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Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

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Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#211

Post by pmags »

simne wrote: post #152

I'm not sure about biggest, but on of the biggest sure. Two problems. 1. DNA sequencing, now is two part process (I simplify a lot, sure) - at first stage, target DNA divided for small pieces, and those pieces sequenced to digital codes and saved to database. Than in second part, computer cluster works few months, to connect those pieces to one chain. And this is very expensive process even considering few gigabytes…

1) I'm afraid you're about 15 years out of date with your perception of how genome sequencing and assembly works. Nobody is assembling PacBio, MinION or other long-read data (or short read illumina data for that matter) with slow aligners in Perl.

2) see AlphaFold2 and other related methods -- the protein folding problem is still a big challenge but the field is moving in leaps and bounds

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#212

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mxuribe wrote: post #57
frozenlettuce wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently the city that I live was hit by pretty bad landslides and floods - some folks organized how to distribute donations to support centers, but as there was no tool for that they used a public google sheet. At some points there were dozens of people using it at the same time. Luckily no one vandalized it

Its funny you mention Google Sheets...At the non-profit where i worked we would research whatever available software/tools would help...and sometimes we looked at software/tools built specifically for non-profit use cases...but you know what? Almost half the time, for many reasons (sometimes because time is of the essence, or because non-techie non-profit people can not wrap their heads around some fancy non-profit t…

Programmers have instinctive contempt for spreadsheets, both legitimate (I had to scale/implement a real system to do what ridiculouly spaghetti-coded spreadsheet X did) and illegitimate (this allow untrained office person X to do what I, awesome programmer, could be doing for 10x the cost).

Spreadsheets are by now almost... 40 years old? And they are ubiquitous in business still despite the explosion on software written for various purposes. The spreadsheet model is a powerful computing and automation platform, with good-enough zero-code UI and organization.

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#213

Post by contingencies »

A respawn of mobile phones with local mesh networking and a user-oriented security model instead of the manufacturer-owned, carrier-tracked, state-tapped state of affairs we have now. Oh, and upgradeability would be great. We are all walking around with supercomputers in our pockets, and due to software issues we can't use them.

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#214

Post by contingencies »

perlgeek wrote: post #109

One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs. Examples: * burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change * during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state * plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste ...…

If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.

Agreed. Supply chain in general is actually a substantial area requiring innovation (see shipageddon/chipageddon/every sales or purchasing department ever). I generalised some thoughts about an actor-transaction-oriented protocol model with features such as risk modeling, arbitrary assets (eg. physical trade) and settlement paths, arbitrary precision, fee/tax/discounts and redundant and multi-hop paths over here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/globalcitizen/ifex-protoco... - since then I've moved in to manufacturing and it absolutely would be a godsend. Happy to help someone else pick up a similar line of development.

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#215

Post by itake »

vikingerik wrote: post #141
itake wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My complaints with reddit model is: 1/ Moderators aren't always aligned with the community (see recent /r/antiwork scandal). 2/ Reddit does not pay moderators for the labor they provide. Moderation is basically a job that takes hours of time and they profit off the backs of that free labor.

Moderators are paid in power. They get to apply their opinions to determine what others can see. That is a very tempting wage for many.

Power doesn't put food on the table.

At best, moderators will be influenced by corporate paychecks and at worst be exclusively composed of privileged people that don't need to work.

This is the reason we pay politicians.

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#217

Post by jslakro »

metta2uall wrote: post #94

Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive & informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one's typical posts.. I'm working on an experiment at https://toplists.app/ that tries to leverage existing social networks, but this would probably work much better if e.g. Twitter expanded its "pinned"…

I have noticed all these years that many social networks falls easily in a descending spiral of garbage content "just" because is what our lazy brain seems to enjoy on small doses. Monetary motivations are not aligned to good content all the time also

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#218

Post by mxuribe »

kaetemi wrote: post #93
mxuribe wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As @fsflover noted, there is Linux as an option...But i'll do you one slightl;y better: try Ubuntu Mate. This is a specific "type" of Linux. This is a distribution of Linux named Ubuntu with a desktop environment named Mate...And the Mate desktop environment allows for a layout - named Redmond - that resembles the typical Windows UI: https://guide.ubuntu-mate.org/#panel-layouts-redmond In other words, you get more po…

I prefer Linux Mint Cinnamon.

Ah ok, so you are clearly familiar with linux. :-) Your comment made it seem like you were a Windows user. If linux mint cinnamon works for you, that's great!

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#219

Post by dane-pgp »

rg111 wrote: post #190
dane-pgp wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth checking out the approach being considered by Matrix[0] which should make the solutions scalable and thus affordable. Empowering users and communities to distribute and delegate their moderation decisions seems like it will enable more innovation, rather than users being stuck with a "one size fits no one" regime. [0] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/19/combating-abuse-in-matrix...

> Empowering users and communities to distribute and delegate their moderation So, basically what Reddit does. This leads to the creation of echo-chambers where the power is at the hand of select few.

> So, basically what Reddit does.

No, not at all. If Reddit were to adopt this model, then anyone could act as a moderator for any subreddit, publishing their modding decisions and letting everyone else opt in to applying those decisions to the posts and comments that they see.

I suspect that if someone's modding decisions could be ignored at the click of a button, there would be less temptation for them to abuse their power, and the role of moderator would no longer attract people who want to force their view onto others.

Re: Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

#220

Post by ISL »

dimatter wrote: post #177
ISL wrote: post #5

A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption. If you extend from five years to fifty, then the answer will be climate-related.

>A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption. signal?

Can I use Signal to prove the authenticity of authorship on documents?
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