Growing up I was one of five kids and my parents could do this if they wanted, as we were aged 4-16. I think I'm a few years from this being possible as my 5 year old daughter is in a jealousy stage with my 2 year old son, so any time together alone turns into an issue every time.
Oh man, where do I start. I had my first kid when I was 21, to say it was unplanned is an understatement, but marriage soon followed and things have really worked out the last 6 years luckily. I now have 2 kids and I'm 27, I'm also a single income for my family. I've been working on my Bootstrapped Startup with four others guys for two years, while it does get painful sometimes what I end up doing the most to handle everything is put off sleep. I probably get 4-6 hours during the week and try to make up for it by getting 8-10 on the weekends, but that rarely works with children (It's hard to be mad when two little kids jump on your head to wake you up because they want to play). We have big updates coming in the future that will hopefully take the site into the limelight, but until then it's a daily struggle and I love it.
I'm not sure a tweet metric like that means much once you realize the news "Beyoncé Reveals Baby Bump" resulted in 8,868 tweets a second, which is about 10.6 million tweets every 20 minutes. Running some quick numbers, the debate averaged about 1,962 tweets a second over 90 minutes.
Over a year ago we created a really simple iGoogle gadget connected to our site that for some reason picked up steam, I really hate to see this go since I know a lot of our users have it.
I currently run an entire startup in my garage, this includes routers, webserver, database servers, UPS's, etc, all hand built by the way. I work on it with 3 other guys who live 45 minutes to 4 hours away. We've bootstrapped this thing in a way that I'll have to write about once we're funded. I'm currently located in Virginia, and there is a mountain behind my house thats on fire about two miles away. I've been battling smoke for the last 48 hours. Operating out of your own house is amazingly convenient and a large undertaking at the same time. I both love and hate it, but most of all I've learned from it. Also, I'm running everything off of a Comcast Business Class connection, which was able to handle a LifeHacker post (10K visits in about 5 hours), so if Comcast frowns on my setup they haven't mentioned anything yet.
Your other projects are impressive as well, are you a one man team for all of them? Also thanks for the insight, this info isn't commonly shared with other startups, I appreciate it.
This news couldn't come at a better time, we've been building a side effect database for almost 2 years using big data sets from several different sources. It's functional and a few people have picked it up but we only recently began talking about looking for outside funding. 2012 should be interesting for us and our competitors.
I've been noticing a lot of health related submissions lately on HN including my own. The future is looking bright in this industry, hopefully we can get more collaboration to bring some of these ideas together.
This is a valid point. I think a couple of things will help resolve this: 1.) time on market, and 2.) letting the public know our credentials. I can assure you the backers of this project are qualified, but we're currently getting some legal issues squared away before we expose who we are. Also, when ads, or overt profiteering, is involved, this can cause issues with credibility as well. We're trying very hard to project ourselves as completely unbiased.
But I think with any project, especially one as sensitive as patient drug safety, time on market and the credibility of the individuals involved is key. We do have a medical doctor with FDA experience who advises DrugCite and has played a key role in the development phase. Honestly I know quite a bit about the other companies in this space, and we're really the only one where all of the players have worked in the medical informatics field for more than a decade each, and has an ex-FDA medical doctor advising the project. Once we post full disclosure on the site, hopefully this will help resolve some of the concerns you've raised. Thanks for the insight; I do hope we end up following Wikipedia's lead on this. And hopefully you'll feel comfortable recommending us in the future ;) Thanks again.
The members of our group all work day jobs doing medical informatics, so we're more or less medical data geeks who identified a hole in the medical informatics field and exploited it. I do it for it fun, although I can't speak for the other guys in the group. I'm the main programmer so I get a certain amount of enjoyment watching our traffic grow. Even though we're not monetizing our traffic (ads, etc.), there is a sense of satisfaction we get knowing we're empowering consumers, providing a research tool for pharma companies, providing actionable data to physicians, and generally taking obscure messy data and making it clean and usable. This project is very satisfying. Right now we're just happy knowing other people find it useful.
I was impressed with the Atrix (Phone that docked into a thin laptop) when it was released. I still believe it's before its time but I'm happy to see where things are going. I'd love to one day carry my computer around in my pocket and just dock it at work or home when I needed to.
I can't express how happy I am to see this post. I made to decision to move all our database servers to Intel 510's 120gb months ago and it was difficult to find any data on long term use in an enterprise environment for any SSD's let alone consumer ones. Ordered several new 520's last week as spares and to replace the drives in our web servers, looks like it was a good choice after all.
I like to think that payments like this go to relatives or business partners at a different company. I only like to think that because the alternative is actually harder for me to comprehend.
Congress has a 9% approval rating, so why won't this change? Because people hate Congress, but they like their Congressman. We need an education revolution in this country and the Internet is the rail for that train, but with issues like SOPA we have the wrong people trying to play conductor.