51–60 of 528 posts
Why the fuck do we see this complaint pop up on HN every quarter?
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"
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…
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.
Sugar production in the US is heavily subsidized.
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?
Because nobody cares about your diabetes and obesity. Lay down that taco and get some fricken exercise, FFS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably than working at Google or playing the startup lottery...
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?
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.
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.
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