Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jaiguss | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Well fucking said.

I guess we're in agreement then. Its easier to work on these small superfluous apps than to work on something like curing diseases (which is being used as an arbitrary example of something more "meaningful" than say, a sexting app (another arbitrary example)). The cool factor is also something to consider since computers are cool these days.

I took the side of the issue that I did because its what was discussed in the article; I definitely agree that the medical cartel system we have in place here is also a huge problem. Its the only industry I can think of where the number of new practitioners allowed to enter the field is a function of the number of existing practitioners.

Commenting on this incredibly late, but I knew there'd be some good fodder in this comment thread.

You have a good point, but unfortunately you're still missing the point. Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing. As others have said, as software engineers, we would have gone to school to do bioinformatics and study the natural sciences if that's what we wanted. The issue is that a vast number of people are working on shitty, pointless, worthless apps.

It has nothing to do with barriers to entry. What kind of problems do you learn to solve in this field? Computational ones, i.e. things involving facets of computing. So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems? Things that software engineers should have plenty of knowledge on, and would be much more beneficial to society than the next bullshit social app. Why is this not the case?

That is what the author is addressing. Churning out photosharing app #35875 isn't helping anyone. But maybe if people started taking pride in the notion of being a hacker and a computer scientist, and actually solving shit worth solving instead of stamping those phrases on their Twitter pages for social approval, then just maybe the Valley could gain some credibility back.

>So why are less companies devoting resources to working on facets of networking, optimizing computer architecture, writing more efficient compilers and operating systems?

I can think of a couple reasons:

1) Because hardware/microarchitecture companies do devote effort to architecture and compilers.

2) Because low-level software/OS companies do devote effort to networking, compilers, and operating systems.

3) Because network effects mean that only a very few mutually incompatible languages and OS's can survive on the open market, with a larger but still fairly small variety surviving on open-source volunteer efforts.

>Not being able to effectively cure cancer isn't the issue Silicon Valley is facing.

Oh really? Aren't there some computational problems we could work on that have cancer-cure-level impacts?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com