6 ms·

You have just exemplified the issue completely. Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Spend more time thinking about how to solve hard

You have just exemplified the issue completely. Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Spend more time thinking about how to solve hard problems. Spend less time thinking about "us" and "them" and more time thinking about "everyone".

angersock 13y ago
Yeah, fuck that noise. "Spend less time thinking about getting sex" hahahahaha yeah okay. Look, maybe when you're in your 30s or 40s and you've got the wife and the kids and the minivan and the bills and the mortgage you can focus on the more noble things in life, like making the world a better place so that your progeny will have an easier time of it. But, in the meantime, for those of us without children, fucking is a pressing issue. EDIT: I'll be still more blunt--the people who gain the most from us "making the world a better place" are those with kids and a stake in society. You are trying to take advantage of us. You should've gotten us healthcare, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us a safety net, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us cheaper student loans, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us more affordable housing, but you fucked it up. So, no, I'm not going to help you beat cancer so you can spend an extra year with your kids (who are going to be bankrupt the rest of their lives because of your medical bills). EDIT2: You couldn't even manage to kick out the bastards in office who are running the alphabet-soup agencies that are ruining our country. There. There's your fucking legacy.
- metaphorm 13y ago
  who are you even talking to? me? you don't know me. I'm not a baby boomer with a wife and kids. I'm in my late 20s and work at a tech startup in New York. I just happen to have some perspective.
  - angersock 13y ago
    Not "you" specifically, the sort of "You" (insert appropriate audience/strawman).
- phaemon 13y ago
  Upvoted for honest expression. But you're doing exactly the same thing you're criticising: you haven't kicked the bastards out either, or gotten healthcare sorted because you're too busy chasing sex and thinking about your own life. In 20 years someone will be writing your post about you!
  - angersock 13y ago
    I actually am working at a startup in the healthcare space, and do mentoring and coach people to try and help give them skills they can earn a living with. I still find time to try and chase tail--after all, it's the oldest game in the world, and if you're not playing, you might as well be dead, right? :)
- kevincrane 13y ago
  I can tell by the fading font color that this isn't a popular post, but I fucking love it.
- greenrice 13y ago
  Hit the nail on the head. There is a plethora of important and difficult problems to solve, and the millenial generation has to trudge through the pile of shit that's been left accumulating for the past several decades. Our most pressing matters involve navigating a new world that is built on the internet.
- Jaiguss 13y ago
  Okay, if you actually need an app to help you get some ass, I suspect there might be another significant underlying issue there, and the app probably wont help you anyway. Besides there being hundreds of these silly things out already, I don't see why you or someone else getting sex should necessitate some brilliant programmers help who could otherwise be spending her time on problems far more worthwhile(e.g. perhaps aiding in curing STD's is more enticing for you).
  - judk 13y ago
    What makes you think that the people getting rich off Poke apps are the brilliant ones? That is the fallacy of it all.
    - Jaiguss 13y ago
      Did you read the article? Its not only about the ones who get rich, its moreso about the significant amount of talent flowing towards these superfluous types of "companies" (ie. startups that are really nothing more than mere features, or eCommerce websites), instead of working for a larger "old-guard" company that actually accomplishes much more because the startup is more cool or popular; according to the author. I think it may be overblown a bit sometimes, but there is definitely truth to this.
      - angersock 13y ago
        So, erm, what are these large "old-guard" companies that somehow would make better use of my talents? And further, where did they come from?
- judk 13y ago
  Are you saying you wish you lived 30 years earlier, because life is better for gat generation than yours?
Kalium 13y ago
Sex and photo-sharing pays the bills. Thinking about "everyone" does not.
- quomopete 13y ago
  If some folks were just trying to pay the bills, working in government or biotech would be fine. What kind of bills are we talking about? I think it's more that sex and photo sharing, at the moment, net an excess of wealth quickly and efficiently.
- Jaiguss 13y ago
  This sounds so unbelievably ignorant I laughed. Do you honestly think solving a problem that aids "everyone" is worthless, or cannot pay bills? Just an fyi, pharmaceutical industry is actually pretty lucrative because everyone is vulnerable to illness. Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc. anyway, so I think the issue may be a tad overblown. Many of these "app developers" are actually people who simply learned to write code on some site and simply churn out games, sex-apps and such just hoping one will catch on and make them lots of money; thats really it. I really don't think many pathologists, biologists, etc. are wasting most of their time making some silly app that "disrupts" how people share naked photos.
  - Kalium 13y ago
    Solving a problem would be worth a great deal. Thinking about how to solve a problem is not worth a great deal. Attacking problems that have been unsolved for decades, despite lots of work, seems like a poor idea when compared to smaller problems that can actually be solved today.
parennoob 13y ago
> Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Incentives, please? I would guess that maybe 20 years earlier, being an engineer who spent all their time working on something that sounds boring like "making better semiconductor materials" probably got more recognition and social status than it does now. If I say something like "Oh yeah, I work on gallium arsenide diodes at [research company]", people at parties are going to nod off before I can get to 'diodes'. Why would a 20-something want to work for the likes of, say, JPL, when they can get tons more pay and recognition by working at, say, Facebook?
- metaphorm 13y ago
  I think the problem has a lot to do with the fact that too many people are motivated by those really shallow incentives (a little bit of money, a little bit of fame) than by things that matter more in the long run.
  - parennoob 13y ago
    "Too many people are motivated by those really shallow incentives (a little bit of money, a little bit of fame) than by things that matter more in the long run" No, I think it has more to do with the fact that people who work on things that matter more in the long run should be offered those "shallow incentives" as you call them by a societal structure. Society (at least in the US) has withdrawn those incentives (a stable family, recognition of intelligence vs. being popular); and the result is that people are moving away from anything that doesn't offer them more recognition -- of any kind.
    - Dewie 13y ago
      Computer nerds have finally, and at this point it seems like for the first time in a good while, gotten some modicum of respect for what they do. And now people think that they're just going to give up that respect so willingly, and for so little reward?
  - ahomescu1 13y ago
    Money and fame impact who you marry and have kids with. That can have a significant effect in the long run (where long == your own lifetime).
mmxiii 13y ago
And you exemplify the kind of self-righteous person that probably spews this kind of junk daily. The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a bit longer without pain, the biggest difference is how people spend their lives today. If they can spend it connecting with other people they care about, and derive meaning from that, that is a thousandfold more compelling problem. It's not that other people don't have their incentives and values right, it's that you don't recognize them.
- Jaiguss 13y ago
  Lets just be honest with ourselves. The biggest reason more people are willing to work on these substance-less apps is because its far easier to create something superfluous as a twitter-helper(or any of the hundreds of ecommerce sites that simply provide new ways to do old things like laundry, via your phone), than it is to cure cancer, and they get to call themselves "hackers", "entrepreneurs", "techies", etc. There are many players in the game now who are in it more so for the hopes of striking in rich and social currency than the actual joy of solving problems, surprise surprise. This is why the app stores are flooded with endless spinoffs and knockoffs of the same things over and over again.
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them. Substanceless apps are not only objectively easier than curing cancer, there are much lower barriers to entry. In fact, for some perverse reason, our society seems to feel that the most trustworthy process for handling real, major problems like cancer research is to erect the highest possible barriers to entry, throw even the survivors out of the field at every least opportunity, and then place absolute trust in the few who survive this winnowing process. The concept that treating everything serious as a tournament-structured winnowing process might have some negative impact on the ability of our research institutions to actually treat and cure cancer does not seem to occur.

angersock 13y ago

Yeah, fuck that noise. "Spend less time thinking about getting sex" hahahahaha yeah okay. Look, maybe when you're in your 30s or 40s and you've got the wife and the kids and the minivan and the bills and the mortgage you can focus on the more noble things in life, like making the world a better place so that your progeny will have an easier time of it. But, in the meantime, for those of us without children, fucking is a pressing issue. EDIT: I'll be still more blunt--the people who gain the most from us "making the world a better place" are those with kids and a stake in society. You are trying to take advantage of us. You should've gotten us healthcare, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us a safety net, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us cheaper student loans, but you fucked it up. You should've gotten us more affordable housing, but you fucked it up. So, no, I'm not going to help you beat cancer so you can spend an extra year with your kids (who are going to be bankrupt the rest of their lives because of your medical bills). EDIT2: You couldn't even manage to kick out the bastards in office who are running the alphabet-soup agencies that are ruining our country. There. There's your fucking legacy.

metaphorm 13y ago
who are you even talking to? me? you don't know me. I'm not a baby boomer with a wife and kids. I'm in my late 20s and work at a tech startup in New York. I just happen to have some perspective.
- angersock 13y ago
  Not "you" specifically, the sort of "You" (insert appropriate audience/strawman).
phaemon 13y ago
Upvoted for honest expression. But you're doing exactly the same thing you're criticising: you haven't kicked the bastards out either, or gotten healthcare sorted because you're too busy chasing sex and thinking about your own life. In 20 years someone will be writing your post about you!
- angersock 13y ago
  I actually am working at a startup in the healthcare space, and do mentoring and coach people to try and help give them skills they can earn a living with. I still find time to try and chase tail--after all, it's the oldest game in the world, and if you're not playing, you might as well be dead, right? :)
kevincrane 13y ago
I can tell by the fading font color that this isn't a popular post, but I fucking love it.
greenrice 13y ago
Hit the nail on the head. There is a plethora of important and difficult problems to solve, and the millenial generation has to trudge through the pile of shit that's been left accumulating for the past several decades. Our most pressing matters involve navigating a new world that is built on the internet.
Jaiguss 13y ago
Okay, if you actually need an app to help you get some ass, I suspect there might be another significant underlying issue there, and the app probably wont help you anyway. Besides there being hundreds of these silly things out already, I don't see why you or someone else getting sex should necessitate some brilliant programmers help who could otherwise be spending her time on problems far more worthwhile(e.g. perhaps aiding in curing STD's is more enticing for you).
- judk 13y ago
  What makes you think that the people getting rich off Poke apps are the brilliant ones? That is the fallacy of it all.
  - Jaiguss 13y ago
    Did you read the article? Its not only about the ones who get rich, its moreso about the significant amount of talent flowing towards these superfluous types of "companies" (ie. startups that are really nothing more than mere features, or eCommerce websites), instead of working for a larger "old-guard" company that actually accomplishes much more because the startup is more cool or popular; according to the author. I think it may be overblown a bit sometimes, but there is definitely truth to this.
    - angersock 13y ago
      So, erm, what are these large "old-guard" companies that somehow would make better use of my talents? And further, where did they come from?
judk 13y ago
Are you saying you wish you lived 30 years earlier, because life is better for gat generation than yours?

Kalium 13y ago

Sex and photo-sharing pays the bills. Thinking about "everyone" does not.

quomopete 13y ago
If some folks were just trying to pay the bills, working in government or biotech would be fine. What kind of bills are we talking about? I think it's more that sex and photo sharing, at the moment, net an excess of wealth quickly and efficiently.
Jaiguss 13y ago
This sounds so unbelievably ignorant I laughed. Do you honestly think solving a problem that aids "everyone" is worthless, or cannot pay bills? Just an fyi, pharmaceutical industry is actually pretty lucrative because everyone is vulnerable to illness. Honestly though, I suspect most of the people sitting there writing those silly apps wouldn't be able to do things like cure Cancer or aid in creating vaccines and etc. anyway, so I think the issue may be a tad overblown. Many of these "app developers" are actually people who simply learned to write code on some site and simply churn out games, sex-apps and such just hoping one will catch on and make them lots of money; thats really it. I really don't think many pathologists, biologists, etc. are wasting most of their time making some silly app that "disrupts" how people share naked photos.
- Kalium 13y ago
  Solving a problem would be worth a great deal. Thinking about how to solve a problem is not worth a great deal. Attacking problems that have been unsolved for decades, despite lots of work, seems like a poor idea when compared to smaller problems that can actually be solved today.

parennoob 13y ago

> Spend less time thinking about getting sex and sharing photos. Incentives, please? I would guess that maybe 20 years earlier, being an engineer who spent all their time working on something that sounds boring like "making better semiconductor materials" probably got more recognition and social status than it does now. If I say something like "Oh yeah, I work on gallium arsenide diodes at [research company]", people at parties are going to nod off before I can get to 'diodes'. Why would a 20-something want to work for the likes of, say, JPL, when they can get tons more pay and recognition by working at, say, Facebook?

metaphorm 13y ago
I think the problem has a lot to do with the fact that too many people are motivated by those really shallow incentives (a little bit of money, a little bit of fame) than by things that matter more in the long run.
- parennoob 13y ago
  "Too many people are motivated by those really shallow incentives (a little bit of money, a little bit of fame) than by things that matter more in the long run" No, I think it has more to do with the fact that people who work on things that matter more in the long run should be offered those "shallow incentives" as you call them by a societal structure. Society (at least in the US) has withdrawn those incentives (a stable family, recognition of intelligence vs. being popular); and the result is that people are moving away from anything that doesn't offer them more recognition -- of any kind.
  - Dewie 13y ago
    Computer nerds have finally, and at this point it seems like for the first time in a good while, gotten some modicum of respect for what they do. And now people think that they're just going to give up that respect so willingly, and for so little reward?
- ahomescu1 13y ago
  Money and fame impact who you marry and have kids with. That can have a significant effect in the long run (where long == your own lifetime).

mmxiii 13y ago

And you exemplify the kind of self-righteous person that probably spews this kind of junk daily. The reason people work on sexting apps over curing cancer is because it is a more human problem than curing cancer. In all your tunnel-visioned dash to label problems as "hard and "worthy" you are the one that missed the forest from the trees. All people will die, and while it would be great if they could stick around a bit longer without pain, the biggest difference is how people spend their lives today. If they can spend it connecting with other people they care about, and derive meaning from that, that is a thousandfold more compelling problem. It's not that other people don't have their incentives and values right, it's that you don't recognize them.

Jaiguss 13y ago
Lets just be honest with ourselves. The biggest reason more people are willing to work on these substance-less apps is because its far easier to create something superfluous as a twitter-helper(or any of the hundreds of ecommerce sites that simply provide new ways to do old things like laundry, via your phone), than it is to cure cancer, and they get to call themselves "hackers", "entrepreneurs", "techies", etc. There are many players in the game now who are in it more so for the hopes of striking in rich and social currency than the actual joy of solving problems, surprise surprise. This is why the app stores are flooded with endless spinoffs and knockoffs of the same things over and over again.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Let's just be honest with ourselves. The people who become research doctors working on curing cancer have very, very hard lives, and most aspiring cancer curers never get to do any actual curing. They have to do a PhD/MD, survive their internship and residency process, and most likely publish papers before they're even out of school before a cancer lab will even hire them. Substanceless apps are not only objectively easier than curing cancer, there are much lower barriers to entry. In fact, for some perverse reason, our society seems to feel that the most trustworthy process for handling real, major problems like cancer research is to erect the highest possible barriers to entry, throw even the survivors out of the field at every least opportunity, and then place absolute trust in the few who survive this winnowing process. The concept that treating everything serious as a tournament-structured winnowing process might have some negative impact on the ability of our research institutions to actually treat and cure cancer does not seem to occur.