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Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

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41–50 of 77 posts

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#42
post #40

I've started developing an idea for a kickstarter-like platform to document, socialize and (forgive me) gamify individual actions towards climate change improvements. If we could get a certain percentage of populations to change some basics in their lives, and influence governmental policy in kind, we could take more responsibility for our own impacts, and our collective contributions. Very nascent, researching and b…

I'd like to discuss this - can you create a forum or similar, or I will?

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#43

The web is not very green or very accessible. Every bloated web page requires a lot of electrons to be moved around. Recently the web has evolved with CSS Grid and this means that you no longer need to have web pages made of 'div soup' with every 'div' using half a dozen non-semantic class attributes. It is extremely rare for a web page to be 10% or higher in actual content, if you look at the actual document and don…

I can't tell if this is a joke or not, but HTML5 and lighter web pages are not a solution to climate change. There's no way in the world that math works out.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#44
All politics is local. Imho the most promising stuff from tech startups is the e-scooter rental stuff. City councils are naturally conservative about big transit-oriented projects, but e-scooter rentals and public transit could work together to be a great system for making dents in climate change.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#45
post #40

I've started developing an idea for a kickstarter-like platform to document, socialize and (forgive me) gamify individual actions towards climate change improvements. If we could get a certain percentage of populations to change some basics in their lives, and influence governmental policy in kind, we could take more responsibility for our own impacts, and our collective contributions. Very nascent, researching and b…

I would love to be kept up to date with something like this.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#46

I'd say from long experience of being ignored when trying to do this and similar stuff, the best payoff is to push it upstairs to those in power, the politicians, who doubtless have many other things to do, but whose job it basically is. Your job is to tackle stuff on an individual level, yourself and your family perhaps, but theirs is to deal with things on a societal level where there is much greater effectiveness.…

Totally agree with both points. I came to the conclusion that liquid democracy could bring about political change more rapidly than any other “movement”, so I built this: https://liquidcenter.org Unfortunately, Sybil-resistant online identification is still a really hard problem to solve.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#47

Can we cut the constant climate change topics? For the last three or four weeks I haven't been able to swing a dead cat without hitting somebody going into histrionics about the end being nigh because humans or cow farts are destroying the planet.

Ignoring the topic will not make the problem go away.

As for cows, the biggest source of methane emission in livestock comes from belching rather than farts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#48
post #40

I've started developing an idea for a kickstarter-like platform to document, socialize and (forgive me) gamify individual actions towards climate change improvements. If we could get a certain percentage of populations to change some basics in their lives, and influence governmental policy in kind, we could take more responsibility for our own impacts, and our collective contributions. Very nascent, researching and b…

I'd like to discuss this - can you create a forum or similar, or I will?

not sure what you have in mind, but i'm game... my profile email address is also valid.

have slack, too.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#49
post #40

I've started developing an idea for a kickstarter-like platform to document, socialize and (forgive me) gamify individual actions towards climate change improvements. If we could get a certain percentage of populations to change some basics in their lives, and influence governmental policy in kind, we could take more responsibility for our own impacts, and our collective contributions. Very nascent, researching and b…

I would love to be kept up to date with something like this.

if you care to, send me an email (address in profile), and i'll follow-up (just the once) in about a month with where i think it's going.

Re: Ask HN: What jobs can a software engineer take to tackle climate change?

#50
I would look to help a marketing team in an organization that promote reducing consumption, marketing is in my view the best shot we have to tackle environmental issues. Once living with a small house not heating too lunch and using public transport will be trendy, lots of people may change their way of life. Now where do you find them? I would start looking for activist artist.
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