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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

#81

Post by umeshunni »

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.

Global inequality has been sharply dropping over the past few decades as hundreds of millions of people in India and China have been lifted out of poverty. Amusing that you think inequality has been rising.

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

#82

Post by clebio »

jxm262 wrote: post #22

Nice read. I don't mean to derail the discussion, but I wonder what sort of developers they were looking for when recruiting for the program. When I applied to the US Digital Service, I received a message back - "we are seeking candidates with skills tightly matched to our current projects. Members of our team reviewed your application, and we don't have the perfect match for your background right now". I'm mostly a…

Not to derail your derailment any further, but hey.

I live in Kansas City, and there's a fascinating startup here working on enabling farming with an open-data platform. They build hardware pucks to go on combine harvesters and stream the data collection to a Django front-end. They're also working on ingesting legalese forms that farmers have to file and putting web-based (Django) interfaces over them (c.f. how TurboTax will show you a tax form that's missing a form entry).

So, as someone else mentioned here, if you're willing to look outside the Valley, there's lots of interesting, high-paying work that helps the common good.

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

#83

Post by afarrell »

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.

Alternately, just give directly to individual poor people, which will mean that entrepreneurs can make money by solving the problems that poor people see and prioritize.

https://www.givedirectly.org/

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

#84

Post by clebio »

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…

I disagree with your first paragraph, but plenty of others here are already responding to that 'trickle-down' sentiment.

I also didn't read the article as being 'holier-than-thou' (in fact, entirely secular, but hey). It sounded to me more like someone narrating their own, personal, feelings on a topic and giving some context to why he might not give an unequivocal affirmative response to coworkers' queries about staying at one or the other job. Because life is complicated and there often aren't binaries. It's not a sentiment that gets a lot of traction on HN, but it's also not proselytizing.

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

#85

Post by refurb »

pagingdraltman wrote: post #79
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…

It could have been less negative, but i've seen much worse. Folks like that tend to get downvoted to nothing pretty quickly.

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

#86

Post by pagingdraltman »

refurb wrote: post #85
pagingdraltman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It could have been less negative, but i've seen much worse. Folks like that tend to get downvoted to nothing pretty quickly.

It lobbed nasty insults at every single human who thinks that curing malaria is more important than Uber.

I get that in the context of HN it's not the worst thing ever, but if that doesn't count as too rude to remain on HN, then the rudeness rules mean nothing.

Perhaps they do mean nothing; after all, dang tends to enforce them not as rudeness rules, but as polite language rules.

If that's all it is, that it's okay to be shitty to each other so long as we use polite language, then let's edited the approach to comments to be more honest and accurate. Let's say "It is fine to insult people for their beliefs, for their actions, or for no reason at all, so long as you do so in a slightly indirect fashion, or while using elevated language so that we can pretend it's high discourse."

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

#87

Post by rifung »

nostrademons wrote: post #68
wpietri wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried this? I know a lot of people, but nobody who has done this sustainably. I've definitely seen people start out on that road. But either they eventually quit and find jobs with meaning or they gradually end up not caring about meaning and spend the money on creature comforts.

Bill Gates is the most prominent public example. I also know a number of folks at Google who are very charitably active despite working big-corp jobs. Usually they compartmentalize very drastically, though, so I never heard about their charitable activities at work and only learned about them second-hand, through chance encounters with mutual acquaintances.

Is Bill Gates really an example of what the person described? Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think his motivation for working or making money was to donate it. It seems like he decided after accumulating his wealth that he should use it for good.

It seems important to note the difference because I don't find it hard to imagine how a person whose motivation is to help the public good might not be passionate about a job which doesn't inherently do "good".

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

#88

Post by codeonfire »

dnautics wrote: post #6

"Helping rich people get taxis easier". As a Lyft and Uber driver, I count among my rides: getting a rough looking fellow (who has spent years in prison after accidentally killing someone in a bar fight) get to the only job that would take him - affordably and on-time (he would have been fired otherwise). I've given an enlisted navy family from Oklahoma (husband was deployed) get home from a late night run to a dista…

Ride sharing is helping lots of not-rich people in small and medium sized towns who can't find jobs but have a car. I can go to my hometown and probably would request an Uber or Lyft. I never once took a taxi living in the same area for 20 years.

I for one think technology should help the living. The goal should not be to maximize human population on Earth. If we could reduce the birthrate, fewer children would die from disease. Overpopulation is sometimes the cause of widespread disease.

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

#89

Post by sliverstorm »

davmre wrote: post #74
sliverstorm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prob…

I'm not saying you can't have any of those things and pursue your dreams, but life is not known for putting your dreams comfortably within reach. Banking is pretty universal (in every city); malaria research isn't.

Odds are at some point you will be forced to make choices; how many people are so lucky that their dream job is walking distance from their dream house in their dream city?

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

#90

Post by benihana »

pagingdraltman wrote: post #79
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…

Way to take the bait.

five seconds to write a throwaway troll line versus fifteen minutes of outraged huffing and puffing and demands of bans over someone saying something stupid on the internet.

Good work.

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