42 ms·

Why the Fuck?

• rachelbythebay 14y ago
  The greatest minds aren't necessarily selling ads, either. This came up in a comment thread about 6 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4347948 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4347948
• Tloewald 14y ago
  I's the same reason, unfortunately, that leads to all (most) commercial radio stations playing much the same music. People would rather chase a small piece of a big pie than come up with a new pie. Great rant though.
• michaelbuddy 14y ago
  Don't forget a ton of brilliant minds are also in finance toiling away in fantastic paying jobs making the mega rich even more rich.
• RoboTeddy 14y ago
  Probably because profit is only somewhat related to delivering actual utility.
  • hammerdr 14y ago
    Is profit the main driver? Should it be?
    • walkon 14y ago
      Should neurosurgeons make good money?
    • YuriNiyazov 14y ago
      Yes and yes.
    • mehulkar 14y ago
      There's nothing wrong with profit. I think how we measure it needs reform.
    • cgag 14y ago
      Yes, no.
    • oh_sigh 14y ago
      Be the change you want to see in the world. Feel free to quit your job and go bankrupt while trying and most likely failing to make the world a better place.
    • sergiotapia 14y ago
      Family man here, yes.
    • RoboTeddy 14y ago
      Maybe we can set up our economic system such that the only way to make profit is to deliver utility more cheaply than other companies. That way, doing good wouldn't be something on the side -- it would be the main thrust of our competitive economic system. (setting things up this way is my life goal)
    • natural219 14y ago
      Tautologically true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(rhetoric)
• aaroncray 14y ago
  oooh swear word so edgy bro
• jerf 14y ago
  http://www.glooko.com/ http://www.glooko.com/ ?
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Who says programmers are the greatest minds of our generation?
  • oh_sigh 14y ago
    Generally their bank accounts.
    • majormajor 14y ago
      There are pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably than working at Google or playing the startup lottery...
      • oh_sigh 14y ago
        I wasn't saying that any given programmer was the best mind of their generation - just that many of the best minds of these recent generations have been programmers, or involved in technology development in some manner. And what are some of the "pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably" that you're referencing?
        • comicjk 14y ago
          Uh, finance? Maybe this isn't as obvious to a non-New Yorker, but that seems to me like the easiest way for a smart person to make money.
          • analog 14y ago
            I was thinking 'finance' too. I'll add 'oil industry' to that list as well.
          • oh_sigh 14y ago
            Except that it isn't at all easy to get into finance, and the profits are not guaranteed in any case, as you seemed to imply.
• jiggy2011 14y ago
  I don't have a degree in medical sciences so I have no idea where I would start.
  • Posibyte 14y ago
    And I think this is the biggest issue. Where do I find the information? Who's going to pay me for it? What incentive do I have to toil over something that might be needed and useful on one level, but stark in contrast to other opportunities that derive much greater incentive. To become competent, I might be wasting my time in the end. If I have a marketable skill now with no additional work, then I don't have much a reason to invest into something else.
  • oh_sigh 14y ago
    Because it's easier to be negative than positive. Complaining about something is a heck of a lot easier than doing anything about it. Reg should use crowdfunding to develop this device, or something along those lines, if he really cares about this problem.
  • ihnorton 14y ago
    Some suggestions: Help build better tools for researchers. * Julia (julialang.org) is very promising and could use talented developers to help build the ecosystem. * Numba (http://numba.pydata.org/ http://numba.pydata.org/) looks amazing and should build on the existing strength of SciPy. Contribute to open-source projects related to medical research; a few favorites in the imaging space: * PLUS (https://www.assembla.com/spaces/plus/wiki https://www.assembla.com/spaces/plus/wiki) * OpenIGTLink (http://openigtlink.org http://openigtlink.org) * XTK (http://goxtk.org http://goxtk.org) * NiPy (http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipy/ http://nipy.sourceforge.net/nipy/) Contributing to an open-source project would give exposure to the problem space while leveraging existing skills and not taking a huge initial risk (school or paycut). If you wanted to make this a full-time pursuit, such contribution could be leveraged: many labs would love to hire a talented programmer. However, expect a ~30-50% haircut (in hospital or university labs you will have a hard time cracking $50k to start and $70k on the high end). I am familiar with open-source projects in a number of other medically-relevant research areas. If you are interested in some specific area, shoot me an email and I'll see what I can think of.
• moneypenny 14y ago
  The benefit is that you know which tedious people to avoid when they tell you they work at Facebook/Google/etc.
• steveplace 14y ago
  Why the fuck do we see this complaint pop up on HN every quarter?
  • glesica 14y ago
    Maybe because it is something HN readers worry about. Seems like a pretty reasonable explanation...
  • oh_sigh 14y ago
    Because complaining is easy, and earns you social kudos. Doing something is much harder. If someone makes this device and markets it 5 years from now, Reg can point back to his blog post and say "See, look how smart I am"
  • mmagin 14y ago
    There's a normal human tendency to occasionally worry about whether one is doing the correct thing with one's life. And then sometimes people extend that from themselves to those they associate with.
• lindowe 14y ago
  There are a lot of interesting startups right now in the mobile health space, but it is a significantly more difficult space to operate in. It takes years to get FDA approval for new medical devices, the healthcare industry is beholden to several large industry players, and the culture of medicine is resistant to rapid innovation. I understand and echo your frustration that silicon valley often only pays lip service to 'dangerously ambitious ideas', but there are also real reasons why people don't operate in these difficult business environments.
  • azernik 14y ago
    As an example, Glooko makes a mobile version of a glucose logbook that reads data straight from a sampling device - useful, but not earthshaking. But to go from that data to automatic reminders and advice about managing glucose levels - what raganwald wishes existed - would require a much more stringent level of approval from the FDA.
    • glennos 14y ago
      I used to work next to the guys from mySugr. They went through the process of having their app certified as a medical device by the European Commission, (the CE or Conformité Européenne mark). Not easy, but doable. I'm not sure whether it gives explicit recommendations, but it let's you identify patterns based on what you're eating and the activities you're doing. https://mysugr.com/ https://mysugr.com/
      • f-debong 14y ago
        Hi glennos! Nice to meet you here! We are now getting FDA approval too. Good fun. Regulations are a bastard, but there for good reasons. Imagine getting a med which wasn't tested and which is made in someones bathtub… Exaggerated but you get what I mean?
• cynicalkane 14y ago
  Bad incentives. Maybe smart people don't care about money all that much, but they want their lives to not suck, their effort to not feel wasted, their identity not wrapped up in the service of dysfunction and politics. There are not many places where you can better humanity for a living and live the life such a person deserves, and it is not the job of humans to sacrifice themselves for no reward. That's why people who do so, effectively, are so rare. Here's a guy who left the ivory tower for Google: http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113 http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113 I’m concerned that the US — one of the innovation powerhouses of the world — will hurt its own future considerably if we continue to make educational professions unappealing.
  • oh_sigh 14y ago
    Is there any indication that education needs geniuses? Does it substantially improve innovation? When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
    • _delirium 14y ago
      > When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry? Good question. How I'd answer for the 1940s-60s depends heavily on what you consider the status of research labs that were outside academia, but rather academic in terms of personnel, style, and management: the national labs, the NSA, the Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, etc. If that's included as honorary academia, I would feel comfortable saying that "academia" (or perhaps "academia-plus") had most of the geniuses of that era.
      • Evbn 14y ago
        Google includes teams that are very similar to Bell, including the surviving employ.
    • nemothekid 14y ago
      I doubt any industry needs geniuses. I don't think the human race needs a super-human .01% individuals to come in and solve all our problems every quarter century. I wouldn't be surprised if 90% of the genetic geniuses Mother Nature gives are struggling in the 3rd world somewhere. I don't think most of our medical breakthroughs in the last 50 years came from geniuses either. They came from mostly regular people, who put the perspiration in and slaved away trying and failing time and time again to deliver life saving products. The sad thing is these people aren't praised for their work and these people have a much higher bar to set. These people aren't any more gifted than the guys at Google. They just made the choice to work in Medicine and not Software Engineering. To me post like OP's say "To everyone who has done anything in medicine in the last 100 years, your achievements don't matter because you aren't as famous as Rob Pike." Why the fuck does this guy think that the engineers at Google would be have half as good as the researchers at Johns Hopkins? What special quality do they have that allows any field they enter to turn to gold? Is it really the case that Google Engineers are super humans or is OP ignoring the hundreds/thousands of researchers who are working towards a cure for diabetes?
• nbashaw 14y ago
  Because it creates value, whether or not you approve or understand it. Fun and entertainment are what most people spend most of their time seeking. Simple as that.
• YuriNiyazov 14y ago
  Because most people, Facebook programmers included, don't have the patience and the resources to undergo the amount of schooling necessary to reach the level of understanding to make an impact in these areas; and after they do, the amount of bureaucracy they will need to fight to make a dent will drive even the most resilient minds to take a job getting people to click on ads.
  • bhickey 14y ago
    Disagreed. It isn't a matter of patience, it's all about incentives. Almost all people who are smart enough to make a difference aren't foolhardy enough to make terrible economic decisions that will drastically reduce their quality of life. The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me.
    • shadowfox 14y ago
      > The existence of economics PhD students still baffles me Interestingly, I have met many in the sciences that feel the same about computer science.
      • bhickey 14y ago
        Perhaps we can chalk it up to the economic ignorance of CS grad students. There's no such explanation for econ students. :)
    • theorique 14y ago
      They want to be professors?
      • bhickey 14y ago
        Being a grad student and wanting to be a professor is like being 6'2" and wanting to play in the NBA.
        • theorique 14y ago
• johnbender 14y ago
  It appears that Diabetes research receives over a billion in funding each year just from the NIH [1][2]. As far as I can tell this doesn't include private funding for cures/treatments. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the data here, but it looks like many people and many millions of dollars are devoted to solving real world problems like the one Scott Hanselman has. [1] General Disease research numbers http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx [2] Diabetes funding by project http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending_project_listing.aspx?FY=2011&ARRA=N&DCat=Diabetes http://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending_project_listing.a...
  • DanBC 14y ago
    Diabetes has a variety of causes. Concentrating on just one cause - too much sugar in the diet - how much money is spent by producers of sugar on, for example, advertising each year? How much is paid by those producers of sugar in tax, and how much of that tax is used for research? I agree with your general point though.
    • bhickey 14y ago
      Type II diabetes is almost entirely the result of obesity. Put on 10 pounds and your fasting blood glucose will skyrocket. Sure, there are genetic factors that predispose a person to insulin resistance, but the dominant factor is adipose tissue. Type I (juvenile/auto-immune) is more interesting. Sugar production in the US is heavily subsidized.
      • thecosas 14y ago
        Thanks for making the distinction. I've had Type I diabetes for over 20 years and occasionally get the "but you're not fat" comment. EDUCATE :o)
        • Evbn 14y ago
          They need to change the stupid name already. Hypoinsulinomia and caloroglucitis, or something.
• bhickey 14y ago
  Because research pays terribly and not everyone has the luxury of martyrdom. Want to be a grad student? 80-90% pay cut. (Unless you go to Switzerland and then it's closer to 70%). Want to be a university research programmer? 70% pay cut. Removing economic considerations, would I rather be researching auto-immune disease? Sure. But 'doing good' means compromises like buying a house at 45 instead of 35. No one asks doctors to make these compromises. Edit: If someone wants to deposit $2m in my bank account I'll quit my job on Tuesday and go to grad school.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
    • bhickey 14y ago
      I believe you're replying to the wrong comment.
      • jrogers65 14y ago
        Thanks for the heads up. Too many hours of work and no sleep.
  • olivier1664 14y ago
    "buying a house at 45 instead of 35" is an economic considerations, no? ;) In the case you had $2M: Have you consider that reasearch problem are far longer and thus far less exciting than the ones we, programers, are used to solve?
    • bhickey 14y ago
      economic considerations Erm -- look over there. pile of money Yes. I did research as a student and as a research programmer / computational biologist. I was just an author on a paper for work done three years ago. There will probably be another one being written up in a year or two.
  • pnathan 14y ago
• derpmeister 14y ago
  Because nobody cares about your diabetes and obesity. Lay down that taco and get some fricken exercise, FFS.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    What an ignorant post. How exactly does "laying down the taco" help Scott Hanselman and the other million of US citizens who suffer from Type 1 diabetes?
    • derpmeister 14y ago
      Even if it doesn't, there's a lot more profit in advertising than insulin. The economy would probably function better if diabetes patients were left untreated and die, since the cost saving estimates are quite enormous.
      • lazugod 14y ago
        Why should we care more about the economy than we care about people with diabetes?
      • ciupicri 14y ago
        Isn't the treatment paid by the patients?
        • derpmeister 14y ago
          That's only a fraction of the costs involved. For one, today’s diabetes patients are tomorrows alzheimer patients.
          • derleth 14y ago
            > today’s diabetes patients are tomorrows alzheimer patients ... possibly. Or they could be tomorrow's cancer patients, or tomorrow's stroke patients, or tomorrow's jack-knifed tractor trailer across three lanes of traffic patients. All those can happen to people without diabetes, too, though; it's part of living.
• categorykni 14y ago
  I'm not toiling to work out how to get someone to click on ads. I'm toiling to feed, house and educate my children. The pay cheque from Google enables me to do those things in the best way.
• shazow 14y ago
  Why do we play videogames? Why do we create art? Why do we eat tasty unhealthy foods? Why do we go on hikes or climb rocks? Why do we write posts complaining about other people not saving the world? We do things we enjoy, things we're passionate or curious about, things we care about or have no choice but to do them. Glamour is a factor. Money too. Perhaps if I had diabetes, or someone very close to me was suffering from the disease, then I would spend some time thinking about how to more efficiently manage one's blood sugar levels. Perhaps if I were closer to the realities of obesity, then I Move You (my former startup focused around getting healthy through social pressure) would have worked out differently. I learned that this isn't something I'm passionate about, but I know there are others who are.
  • Draiken 14y ago
    But this just states what this generation lacks the most... Empathy. I couldn't care less if Facebook didn't exist because humanity focused it's work into solving real problems. But some people just don't care. As long as they are living their good life... who cares about diabetes? The biggest problem IMHO is our generation's goals. Money, money and more money. If the world provided better ways for us to help each other instead of distracting us, while they suck work and money out of us, until we die. Imagine how different everything could be...
    • mattgreenrocks 14y ago
      We could live in a post-scarcity world, but, no, we have to have it all, and exert power over others. Our own fear and depravity damn us to these outcomes. :(
    • bluekeybox 14y ago
      As someone who left biomedical field and moved into tech, one of the biggest reasons for my move is that I have a distaste towards relying on guilt in order affect things (this probably goes back all the way to my childhood and my parents' use of guilt in order to affect my own decision-making), and that I generally dislike people who rely on it to further their causes. I will work hard if there is an incentive. I will not work hard because someone is trying to guilt-trip me to.
• tunesmith 14y ago
  I don't get the sense that there's an obvious, simple solution here that is just waiting to be implemented. I don't think it's that the only reason it doesn't exist is just because programmers are choosing to work elsewhere. Basically I think this question is probably built on faulty assumptions.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    I was really excited when Gates announced his foundation. Smart people, lots of money, focussing on evidence based things that work or should work. Even though they've done fantastic things it doesn't feel like we're much closer to a cure for Malaria being developed. Would the world be a better place if smart people weren't sending private vessels to space or the deep ocean or around the world photographing every road or onto the public roads with no human drivers? Like actors working the lousy but well paid films to give them the cash to work on the good but low paid films we need the cat pictures and social buttons and advertising to give companies the funds to do exciting things. Having said that, anyone facing burnout in the industry should really consider some humanitarian thing because there are problems looking for solutions there, and more smart people can't hurt.
• mahyarm 14y ago
  Seeing how pharmaceutical companies and other medical related things have a lot of money thrown at them world wide, I think that isn't the case. Computing isn't the only place where 'the greatest minds of our generation' reside, there are a lot of them in the medical community. Also there has been a recent trend of quantified self and medical start ups starting to gain traction, such as fitbit, mybasis.com, the tricorder xprize and so on. For quite a while it's been a software only world and just now we are starting to see an uptick in consumer electronics start ups. Not everybody can work on curing cancer.
• madiator 14y ago
  Thats a very myopic view. Indeed its not good if everybody work on things that 'matter'; it is essential that some people do work on things that don't matter. Not everybody can be doing and/or should be doing cancer research or whatever the author seems to perceive is important.
• sshillo 14y ago
  Because curing cancer and solving major issues doesn't make money right now. It takes major investment and years of research for something that may or may not give return. Further, google is solving big problems. How bout better internet service, cars that drive themselves, making computers more accessible, a universal translater, etc. How bout the fact that many of the top grads from schools go to work in finance. If we could get all those people to go work at google, the world would be a better place.
• glesica 14y ago
  To launch a Facebook clone you sign up for Heroku or AWS, push some Rails code, and start promoting yourself. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you. Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence. This probably doesn't explain the whole thing, but it is certainly related.
  • pavel_lishin 14y ago
    > Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence. Or, you know, people die.
    • Ingon 14y ago
      The most scary moment - one of the applications we've written was used to take life-saving medications on time. Scary stuff I'm telling you.
      • stingraycharles 14y ago
        Off-topic, but I'm curious how you handled that situation. Personally, a safe-guard I might build in would be to audit our code by an independent third-party. Was this at all feasible in your situation, and/or how did you handle QA?
        • Evbn 14y ago
          When I was a kid, volunteering at a hospital for Community Service, I was assigned a task to transfer pills from bottles to those plastic + foil single serving wrappers using a hot glue machine, and deliver said pills to the wards. I had no training, supervision, or QA/QC in this job.
        • Ingon 14y ago
          Well... External QA for app which costs 2.99$ (or less at times)? No. We just tried to make sure it worked properly - some code reviews, several unit tests to cover some nasty edge cases and that's it. I really hope everybody is alive and well. :) Also it did help that the users grew confident in it over time. It was not like these overnight success stories (not even success story) which you hear all over the news :)
• maxcameron 14y ago
  Reginald strikes again! But the real question is why a mind as bright as Reg is doing biz dev at a services company in Toronto? Shouldn't he be saving the world?
• ryanjodonnell 14y ago
  Diabetes isn't a problem that we need technology to solve. Sure it could help, but that's treating the symptom, when what we really need to do is use preventative care to treat the root of the problem - corn subsidies and education.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    There are more than one million of Type 1 diabetics in the US alone, like the man mentioned in the post (Scott Hanselman). How would those measures improve their life?
  • shanselman 14y ago
    Type 2 diabetes, yes. These very valid points you make are not related to Type 1 diabetes, however.
  • hedgie 14y ago
    the most annoying part about being a type I diabetic is hearing people who haven't even looked up the basics of the disease rant about diet or corn.
• MisterBastahrd 14y ago
  Individuals are motivated by different sets of wants and needs. Financial security just happens to be damned near at the top of the list.
• seehafer 14y ago
  If you knew the difficulty/incentive trade-off involved in making sugar management easier relative to that involved in getting people to click on ads, you wouldn't ask this question. If web application developers had to jump through the same hoops that medical device developers did we'd all still be using AltaVista.
• OafTobark 14y ago
  Why people gotta judge? Lead by example, or shut the fuck up (statement made by the excessive fucks in the article). Ignore what others do and do what you believe.
• scottilee 14y ago
  Raganwald, Have you considered asking yourself this question? You "take the friction out of writing and selling books." You could start with yourself and helping with Diabetes.
• kogir 14y ago
  Judging by all he's accomplished at Microsoft, I'm sure Scott could successfully lead a team to solve his problem and bring a product to market. But he doesn't. I (luckily) would not have use for such a product. If he doesn't care enough to tackle the problem, why should I? Same goes for Obesity. Most of it could be controlled by changes in diet and behavior. If people affected can't be bothered, why should I care?
  • shanselman 14y ago
    I didn't know my friend @raganwald was writing this post but I thank him for his outrage. That said, I've already put a product to market in the mid-90s. I wrote GlucoPilot, the first portable blood sugar management software for the original PalmPilot. I worked a lot in the diabetes and healthcare space. I'm tired though, and I did my part for now. Now I guess I'm just complaining. As far as obesity, I agree that's totally unrelated to Type 1 diabetes and I share your opinion. Move more, eat less.
  • fatalerrorx3 14y ago
    kogir hit the nail on the head. It's hard to convince someone to care about their health, and a good majority of people don't. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089690 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089690
• opminion 14y ago
  Because the diabetes researchers use Google.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• benihana 14y ago
  Oh goodie, another arrogant whine by raganwald where he can't understand why the greatest minds (implying people writing code are somehow the greatest minds) aren't doing what he thinks is important. This post makes two incorrect assumptions. First, that the things he derides (Google automating targeted content, Facebook introducing new search features that are tangential to their current features, Apple changing form factors) aren't beneficial to society as a whole. Second, that problems he would like to see solved are more important than problems other people would like to see solved.
  • pud 14y ago
    This post makes a third incorrect assumption too. That the "greatest minds of our generation" work at Google, Facebook and Apple.
    • jfb 14y ago
      Perhaps the most laughable assumption of all.
      • justsee 14y ago
        It also assumes those terrible choices aren't stepping stones, enabling these great minds to undertake the meaningful work Raganwald demands, once they have acquired more capabilities and capital.
        • dev1n 14y ago
          Stepping stones akin to Elon Musk and Paypal. He's now commercializing the electric car (Tesla Motors), running a solar company (SolarCity) and the most grandiose, SpaceX.
          • jholman 14y ago
            Well, it's worth noting that Musk claims that PayPal was also a major move to improve the world, and I think the claim is credible. And before that he did Zip2, which is about as impactful as Google. Which, btw, is fucking impactful.
• uladzislau 14y ago
  The answer is well known. All challenging real world problems require deep domain knowledge besides programming. You need to have medical expertise to even consider providing solutions to people with diabetes. That's why we have 100:1 ratio of useless, solving not existing problems projects to world changing ones.
• chewxy 14y ago
  Because those who can market themselves lean to 'easier' spaces. Think of it this way. I'm a very terrible programmer. My understanding of the O notation is abysmal at best. If you ask me to write a distributed database, I probably won't do a good job at it. But you know what I can write? Webapps! Any Tom Dick and Harry can write them. People who can market themselves well and can write the easy stuff wins. And with that comes the compound effect of the rich getting richer. Example: I write the next social network and I market the hell out of it. Now I'm the cool company that people who are really good in computer science want to join, since you know, I've scaled out to the point where data is big enough to warrant the term 'Big Data', where information retrieval is now a problem. Imagine instead if I were say a very very good biologist. That also typically means my focus is very very narrow, and doesn't lend itself to marketability. I cannot start a company saying I want to create a drug that turns off production of the PRSS3 enzyme. No, I'd have to market it as "I am creating a drug cure for prostate cancer". But I can't and I won't (if I am being honest with myself), because all I know about prostate cancer is the PRSS3 enzyme. There are other factors that causes prostate cancer. People who are experts in their fields are generally stuck on the narrow field they're in. A PRSS3 researcher would know everything there is to know about the PRSS3 enzyme. He/she would probably suck at marketing it though. Same with say, information retrieval experts. The people who don't give talks at XYZ conference. The people who work behind the scenes, engineering everything - they don't market themselves well. As a result, the people who best market themselves win. The easiest things to make are also usually quite easy to market. tl;dr: people flock to 'easier' spaces because that's what's easy to market to. Programmers flock to the latest SoLoMo startups, because SoLoMo is easy to market to hackers. wow I'm so ranty today
• kolleykibber 14y ago
  Why is this upvoted..? HN needs a homer simpson exclaiming boorring. Let's tell the truth. At least they're not bankers. The world is truly getting better,
• untog 14y ago
  "Reginald Braithwaite is a software developer at Leanpub, where he and his colleagues take the friction out of writing and selling books" Why the fuck are the greatest minds of our generation toiling away on a book publishing platform? Oh, right, because you think it's important. Guess what- we all have different opinions. Is book publishing more important than dating? Before you laugh, think about it- finding someone to share your life with is very important to a lot of people. A lot more than will ever publish a book. It's pretty depressing to see this upvoted as far as it has been on HN. What is it actually saying? It's like one of those stupid motivational posters (only negative)- all emotion-tugging, no depth. Why are you making a book publishing platform and not following your own advice?
  • mdda 14y ago
    Upvoted because it makes for an interesting discussion, which is what HN is for. An upvote doesn't mean agreement, it means (AFAICR) 'worth having on the site'.
    • untog 14y ago
      I don't think it does make for an interesting discussion, though. It doesn't even try to investigate the reasons why more people work in social tech than in healthcare, for example.
  • amix 14y ago
    There's an old saying that applies to this: Don't throw with stones when you live in a glasshouse. I can't really give much respect to people that don't follow their own advice and that rant with profanity at people that make a difference in the world to at least 1 billion people (Google and FB combined).
    • enraged_camel 14y ago
      >>I can't really give much respect to people that don't follow their own advice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
• mikle 14y ago
  Is the author of this is currently working on curing diabetes? I think the chances are small he is. What I'm trying to say is that he is a hypocrite.
  • ruswick 14y ago
    I don't think so. In order to be a hypocrite, one needs to criticize a group into which one fits. However, the post explicitly referenced our nations "smart people," or whatever phrasing he used. Evidently, he doesn't consider himself sufficiently educated or academically positioned to pursue cures for diabetes, so it's permissible that he criticizes people who are in such a position and choose not to cure diabetes. This is why people who are not professional football players can still criticize a team: they are not members of that team and do not have the capacity to improve the performance of the team, so there is no hypocrisy. Although this post is arguably bullshit for other reasons, it's not hypocrisy.
    • mikle 14y ago
      So you think he is talking to that department at Google full of MDs? :) Just to make sure I got the point across - the above joke was meant to say that people working in Google usually are also not sufficiently educated or academically positioned to pursue cures for diabetes. Being a programmer is not some aptitude test that means you can do anything. I'm a great programmer but I can barely watch House MD without cringing at the sight of innards or blood.
• justsee 14y ago
  Elon Musk chose to do PayPal (a rather disliked company on HN) which enabled him to work on Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX (which HN rather likes). Isn't it possible that some of these people toiling away in the corporate womb are acquiring capabilities and capital so they can be reborn to do important, but potentially unprofitable 'change the world' projects?
  • whatusername 14y ago
    Paypal is awesome. It's 2012 and I'm still not aware of any other company that allows me to sign up (for free) and start taking payments straight away (for arbitrary items no less). See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html (Note: Stripe have a schlep blindness in International Transactions. I still can't sign up for Stripe. Last Week I was recommending a friend use paypal)
    • justsee 14y ago
      Yes, but if Raganwald is laying into Google, I'd imagine he'd place a PayPal in the same category. Raising the Musk example was illustrating the shlepping he did before embarking on great things.
    • antidaily 14y ago
      Well even if it does suck now (I think it does), it didnt suck when Musk sold it.
    • zt 14y ago
      I work at Stripe and we are working hard on rolling out our products internationally. I am sorry you cannot use it yet and that you can't recommend us to your friends yet. It takes time to do right--it's a schlep--as we want to make sure that the experience is as dead-simple everywhere. "Fixing payments", as PG put it in the Schlep blindness essay, involves working with new banking partners and new back-end infrastructures to make it as easy in every country.
  • polshaw 14y ago
    Precisely. Most here are going to be able to benefit society the most by creating the next pinterest or whatever and then using their money to bring forward change in the world, than trying to do some bio-medical-whatever that they don't have any skills in. Basic laws of specialisation/comparative advantage. Of course, if you can find a relevant area to apply your skills to, then that's great. There is a lot that is less frivolous, too, even in the tech world.
• DigitalSea 14y ago
  I hate to sound rude, I mean well. But why the fuck is Raganwald whining about start-ups that aren't solving real problems instead of solving the problems himself? That's what really irks me about today's society. People bitch and whine about things, wanting people to change the world and yet don't do a single things themselves to make it happen. I hate the mentality that it's up to everyone else to solve serious problems when Raganwald is wasting his time whining about people not solving real problems behind his computer screen oblivious to the fact there are people out there trying to make a difference. Curing things doesn't happen over night. After the initial study, it can take upwards of 10 years before a new drug can come to market. Maybe people aren't solving medical issues because it's not easy. Case in point: a man by the name of Thomas Shaw engineered a syringe that after it's use the tip retracts inside of the syringe to prevent people from jabbing themselves, an obviously genius idea, right? He's worked on the design for over 15 years and has failed to crack into the market, although accomplished many other notable contracts and things other budding start-ups wanting to crack into the medical market could only dream of. Other companies have copied his device, he's had to fight even though his device has been proven to be the best in comparison to others. The medical industry is not only tightly regulated, it's heavily infiltrated by super lobbyist groups. Doctors taking kickbacks for exclusively using a particular medical supplier or company regardless of safety or price. Having said that, what makes this guy think people aren't out there solving problems? While diabetes is a serious medical issue, it's manageable. But I would much prefer resources are allocated to illnesses where they're only treatable for so long before you die, like you know cancer and leukaemia. Be grateful you have a condition that if managed properly you can still live a normal life unlike those who are bed ridden and slowly dying from cancer because even though the treatments they have can cure them if caught early they make you extremely sick in the process.
  • desireco42 14y ago
    He is just starting conversation it seems. I agree that we should do more about things that matter and in that, most posts to this are right.
    • ruswick 14y ago
• charlieok 14y ago
  Economics is about allocating resources in order to produce goods and services that people want and need. A lot of people are spending a lot of time using google and facebook's products these days. Assuming that people are spending time this way because they like what they are getting, and presumably need or want more of it, it makes sense to allocate resources to the upkeep and evolution of these services. How to balance want vs need, and how to add all this up to get a useful total score is, of course, subjective and up for debate. The person doing the complaining is, of course, highly encouraged to offer suggestions for improvement...
• Shenglong 14y ago
  My friend is in the process of completing his residency in emergency medicine. When I asked him what the most difficult part of his job was, he told me, "having to see one obese person after another, knowing what I tell them will almost certainly have no impact." Lots of people have already mentioned the incentive factor (well covered by Bill Gates in his comment about baldness: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html), so I won't speak about that. Rather, it might be worth thinking what solving these real problems involves. Fixing obesity? Working with obese people day in and day out, trying solution after solution with no success? It's not just that these things aren't glorious - but they're also soul crushing. When you make a social network, people around you get excited for you. When you make a weight-loss application, well... not much happens. For an industry that is already prone to depression and mental illness, it's not entirely difficult (although it may not be right) to see why things have developed the way they have.
• haberman 14y ago
  In my five years at Google, I am not sure I have met a single engineer who is "trying to figure out how to get Scott Hanselman to click on ads." I have met tons of engineers who work on interesting problems like building models of query patterns to detect spiking queries (Google Trends and Google Hot Trends, all publicly accessible: http://www.google.com/trends/ http://www.google.com/trends/), Gmail, Maps/Directions/Traffic, improving (machine) efficiency of Google Search, and tons of systems problems/architectures like MapReduce, Dremel, etc. And people I haven't met are working on everything from Flu Trends to Driverless Cars. This oft-repeated claim that Google is squandering a bunch of engineer talent building things that don't improve humanity reflects a distorted view of what Google engineers do, one that is easily refuted even by the publicly-accessible information about Google's engineering accomplishments.
  • pekk 14y ago
    That makes sense. And I am sure engineers working on cool problems at Facebook and other large companies can say the same. But there has to be someone thinking about how to get people to click on ads at these companies, because selling ad clicks is their bread and butter. Right?
    • haberman 14y ago
      Yes I'm sure there must be some mixture of business people, engineers, and UX people who do focus on this. But I've never met any of them, and have never had a conversation with any other engineer that discussed how to get people to click on ads. My point is that it's a small minority of Google's engineering effort that goes towards this.
    • Evbn 14y ago
      There are ads and there are ads. Spamming you with Brand awareness billboards so that you buy Frobulous instead Snaztacular (both produced in the same assembly line and recipe) at the grocery store is one thing, helping you find a good deal on a product you are searching for (even if you don't know its name) is another
      • 14y ago
• roopeshv 14y ago
  similar to "Why should we be spending money exploring space when there are so many problems here on Earth that we need to solve first?".
• JustARandomGuy 14y ago
  Diabetes. Overweight. These are real problems, affecting real people, that need real solutions... Doing healthcare projects requires dealing with hardware, dealing with regulatory overhead, etc. It's much, much more difficult than building out another web app for social/ads/etc.
  • sjs 14y ago
    Facebook has dealt mainly with software till now, but look at all the projects Google has tackled. Self-driving vehicles, fiber Internet service, blanketing cities with wifi, Google Glass, fighting for net neutrality. Google has the talent, bank roll, and ambition to tackle something monumental that spans hardware, deals with regulatory overhead, involves a lot of on-the-ground grunt work, etc. Apple has the resources to tackle such problems as well but hasn't shown the will to do things like street view or fight for net neutrality, which is probably why people think of Google more than Apple when they think of such problems.
• rewind 14y ago
  It used to annoy me, but now I'm just amused when someone tells me what I should think is important when he's not even putting importance on those same things himself. HN trolling at its finest.
• deleted 14y ago
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• kylebrown 14y ago
  Diabetes is just another first-world problem. What about the millions of children dying of preventable diseases in the third-world?
  • derleth 14y ago
    > What about the millions of children dying of preventable diseases in the third-world? What about children serving as child soldiers? What about everyone in the world who gets assaulted? There are a never-ending parade of problems in the world. Any one of them you pick, you pick at the expense of something that someone will think is a lot more important. That's why statements like yours are completely worthless and always will be. In addition to the fact you're factually incorrect.
• noonespecial 14y ago
  Is it possible that one activity doesn't necessarily preclude the other? Perhaps society is already running at its "cure diabetes hull-speed". What is everyone else to do? Sit around and cheer them on... hey that gives me an idea for this social app...
• will_brown 14y ago
  As it relates to developing pharmaceuticals and medical devices they generally require FDA approval. Please watch "Burzynski Movie: Cancer is Serious Business" it is about a Dr. who patented non-toxic cancer treatments that have better "survivor" rates than surgery+chemo on many types of cancer and it has even treated certain brain cancers in children that have never been successfully treated by current treatments. The Movie documents the FDA's continued harassment of the Dr. on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies, including multiple criminal charges that the Dr. was always acquitted for. Included is footage of Congressional hearing about this matter and a direct question to the FDA Director as to why the Dr.'s applications for FDA trials were repeatedly denied when his treatments had cured certain childhood brain cancers, and the response was he never had and never will approve applications unless they are from big pharmaceutical companies. The best minds are busy preventing the best minds from taking a piece their pie (ie. Google protecting its market share), for the best minds to be busy making a difference (this is simultaneously why none of us have privacy on the internet, we cannot enjoy an internet experience without a bombardment of adds and why cure of diabetes is not the focus but rather treatment.
• wissler 14y ago
  I agree with Raganwald's sentiment, and I think most of the posters here at HN lack vision and standards and are just fat dumb and happy with the status quo. Well the status quo is not good enough, and YOU need to raise your standards and expectations about what is possible and you need to get a clue about the kinds of things that are holding us back, but first and foremost, it is YOUR ATTITUDE that is holding us back.
• raganwald 14y ago
  My fellow HNers: It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could work on "big problems." The simple truth is, I'm not smart enough, I don't work hard enough, and I've been napping when opportunity knocked a few times in my life. That being said, sometimes a man in a saloon has a few drinks and yells at the television, telling the coach of some football team what to do next. Just because he's drunk and in a saloon doesn't mean he's wrong, just boorish. I lamented the fact that it's easier to upload and simultaneously tweet about a picture from my phone than it is for Scott to lead a normal life. There are lots of reasons why this is so: 1. The barrier for entry (education, &c) is higher in medicine and bioinformatics. 2. There are regulatory obstacles for businesses. 3. The problems are harder to solve than it may seem to the man in the saloon. 4. Some people feel the monetary incentives are to avoid medicine. p.s. "Hypocrisy" is one of those empty criticisms, like "Unprofessional." If someone says to you, "smoking is bad," it doesn't matter whether he smokes. Maybe, his advice is actually more relevant if he's an older fellow who smoked and now regrets not making a different choice when he was your age.
  • mscarborough 14y ago
    You're obviously a smart dude. Nothing more annoying than a good person who wants to claim how bad they have it.
  • DanBC 14y ago
    There is a problem with the way that HN wants article titles - this one is link-baity and has caused some unneeded negative reaction to a reasonable blog post. I have no idea what it could have been changed to when being submitted, or if that new title would have been kept.
    • Semiapies 14y ago
      Someone could have shown better judgement and not submitted it.
  • kibwen 14y ago
    > It does depress me, daily, that I do not have a career in > physics or chemistry or biology or medicine where I could > work on "big problems." Seconded, though I could never find the words to express this before. How the fuck is anything that I'm doing right now helping to make the world a better place? How could I even begin to make a difference with my life? Making software is the only thing that I'm marginally proficient at--I'll never start a company that sends a man to Mars or discovers the cure to a horrifying disease. Is making the next $BIG_SOCIAL_NETWORK the best that I have to aspire to?
• djt 14y ago
  My friend has a insulin pump similar to this http://www.medtronic-diabetes.co.uk/product-information/paradigm-veo/index.html http://www.medtronic-diabetes.co.uk/product-information/para... This seems to be a solved problem, if only someone could make a way for people to search out such things via the internet ;)
  • thedamon 14y ago
    Solved problem? Not even close. Having an insulin pump is equivalent to doing frequent insulin injections more easily and calculating what your dosage should be in a more complex way. Still requires tons of attention to make sure your insulin sensitivity ratings etc are accurate. I've heard from endocrinologists that patients on insulin pumps tend to have hbA1C scores about the same as patients on multiple-daily-injections. Insulin pump definitely does not 'just do everything for you' Fun note: I have a very similar insulin pump. Up until a year ago when I logged onto their 640x480 resolution Java Applet to upload my device readings, it warned me that my browser was unsupported and that I should acquire Internet Explorer 6 or higher. That's a good example as what we deal with as far as tools to help us manage our diabetes ;)
    • djt 14y ago
      my friend has one and it is imbedded 24 hours and monitors giving top ups throughout the day. I was commenting that the problem the author mentioned is solved (ie measuring and injecting many times throughout the day). Yeah that sounds horrible to deal with. Maybe chat with Fit Bit :D Its not ideal by any stretch of the imagination but short of pancreas gene therapy, it is an intervention rather than cure unfortunately
• dakimov 14y ago
  Dude, the folks doing websites aren't greatest minds. They aren't even engineers. It's a bunch of ADHD kids rushing for cash. All this social web bullshit is not really even programming, and programming is not even engineering.
  • pyre 14y ago
    All of the PhDs working on machine-learning and self-driving cars at Google are ADHD kids rushing for cash. Good to know...
    • dakimov 14y ago
      Obviously, those guys aren't, kudos to them.
• crazygringo 14y ago
  > Why the fuck are programers strategizing how to pivot Facebook into being a dating site? Umm... finding and getting a date with the right person can eventually lead to marriage, incredible happiness, new children in the world... seems like a pretty worthy goal to me.
• deleted 14y ago
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• waterlesscloud 14y ago
  A year or two ago most of the responses to a blog like this were along the lines of "But facebook/google/mystartup is trying to change the world." Now people don't even bother with that line. That might be progress, actually.
• krickle 14y ago
  I bet if you pay them what they expect to get from their own companies, they'll stop fucking around and get right on it.
• rickdale 14y ago
  The one word answer to your question is MONEY. Thats why the fuck. Also an old proverb from urban dictionary tells you, don't hate the player player hater, hate the game.
• nirvana 14y ago
  I can't speak to the other companies, though I know google want's "all the worlds info at your fingertips" which is a reasonably high ideal... I can speak to what Apple is doing as someone whose followed the company closely for a couple decades. Apple doesn't care whether you buy the 3.5", 4.0", 7.85", or 9.8" screen. Apple is bringing the personal computer to the 6 billion other people who weren't able to get in on the PC revolution. Their slogan in the 1980s used to be "The Computer for the Rest Of Us." While it isn't used for marketing, the mission hasn't really changed. There were two key issues that prevented those people from participating in the PC revolution. The first was that you had to be trained how to use a computer. You had to be at least literate, and you had to spend the time to overcome the significant usability hurdle that even Mac OS X presents to the random person. (Eg: your grandmother.) iOS has revolutionized computer usability such that your grandmother can use it, even if she never made it to high school (bless her heart.) The second is price/distribution. PCs were for the relatively rich. And while Apple never seemed to compete on the lowest end, that's simply because most people who think Apple makes expensive products think about $300 laptop as "affordable". Instead, Apple put a $50 computer in peoples hands- the iPod shuffle. Sure, it might not be as full featured as a laptop, but you have to walk before you can run. Lets also not forget that there's a big difference between a PC that draws serious amps and thus needs a house wired for electricity... and a mobile that runs on batteries and can be charged with solar power. Apple is toiling away building the greatest development/ design/ manufacturing/ distribution machine in history. Of course they have some key partners in this- foxconn and their suppliers. That iPod shuffle has been replaced with the inexpensive iPod touch, which really is a PC. And of course there is the iPad mini, also a new entry on the low end pc market. Just because they didn't choose to make zero margin crap that nobody can use (Eg: windows running netbooks), doesn't mean they aren't working their tails off to address this under filled market. They are coming in from the high end, which makes sense given that they can't make the devices fast enough. Hence scaling the company across all those axis I mentioned. I'm sure this sounds like a radical idea, because "everyone knows" that Apple is only interested in selling "shiny things to rich people". Just keep thinking that! Whether android ultimately beats them to it, or not, their mission is pretty damn noble, as far as I'm concerned. The post-PC era they created is going to empower a massive number of people.
  • 14y ago
• deleted 14y ago
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• natmaster 14y ago
  Audience isn't scalable.
• spuiszis 14y ago
  Awesome title
• Mz 14y ago
  Hey, dude, I will probably make money from a webcomic at some point. People like it when I am cute and funny. No one wants my "cure"* for cystic fibrosis. So I will likely pay the bills by making people laugh, then sereptitiously slip the health thingy under the door while folks aren't looking. Chill. Life is more convoluted than you seem to think. For example, fiction is how humankind dreams up the future. We collectively write about things like traveling to the moon long before we do them. There are no small problems. Go watch the movie "It's a wonderful life", examine your bellybutton more privately for a bit, get laid or drunk or loose. Come back fresh. Happy New Year. * Not a cure, a means to be healthy in spite of the defect. Quibbling detail which everyone misses.
  • illuminate 14y ago
    "No one wants my "cure"* for cystic fibrosis. * Not a cure, a means to be healthy in spite of the defect. Quibbling detail which everyone misses." Your confidence in your anecdotes and bitterness that they're not taken as fact may be seen as offputting. Try understanding why people may listen to your experiences and not see them as an immediate path to follow. Regardless of whether your "methods" are sound or not, there have been and are plenty of well-meaning and sincere quacks throughout history and certainly today, complaining that you are entitled to respect for having these hypotheses isn't going to swing anybody your way who doesn't already believe as you do.
    • Mz 14y ago
      I am curious why you feel the need to hound me and repeatedly use terminology like "quack". That is generally not socially acceptable behavior. No one else on HN does this to me. I wish you would stop. It isn't likely to accomplish anything constructive.
      • illuminate 14y ago
        I'm saying that a change of tact is required if you're experiencing hostility from the communities you wish to draw readers from. Realizing and working around these preconceptions will be essential. I use the phrase "quack" because these people exist in large number on the internet, and there certainly exist people who offer promises to the disabled community that they are not capable of delivering on. There's a very large burden of proof that many persons would wish to meet to take a hypothesis seriously. This isn't fanfiction, this isn't diet tips to swap, this, if real, would be a lot of promise to people. Sarcastic comments about the people who don't believe you implicitly are unnecessary, there are very real reasons why these barriers to belief exist.
• snitko 14y ago
  The incentives are in the wrong place. It's not that entrepreneurs don't want to work on important things, but rather that important things are regulated by the government. Good luck waiting 2+ years and spending millions waiting for your blood sugar measuring device approved by the FDA. It pays to work on Facebook-like things because government has not yet spoiled the internet with endless expensive regulations.
• cromwellian 14y ago
  Only a small fraction of Googlers work on ads optimization. The money made from ads allows the vast majority of the rest to go work on other problems.
• deleted 14y ago
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• pg 14y ago
  Essentially he's asking why person-hours are expended on things that make the most money rather than things that are important, for some definition of important. There are several answers to that. 1. The most obvious is that people need to make a living. People can and do work at some discount in order to work on things they think are important, but it rarely stretches as much as 10x. I expect most workers either don't care or can't afford to. 2. A lot of people do work for nonprofits (the biggest of which is the government), but the number of such jobs is constrained by the amount of money nonprofits can raise. 3. The number of people employed on frivolous things seems larger than it is, because e.g. things designed for entertainment are by their nature more visible than infrastructure. So it is dangerous to draw conclusions based on anecdotal evidence.
  • wamatt 14y ago
    Meta: OP is looking past the author's sentiment, generalizations and inaccuracies to respond thoughtfully to the central point of the message. Someone is following their own advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html So regarding hypocrisy, while it's true in certain contexts and under certain conditions, calling out hypocrisy, could constitute a logical fallacy, simply stating that possibility, says very little about how to value it. Is hypocrisy good or bad? Perhaps the question is ill-framed. Avoiding hypocrisy, can create a powerful resonance between the speaker's aligned actions and words. It may be worth nothing this not a moral value judgement, but speaks to leadership. People on average, appear more willing to follow those with strong and bold congruency, and yet abandon them, when that illusion shatters (aka Lance Armstrong). That said, my own view is that hypocrisy is generally inefficient, as it appears to increase the noise in the system.* As the proverb goes "talk is cheap" and hence it costs little to put an opinion out there, which is not bad in and of itself, merely that it requires little effort. Thus with a sea of opinions floating out there, and limited time to process (if your cognition doesn't naturally operate in a frequentist manner), who can you trust? There does not appear to be a definitive set of answers, however the heuristic of matching words to actions, while not perfect, combined with a test for integrity, has personally proven useful over the years. *cf bounded rationality, opportunity cost, SnR etc.
    • 14y ago
• jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Apparently all of society needs to be devoted to fixing diabetes before we do anything else. Meh. This article kinda sucks, as does the sentiment behind it.
• HunterV 14y ago
  Is this not unlike one yelling at a toy maker for not using his clever engineering to create "more useful" products? I'm sure the toy maker would tell you that making a child smile is as useful and satisfying as a product can be.
• rjzzleep 14y ago
  you don't need a degree in physics chemistry or biology to do great things. And you don't need to be at google, to be qualified as a great mind. But people may not call you that then. So what
• quasque 14y ago
  Funnily enough, this is exactly why I gave up on software development and went to study a degree in the biosciences. Ten years of fixing crappy websites, writing dull database interfaces, troubleshooting bugs in shit code written by people who didn't give a damn -- and for what purpose? The paycheck was good but money is not everything. It felt like such a colossal waste of life. My mind is my best asset - I want to apply it to something that will actually make a difference and help people. And it isn't going to happen in software or IT. Anyway, I'm well on my way to working in biomedical research as a career, so this has really paid off. Already interned in a lab for a while and it was amazing, just the feeling of finding out something new and real, even if it takes months, is such a rush. The previous software experience came in very useful too.
  • Draiken 14y ago
    Wish I could have the choice of a career on any kind of research where I live, 3rd world countries just don't have that luxury. Good for you that you made that move... Wish you best of luck!
    • quasque 14y ago
      Thank you! But sorry to hear your choices are more limited than you desire.
  • vacri 14y ago
    I've gone the other way. I started out as a medical tech. It's the same thing every hour, every day. Usher in a patient, do a test. Usher in a patient, do a test. There's no real scope for 'using your mind', but you are directly helping people. At least I saw patients - some medical scientists do nothing but pippette things all day, doing pretty much the same thing as assembly-line factory work. I know one that got RSI of the elbow from endless pippetting. If you want to 'use your mind' to help people, then either get a job that has some form of diagnostics in healthcare, or build healthcare products in a company in the industry. I moved from medical tech to support at a company that made our equipment to R&D in the same company. You can still do IT things and help people in a medical sense. Just because you don't see the patients directly doesn't mean that the software you build isn't helping them. It sounds like you've found a good place to be, but I thought I'd throw in my 2c that IT is not a sort of 'by definition not helping'.
• desireco42 14y ago
  Why to fuck do you think that overweight people are the real problem, I would think endless wars and poverty and living on this planet without destroying it would be real problems. I agree that masses of people are working on ridiculous problems, it is like those people in wall street working on how to squeeze out few pennies more during a trade. In part, it is because we live in capitalism and money is only measure of success, so if you make 40K and i make 60K, I am better then you and 150% better to be precise :). Plus, these other problems are really hard and if you start tackling them you really stir up things. I believe Elon Musk is, for example, a guy who is trying to work on real problems.
• dannyr 14y ago
  It is pretty easy to dismiss that what Google, Facebook & Twitter are not that important. These companies have impact that are not easily measured. Google gave people knowledge at their fingertips while Facebook and Twitter have become tools for democracy.
• moultano 14y ago
  Lots of people in the Googleplex, including my team, are working to make sure that when Scott Hanselman types [blood sugar monitoring] into Google he gets useful results. I'm working on this because I believe it to be the most important thing within range of my skills and experience. People at Facebook are working to allow Scott Hanselman to be able to find friends of friends with diabetes to ask for advice.
  • shanselman 14y ago
    Agreed and both are truly useful and greatly appreciated.
  • OGinparadise 14y ago
    Lots of people in the Googleplex, including my team, are working to make sure that when Scott Hanselman types [blood sugar monitoring] into Google he gets useful results Lots of people in the Googleplex, including my team, are working to make sure that when Scott Hanselman types [blood sugar monitoring] into Google he gets lots of ads, useful to our bottom line. Sorry Google, but I'm telling like it is.
• mangler 14y ago
  Because millions of others have a much more desperate need for some love and some feeling of self worth. Even a surrogate one. There's no insulin for that...
• studentrob 14y ago
  You don't need great skills to make an impact. I work in Cambodia and there are plenty of opportunities for web developers to bring opportunities and learning here for the local culture. Also I would compare the existing base of developers here to what I imagine it was like in the US in the 70s. Computer Science is just picking up steam and the folks who learn it are very bright. Quite a cool climate to be in, in my opinion. Cost of living is dirt cheap, you have all the western amenities, and internet is fast enough (5 Mbit down via my phone).
• deleted 14y ago
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• seanduffy 14y ago
  I'm the Co-Founder & CEO of Omada Health (http://omadahealth.com http://omadahealth.com), and any engineers who are keen to help make a dent in the diabetes and obesity crisis should please reach out. Our company has built a web-version of a landmark clinical study called the diabetes prevention program (http://goo.gl/shiaw http://goo.gl/shiaw) to help the 78 million people with prediabetes from progressing to full-blown type 2 diabetes. Diabetes prevention is absolutely possible, and there are technology and design solutions that can help. sean@omadahealth.com
• ruswick 14y ago
  Why? Because people don't want to change the world. Most people want a job that they can easily complete with minimal effort that still affords them a large salary. Most people want a comfy couch upon which they can stare a black rectangle on their wall for 4 hours each night. Most people want to sit on a beach for 2 weeks every winter. Most people want to pursue a lifestyle, not a legacy. An unremarkable life lived to achieve domestic success and hedonistic pursuits is an attractive proposal. I don't blame people for wanting one.
• hbien 14y ago
  If you're looking into making a big impact: http://80000hours.org/ http://80000hours.org/ The answer is usually not clear cut.
• thewisedude 14y ago
  I usually dont like to talk in sound bites. But I can't help but say this famous quote from Gandhi. Be the change you want to see in the world. This article has a very judging tone. People are doing whatever they think matters for whatever reason - Its their choice. If you think Physics/Chem/Bio research is more important than dating, please be the guest of the world.... learn it and do it! If you improve dating (to sufficient levels) and people are having better marriages and in turn healthy family structure that could possibly be more effective(in some measureable way) than say finding cure for some disease. So I dont buy that doing a dating service is worser!
• AndrewKemendo 14y ago
  C.R.E.A.M. my friend, it all comes back to the C.R.E.A.M.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• namank 14y ago
  Oh my god why does every god damn person, including the author, think they are incapable of stuff? Fucks sakes people, you don't need to learn physics or chemistry or math or whatever. You bunch of perfectionist want to learn the science when ALL you need to do is learn how to apply it. EVEN if you're technically incapable, think about how you can make someone's life better. How you can help someone feel better about themselves. Go figure out how to solve a human problem if you can't do technical ones. But, no matter what, do not give me excuses as to what you can't and why you can't. That, sirs and madams, is unacceptable. All of us, within our current skillset, have some knowledge that the world can directly benefit from. Find it, own it, be it.
• orion512 14y ago
  The greatest minds of today are not all specialized in diabetes. If they are not masters of a highly specialized skill, their main focus is probably earning money. Which is OK, because all this infrastructure being created is going to hopefully make the life easier of those who do specialize in curing disease.
• agentultra 14y ago
  I suspect the rewards of an academic career are not on par with or even close to those of a career on the commercial path. The cost of tuition is prohibitive for most families and the rewards of a teaching/research career are mediocre at best compared to one in on a commercial track. As well most schools have incentives to place students in commercial careers. It's what parents and students expect these days from an educational institution. Finally it's extremely easy to get started and learn enough programming to be dangerous and difficult to learn enough to produce real innovation.
• jisaacstone 14y ago
  I was thinking about this the other (past few months) Getting into _that_ industry, I mean. I was wondering specifically if it might be possible to get some existing medical devices to communicate via bluetooth with a central server; to build an adapter so everything that sent out a vital signal was logged on disc and remotely accessible in real time. I was in a hospital recently, and the vital signs were logged on paper, and abnormalities were signaled by a loud alarm, to be audible at the nearby nurses station. But I don't know how I can 'weekend hack' this sort of thing. Perhaps I can grab some medical surplus, a bluetooth adapter and start hacking?
  • ihnorton 14y ago
    Getting access to devices is definitely a big hurdle, but there are people working in this area already. Maybe you could contribute to framework engineering in collaboration with groups who can get (or reverse engineer, more likely) communication protocols on specific devices. Here are a few links to get started: http://www.mdpnp.org/ http://www.mdpnp.org/ http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2012/medcomm.php http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2012/medcomm.php (google the speakers and organizers) http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1525&context=cis_papers http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1525... OpenIGTLink is working on something similar for surgical navigation (http://openigtlink.org http://openigtlink.org). (See this comment for some more general suggestions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089663 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5089663 )
    • jisaacstone 14y ago
      fantastic! thanks
• CleanedStar 14y ago
  As Warren Beatty said in Reds: "Profits"
• tomasien 14y ago
  Control f'd "vulgar" and "profanity" - only one hit. Really proud of HN for not making this about the use of the word "Fuck", which was used exquisitely and in its most potent form (which is "to add emphasis").
• sakopov 14y ago
  Since we're talking about medical industry here, we're talking about insane regulations because human lives are at stake. I personally believe that software professionals working in this field must be professional engineers. Much like every other engineering discipline where you are obligated to take the blame for your actions. Unfortunately, given the current state of our industry, I would have to say from experience that more than 50% of devs are either self-taught or certified without any formal education. Not to say that all of them are terrible devs, but it sure as hell doesn't look good for us. I don't want people "hacking" medical industry like it's some kind of mind-numbing picture-sharing app. I want people building better medical experience.
• dorkitude 14y ago
  Well, that's certainly not what everyone of consequence is doing, just the risk-averse and as-yet-unrescued. A lot of us work hard to rescue them :P
• dotborg 14y ago
  "the smartest guys" didn't want to work on health problems, ok, however Google Search is pretty much crap lately, AdWords/Facebook ads campaigns are expensive and ineffective maybe it's not that bad after all
• bhauer 14y ago
  I can't do anything to help with diabetes research directly, but my own little side project is predominantly about using charitable giving as a force to drive local community improvements. So what I can do, if not the research itself, is make a $50 donation to the American Diabetes Association on behalf of a favorite city-improvement tasks of interest to me [1]. Sure, it's using charitable giving to draw some attention to something of interest to me, and that may sound base. But what's wrong with a tiny incentive to give to good causes such as this research? [1] http://btforce.com/348 http://btforce.com/348
• kcbanner 14y ago
  Check out Glooko.
• levlandau 14y ago
  "The market will be satisfied"--Marc Andreessen i) It's probably never right to worry about technological stagnation. ii) Tech solutions to big problems (including diabetes) never look like solutions to big problems at the start. I worry about startups that complain about regulations. Want to become the hotel industry? Start by renting out air beds. For now maybe it's just making some hardware that tells you how many hours a day you sleep. We all know that the answers here lie in the data. It's a mistake to try an obvious frontal attack on this problem though. Maybe it's some hardware made by the guys up at Mountain View that you put in front of your eyes that eliminates the ned for a guide dog because it talks to you. There are numerous (smart) engineers working on very useful and tractable problems in these spaces. They just look like toys now... that's all.
• orangethirty 14y ago
  The line reached the restaurant's entrance. It was 12:00pm, people were on lunch break. Orders came in as Confederate batallion ready to strike us down. There I was. In the middle of everything. Knowing how the software that took the orders worked (and how to write it), and working in that restaurant. Why the fuck? At that moment, it was one of the choices I had. Being smart does not give you unlimited amount of choices. It only means that you can understand some things better than others. It does not grant super powers. Or even connects you socially. You are just smart. Why are the smartest minds doing those jobs? Maybe they don't have a choice. In reality, few people (percentage wise VS. general population) are equipped to start, grow, and operate a successful business. Smart people can't just go and get funding and cure Cancer. Shit don't work that way. There is a lot more needed than being smart to do so. Instead of asking why the fuck, focus on how the fuck can I build something to allow this people to build the cure for Cancer.
• saurik 14y ago
  > even if they don't sound glamorous when writing a "Show HN" post Is this true? I feel like "Show HN: technological solution that allows people to forget they have diabetes" would cause a "woah, that's awesome" reaction. I mean, for another example, imagine "Show HN: I'm 14, please check out my fool-proof iOS dieting app"; or, at the far end of the scale, "Show HN: my weekend project - I cured cancer". I feel like these would be pretty "glamorous"; like, sufficiently so, that I'm having a difficult time keeping a straight face writing the titles of the posts, as they come off as the kind of thing way too epic for a "Show HN": if I saw these headlines, I'd immediately think "yeah, whatever, obviously total BS; maybe let's check out the comments to see what they failed to take into account" ;P.
• a_bonobo 14y ago
  If you're interested in working in bioinformatics, use Google to check for your local university and drop a mail to any of the bioinformatics groups, interns and research assistants are always great! We love to have someone on board who's a) motivated and b) actually knows what he/she's doing, not many bioinformaticians know how to "properly" code, it's a lot of dirty hackish stuff.
• adventured 14y ago
  The speed of product innovation radically slows down when you have to seriously concern yourself with whether you might kill the consumer with a mistake. There is a large class of engineering minds out there that simply don't want to work in that field of risk.
• cowsandmilk 14y ago
  Does he honestly believe the greatest minds of this generation are all working at the googleplex? Anyone in the biomed field knows there have been huge advances towards artificial pancreases over the last five years. The purpose of an artificial pancreas is to provide the "second-by-second efficiency" that raganwald discusses. From googling (as I am an expert in other areas of biomedical research), there are several companies and universities going into clinical trials in hospitals during this time and UVA entered outpatient clinical trials last year[1]. FDA gave preliminary guidance on approval of these devices in December 2011 and final guidance in November 2012 [2]. As one example of the extremely intelligent people working in this field, I point to an interview with Ed Damiano[3], who describes some of the difficulties in the control algorithms around these devices. A big one is that the time delay within a single patient evolves with time, and this time delay can be on the order of hours. So, you have continuous glucose monitoring on a second-by-second basis, but if the patient doesn't respond to the insulin for hours, you can quickly overdose the patient. A lot of control theory work is extremely well established, but usually with a fixed time delay related to the physical parameters of the system. (at this point, I should point out that work on ad systems that learn over time and adapt to changes in individual users response over time to an individual ad may be very applicable here, meaning work on optimizing ads may someday contribute to better managing diabetes, who knows? cross-polination in algorithms is very common, one algorithm I have used in my biophysics research was adapted by Ephraim Katzir from work he did for the israeli army on detecting tanks in satellite photos....). I don't know why raganwald believes "the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex". There's lots of proof this isn't the case and I know several people in the biotech field that are much smarter than anyone I've seen go to work at Google. In fact, just as it is easy to jump from a physics PhD into google or the finance industry, I've seen a ton of people do it from the biotech field (prominent example: D.E. Shaw[4]). At the same time, don't forget that people work to cure or manage diseases such as diabetes so that people can lead normal lives with a vibrant social circle. Many social apps serve a similar purpose of helping keep us connected with loved ones. While there are specialized social networks for people with diseases, this activity is often mirrored on nonspecialized platforms. Additionally, while a specialized network may help you find people with a similar disease, facebook or gmail may be what keeps someone who has to have a specialized treatment at a hospital hundreds of miles away in touch with their friends and facetime can allow a patient to call the spouse and kids and read a bedtime story. When Intel comes out with a new power-efficient processor, they may be driven by tablets and ultrabooks, but those processors may allow new portable medical devices that save lives in the field as paramedics are now able to apply medical technologies critical minutes earlier to a patient. So, don't let your narrow view of technologies blind yourself to the good actually resulting from the work done at these companies. Not everyone will make the next vacanti mouse, but their work may save more lives. [1] http://www.news-medical.net/news/20120514/First-US-outpatient-trial-of-UVA-developed-artificial-pancreas.aspx http://www.news-medical.net/news/20120514/First-US-outpatien... [2] http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/UCM259305.pdf http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulation... [3] http://www.diabetesmine.com/2011/02/behind-the-scenes-of-the-artificial-pancreas-human-trials.html http://www.diabetesmine.com/2011/02/behind-the-scenes-of-the... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._E._Shaw_Research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._E._Shaw_Research
• andrijac 14y ago
  money
• thechut 14y ago
  Well said, people need to focus on real world problems. On the diabetes note, I'm close friends with the founders of Jerry the Bear[1], who's primary goal is helping kids with diabetes. There are startups out there doing real good, but they need to get more exposure. 1. http://www.jerrythebear.com/ http://www.jerrythebear.com/
• jholman 14y ago
  Okay, wait, what? You seriously think that Google isn't making huge positive impact on humanity? I mean, please discount the following argument based on the admittedly-confounding fact that I have drunk the kool-aid and am on payroll, but... First, I claim that the improvement from searching with AltaVista etc, to searching with Google, has made the web orders of magnitude more useful. And Google search continues to get more effective. Second, I claim that the web, as an information-interchange platform, is hugely impactful to society, on the same level as curing diabetes, and more useful to society than the kind of incremental improvement in diabetes management that was Raganwald's case study. Third, I claim that making hugely awesome projects profitable (or at least sustainable) is part of making those hugely awesome projects actually have impact. With no revenue ever, Google wouldn't be able to have all the positive impact it has. Fourth, Google has done and is doing lots of other shit that is also hugely impactful. Along with, let's all explicitly admit, lots of bullshit stuff that it's fair to mock. Google Books. Google Health (which admittedly failed). Mother-fucking Maps and Earth (which admittedly were _founded_ outside of Google, but were bankrolled into awesomeness by Google ads). Maps and Earth are a big deal in solving real-world macro-scale ecological problems, even aside from the huge convenience they provide their normal users. Google.org. And in the sexy-so-it-must-be-bullshit department, the self-driving cars _could_ save hojillions of lives and help reform oil dependence. So if you want to decrease "useless busywork", and you want to increase real solutions to real problems that affect real people, Google is doing that. And also some bullshit stuff involving social/mobile/local whatever whatever.
• tubelite 14y ago
  If you get right down to it, the end goal of anything and everything is absurd. Life is a runaway exploding self-catalyzing chemical reaction and its ultimate goal is the replication of aperiodic crystals. It so happens that the replication process involves some fiendishly complicated side effects, rube goldberg to the goldbergth power machinations (viz. multi-cellular plant and animal bodies) which are very very interesting indeed. So what if the smartest minds are focussed on getting clicks? That is only an issue if there weren't very interesting side effects, like indexing megatons of information and making it accessible by a simple search interface. In fact, I would encourage Google to get its smartest minds to do focus on insulting everyone in the universe in alphabetical order. Space travel, here we come.
• ilaksh 14y ago
  Because the underlying 'economic' and political institutions are fundamentally flawed since they doesn't incorporate relevant information like human needs and social science, ecology, physics and developments in technology, etc.
• ok_craig 14y ago
  I think one obvious point is that the minds dedicated to increasing ad clickthrough generate the revenue needed for other great minds to embark on projects like self-driving cars, glass, and, you know, only indexing the entire internet. Also, not everyone on the planet is interested in becoming a doctor. People have different interests. The ones who are not people who want to solve those problems, instead support the economy that allows people who are doctors to do their work and make scientific advances. To simplify, if we were all capable of working on these things, and we all did so, it wouldn't be any better because we'd all die from lack of food, because none of us are doing menial things like being farmers and cashiers.
• hawkharris 14y ago
  Why the fuck does everyone always throw plastic beads in the air, drink tequila and eat catfish? Oh, wait, I'm on Bourbon St. in New Orleans. Just saying it's easy to make generalizations based on the people, places and industries with which you're familiar. While I agree that too much emphasis is placed on ad-related tech careers, it's a cop out to say that engineers aren't finding important solutions, some of which improve the lives of people with disabilities. Other commenters mentioned Google Flu Trends and driverless cars, which are both great examples.
• chaostheory 14y ago
  I feel that Jolie O'Dell had a more eloquent rant on the same subject: "However, more and more, I am royally pissed off that so many bright engineers, good entrepreneurs and capable venture capitalists are throwing resources into problems that no one really has. They’re creating “bread and circuses” in a digital format — apps that are wildly popular, infinitely entertaining, and exactly what people want. The only problem is that they don’t really do anybody any good. They’re not doing what technology is intended to do: Solve problems." http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/10/07/bread-and-circuses-the-state-of-web-app-startups/ http://blog.jolieodell.com/2010/10/07/bread-and-circuses-the...
• brudgers 14y ago
  My son doesn't trust my recommendations in books. It's justified. He'd been reading a fantasy series. I recommended Sword of Shanara. He thought it sucked. Fair. I thought it sucked when it came out. I was the same age. Yet, when I pulled Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy off the library last month, the title pulled him in. "Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground" is a hit in middle-school. But that's not the part Reg got me thinking about. The other two-thirds, of course, stayed at home and lived full, rich, and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone. I'm in agreement with Reg. To a point. He is able to share his thoughts with me here, not because someone was seeking a cure for diabetes, but because someone wrote software to automate the building of web storefronts. While steely eyed missile men took us to the brink of nuclear war, a B-grade actor, a lawyer, a playwright and a longshoreman helped bring down the iron curtain. The idea that we should seek work which matches our nature goes back to Plato's Republic. We don't know in advance phone sanitizers important.
  • charlieok 14y ago
    I assume the B-grade actor is Ronald Reagan, yes? The lawyer could be almost any politician and I'm drawing a blank on the other two...
    • brudgers 14y ago
      Gorbachev, Havel, Walesa.
  • jacquesm 14y ago
    You forgot about the electrician.
    • brudgers 14y ago
      I remembered him. I forgot to go to Wikipedia.
• agumonkey 14y ago
  Didn't Steve Yegge have the same issue ? I wish there was less layers to important research, I always have a feeling that solutions would emerge if some people have met but they just don't know each others.
• tathastu 14y ago
  It actually takes a lot more to have a career in the sciences; the field is extremely competitive. More so than getting a job at Google or Facebook. I applied for a lot of computational biology post-docs (having a PhD in the field), and because I wasn't from a big-name university, didn't get anything, and wound up working for one of the so-called "WTF" companies.
• dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  Kind of a tangent by why are we wasting so much engineering trying to make hypertext documents and HTTP do do things that could be done with other software years ago, why are we wasting all focusing so much on limited constraint computing when we have a lot of horsepower we could be going interesting things with. LaTeX on a browser? Near, but we've has LaTeX for decades. I'm not trying to call anyone specfically out. I just can't help feeling we as an industry have gone so full barrel down the hypertext path that innovation as a whole has potevtiallt suffered. Just my rambles.
• armored_mammal 14y ago
  If I new of a job where I could program for a container agriculture company or something I would. Your comments ring true to me.
• polskibus 14y ago
  5 letters as the answer: money.
• Zarkonnen 14y ago
  My father spent most of a decade running a company developing a non-invasive blood sugar meter: http://www.diabetesnet.com/diabetes-technology/meters-monitors/future-meters-monitors/solianis-monitoring-ag http://www.diabetesnet.com/diabetes-technology/meters-monito... After many years of struggle, the company folded from a lack of investment: medicine investors were scared off by the tech component, and tech investors didn't understand that in medicine, you have to prove, with studies, that your treatment or device actually works. This takes time, and frequent trips back to the drawing board.
• petercooper 14y ago
  Love the sentiment of this post. But why does water run downhill instead of up? Up would certainly be useful. As in physics, there seems to be a gravity that pulls people towards the greatest rewards for the least effort. Becoming wealthy by building a diabetes management tool is, I suspect, much harder than drinking some of Facebook's cream for working on their ad network. There are certainly people who relish and lean into such challenges, but it's not the majority and never will be IMHO.
• crockstar 14y ago
  All I can say is "thank you." In spite of not being one of our greatest minds (far from it) this kick up the backside forced me to respond to an email and get involved in a project that might actually do some good.
• cynwoody 14y ago
  Too small; didn't read. Raganwald needs to forget the font-size attribute.
• jmadsen 14y ago
  How smart can the guy be if he can't even express himself without using a word that is still considered by most people to be vulgar and unfit for public use? "Vulgarity is no substitute for wit"
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• saurabh 14y ago
  For money, obviously.
• wr1472 14y ago
  Wow! This post has generated a lot of debate. I wonder is it because of the content or the delivery? Playing devil's advocate, I would say that Raganwald has touched a raw nerve with those that are working on the types of apps he is having a go at. There are a lot of people who are attacking his point by name calling and responding to tone (ie. the delivery and not the content).
• thetable 14y ago
  I've been entertaining the thought lately that all the work being done on photosharing sites and other "unworthy" commercial projects may qualify as basic research in the sense that the short-term benefits for society may be hard to see. In contrast to traditional science, today, in computing, big ideas and inventions come from commercial applications, and then move into the public domain where they are often used for greater causes. For example, a new database may be invented at a hot photosharing startup, but graduates that particular application and becomes something that _could_ be used to fight cancer.
• hanula 14y ago
  That reminds me of this terrific example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOYCkHFMnVc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOYCkHFMnVc Funny/sad, but true.
• LatvjuAvs 14y ago
  One day I killed few children, few days later I happen to kill about two children. Week later I killed one... And so day by day, I kill few, mostly children, of course sometimes I kill adults too, but most targets are children. Yet, I feel perfectly fine. Every time when I walk past charity advertisement person.
• elisk 14y ago
  Why the fuck? I'll tell you why. Because true innovation is too far and few in between, because it took us 60,000 years to realize that we can plant our own crops, that we can cultivate and breed our own farm animals. Because it took us a good few thousand years to understand that there is more to life than just bashing each other with stones and sticks. Because coming up with something new, and having the guts to share it with your community, and not being killed for it is still rather rare today. Because it took us almost 1,500 to "accept" the fact that we're on a spherical object, not being held by a bunch of turtles. Because some of us are still not convinced that this is true. Because most of the time we're not actually creating anything new, but instead try to improve something that was already there, because we're afraid thinking out of the box. Because our society loves new stuff as long as it doesn't change their old views, and most of the truly revolutionary ideas are just that, shattering our older views. Because we're distrustful apes that think that their youngsters are naive or just plain stupid. Because we think that our 5 year-old's are too young to see the naked body of a human being. Because our society teaches our kids how to suppress originality from the very first days in schools and throughout their "education", which is just a pretty word for enslavement camps that teach our population how to be obedient, unoriginal parrots. Because if you ask 95% of humanity who they believe more, their parents or the scientists that tell them something different than what their parents (and their parents parents) said or think, they'll tell you they prefer the "truth" of their parents, ignoring facts, experiments, and their own eyes. Because we have patent laws that do nothing but prevent true innovation. Because a lot of the ideas that we have are already protected by some stupid law and we can't actually do that. Because we can't experiment with human embryonic cells because we consider them sacred and at the same time we allow the slaughter of millions of people around the world, deny them the food that we throw away in the garbage because we simply can't consume that much. Because we distrust each other and we intimidate and sometimes execute those who do something different. Because we're so arrogant that we're always sure that we know best, and this new thing that someone just mentioned to you won't work because of a million reasons. But mainly, because we're lazy as fuck, and we rather complain about why we don't have anything truly new and life improving, and replying to those rants explaining the reasoning behind it. Why? Because you're too squared in. Because you're too afraid to truly say what's on your mind. Because you don't want others to think that you're crazy. Because if you don't conform, society will reject you. And new things, are by definition, non-conforming. Now go and create something new. I dare you.
• confluence 14y ago
  Simple. Ad work pays better and is less hard work. Same reason people become radiologists and gps instead of working in the er. Make the other shit pay better and you'll be flooded with applications. I only live once and I don't intend to be a sacrifice on the altar of science when I can easily live a great life pushing cat pictures to a sedentary work force. Do I feel bad about that? Not really. I have bills to pay.
• oliyoung 14y ago
  Well, if you can't do something, support one of us who is http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nialg/the-diabetic-journal http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nialg/the-diabetic-journ...
• jowiar 14y ago
  2 brief points: Consider the amount of human innovation dedicated to killing other humans more efficiently. Ads are an improvement. Also, analysis techniques and technologies developed and funded with the goal of selling more ads translate to other fields, making life easier for researchers there. Just because the short term goal isn't curing cancer, that does not mean the work does not bring us closer.
• abrahamsen 14y ago
  Not sure about the world, but the smartest people in Denmark are likely working within the Novo Nordisk domicile, trying to work on better ways to manage diabetes with second-by-second efficiency. They don't post a lot here, because honestly, this site has few stories that matches their interests. It is rather arrogant to believe that the greatest minds of our generation are to be found in our field, and not e.g. in biomedicine and other fields more relevant for diabetes treatment.
• boomlinde 14y ago
  Capitalism?
• sajid 14y ago
  The greatest minds of our generation are not working at the googleplex. They are at universities and research labs working on math, physics, molecular biology, etc.
• shaunxcode 14y ago
  I can only speak for myself: When I was younger I had nothing but the loftiest of goals. To implement the cybernetic fantasies that had been suggested to me either directly by my favorite authors, or by my imagination connecting the dots of how the world I longed to live in could exist. I got older. I realized it was going to be nigh on impossible to get a large enough user base for anything of that sort to exist so I settled into a cycle of keeping a straight job whilst I focussed on tool refinement as a form of procrastination. "Once I have the perfect platform..." I doubled down on my critical theory. Maybe once I REALLY understood what marx, beer, derrida, lacan, mcluhan, and debord were REALLY saying my next steps would be clear. I became stuck. Entirely aware of the complexity and futility of the "all". For now I wait and attempt to inspire those around me to take a deeper look into their cybernetic heritage (past and future). Keep on refine, keep on read, keep on eval, keep on print.
• pbreit 14y ago
  Maybe I misunderstood the post but my first reaction is "I hate this sentiment". I refuse to listen to anyone trivializing the good put forth by Google, Apple and Facebook. They may not be perfect (no entity is) but it is simply ridiculous to suggest these 3 companies are wasting human brilliance on things of comparatively little import.
• jgrant27 14y ago
  Because today almost everyone is pre-occupied with making themselves forget about the true moral implications of their actions in regards to the things they create using technology. Technical diversions in programming or whatever else are a powerful way of doing this. The possibilities for mental masturbation are endless. We rationalize our daily 'tech' work tasks as being highly important when at the end of our lives they will be massively unimportant. We will be filled with regrets for not having done what really mattered. We hate those around us that remind us of these things and wish they would 'shut the fuck up' as the author of that post experienced for asking meaningful questions. For the most part, the moral 'why' has been long ago replaced by the technical 'how' in our industry.
• robwgibbons 14y ago
  In a word, money.
• timonv 14y ago
  Obesity isn't a problem, it's an effect. People eat crap and don't work out and the media doesn't help. Whether problems are 'real' is a point of perception. Obesity and the high rate of diabetes are only a problem in ignorance of the cause. That's yours to fill in. The same goes for the banking crisis, political scams and the facade we call democracy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/). I totally agree we should be addressing real issues in our society, however, addressing effects is like duct taping a drain - temporary.
• drkmtr999 14y ago
  There are already monitoring solutions out there. get wet wired.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]