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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?

#351

Post by phoenixProgram »

the people (political people, legal people) are not a single species. there are multiple species and there is no such thing as a single dominant species. tall tales of this sort are jewish lies. the jews love to have sex with species they consider inferior and take care of their inferior offspring by using operant conditioning on society to inflict psychological wounds. they are evil bugs who breed half bug/half humans. these half-people are unable to cope with society, so the jews inflict psychological wounds on those who display real talent since the half bugs cannot stand actual competence. They hate competent people.

You can forget about the "single species" lie. Stop repeating it. That is how you can do some good for yourself and your species. Don't ask me what species you belong to.

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

#352

Post by jugularkill »

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…

iugiug

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

#353

Post by lngnmn »

whistlerbrk wrote: post #149
lngnmn wrote: post #80

as a species, no less? ;) Education then.

Besides the brevity of your answer I can't imagine a possible explanation as to why you would be downvoted. Education is by far the best way to implement positive change on a generational and self propagating basis.

There are even obvious historical evidences - one should compare the impact on Upanishads and Buddhism (which philosophy has been built upon Upanishadic) with primitive, barbarian cults which are still powerful in some unfortunate countries.

The borrowings from Greeks and Romans (and in the later times British) in progressive European nations are self-evident.

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

#354

Post by qt31415926 »

bradyo wrote: post #180

I recently went through a job search focusing on organizations doing social good. Full disclosure, I now work at Remix ( https://www.remix.com/jobs ) and we're hiring! We're a for-profit founded by a collection of former Code for America fellows helping to improve cities. I have a list of resources that I collected while I was searching as well: - The Fast Forward accelerator's tech nonprofits job board and directory…

This is such an amazing post! So resourceful, thank you so much.

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

#355

Post by mythrwy »

If we go looking for what truly betters our chances as a species I'm not sure we'd like the answers we'd find.

And I'm pretty sure most of it would fly in the face of just about every conventional human morality (which comes about largely for self serving purposes in my opinion).

Our horizons of view are necessarily limited by the narrow slice of space and time we occupy and the culture in which we come to conceive the world. We can break out a little from time to time but for the most part we can't separate our innate ideas of "social good" from that which more objectively probably is better for the species.

I understand the sentiment. I thought about it a lot. As I got older I realized the important things in society are the little things. We are individuals, there are millions of us. We generally won't dramatically alter the course of history but the way we treat others personally, the way we conduct our affairs, our character as individuals, that's what makes up a society. We have to eat and drink. It's part of life. So we sometimes have to do things that we'd rather not. But we can try to minimize our negative impact.

Also I think we partially got where we are right now because some of our ancestors were basically beasts who killed the competition and took their women. And if that hadn't happened at some level regularly we'd probably still be swinging from trees and eating seasonal fruit. I'm not sure I want to know what the implication of that is. But I try to live in peace and stay balanced which means not worrying about saving the world all the time. Because it truly cannot be saved but maybe you can be. And a few others.

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

#356

Post by JamesBarney »

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…

Norman Borlaug(Saved a billion lives) had a net worth far less than Martin Shkreli(poached a billion dollars from the sick).

So I would be very surprised if compensation is directly tied to societal value.

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

#357

Post by thomastjeffery »

sheraz wrote: post #323
thomastjeffery wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is not.

The negative effects of inequality are free to do harm in a society with capitalism. That does not make capitalism the cause of those effects, it simply means that capitalism does nothing to prevent them.

Socialism does (claims to) do some things to fight inequality, but that does not mean I must prefer it to capitalism.

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

#358

Post by thomastjeffery »

sheraz wrote: post #323
thomastjeffery wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just reread my post, and noticed that I wrote the first sentence completely wrong. It's too late to edit, so here is what I meant to say:

Inequality does not come from capitalism. Liberty allows inequality. Those "negative outcomes" come from inequality, not capitalism. Fighting capitalism (socialism) is a workaround. It's an appealing workaround because the "underlying system" is centralized, and inequality is not.

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

#360

Post by droithomme »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #266
peacetreefrog wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's comforting to think that just going to work and doing your job is actually contributing to something, but I just don't see how that can be generally true..." I can't imagine how it would NOT be true. Say you buy something from the store. Presumably you're getting more value from it than it costs, if you weren't, you wouldn't buy it. Same with a company. If an employee provides more value than their salary, it m…

You are correct about the starting conditions. A company with no revenue will devote close to 100% of its resources to creating value for customers. But as it grows revenue, shifting resources to protecting its revenue stream starts to become lucrative. Employees spend some of their time providing value to customers, and some of their time protecting the "moat" around the company. The percentage varies quite a lot, b…

"as it grows revenue, shifting resources to protecting its revenue stream starts to become lucrative"

I have a lot of nice blue chip stocks that don't do that. Companies that not only pay me dividends far greater than any savings account, but the base value of the stock increases as well. None of these companies are tech or speculative stocks. They are solid big corporations manufacturing real things that people buy to live. Maybe it's essential. Maybe it's artificial cheese and soda pop. But it's something regular people buy at the corner store or the equivalent. And there's lots of them. And this activity is essential in some way for them and nothing about the transaction is misrepresented or unreasonable.

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