Why should I care about this person, and how is it relevant to startups, hacking, technology, etc.?
"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.
He actually brings a point I've been wondering since the entire thing started: Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list?
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.
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.
"Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list?"
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?
> What makes you say the community is ignoring the faceless sufferers?
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.
I just don't understand responding to someone helping someone else by demonizing them for the all people they're not helping. Amit is a member of our community, he's raised awareness for an important issue, what's the problem here?
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.
Anyone else see the irony of a community fighting to save a person's life, while ignoring all the other "faceless" sufferers, when the life that they're fighting for probably depends on the good will of a "faceless", anonymous person? Serious question.
Since donors, once added to the database, can save anyone in need who's a match, it doesn't affect the outcome whether HNers join to save Gupta or a faceless stranger.
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.
There are a couple of reasons this case is different in a way relevant to HN community:
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
When I first saw his headlines a while back, I had the same question...
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.
He isn't, it just so happens that he is a member of our community.
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.
In addition to the other answers, raising awareness and getting people to sign up to be bone marrow donors can potentially help a lot more people than just Amit.
Ingroup + prominence I'd guess, as in many communities. For example, if a well-known punk-rock guitarist had a similar issue, he'd probably get similar exposure in that community (more than someone not from that community, and more than a "mere" fan who wasn't a prominent guitarist).
Why is he somehow more "important" than all the other people on the bone marrow transplant list?
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.
his life is as important as any other - however, he has done an invaluable service to the entire south asian community by taking on the issue of bringing more to the bone marrow registry. From any account, the campaign has been a revelation. He deserves to find a match, and live many more terrific years. So do others. But I'll be extra happy if he does too.
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.
If you were facing death and your best hope at survival was crowdsourcing help on the internet you'd... what, politely decline to bother anyone in the internet community you've been a major part of? Skip the chance to raise awareness for something that could save the lives of many others besides yourself? Die alone knowing you saved someone half a second reading an HN headline that wasn't directly relevant to them?
The help they requested will go to help an entire ethnic group of people, not just one person. This effectively a massive charity operation using an individual story as a hook. I don't understand how anyone could possibly criticize this as being selfish.
"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.
I hope you are never in the situation where you need help. There could be a chance that someone from this community can have their life saved and you want to complain about it.
Just skip over the link if you dont want to read it. WTF. Its not hard.
Amit Gupta's influence on bone marrow registration will uncertainly save several lives over the next decades. The role of technology and the associated community is an important part of that story.
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.]
Unless you think all the people upvoting don't fall into the good hackers category (and how could you know that if you did think so), that it is so highly upvoted should give you a clue.
Exactly. I'm not actually saying they should be in congress, God knows they are way too competent to be there. But if these smart rich people can threaten to do something (run themselves, say they will do all donations to maximum permitted by law to other candidate, support some aide of them, etc) that will cost the election for the current candidate that is supporting SOPA, they may think twice about being shells for some industries.
What I am advocating is actually fighting fire with fire. You have politicians that get elected mostly by the donations made to them by these companies. So, why not get other companies that matter (Google, Mozilla, MS and Apple (not sure they stance on this) FSF, etc) together and start pushing the agenda as well?
Again, I don't know enough about the US system to even think what I'm saying is possible.
About half of people with AIDS got it from homosexual behavior, although I don't remember the exact statistic.
edit:
"The CDC had already revealed last year that approximately 53% of the estimated 56,300 new HIV cases in 2006 were in homosexual men, with the African American population being particularly affected."
I'm always surprised when I buy new RAM but I just bought some a few days ago and I really was shocked. Almost exactly one year ago, I bought 2GB of Mushkin for $50. This week I bought 8GB(2x4) of Kingston for $40 ($30w/rebate). Both are DDR3 1333 so maybe it's just a large overstock near the end of it's cycle but that price drop is huge.
Well, since the mid 90s, every time I built a computer, a 'good' amount of ram landed somewhere in the $200-300 price range. So the cost of a modern amount of ram has stayed relatively constant in my experience.
But maxing out the ram in a machine for $40 certainly seems a hell of a lot cheaper than it's ever been.
The (? ... ) syntax is for "extended patterns". In this case, it makes the rest of the regular expression case insensitive. Read through http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html#Extended-Patterns for more information on extended patterns.
It's good to know about it. Earlier at an employer we had a system where a processor in the pipeline took regular expressions as input - you can pass regular expressions but not the flags. (?i) is the only way you can indicate case-insensitive in these cases.
Also I don't think the exact day of birth being Tuesday makes one bit of difference to the gender. For example, if you were to say the known boy was born crying, and the chance of this is 70%, it doesn't affect the gender of the other children. It's just useless trivia.
In Emacs you often need to make Lisp macros for customizations. I love Emacs and have been using it daily for the last few years, but it's not newbie friendly. Making small tweaks can require extensive Google searching.
It's definitely a function of social conditioning -- how else would it vary so much based on the community in which one is raised?
When it comes to salary negotiations, most lower-SEC (socio-economic class) country women I know will counter their first offer. Getting more than the initial offer makes them feel respected; they want to see that the employer wants them enough to make a concession. Most higher-SEC urban and suburban women I know won't ask -- they'll take or turn down the initial offer, but they tell me that asking for more money would make them look whiny and high-maintenance.
Growing up in the country, being able to haggle was a badge of honor. One haggles (or at least asks about discounts/freebies) everywhere from garage sales to car dealerships to the local fabric store. I cannot tell you how many times as a child I heard my mother, grandmother, and aunts say "it never hurts to ask". It's considered mostly a woman thing there -- I get funny looks from the men for teaching my 8yo son to haggle, but my male friends ask me to come shopping with them to handle negotiations.
The women I know from the techie world (all from higher-SEC and more urban backgrounds than I) may look for advertised sales, but haggling or asking for discounts not offered is seen as showing weakness/looking poor. When I go ahead and haggle around them, they say things like "I cannot believe you just said that!" or "You are embarrassing me, we don't need a discount that badly, we can afford this."
As adults, we seem to translate that consumer experience to how we approach salary negotiations. Both groups pursue the strategy that they were raised to believe shows confidence and strength.
My advice: if you want your daughter (or son) to negotiate a higher salary as an adult, teach her (or him) to haggle young. That garage sale where she/he asks "If I buy all twelve of these books [marked 50 cents each], would you sell the lot for five dollars?" will eventually become
"Would you consider 70k/year?" (in response to an offer for 55).
"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."