We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today • Hacker News Board

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#81

Post by Throwaway0812 » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:12 PM UTC

sejje wrote: post #54

Throwaway0812 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not fund them? If you think you can make a profit investing in Yo, then go for it. Who cares if it's not a life changing app, that's 99.99% of the app market, and it is what it is. If people install it, and use it, then it's providing some benefit to their lives, even if it's just for entertainment purposes. I'm not going to start telling people to stop watching Game of Thrones, because all those man hours are go…

And because, sometimes, Game of Thrones (or whatever you do with your spare time) can be the inspiration/genesis for something world changing, or at the very least a recharge period.

If watching Game of Thrones can be inspiring, than surely Yo can be as well.

I don't understand why the author chooses to single out Yo. Someone took the time to develop something, and others are using it. Congrats to them for providing something of value. The simplicity of the app is inspiring in itself. Who cares if they raised 1.2 million? This is investment money, this isn't 1.2 million sucked out of a charity, or off the tables of families in Africa, this is 1.2 million that someone wanted to invest in a business, and they believe Yo is that business that'll give them a return.

This entire article is complete nonsense. Trillions of dollars are pissed away in this world, and we're going to point fingers at a developer that did nothing but invest some of their free time to contribute a fun social app to the market?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Show+HN#!/story/past_month/0/Show%...

Take a look at what's coming out of the HN community. Do we criticize each other here for not solving 'real' problems?

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#82

Post by cheald » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

k-mcgrady wrote: post #48

cheald wrote: post #2

Let's build apps like Yo. They're good practice. Doing silly things that amuse oneself is a critical component of hackerdom. Let's just not fund them.

>> "They're good practice" ...In releasing massive security flawed apps.

If you haven't ever released a product with massively flawed security, you've probably likely never released something, or you have released something massively flawed and don't know it yet.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#83

Post by marknutter » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:13 PM UTC

I think the point the OP really should be making isn't that we shouldn't be building them, but that we shouldn't be giving them so much press. Who's to blame here, really?

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#84

Post by gfodor » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:14 PM UTC

pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…

Yes, I believed you missed the point. Someone lamenting the fact that smart people are working on stupid problems is not the same thing as them saying that smart people should be forced to work on hard problems. Hamming put it best:

"Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, ``Do you mind if I join you?'' They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, ``What are the important problems of your field?'' And after a week or so, ``What important problems are you working on?'' And after some more time I came in one day and said, ``If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?'' I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Yo's developers getting more than a million in funding at least makes it pretty clear at least in part why this happens.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#85

Post by Killswitch » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:14 PM UTC

atmosx wrote: post #72

pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…

> [...] "energy, food, water, health, education" [...] I guess 'food' stands for 'poverty', in this list. Seriously though, does anyone believe that these problems can be solved by an 'app'?

GrubHub helped solve my food issues.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#86

Post by digz » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:14 PM UTC

digz wrote: post #79

pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…

>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

Also, I'd venture a guess that if you sum up the total cost that has gone into Facebook's Poke feature (development, maintenance, deciding whether or not to turn it off), it would dramatically eclipse the 1.2M that everyone is so up in arms about. No one is losing their marbles over that stuff.

Look, I agree it's a ridiculous app.. but if people use it and derive value from it, good! Utility created!

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#87

Post by collyw » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

mtdewcmu wrote: post #66

pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…

>energy, food, water, health, education The problem with those problems is that they are very hard. Much harder than starting a Yo. It's a false choice. Even if the founders of Yo were working on important problems, those problems might not get solved, because they are very hard. The world is big enough to have people working on big problems and people working on Yo.

I would disagree. Sure the app itself does something ridiculously trivial. But setting up an app that is expected to scale is not (I assume it is, if they got 1.2 million). They must have some very good marketing, or something special to get that million.

I do the database for a DNA sequencing centre. I guess some of these things are considered "important" problems (working towards curing cancer, or other diseases). But most of the bioinformaticians are second rate programmers (there are a couple of geniuses thrown into the mix as well). Their work generally helps, but to say they are doing something smarter that a scalable web app is a bit naive. Most of the stuff is 100 line scripts that count some numbers, and do some basic stats. Their software doesn't scale, it doesn't even have to be reliable, as often it will only be run on a couple of datasets. At the end of the day its a different set of knowledge and problems, the only similarity being that there is some programming involved.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#88

Post by 6d0debc071 » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

Solving problems in an already crowded domain often takes non-trivial political skill even where it's technologically feasible to do so. If politics weren't an issue, I could walk down to the local hospital right now and save them tens of thousands of hours of time a year - they wouldn't even be hard problems; simple things like typing certain kinds of reports rather than using hand-writing, making one system able to read the files of another - that sort of thing. But, sadly, that's not the world we live in.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#89

Post by grecy » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:15 PM UTC

digz wrote: post #79

pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…

>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world? This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

> If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

Then you wind up with things like Fox "News" (actually Entertainment, NOT news) being popular, because they found that entertainment is much better at making money than actual news. If you let "making money" be the decider, lots of valuable things fade away.

Re: We have the potential to solve the biggest problems of today

#90

Post by jal278 » Mon, Jun 23, 2014, 9:16 PM UTC

pdabbadabba wrote: post #51

There's a lot that I dislike about this article, but I'll start with this: it is probably self-refuting. Someone could just have easily written: "I find it difficult to see individuals who could focus their time and effort solving [problems like energy, food, water, health, education], instead put their efforts into something like a takedown of the moral priorities of the people behind Yo on a their personal blog." A…

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." [0]

The reason why this article resonates with many readers is that it expresses frustration with the triviality of how our economy allocates resources to start-ups. The promise of tech is huge, but following the money often leads to optimizing ads, machine learning algorithms competing with each other in HFT, or other applications with little net benefit to society.

It's not that EVERYONE should be working on the big problems -- just that the incentive systems seem to lean towards triviality over deep human benefit.

[0] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...