in ways you can't possibly imagine.
> Isn't it my moral duty to do that? No, there is no absolute "moral duty" to anything or anyone. There is a thing called "guilt", that some people try to induce (moral manipulation), when you don't do the things they want you to do. You only duty is to do things that you think are right. > Could I have saved Kristie, or if not her, others like her? Saving her - quite unlikely, unless you manage to find a cure for th…
There's nothing about what the author wrote that struck me as though he had some tremendous guilt weighing him down. There's guilt and there's humble recognition of one's own privilege. They aren't the same thing. He strikes me as someone who understands the opportunity cost of what he's chosen to do, and not only appreciates the fact that he has a choice, but feel conviction that he made the right one.
I'm sure you intended your pep talk out of a genuine desire to help, but I think you missed the point of why the author wrote what he did, at least my perception of it. He's trying to bring a little perspective, through the lens of his own experience.
We romanticize what we do in the startup world like we're living on the edge. He's comparing one sense in which working on a startup pales in comparison to other challenges people face, versus the sense in which you truly are out there on the edge. There's truth on both sides of the coin.
I applaud your mission to try and improve lives, and I believe that every start-up should focus on just that. I would also like to give it a little perspective though. There is generally an inverse correlation between the effectiveness of solving a problem and the directness of the approach. If you would like to cure cancer, the most effective way is to cure cancer. The next most direct approach is to help the doctor…
I don't know why the parent comment got down voted (other than being a bit harsh). I agree that too little is being done to cure cancer directly. Unfortunately, I see two main causes for this: * Too many successful people (especially founders) end up having an "I've got mine" mentality. They take the money and run instead of seeing their wealth as a grant from society, in other words a kind of debt that they should p…
> my mother's partner was diagnosed What business is this mother in? An accountancy? Perhaps you meant to say spouse?
My boyfriend is my partner, but not my husband, though we've been around for longer than many marriages. For some reason, I don't think Chris would have had a problem saying wife were it so. I respect the fight, but we don't all fit into the marriage binary either. (And hey, maybe someday the two of us will be married too, heh.)
"Partner" is seriously problematic because it really does deliberately evoke two profit seeking individuals in a venture, and that is not at all the basis of a marriage.