Hacker News Reader

Comment by ezy | Hacker News Reader

I understood the point of the article... but damn, it made me respect the OLPC less, and confirmed my suspicions about NN. You see a village without power and your first thought is to make a laptop --- yikes, maybe you can include some cake with that.

View on HN

If I see a village without power, it may very well have been a village with power, but had its power source stolen, or broken without ability to repair, or just destroyed out of spite. However, when I see a village without education, I know that this is a village that has not yet been touched by education. Education is viral; when you give real, useful information to people, it stays with them forever, and no one can take it away from them. Drilling a well, say, only helps those already-powerful who lay claim to the well. No one can lay claim to a mind.

Let me see if I have you right:

  Proposition: We do not have universal 'x'

  Proposition: 'y' depends on 'x'

  Conclusion:  We should not work on 'y' until everyone has 'x'

You, dear sir, fail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com