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

51–60 of 260 posts

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

#51

Post by Retric »

pjerem wrote: post #40
cbetti wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're spot on. Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about.

> Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about. I remember this being said as far as a decade ago, and still, Teslas from 2022 are emergency braking on the highway.

At scale safety is just a numbers game. A car model could be 10x as safe as human drivers and still occasionally drive directly into oncoming traffic.

Tesla isn’t anywhere close to that, but self driving cars have no reason to get worse. Systems good enough for fully self driving taxi services are already on the road and the the software is steadily getting better.

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

#52

Post by Cthulhu_ »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #9

I know crypto will be a controversial one, but in terms of potential surely even a skeptic would acknowledge it. Decentralised Finance in particular could take a huge chunk out of retail banking, investment banking and insurance.

Could, but it's not going to while the people pushing it are in it for the money.

At least retail banking is controlled and guaranteed by national and international governments and banks. If a crypto exchange goes fucky for whatever reason, you're fucked. If the value of your cryptocurrency of choice varies, you're fucked.

I mean how much did a pizza cost 10 years ago vs today in BTC vs USD. In BTC it was a few BTC, now it's 0.00025. In USD it was $10, now it's $10.

There is nothing wrong with retail / traditional banking, investment and insurance. Cryptocurrencies / blockchain technology does not solve a problem.

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

#54

Post by aabajian »

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 as an adult are to take a course online, take a course at a community college, or buy books and watch YouTube videos all on your own. The problem with these approaches is that all motivation must come from within. There's no requirement that you learn. As soon as you get bored, you can quit. A large majority of kids, even stellar students, study because they are required to do so, out of a fear of the consequences imposed by their parents, by their teachers and even by their peers.

Imagine if you had to learn a subject outside your comfort zone. How attentive would you be to an online classes? Even basic courses like algebra are very uncomfortable to adults with minimal mathematics knowledge. It's not enough to hope adults who enroll will 'do their best', you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel.

Now...I don't know what such a system would look like or even if it's possible to implement on a large scale.

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

#57

Post by mxuribe »

frozenlettuce wrote: post #38
juliushuijnk wrote: post #26

non-profits need to write all sort of reports to stakeholders to justify their funding, etc. Software that would make this easy, or otherwise make that problem go away or smaller on a global scale, should have huge positive impact: - increase positive impact of all non-profits. - improved feebackloop should also make quality better (less funds to bad non-profits that write great documents). Seems to be a problem wher…

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 tool/app), someone just ends up spionngin up some google sheet or share an excel file via sharepoint/oneDrive, etc. I used to get annoyed with this approach but then realized that i can't fully blame my former colleagues because sometimes they had to get stuff done and didn't have time/other luxury to research the "perfect tool"...Or, the landscape of available tools built for non-profits either sucks, is expensive for the value they supposed to bring, or non-profit folks don;t know how to take advantage of the purpose buolt tools,. etc. So, i learned to not get all annoyed when someone reaches for google sheets, office docs, whatever if it means that a human is helping out another human. ;-)

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

#58

Post by gameswithgo »

I see Rust with a lot of potential, especially if/when it moves into domains like aerospace and other control of critical physical hardware. These are places where a reduction of bugs saves lives and/or huge amounts of money.

Machine learning definitely has potential, if we have another surge of breakthroughs in the future amazing things will become possible

Something I would like to see is a movement for software user rights. Between hardware that locks you into to the manufacturers store, and software that is constantly interrupting you and pushing ads at you instead of allowing you to do your work, some kind of social movement to push back against these UI dark patterns is sorely needed. Using computers is absolutely horrible compared to what it could be because of these issues.

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

#60

Post by mg »

xenocratus wrote: post #23
andix wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean like this https://blog.tjcx.me/p/40k-fantastic-startup-idea ?

I remember reading that post a while back.

I was surprised the author gave up after he didn't find doctors who would pay for access. The post says he met 10 doctors in the bay area and when none of them became a paying customer, he shut his project down.

If you really think you are making a dent in the worlds health situation, why give up so fast?

Post reply on HN