You certainly won't find me on twitter/irc/aim, but I read Hacker News because there are generally intelligent stories. And a "Do you need Twitter' thread is right up my alley. Actually I work on computer vision not cancer, but if it ends up working out cars will drive themselves and some lives will be saved. It probably doesn't pay as well as founding a throw away social networking Web 2.0 whatever, but it is more fulfilling than networking on Twitter all day to see if I can get my noticed for something.