Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solving All the Wrong Problems

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 118 posts

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#101

Post by auntienomen »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #91
johnnyhillbilly wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand how much time and focus is spent on trivial problems. Somebody already replied to this, but I will add more on the same note. 1 If some scientist finds a way to save a minute per instance of brushing your teeth, and if there is no difference in quality and cost, that is 600 million+ minutes saved every day in the US alone. 2 If some scientist finds a way for nocturnal people to contribute to…

Aggregations in this case aren't interesting unless the component part of the aggregation is by itself interesting. A human, due to real constraints can't do a whole lot with an extra minute per day, and humans as a social body due to real constraints can't effectively collectively block-allocate 600 million diffuse minutes to some other cause. Each of them can only reallocate the minute they own/save. The units and…

Reading hacker news. You never know which minute is the one with the good idea.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#102

Post by Swizec »

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #91
johnnyhillbilly wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand how much time and focus is spent on trivial problems. Somebody already replied to this, but I will add more on the same note. 1 If some scientist finds a way to save a minute per instance of brushing your teeth, and if there is no difference in quality and cost, that is 600 million+ minutes saved every day in the US alone. 2 If some scientist finds a way for nocturnal people to contribute to…

Aggregations in this case aren't interesting unless the component part of the aggregation is by itself interesting. A human, due to real constraints can't do a whole lot with an extra minute per day, and humans as a social body due to real constraints can't effectively collectively block-allocate 600 million diffuse minutes to some other cause. Each of them can only reallocate the minute they own/save. The units and…

1min here, 10min there, 5min over there and before you know it, that's a whole extra hour of browsing the internet every week!

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#103

Post by Retra »

canadaduane wrote: post #76
tijs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 2 is a common misconception. People who might not have much money to spend on luxury services as described in the article will most likely still pay for something that truly solves a problem. Actually solving a problem will always be worth more than scratching an itch. Taking the 'underserved' seriously as potential customers is worth a strategy meeting at a lot of startups I'd say.

At the bottom, where need is greatest, they may be underserved because they have so little money. I'd love to see the entrepreneurship engine better incented to search for solutions in such a space. I see universal basic income as a worthy pursuit for this reason (among others)--universally distributing an incentive to solve the problems of the bottom 20% would work wonders.

I've probably seen like 40 "boil water with sunlight" inventions over the last decade, each of which is claiming to revolutionize the lifestyle of poor Africans. ...Which is great, I guess, but nobody with money is buying them. And the fact that I've seen so many of these tells me more that people are really trying to sell something to me: the idea that I can feel good about myself by donating money to Joe Rando USA with a pot and some bubble wrap.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#104

Post by BWStearns »

Apocryphon wrote: post #60
SwellJoe wrote: post #54

The interesting thing about technology is that it has proven to be so powerful that when people do mundane things with it, it is viewed as a failure (maybe rightly so, to some degree). But, and this is a big but, the vast majority of people go to work every day and do very little of importance . 99% of people are not changing the world, for the better or otherwise. All the people making coffee, serving food, pushing…

So, why do techies get blamed for lack of world-changing work? Because there's a visceral, emotional response people get when they see the amount that we're being paid to work and the capital that's being poured into what looks like frivolous trivialities. Artless commerce. If we weren't here the focus would remain on Wall Street, except CDOs and complex financial instruments are trickier to reduce to absurdity in th…

Or because "we" keep insisting that our work "makes the world a better place" and "changes the world". I'm sure there's at least one barista in soho who claims that (and frankly I've had more than one barista or bartender greatly improve my little corner of the world) but it's not constantly used to justify mind boggling financial returns or to write off the negative externalities of their work.

None of this is to say that tech can't change the world for the better but that the tech community gets a lot of monetary and prestige benefits that derive from these arguments so we shouldn't be surprised when people want to see results.

Edited to add: Wall Street never tried to get the mileage we get out of "no really, we might get rich but the whole world is a better place for it".

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#105

Post by Swizec »

throwanem wrote: post #67
Swizec wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a problem or a good thing? Washing machines, kitchen appliances and similar technological advances, freed up our at home time so much that we can put a whole nother 50% of the population through college. A whole 50% of the population that can get jobs, have careers, and do cool shit, who was stuck wiping men's proverbial bottoms until the 1950's. Making free time free is a good thing. There's no telling what…

Is it possible that most of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked?

No. Our definition of low-hanging fruit is ever evolving. There's always the next lowest fruit.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#106

Post by kozikow »

Every SV company have the grandiose "mission" or claims like "we are making world a better place" mentioned in the article. Those claims usually get ignored if they become a minor hindrance for projected profits.

If you think about it, this moral duplicity is behind majority of SV mockery, like the TV show or this article.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#107

Post by throwanem »

Swizec wrote: post #105
throwanem wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible that most of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked?

No. Our definition of low-hanging fruit is ever evolving. There's always the next lowest fruit.

Having grown up around apple orchards, I feel it perhaps worth mentioning that this is not in fact true. The fruit that hangs low does so because its weight bends the branches. Once it's picked, the rest is considerably harder to reach. That's why the phrase means what it does.

(If you're interested, the word "windfall" is of similar origin. It refers to fruit shaken loose of the tree by a stiff wind, thus requiring no effort to collect beyond that involved in simply bending to pick it up.)

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#108

Post by perrygeo »

ebcode wrote: post #89
ixtli wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm unclear how what I said was racist :/ Edit: To be clear I used those examples because they are the majority in America (which I should have been more clear about) in an effort to point out that the majority often does not pay as close attention to the problems that arise from being in a minority.

>Homogenous, largely white, largely male, largely safe people are not going to detect the problems the author appears to be implying are going untreated. What you said was both racist and sexist. You're saying that a group of people (based on race and sex) are "not going to ..." do something. Speaking in generalizations using these classifications is generally regarded by most folks as racist/sexist. It can be tricky…

No. There is nothing "racist" in that comment. That comment exhibits "prejudice". Prejudice may co-exist with discriminatory actions ("bigotry") or become institutionalized ("racism") but making comments about an ethnic group is not by itself racist.

"Racism" (note the -ism to denote a system) requires a social, political and/or economic system by which a dominant group retains power over other groups. By that widely-held definition, it's literally impossible for a non-member of the dominant group to exhibit racism.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#109

Post by nickpsecurity »

Swizec wrote: post #46
im_down_w_otp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The calculus of the opportunity cost presented here isn't the tiny incremental improvement attached to my already amply comfortable lifestyle, but rather the aggregate full-time loss of many dozens or hundreds of engineers, data scientists, and investment $$$ diverted to trivial pursuits. Or put more simply. The lost problem-solving potential for 8-10 hours a day of a single PhD in Applied Mathematics massively dwarf…

But what about the time cost/opportunity of a single full-time phd versus 10 minutes a day for the 253 million cars on US roads today? Globally? Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day. That engineer's time investment is virtually free in comparison. Of course these savings will only materialize after parking technology becomes commoditized. Commoditization i…

"Assuming parking only once a week for each vehicle, that's over 60,000 hours of saved time per day"

That complicated stuff with associated costs might benefit middle class and up. The few who buy it among them. Many will also want the pride of parking themselves, distrust the technology, and so on. You're not saving 60,000 hours a day so much as a tiny faction of it. If you succeed where others failed for a few decades worth of PhD hours on computer vision, pathfinding, robotics, etc.

Simplifications in this thread are way off. The real world involves interplay of the technical capabilities, whatever regulations will be, finances, and social factors.

Re: Solving All the Wrong Problems

#110

Post by inputcoffee »

inputcoffee wrote: post #4

Point taken. The most important thing in the world is love. The most cherished thing in the world is a memory of a loved one. Idea! I must make an app that helps me take pictures of loved ones, and share them with other loved ones.

I am glad someone is listening:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/microsoftpi...

Post reply on HN