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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?

#241

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

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…

On the contrary, Matrix and Mastodon give more freedom to their users. Which will mean, unfortunately, more fake news, more echo chambers and in general more decoupling of online reality from the real reality.

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

#242

Post by rfrec0n »

ericfrazier wrote: post #143

Right now, government holds corporations accountable. I think the people themselves should hold corporations accountable and stop relying on the state, which is owned by the corporations. Consumers need to be conscious of where their money is going and what causes it supports. If a person believes in trans-person's rights they probably shouldn't be eating at Chick-Fil-A. There's no faster feedback for bad corporate b…

> Right now, government holds corporations accountable I know that you meant that the role of government is that they are supposed to hold corporation's accountable but as you said, when the same people that run the government are the same people that run the large corporations, that will never be possible. We need to find a new way for everyone to be able to hold them accountable. However I don't think that consumers really have any influence with their wallets nowadays. Consumers have very little financial influence in the grand scheme of things because as long as other corporations or the government is willing to continue doing business with the targeted corporation, it's profits will never be significantly damaged.

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

#244

Post by simonmic »

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 ...…

This sounds like a recurring dream of mine: ubiquitous eco accounting (energy, resources, pollution, future impact, ...) , becoming a normal mainstream thing everybody does as a matter of course.

As a plain text accounting fan, I usually think of this as the way. Then I think we could do it more easily in spreadsheets, if we wanted to. Then I think spreadsheets don't induce collaboration, education, auditability and persistence the way PTA can.

Then I think more software is rather far from being our biggest need. Building relationship with nature and ourselves is far more impactful. Still, we are complex creatures, capable of doing many things at once..

OP, that's a great question; I see the Cardano project, I think it's one you should take a look at.

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

#246

Post by cupofpython »

andix wrote: post #14
mg wrote: post #12

I think that aggregating medical research studies could lead to a significant improvement of the worlds health situation. There are tens of millions of medical studies available online. But no system to look at the data in an aggregated way. I have been doing data analysis and aggregation in several fields. Every once in a while, I dabble with the concept and implementation of a tool to do it for medical studies. It…

Even more interesting would be, to automatically link patients medical history with studies, and show the doctor some suggestions: did you consider rare disease X?; there is not enough data, do test Y&Z because then we know much more

Please remember that we do not have a perfect litmus for every disease, especially rare diseases. And statistics nearly falls apart entirely when assessing a single individual. So although i agree there is potential.. I believe the potential is more along the lines of "You have 15 patients in your practice with X, Y, Z active symptoms - it is incredibly likely that 1 one of them have A, or 3 of them have B"

There is significant reason to be hesitant about having an algorithm suggest every sickness under the sun that hasn't been "ruled out" by testing or statistics yet. Ever use WebMD to try to diagnose yourself?

In other words, I worry about what this approach would do the signal to noise ratio for doctors.

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

#247

Post by huqedato »

Any software with application to the field of energy (generation, resources, exploitation, storage, research). The "energy problem" will become more acute in the short/medium term. I would invest in a startup that creates software in this domain.

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

#248

Post by simne »

pmags wrote: post #211
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

1. You should read carefully and not tie to some part of text and miss all others.

2. Author asks about biggest opportunities, and I give example. I suggest you to learn, how to be less toxic in conversation, as this will make your life better.

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

#250

Post by dane-pgp »

webmaven wrote: post #229
dane-pgp wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ac…

Thank you for clarifying. I still think the situation isn't quite as bleak as you're suggesting.

> 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 don't recommend that any community makes a social media follower equivalent in value to an academic citation metric, but there may be specific cases where, for example, having more than 1000 social media followers grants you the same allowance of a resource (e.g. compute cycles, or disk space) as having 1 research paper cited in a prestigious journal.

The important thing is that it would be up to each community to decide for themselves how much each type of reputation is worth. (They could even decide that having an Academy Award nomination should give negative reputation, although if identities are anonymous then a user would have plausible deniability).

It's also worth noting that social media followers are, in some sense, already fungible. For example, some monetisation programs require at least 1000 followers, and some brand deals require a specific audience size. Obviously that is treating one follower as completely interchangeable for any other follower.

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