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Comment by TriinT | Hacker News Reader

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TriinT

When I think of solving "real problems", I think of:

- curing cancer

- cheap water purification

- vaccines for tropical diseases (the U.S. / European pharma companies have very little incentive to work on them)

- energy-efficient desalination

- energy-efficient computing systems

- efficient solar panels and cheap fuel cells

- easy access to high-quality learning materials (MIT OCW rocks)

and you think of YouTube, Facebook. Do you want to include Twitter, too? For Christ's sake, the "social media" virus has infected a lot of minds here on HN. Let's put things this way: 5,000 people die everyday all over the world of preventable water diseases, and you're talking of social media as a real problem?

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You are completely distorting my point. It's like if I said I love chocolate, you'll say "OMG the things you should really love is your family blabla."

Indeed. You can love chocolate and your family. Just like you can view facebook, mint AND curing cancer as "real problems".

So, Facebook is to chocolate what curing cancer is to one's family. That's an interesting view. I get your original point, and I still believe a more careful choice of words would have been more appropriate...

An outsider who accidentally finds HN will probably think this is a community of slightly emotional retarded, detached, autistic nerds living in a complete fantasy world where the problems are server outages and the discussions circle around social media and childish Python Vs. Ruby drivel. I am a hardware guy and sometimes I think HN'ers have lost their sense of reality. Imagine what a more normal person would think...

I'm hoping a more normal person would simply not be interested in most of the topics that appear here. Another term for normal is that mythical average person, who by definition of average does not share your well beyond average and deep interest in subject X.

Having taken a brief look at your submission, I find them great, and hope no outsiders are voting them down because they are too technical.

I'd hope so. This is not a save-the-world forum. It's Hacker News. We do think more about server problems than cancer when we are on here. It does not mean we consider server problems to be a bigger problem than cancer.

My original post was about relative use of Mint vs. Facebook. You're making it facebook vs. cancer. A more appropriate argument would be facebook/mint vs. cancer which is a completely valid debate(except I'll probably end up agreeing with you wholeheartedly)--just not for this thread.

There's nothing wrong in discussing highly technical problems just as long as one keeps in minds that there are bigger problems outside one's small bubble.

The cure for cancer will likely be found in a highly technical way.

Thanks. That's the most obvious truism I ever heard.

I think the parent, and OP were talking about "real problems" within the realms of software. Which is what most of us do.

Online communication is an invaluable net win for everyone. Social media is just one type of communication but a valuable force for good.

Well done for saying we should cure cancer though.

"Well done for saying we should cure cancer though."

That was cliché, I admit. In any case, cancer is only one problem. Cancer is a very difficult problem that kills many people. There are diseases that kill as many or more people than cancer, and that are easier to fight than cancer, but that no one pays attention to...

Why is that? Because cancer kills rich people too, while some diseases only kill poor people. Poor people cannot pay for vaccines, or top-notch healthcare, or even basic healthcare actually... so there's no market there. Bill Gates wrote all about it, so I am not claiming to have found anything new. Thanfully, Gates has the money to do something about it, while I barely have the money to pay my rent (I live in California, after all).

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