Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 260 posts

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

#251

Post by ericfrazier »

1270018080 wrote: post #149
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…

Like an app where you input your opinion on an issue, and you can find businesses with leadership or lobbying efforts that don't oppose you? You'd run out of places to shop pretty quickly with 5 corporations run by oligarchs that own basically all consumer products in America.

An app that suggests alternative products made by companies aligned with your politics. Instead of buying Nestle made cheese, why not try Lucerne, etc. Slowly over time change will happen and good companies that people want to support will live and bad companies will die. It all starts with a knowledgeable consumer who believes in their own power.

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

#252

Post by ericfrazier »

rfrec0n wrote: post #242
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 consumer…

When corporations lose large chunks of consumers, they notice. The problem is that it's too easy for corporations to hide behind a million brand names and subsidiaries. Even people who are adamant about boycotting Nestle still end up buying from a Nestle subsidiary because it's almost impossible not too. Nestle has so many subsidiaries how can anyone keep track? An easy solution to this problem, of not easily knowing if the product you want to purchase is made by a company you boycott, would change the future the most.

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

#253

Post by thephyber »

aabajian wrote: post #54

I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don't choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there's no later-in-life educational safety net for adults without those early childhood benefits. If you went to a crap high school because of where you lived, you have limited options after graduating, and even less if you dropped-out. Your current options…

There is nothing in this post specific to adult education. The same exact issues interfere with exercise, diet, sleep, relationships, career advancement, etc.

In a world where adults are given freedom, the government doesn’t generally take part in motivating them to do anything outside of paying taxes, avoid breaking laws, participation in military conscription. Nearly everything else has always been up to the individual or their social circle to generate motivation.

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

#254

Post by thephyber »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #84
aabajian wrote: post #54

I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don't choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there's no later-in-life educational safety net for adults without those early childhood benefits. If you went to a crap high school because of where you lived, you have limited options after graduating, and even less if you dropped-out. Your current options…

You're absolutely right that education is broken. It's been captured and commodified by a cult of testing, shallow training, exclusion, competition and normativity that cripples maturation, creative thought human development. Can technology help with that? Maybe. Look at what Wikipedia, Internet Archive, YouTube, Vimeo and other sites have done. We've never had access to more high quality learning materials in histor…

I would argue that most of your complaints aren’t actually about education, but about the increasing specialization of the world. The more people there are, the more pressure there is for each individual to do something that can’t be commoditized. Universities seek students with high scores and unique motivation. Companies seek employees from great schools and with unique skills+training+motivation.

> There are many very successful self-educated people in the world.

How is this relevant? There always have been and always will be. The education system wasn’t designed for auto-didacts. They will thrive no matter the system. It is for the average worker bee to make sure they aren’t stuck with limited capability/mobility, which is bad for society. The question nowadays is related to whether the education system is too old to train the average worker for modern jobs as opposed to the old Prussian factory style education.

Education reform through technology hit a plateau early. MOOCs seem to have bad engagement metrics, so they suffer from the same problems that the worst in-person schools have. Few companies use online certificates as a stronger signal than branded, accredited 4-year university degrees.

I would argue that YouTube has been as much of a curse as a blessing. For those individuals with any non-trivial amount of gullibility, they can easily fall down a rabbit hole of false facts. Finding rigorously verified facts is more difficult, but still possible. I would have a really hard time hiring someone who believed the world was flat because they learned it dozens of videos on YouTube; that is a signal of high motivation but an inability to filter signal from the noise.

I agree that really reforming education will involve all of the tough things in your last paragraph. But you didn’t once mention parents in your comment, which is really interesting. I haven’t seen a movement of homeschooling which is much different from the anti-secular Christians have been pushing for decades.

Charter schools seem to be a mixed bag. Their biggest feature seems to be that they select their pupils/families (selective admissions, expulsion, etc). It will be interesting to see if any charter companies can grow to a national scale and keep high quality teaching results.

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

#255

Post by nonrandomstring »

thephyber wrote: post #254
nonrandomstring wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that education is broken. It's been captured and commodified by a cult of testing, shallow training, exclusion, competition and normativity that cripples maturation, creative thought human development. Can technology help with that? Maybe. Look at what Wikipedia, Internet Archive, YouTube, Vimeo and other sites have done. We've never had access to more high quality learning materials in histor…

I would argue that most of your complaints aren’t actually about education, but about the increasing specialization of the world. The more people there are, the more pressure there is for each individual to do something that can’t be commoditized. Universities seek students with high scores and unique motivation. Companies seek employees from great schools and with unique skills+training+motivation. > There are many…

Many good points I agree with. Especially on the mixed blessing of YouTube etc.

> your complaints aren’t actually about education, but about the increasing specialization of the world.

I hadn't noticed. Can you maybe give an example of where my aim is off? To me, education is at the centre of my thought regardless the way the world is turning because it's about more than filling jobs.

> How is this relevant? (that there are many very successful self-educated people in the world.)

Sure, I meant to imply that actually autodidacts, and the plain-old 'talented' have less opportunity to thrive regardless as certified education becomes essentially mandatory. Sure, with the right social connections, supreme confidence and some money you can still freestyle through life. But requirements for credentials are closing in. The "Education Industry" is not just about teaching people, it's about erecting systems of trust and verification, metrics, models, passports and gatekeepers, serving industry as an outsourced filter and so on.

Perhaps I would say; there are many very successful self-educated people in the world today, who would not make it if they were born now and faced the gauntlet of the twenty first century judgement machine.

> Education reform through technology hit a plateau early. MOOCs seem

Yes I am aware of that functional saturation. I was involved early in research on what we called CBT (computer based training) and we saw limits as early as 1990. What I am more concerned about now is the non didactic encroachment of tech. Google and Microsoft are taking over the academy not in the classroom but at the infrastructural, communication and behavioural level. This is not a value neutral prospect, they very much are bringing SV values into places they don't belong, along with normalising permanent surveillance and extraction of psychometric data from students.

> But you didn’t once mention parents in your comment, which is really interesting.

Oh you got me. I am one, so it's just too confusing. There's a can of worms there next to a tin-opener and I am resisting the temptation as much as I can.

respects

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

#256

Post by tcmart14 »

duped wrote: post #140
yojo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see that software too, but most of the issues you describe (plastics, greenhouse gasses) had impacts that were non-obvious at the outset. Then they were controversial, then no longer controversial but heavily lobbied. At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming. Then the science came out but was lobbied against. Now the science is (mostly) accepted, but we still don’t know c…

I don't know how software can be used to fix any of the "big" problems other than as an avenue for information and manipulation through social media. Like for example we know that if we want to do anything about climate change we probably need to change our diets. I don't know how we can convince anyone to do that except through questionable means like social media campaigns.

Software may not cause a change in diet, but machine learning and software stacks are being employed to help boast yields on agricultural output. It may not change peoples diets, but if it helps farmers who grow cops know when is best to water, fertilize or know the weather to plan their activities and results in better quality and quantity yields, it is going to have an impact.

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

#257

Post by solarkraft »

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…

> the inherent tradeoff of flexibility vs ease of use

But it’s not inherent. Making a UI that can do both is hard, but possible.

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

#258

Post by solarkraft »

Reproducible builds. There is no (!) other way to trust binaries you download from the web. And the best E2EE is worthless when your client is compromised.

Nix. Makes dependency management kind of magic (but requires so much more development to make it practical for common people).

Data being a liability. Stuff like data breaches being adequately punished to make overreaching tracking unprofitable and encourage E2EE everywhere.

Open platforms. Apple being forced to allow running software on iOS devices.

Federation. Imagine the E-Mail model for everything. Matrix and Mastodon are leading the new bunch, but still have quite some adoption gains to make by improving the UX.

GUI programming. Think Blockly, but for real work. This will first be used to extend end user application with scripting and eventually make its way into general programming. A lot of tooling potential can be unleashed when you stop forcing the semantics of code into a linear text representation.

Traditional SaaS ceasing to be a viable business model. Ok, this is just a wish, but you can’t depend on something that can change or completely go away at any time. The JetBrains model is reasonable.

Explicitly not mentioned: Distributed databases (blockchain), VR.

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

#259

Post by teknopaul »

Beltalowda wrote: post #197
teknopaul wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Better" for who? And many "betterments" come with downsides and trade-offs, too. It's rarely that simple.

My point was just about the ambiguity of the word progess.

I agree that development/forward movement is not always good (or inevitable, and a deep rooted bias)

And that "good" needs context or is a simplification.

I'nt language fun: it's both logically correct and incorrect to say that progress is always progress. ;)

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

#260

Post by webmaven »

dane-pgp wrote: post #250
webmaven wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 met…

> 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.

Okay, let's explore that. Now a researcher has an incentive to go buy social media followers as a hack to get compute resources.

The problem with these sorts of equivalencies is that they are often transitive ($ = followers, followers = compute, therefore $ = compute). I've exploited some myself in a small way (eg. created Gmail accounts to generate 'referrals' to get more free storage), but many developer services have recently had to discontinue their free tiers due to exploitation for mining bitcoin, and there is a whole subculture of travel points and credit card reward hacks, eg. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/13/137795995/how-...

Formalizing a mechanism for reputational equivalencies could lead to an explosion of exploitable edge cases similar in spirit to privilege escalation in a security context.

Post reply on HN