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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?

#221

Post by sn9 »

teknopaul wrote: post #193
Beltalowda wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming. This is true, but it's been known since at least medieval times that that air pollution was pretty unhealthy; arguably a better reason to actually do something about things than climate change. The same can be said about the usage of lead in fuel and paint; people have known it was harmful well before leaded fuel was invented. The elephant…

Progress (noun) : gradual betterment. By that definition progress is always good.

Except sometimes things are called "progress" to sell them as ideas, but then it turns out the negative costs outweigh the proposed benefits.

Or maybe there's progress in the short-term but not in the long-term.

For example, the globalization of our supply chains was probably viewed as progress by some, but that very efficiency also involved a trade-off in resiliency that resulted in how brittle we now know them to be from the events of the last two years.

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

#222

Post by jareklupinski »

loudmax wrote: post #50

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by ou…

obligatory "I miss Pidgin"

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

#223

Post by Nicholas_C »

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 ...…

Many companies are very interested in measuring, managing, and reporting their fossil fuel/carbon usage. A few software companies that provide this off the top of my head:

https://iconicair.io/ https://www.sinaitechnologies.com/ https://www.persefoni.com/

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

#224

Post by tau5210 »

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 ...…

I am rather skeptical it is a matter of software or any tool for that matter with problems like this.

Similar to Paul Grahma's design paradox: " I call it the design paradox. You might think that you could make your products beautiful just by hiring a great designer to design them. But if you yourself don't have good taste, how are you going to recognize a good designer?" (http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

As long as people (including the business owners, customers, the rest of society, the rest of the world, etc) don't recognize the cost or don't care sufficiently even if they do recognize it, the best tool still won't have any effect nevermind solve. Usually, that's the critical problem, not the tools. And of course, tools won't fix people either. Software is useful only if used by the right people in the right way, which is usually much later.

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

#225

Post by gregable »

Electricity Demand Response / Micro Grids. Right now, most electrical systems, even internet connected ones, don't have any awareness of electrical supply and demand. Most of the grid is designed for power to flow one direction.

As we bring more intermittent power supplies onto the grid, things get harder. The batteries in electric cars are a small, but growing storage capacity that currently can't flow "backwards". Hardware will be a large part of this, but software will be needed too.

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

#227

Post by nabaraz »

midiguy wrote: post #179
nabaraz wrote: post #155

Websites for non-technical people. I don't think this is a solved problem. We have a lot of choices with WordPress, Wix, etc., but the drawbacks are too much. 1) You don’t own the domain. 2) Personalization is limited, so you end up with a generic page. 3) They cost too much. I think something like Gatsby+ +Github Actions+Azure Static Apps in one tool. Everyone should have a personalized web page that they own.

It comes down to the inherent tradeoff of flexibility vs ease of use. Wix is easy to use because it does not offer much customizability. If you made it flexible enough to create any layout, theme, etc, you would probably end up with a GUI that is straight up harder to learn and still less flexible than code (remember Dreamweaver?) For what it's worth, most musicians, small business owners, etc. I know are pretty happ…

> remember Dreamweaver?

Reminds me of Frontpage days. Most of the web pages had marquee (floating text?) and sound those days.

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

#228

Post by ehnto »

loudmax wrote: post #50

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by ou…

Slack/Discord are just hosted community platforms, I wouldn't put them in the same vein as Facebook/Twitter. Slack/Discord/IRC communities have intentionally curated walls for specific purposes, just as we do in the real world, I think that is fine.

Would love to hear thoughts to the contrary however. It's worth discussing as this is a big problem for an internet hitting critical mass in participation.

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

#229

Post by webmaven »

dane-pgp wrote: post #181
webmaven wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone needs to solve online identity and reputation (in a privacy-preserving way) so that you can accumulate trust on one site/service and carry that over to another. The problem is that most of the existing ways of transferring reputation (or the appearance of it) between contexts result in opportunities for arbitrage: celebrity endorsements, scientists supporting theories outside of their field, con artists lev…

> transferring reputation ... between contexts The problem is, the systems we have today don't put walls between contexts but between implementations . If someone is a famous actor, and they have millions of followers on Twitter, then they can tweet out some hot take on vaccines and all their followers will see that. However, if a scientist has a lot of followers on Twitter, but wants to move their account over to Ma…

And yet, the actor can far more easily leverage their Twitter following to establish an Instagram audience, to post the same hot takes.

Conclusion: Celebrity reputation is more transferable than science reputation.

Which is beside the point, because the ability to migrate between services doesn't affect the issue I was pointing out that the potential of making social media followers, Academy Award nominations, and academic citation metrics all fungible with an "Internet points" abstraction even in principle is almost certainly a disaster waiting to happen.

I'm commenting on the "trust and reputation" aspect in the bit I quoted, and you're replying on the topic of identity and federating the social graph (where I actually don't disagree with you).

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

#230

Post by Mandatum »

loudmax wrote: post #50

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by ou…

And they never will for the same reason email, IRC, forums and every other form of commnication gets gobbled up and surpassed by private companies.

Open source software isn't driven by a dictator with a better vision - software projects run by good dictators will always win out against "built and design by committee" open source projects.

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