We, as species, are invasive parasites. If you want to do some good for the future of the human kind, environment and this planet, invest your time in research about reducing human population by at least 2/3 without compromising future scientific discoveries and advances.
Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
51–60 of 394 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#52I really like the UN's Sustainable Development Goals as a guide for "the world's biggest problems". See them here: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300
Luckily, these days there are an abundance of ways you can 1) make money, 2) work on interesting problems, 3) work with amazing people, and 4) do social good. You used to have to choose 2 or 3 of those things, but no longer. I run a nonprofit organization that highlights these opportunities: http://impact.tech/
I also run a VC fund that supports these sorts of startups. You can see an example of the companies we back here: http://www.fifty.vc/companies/
If anyone is considering jumping into the social impact startup space, feel free to drop me a line and I can help you navigate the opportunities. First name AT the URL of the nonprofit I mentioned.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#53do something for the education
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#54You have a job, right? If your employer solves a useful problem for its customers at a reasonable price, obeys the law and treats its employees and suppliers fairly then it is doing good and you are doing good through it. Do your work conscientiously and go home happy.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#55You can do something for education.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#56You have a job, right? If your employer solves a useful problem for its customers at a reasonable price, obeys the law and treats its employees and suppliers fairly then it is doing good and you are doing good through it. Do your work conscientiously and go home happy.
This is precisely what I meant when I said this was the wrong place to ask. Thanks for providing an example.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#57Honestly, I think the most effective thing to do is find an organization doing social good, who is hiring programmers, and go work for them. There are plenty of non-profits and governments that do a ton of good, and employ developers to work on their web sites and infrastructures. A good friend of mine is a developer for the ACLU, for example. There are also organizations like Code for America that do open source wor…
Thank you for the Code for America recommendation, checking them out now
Jennifer Pahlka, the founder of Code for America, has been making the rounds lately.
Good conversations on both the Econtalk podcast [0] (which I know is an HN favorite) and the Long Now Foundation [1].
Procurement sounds absolutely awful at the federal level; she makes a compelling case for how needed modern software design and development processes are in providing effective and cost efficient government services.
[0]http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/05/jennifer_pahlka.htm... [1]http://longnow.org/seminars/02017/feb/01/fixing-government-b...
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#58You have a job, right? If your employer solves a useful problem for its customers at a reasonable price, obeys the law and treats its employees and suppliers fairly then it is doing good and you are doing good through it. Do your work conscientiously and go home happy.
That's assuming "giving people what they want" is inherently good, or worse, the only good. It is neither.
People getting what they want is neither good nor bad; it is effective at distributing resources. But this is distribution isnt inherently good either (effective != good).
We don't need to define "Good" in order to observe this. Very few definitions by anyone, let alone OP, produce this equivalence.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#59UN Volunteers ( http://www.unv.org/ ) has a Technology development section. ( https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/opportunities?f[]=fiel... ) A lot of it is web work, but there's sometimes app development.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#60I started a project to link charity streams to 3rd party charity fundraiser websites to allow better exposure of the cause and the fundraiser progress in real time.
I'm currently working on version 2 which returns a lot of stastical information, allows for graphs and better statistics to be shown on stream overlays and a back end console for auditing and reporting purposes.
I am currently breaking up each part and exposing them over HTTP APIs to allow future integrations and to allow the system to scale for large streaming events such as Special Effect's Gameblast.
The gaming for good initiative is ripe for new tools and services, as there are very few players in this space, to the end where I thought that I was the only one with this idea up until a few months ago.