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Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
81–90 of 394 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#82https://www.github.com/open-source-economics/tax-calculator
Open source tax-calculator for tax policy analysis. Used by many policymakers to inform their decisions about tax policy via the TaxBrain GUI (https://www.ospc.org/taxbrain). Influences decisions that affect hundreds of millions of lives.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ummmmmm but Uber made the world a better place? (for me anyway)
Did it make your world a better place, or just add a bit of convenience whose cost was distributed to people you don't know?
Disrupting the taxi mafia has definitely made the world a better place.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#84Work for a B Corporation: https://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#85Work with mission-driven businesses. B Corps[0] are a good place to start. There's nothing quite like coming to work every day with a group of like-minded folks who want to make a dent in the universe. My company, www.grove.co, strives to help families making it easy to buy sustainable products vs. conventional CPG. It seemed a bit crazy when we started, but now literally thousands of families get sustainable product…
B Corps don't always stay B Corps when they get all grown up: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-18/the-barba...
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#86I help women become happier by making love with them. It's for free.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The HN demographic is spectacularly disinterested in the well-being of humanity. Wait, what?
You can see it in the many comments claiming that working at an ordinary day job or donating your income to charity is akin to the social good asked for by OP. It's a failure of imagination to assume that you can do more good for the world as programmer #9001 at Facebook who donates some of his income to effective altruism than as a programmer who adds all of her value to some other cause. A good programmer making 10…
It's a failure of imagination to assume that you can do more good for the world as programmer #9001 at Facebook who donates some of his income to effective altruism than as a programmer who adds all of her value to some other cause.
Consider law, for example. To use round numbers, biglaw mid-career in NYC could target $500k/yr, and plenty of lawyers are working for non-profits at $50k/yr. So one could choose to take the $500k/yr, plus donate enough to a non-profit to hire two people full time. Now you have 2x your "more than x value".
The numbers in tech are actually not much different, for certain skill sets. It's also important to remember that skill sets are not fungible this way. I could be really good at something HFT or OR companies really want, but only middling at what a non-profit needs. This affords a sort of arbitrage opportunity.
Another option - chase a high paying career for 10-15 years, retire with a modest but secure income, move to a cheaper location and volunteer the remainder of your working life to charities.
etc. etc. be imaginative.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#88I think the best social good comes from fostering a more civilized environment. Sure, we need things like fire fighters and EMS. But keep in mind that fire fighters also try to do fire prevention. Sometimes, people get so focused on how to be a hero (metaphorically looking for the best way to fight the worst conflagrations) that they overlook opportunities to do more valuable though less "sexy" prevention.
Anything that helps feed people well or better, promotes germ control, reduces social friction in some way, helps marginalized peoples earn a living or helps people of limited means access basic decent housing promotes the social good. But those things are often not the heroics people have in mind when asking this type question.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#89I'm working on an application that will allow organizations to better keep up with the homeless. From what I've heard a lot of folks who are chronically homeless difficult for a single individual to keep up with so it often takes a team to keep tabs on them. Sometimes information isn't adequately disbursed through the whole team and it leads to knowledge that goes nowhere. My idea was to create an app that works as a single source of truth allowing all workers to update on an individual and raise issues. Probably just going to make it donation oriented unless it really takes off and I need to acquire an operating budget.
Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?
#90Honestly, 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…
I agree with this comment. A friend of mine is a programmer taking a year off of work to volunteer for a refugee aid organization to analyze and improve their databases. It's important work, not necessarily sexy, but helps these organizations do their work. In the end he's likely to emerge a better programmer along with a body of domain knowledge. It helps to actually be passionate about the field.
can you share the organization name?