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Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

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Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

gress wrote: post #69
pdeuchler wrote: post #37

Large leaps in technology have always, and will always, benefit the wealthiest 1% at the beginning. This is just the basics of capital in a capitalistic society. The internet has already redistributed earth shattering quantities of wealth in record time. Besides, to actually solve the "real problems" (no true scotsman, but we won't go down that path) you still need massive amounts of capital. Where else are you going…

> The Internet has already redistributed earth shattering quantities of wealth in record time. Given that inequality has been steeply rising, you must mean that it has redistributed wealth further from the poor to the rich.

Or one might mean that it has redistributed the other way, while other factors in society were redistributing from the poor to the rich, and that the net imbalance would be far worse without the mitigating effect of the internet.

Your presentation presumes that the internet is the only redistributive factor that existed in the time under consideration.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#72

Post by timr »

nostrademons wrote: post #66
wpietri wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explicit inspiration for Uber's founding was as a "limo timeshare service": http://newsroom.uber.com/2010/12/ubers-founding/ I"m glad that some people are also getting easier taxi service. But having worked in in SF since the last bubble, there is definitely an intense focus here on solving rich-people problems; when they serve others (e.g., struggling felons and young military personnel) it is often, at best, a…

That's often how technological progress works: it's developed to solve either a pressing-but-not-so-noble problem and then someone adapts it so the average person can benefit, or it's developed to solve a trivial and useless problem and someone improves it so it's useful to the average person. We built radar so we could detect German bombers; we got microwave ovens from it. We built GPS so we could guide missiles and…

I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broader view than the latter half of the 20th century, most of the technological progress that actually made our lives better were the results of targeted effort: wastewater treatment, antibiotics, essentially all medications. We didn't get to these things accidentally.

Maybe those technologies were expensive at first and came down in price with adoption, but that's different than making the claim that if we just work on whatever rich people want today, we'll automatically get to places that are beneficial for society. Want to help the third-world feed itself? Perhaps you should invest your resources in that, not in a silicon valley nutri-shake startup.

Hell, most of your examples are cases where the military did something to solve a known problem that was too expensive (or too speculative) to be left to private industry. How you turn that into an argument that our best-and-brightest should be working on ad-optimization eludes me.

This industry, I swear: we whine about the loss of space exploration, and wonder what happened to our flying cars, but we brush off criticisms when someone invests millions of dollars in the sixty-seventh niche food-delivery service for the SF bay area. Perhaps the two things are related?

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#73

Post by acchow »

wpietri wrote: post #52
jsn117 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every solution starts out as a solution for rich people, that's what brings the price down for everyone else

That's pretty far from true. Using rich people to pay for product development is a well-developed modern technique, and it can definitely work well. But we didn't get, say, the smallpox vaccine because Jenner said, "I wonder what I could do for very rich people?" Most early Internet work was done for the sake of public benefit; the rich-person version was Compuserve, which was basically an evolutionary dead end. More…

They wouldn't have developed a smallpox vaccine if it didn't affect rich people.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#74

Post by davmre »

sliverstorm wrote: post #53
Jemaclus wrote: post #31

I applied and interviewed with the USDS, but the biggest thing was that they wanted me to move to DC for 6+ months. I'm quite happy here on the west coast, engaged to be married, and attempting to buy a house. Moving cross-country is pretty much a deal-breaker for me. That said, I really, really want to get involved in something that matters. My dream, for lack of a better phrase, no matter how cheesy it may sound, i…

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think if you want to solve Epic Problems like malaria and slavery, you are going to have to be ready to put things like buying a house and living where you like in the back seat.

That doesn't seem obvious. There are people working on banking, advertising, business software development, etc. in pretty much every major city. Why shouldn't the same be true of Epic Problems?

You can direct your work efforts towards goals that are important/meaningful to you without necessarily sacrificing everything else in your life. Conversely you can give up a good deal of your life to work on unimportant problems, and many people do.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#75

Post by nmrm2 »

alwaysdoit wrote: post #29

Why not take rich people's money for taxis, and then donate how ever much of your salary to charities that are trying to fight malaria you think is appropriate? Is making $40K/yr doing something "meaningful" better than making $100K/yr doing something "meaningless" and donating $60k/yr to meaningful causes?

Doesn't that entirely depend upon whether you think you'll be more effective than some other person making 60k/yr?

In other words, if you're a "10x" malaria killer and if 10xers are rare in the malaria killing business, then probably it's better for everyone (except you) that you kill malaria for a living. Rather than paying someone 60k to take your place (esp. if that other person is a 1xer or -10xer.)

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#76

Post by jrochkind1 »

walshemj wrote: post #58
jrochkind1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what you mean by "2 or 3% suboptimal query's", or really, in general what you mean.

They don't have to be 100% right but say an accounts system must reconcile.

A google query? What does it even mean for a google query to be "100% right"? I'm not sure that's even a thing.

But I think you misunderstand software engineering and the nature of engineering skill or fields of experience. There may be no such thing as "100% right" when it comes to which hits are included in the result set for a google query, but I have no doubt that nearly any google engineer needs to write all sorts of code on a regular basis that indeed needs to be 100% right with regard to specifications or requirements.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#77

Post by dragonwriter »

alwaysdoit wrote: post #29

Why not take rich people's money for taxis, and then donate how ever much of your salary to charities that are trying to fight malaria you think is appropriate? Is making $40K/yr doing something "meaningful" better than making $100K/yr doing something "meaningless" and donating $60k/yr to meaningful causes?

> Why not take rich people's money for taxis, and then donate how ever much of your salary to charities that are trying to fight malaria you think is appropriate?

That's a great thing to do.

It doesn't directly address the problem of insufficient talent being directed to those projects, though of course the money might allow the people running those projects to offer more to talent, which might deal with the problem.

Of course, choosing to work on the project yourself deals with that issue more directly.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#78

Post by karmajunkie »

markdeloura wrote: post #47
Jemaclus wrote: post #31

I applied and interviewed with the USDS, but the biggest thing was that they wanted me to move to DC for 6+ months. I'm quite happy here on the west coast, engaged to be married, and attempting to buy a house. Moving cross-country is pretty much a deal-breaker for me. That said, I really, really want to get involved in something that matters. My dream, for lack of a better phrase, no matter how cheesy it may sound, i…

You should reach out to 18F! While home base for them is DC, quite a few of the members are on the west coast. https://18f.gsa.gov/

What about austin?

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#79

Post by pagingdraltman »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #55

Standard liberal guilt. If you're a programmer and you feel like curing malaria is more important than Uber, you should make a shit-ton of money and give it to Bill Gates. Without the teen angst.

Hey @dang and @altman: if you two are remotely serious about trying to make HN a decent place, then you need to ban this shit and ensure that anybody who upvoted it can never vote again.

That's not a joke.

I get that you two tend to ban only people who are personally rude, but sophistifunk was just INCREDIBLY rude to anybody who is an essentially decent human being. Ridiculously rude. Unforgivably rude.

HN used to be awesome. It was so fucking good. It wasn't a place where people wrote snarky political shit, it was a place where people who got shit done came to learn from other people who got shit done... and look what it's sunk to. Now it's just some asshole shitting on people who think that malaria is more serious than Uber.

If you can't recognizing that Sophistifunk's comment is a perfect embodiment of HN's decline in quality, you are fucking blind.

HN sucks and it is because the two of you refuse to do anything when people like Sophistifunk decide to be outrageously disgusting assholes.

Re: Back to SF After the U.S. Digital Service

#80

Post by afarrell »

timr wrote: post #72
nostrademons wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's often how technological progress works: it's developed to solve either a pressing-but-not-so-noble problem and then someone adapts it so the average person can benefit, or it's developed to solve a trivial and useless problem and someone improves it so it's useful to the average person. We built radar so we could detect German bombers; we got microwave ovens from it. We built GPS so we could guide missiles and…

I'm so tired of the thoughtless repetition of this talking-point. Yes, some technologies developed serendipitously for luxury products. But when you take a broader view than the latter half of the 20th century, most of the technological progress that actually made our lives better were the results of targeted effort: wastewater treatment, antibiotics, essentially all medications. We didn't get to these things acciden…

An example of a startup doing work for the developing world is Wave, focusing on helping people send remittances to family in west Africa.

http://www.sendwave.com/

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