[rayiner]

Lots of these things are amenable, at least partially, to technical solutions.

Example: A major problem poor countries have is that donors donate medical equipment, but the healthcare systems have no ability to maintain or sometimes even not the knowledge to use that equipment. There is a ton of equipment that could be easily fixed, or even just unpacked and used, that instead sits gathering dust.

Don't you think something like that is amenable to a technical solution?

[jlgreco]

It sounds like they need training and skilled labor, not hackers.

Could a bunch of hackers get together and say "I know, lets roll Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about!"? Sure, a bunch of hackers could say such a thing. But is the real problem here really a lack of technology for online training?

If you really want to attack this problem, you would talk with the donors that donated the equipment in the first place and work on allocating the donations in a more sensible manner. That could be as simple as prioritizing donations to teaching hospitals and using some of the donation money to attract and retain skilled teachers instead of just using it all on equipment.

[oblique63]

> Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about!

That example could actually work, you know. There's nothing stopping you from automating some intelligent scraping for each item that gets registered into the db, and presenting the users with tid-bits of what that item can be used for and how to use it, with a couple of links to places. It may not seem like a lot because it's so simple, but just trying to gather that tiny bit of preliminary information is probably a huge bottleneck in places that aren't used to automating everything and have better things to worry about. At least with this service they'd be able to quickly dive-in, get an idea of what something does, and if they need to, click on a few links for more information and have their questions answered within a few minutes.

The problem here is just assuming that this is a 'hard' problem that we lack the skill sets for. If we start looking at it that way, we prevent ourselves from even really trying to find any solution because our minds have already hinted at us that it's useless. "Nothing is impossible", and a community of entrepreneurs like HN should know that by now; but for some reason that curiosity, ambition, and cleverness just shuts down when looking at bigger problems that we might be a bit detached from. That doesn't make sense.