Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 394 posts

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

#72

Post by ska »

NoGravitas wrote: post #2

This is almost certainly the wrong place to ask this question, unfortunately. The HN demographic is spectacularly disinterested in the well-being of humanity. Try /r/socialistprogrammers or /r/anarcho_hackers on Reddit.

In my opinion, the HN readership is far too diverse to accurately make any such narrow statements about.

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

#73

Post by oddlyaromatic »

simplicitea wrote: post #49
ajdecon wrote: post #19

Honestly, I think the most effective thing to do is find an organization doing social good, who is hiring programmers, and go work for them. There are plenty of non-profits and governments that do a ton of good, and employ developers to work on their web sites and infrastructures. A good friend of mine is a developer for the ACLU, for example. There are also organizations like Code for America that do open source wor…

Thank you for the Code for America recommendation, checking them out now

Through the Code For Atlanta group I was able start a project with MARTA to make some things better about paratransit customers' access to up to date ETA info for their rides, which is currently a pain point for many customers. The code for America idea is awesome and stuff really does happen!

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

#74

Post by sz4kerto »

numlocked wrote: post #20

Work with mission-driven businesses. B Corps[0] are a good place to start. There's nothing quite like coming to work every day with a group of like-minded folks who want to make a dent in the universe. My company, www.grove.co, strives to help families making it easy to buy sustainable products vs. conventional CPG. It seemed a bit crazy when we started, but now literally thousands of families get sustainable product…

Exactly. :)

Shameless plug: we at https://www.patientsknowbest.com/careers.html are also hiring and are a B Corp -- our mission is to give patients control over their own medical data.

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

#77

Post by scelerat »

ajdecon wrote: post #19

Honestly, I think the most effective thing to do is find an organization doing social good, who is hiring programmers, and go work for them. There are plenty of non-profits and governments that do a ton of good, and employ developers to work on their web sites and infrastructures. A good friend of mine is a developer for the ACLU, for example. There are also organizations like Code for America that do open source wor…

I agree with this comment. A friend of mine is a programmer taking a year off of work to volunteer for a refugee aid organization to analyze and improve their databases. It's important work, not necessarily sexy, but helps these organizations do their work. In the end he's likely to emerge a better programmer along with a body of domain knowledge.

It helps to actually be passionate about the field.

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

#78

Post by pwne »

https://www.drivendata.org/

"Data science competitions to save the world"

OK, the tag line might be a bit much, but here's a snippet from one of their current competitions:

Your goal is to create better models to estimate populations for hard-to-reach sites in the Antarctic, and thereby greatly improve our ability to use penguins to monitor the health of the Southern Ocean!

Post reply on HN