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Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#321

Post by lkbm »

simplicitea wrote: post #252
ChuckMcM wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 'bettering humanity with Windows' is open for debate. Some would argue that Windows, and the security problems it brought to the Internet, was the enabler for the single largest source of income for criminal enterprise outside of the drug trade. Now it is much more nuanced than that, network based criminal activity has existed since the invention of the telegraph, but I would be willing to wager even on a per…

| poor update policies which ones? forcing them or not forcing them?

Neither.

1. Bundling them -- it should be trivial to turn off all non-security updates while still getting all security updates.

Counterpoint: There might be no unambiguous distinction between security update or non-security update.

2. Not having them. WannaCry was so bad because Microsoft stopped providing security updates for a system that's still widely used.

Counterpoint: It seems odd to insist Microsoft continue to provide updates to a fifteen-year-old system they end-of-lifed three years ago. Should we be able to force them to keep providing updates indefinitely by steadfastly refusing to upgrade?

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#322

Post by siquick »

popeshoe wrote: post #21
tacostakohashi wrote: post #12

Work as a programmer for whoever will pay you the most. Invest, and donate money to causes you care about.

If you're on HN you're probably also conscious of your philanthropy being used for the maximal good, in which case you may be interested in projects like https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

Thanks for posting

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#323

Post by sheraz »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #282
arglebarnacle wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the idea that capitalism itself systematically causes inequality is not a crazy thing to believe. You obviously don't agree and that's fine, but it's not the case that every smart person believes the "negative outcomes found in capitalist societies" can be resolved without a fundamental change in the underlying system.

My thought process: Inequality causes capitalism. Liberty allows inequality. Those "negative outcomes" come from inequality, not capitalism. Fighting capitalism is a workaround. It's an appealing workaround because the "underlying system" is centralized, and inequality is not.

Can you expand on how capitalism is an outcome of inequality?

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#324

Post by julianmarq »

NoGravitas wrote: post #61
falcolas wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crudely phrased, but the quantity of posts which show up in opposition to anything that helps society at large at the cost of profits is remarkably high, and getting higher as time goes on. All anecdotal, of course.

Indeed. Go read the comments on the "My Family's Slave" article from a few days ago. A large proportion of them were supportive of slavery, or at least identified strongly with the slavers rather than their victim. Furthermore, the admins apparently disabled downvoting of comments, and detached strongly anti-slavery subthreads. HN and the HN demographic are strongly interested in preserving/advancing a particular soc…

> Go read the comments on the "My Family's Slave" article from a few days ago. A large proportion of them were supportive of slavery, or at least identified strongly with the slavers rather than their victim. Furthermore, the admins apparently disabled downvoting of comments, and detached strongly anti-slavery subthreads.

Both of these are outright lies. You can dress them however you want if you dare to reply but these are lies.

And why bother? It's not as if everyone can go check the discussion and see that these are lies. Weird.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#325

Post by daguar »

simplicitea wrote: post #220
daguar wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question! Overall I'd say our gov't partners are incredibly supportive. A lot of why these processes are hard are not by intentional design, but rather by _unintentional, non-design_. What do I mean? It's that these systems evolve over time, via massive waterfall IT procurement processes, and you often have someone (say, one county, or one unit) who proposes to add one more question because it makes it better f…

Actually, to follow up -- you mention simplifying the process to be easier on the user. Are myriad of questions one must laboriously answer to enroll in EBT programs a matter of... legislation? taxes? I would imagine that the questions have to do with honing in on a complex placement within the law which determines benefit levels. How do you go about simplifying a process which requires a large number of distinct dat…

That's a fantastic question. There's a few strategies we've used to build a service design that deals with those things:

1. After the initial application, the next step is a phone interview where they're going to ask many of the same questions and verify information anyway. So what we do is focus on the 10-15 questions that make getting someone to that interview as quick and efficient on the gov't side as possible, as well as prepares the interviewer with the best information.

For example, there are complex rules around income and expenses (earned/unearned, self-employed, utilities, child care expenses) but we basically have found that the best situation is — since they'll be talking with someone who knows those rules extremely well — focus on the basics: who's in your household, do you qualify for expedited (emergency) service, etc.

2. Many of those ~200 questions really CONDITIONAL on some (eg, do you have a felony? do you have a felony for DRUGS?) —— but candidly many online gov't forms are just the digitization of paper forms (which obviously can't do conditional showing easily.)

3. We've found that there's a ton of low-hanging fruit. For example, we have an easy way for clients to take pictures of documents they need to submit from their phone (these days, these are often SUPER high quality, even on low-end devices.) We send those to counties via secure e-mail, which means it comes instantly. This has been so successful in one county that they're now using this document feature across ALL programs (health insurance, cash aid) and actually asking clients to send in documents WHILE they're on the phone with them, meaning they can hold for a second, check the email, see the pic, and issue the benefits immediately (rather than waiting for them to mail/fax/scan and upload after creating an account.)

Overall, we've found that despite that "intrinsic complexity," there's still a huge space for simplification just using what computers — and web sites — are good at.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#326

Post by julianmarq »

adamsea wrote: post #175
threepipeproblm wrote: post #163

Although it sounds like they are working on some important issues, I'm not sure I'd want to work for an organization who posts racially targeted messages -- which presumably they think are ok with some races filled into the blanks, but not others. https://twitter.com/JazmynLatimer/status/864585574581059584 It seems like non-racist messaging would be a better approach!

A little history-and-context-free, are we? First, this is the text of the tweet in question: "Any black or brown engineers wanna work at Code for America on criminal justice? Come code to keep people out of jail, it's worth it." Your assumption that the poster is not OK with non black/brown engineers is an assumption. I'd add, your comment is context-free and somewhat disingenuous, considering that we live in a socie…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#United_St...

Jeez, that entry needs heavy rewrites. "Racism in the housing sector can be seen as early as the 1930s"? Really? Couldn't it be seen earlier?

And that's not institutional racism anyways; there's no public institution enforcing racism in the US. There's plenty of racism at the societal level, but it hasn't been backed by law for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#327

Post by nyargh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #301
nyargh wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NGOs are not simply biding their time waiting for the next Tech Messiah to come along and save the world. Their tech problems are terribly boring and mundane. We deal with this all the time. Well meaning techie comes along with a bunch of ideas, none of which are particularly compelling and all require a ton of work (on both sides). When we don't immediately do backflips, they disappear. Rinse, repeat.

It's good that you mention this and it's an important datapoint for OP's question. That said, I don't think OP gave any indication anywhere to dismiss them as fly-by-night techie seeking social status. There are people (myself included) honestly asking how they could maximize their positive impact on this world, especially using the skills they already have.

Yes yes, #notalltechies - but as stated above, best thing you can do is to take your wildly disproportionate capacity for earning, do the due diligence and find a group worth sponsoring.

edit:

Let me explain why donations like these are particularly valuable for orgs that survive on donations. Every bit of grant money comes with a huge amount of donor service attached to it, from the initial grant writing, to metric collection, to reporting and presentation - then the hassle of having to do it all again next year and hoping you still have the donor's attention. Of course all of these things take away from your core mission, and sooner or later you are wasting huge amounts of time doing fundraising and donor service.

If you find under resourced people doing effective work for a cause you believe in, a no strings attached gift at the right time can be a huge relief.

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#328

Post by uhtred »

peacetreefrog wrote: post #188

Just read all the top line comments here. Interesting that no one had mentioned the one thing that has probably done the most to "better our chances as species" in the last few hundred years, and has helped hundreds of millions in India and China get out of backbreaking poverty and accumulate some wealth. And that is... Work hard, accumulate skills, and become better at your normal job. Even if you're not writing ope…

Surely it depends on where someone spends the money they earn doing their job?

If I earn a good salary but I buy nothing but fast food or the cheapest (factory farmed) meat, cheap clothes made in sweatshops, expensive gadgets from companies that exploit workers, own 3 gas guzzling cars, have 5 children, vote for politicians who enjoy waging war on on other countries, how am I making the world better?

Re: Ask HN: How can I do social good through programming?

#330

Post by shawndimantha »

simplicitea wrote: post #261
shawndimantha wrote: post #260

We are taking a technology driven approach to improving the US healthcare system at the Peterson Center on Healthcare, our goal is to improve the quality of healthcare accessible to all, reduce the total cost of care our system bears, and improve the experience of healthcare professionals delivering this care. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, on HN or by email at sdimantha(at)petersonhealthcare(dot…

What is a problem that you have recently defined and solved?

We solve a variety of problems, but one example is physician burnout, especially in primary care. We've implemented technology enabled behavior change initiatives that help primary care practices implement and maintain evidence-based habits like team based care and ensuring staff operate at the top of their license meaning more time with patients and less time with paperwork for physicians and creating a more sustainable environment. There are other areas we address in primary care like patient access to care, quality care gaps and more that we break into smaller chunks. Our overall focus is on dramatically improving the performance (quality of care, cost) of the healthcare system piece by piece at an increasing pace, starting with primary care and eventually moving to different focus areas like high need patients.
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