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Ask HN: What problems can techies solve to help world?

10 points by marmot777 ↗ HN
I'm using the term techie to be more general as clearly one could use a variety of skills to solve problems, not just coding.

Sure, there are all kinds of domains that the market will pay for and even more that investors will fund. I'm for the free market.

That said, I think that there are a lot of problems in the world that are barely noticed much less focused on by techies. First of all, why is that? It seems like more and more it's stuff like _Beerme,_ an app that connects people with beer with thirsty people or whatever. Is it because there's no money to be made in solving more important problems?

24 comments

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mtmail
Have a look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team. You can help by adding streets based on satellite images from home (armchair mapping). Or you can work on tools. Almost any tool used for openstreetmap can also be used to help areas (before and) after a major disaster happened.
marmot777
I took a look at these again and will again later. A friend of mine who does web dev showed me some pretty cool and powerful stuff he's done for some well known non-profits. It was good stuff. One cool thing about my quest for knowledge is I've learned more about the good things.
marmot777
When you say your quest for knowledge ended up with you seeing some good stuff was it because you were asking around or you put the intention out in the universe or what? It's awesome when someone says something like, "one cool thing about my quest for knowledge is that I've learned more about the good things" but it leaves you wanting to know exactly what it was that you were seeking, why, and where did you look?
pesfandiar
As a techie, you can just help the economy by making/providing whatever widget/service the market needs. That creates employment and keeps people's retirement funds afloat. If the growth stops, many people will suffer.

If you actually want to make a huge difference, get into economics, politics, policymaking, etc. to affect the way markets work.

marmot777
I think that's true as far as it goes but I think the market fails in critical areas. I think people who work any widget or service that people are willing to pay for is helping someone, excluding pure evil like DDOS as Service, cracking tools, etc.
marmot777
I don't really think affecting how markets work is something I think's a good idea nor do I think it's an optimal path for me anyway. God bless those who do it. The thing is I don't even see fundamental changes to the way the market works is even a good idea to attempt, however incompetently or well, it's going to be a buggy mess.

I'm not advocating anything at all right now, I'm just listening and expressing my own opinions, all provisional.

marmot777
Of course, there's nothing wrong with using the tax code to try to, say, reduce pollution.
HeyLaughingBoy
There are important problems being solved by techies every day all over the place. Transportation, medicine, funding, housing, clothing. Why are you choosing to ignore all those areas and the businesses that are involved with them to focus on BeerMe?
marmot777
I realize that but it seems that the attention and investment is focused on the Beerme type stuff. I personally know extremely talented people working on transportation so I'm aware that it's happening but these domains aren't celebrated.
marmot777
I want to reiterate that this question wasn't meant as a criticism or lecturing or to diminish the tremendous accomplishments thus far. I genuinely think we live in times of great change and serious problems that need addressing. I don't I even grok the problems much less the solutions at this point so that was my goal to increase understanding to be able to particate in a more meaningful and useful way myself. I've not exactly spent my years in the tech industry doing work that I think was anything more than services that helped business people accomplish some of their goals. That's something but not exactly the most important problems. Any side projects I've worked on I've done so simply because it was something that caught my interest. So god knows, many if not most of people who read HN are probably contributing more than I am.
maramono
IMO, first we need to solve the smaller issues, most importantly to have developers start making high-quality software consistently.

There is nothing that will get solved with the current "bugs are unavoidable" mentality, which is simply a mediocre and unprofessional attitude.

The way I see it, if mediocre developers try to "solve" world issues, the solutions will be mediocre as well, just like their software.

More of my thoughts here: http://ortask.com/why-your-mindset-might-be-setting-your-sof...

marmot777
Yes, this sort of thing. That's cool!
bbcbasic
I agree that we need to aim higher in quality.

However bug-free software may be prohibitively expensive to create. You would need military-style controls on every line of code, every change. Specifications going to the n-th degree to be ratified and signed off by all of the stakeholders, who need to be highly engaged and quite technical. No vague requirements allowed. If no one makes a mistake in this process then maybe it will be bug free.

Yes bugs really are unavoidable. That will never change because bugs (other than silly errors) are usually an artifact of translation of user requirements, system requirements etc. into a working system.

However I agree it is feeble to use that as an excuse. It's like saying I won't exercise because I can't ever run 100m in 1s, no matter how I hard I train.

Tooling is definitely an issue. I'm reading "You don't know JS" for fun and learning a lot about why JS is a really horrible language to write bug-free code in. If you are stuck with languages like this (and all languages have their respective problems, if not as bad as JS) then it is hard to write bug free software.

marmot777
I learned it finding that the feeling I get from it is slightly overwhelmed, mostly because there seems to be so many new things coming up and so much is in flux. I found it worthwhile nonetheless as it's useful for some things and Node is kind of cool actually.

I get a fragmented energy from JS and a more integrated energy from, say, Python.

p333347
Techies can only assist the scientists in bringing their successful lab experiments into the real world. I expect scientists to solve problems in two fields - agriculture and water resources (especially drinking water) - before tackling fancier things like interplanetary exploration, brain computer interfaces etc. I understand not all scientists (or their domains) are equal but I expect science to solve basic problems first. Science created the problem by making people live longer, so science must solve the problem as well (half kidding). Once a solution is in beta mode, the techies can go crazy building software and gadgets for it, which is what they do well.
marmot777
Yes, excellent points to observe that there's no substitute for domain expertise, and I agree with you on good and water being important. I guess our sf has made space travel more exciting than any water or food related themes, which are aren't exciting as trips to Mars or traveling the galaxy meeting interesting beings.

I guess there are some good dystopias out there, and some royal political fuck-ups that make you start thinking there really is "evil" if you didn't before: Flint, Michigan.

p333347
I personally like deep ocean exploration much more than space exploration as it is extremely relevant to us as living beings on Earth. I hope some like minded sf writers popularize this genre in near future (I don't read sf but a cursory look at it seems space exploration is favored a lot, probably next only to (and intertwined with) time travel).
marmot777
Yes, and it didn't even occur to me until you mentioned it. The return in terms of knowledge and perspective would be realized quicker and at less cost. The discoveries likely just as alien but perhaps more useful to our plight.
IpV8
This is an underrated point. I believe that as an average techie, your highest social impact is in building the tools required to solve these problems. We don't need better phones and advertisements, we need better tools for out scientists and doctors. I currently build research devices for applications in marine science and water quality research. Though my day to day is a bit removed from the social benefit, it is uplifting to hear about the companies and universities that but these products to good use.
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marmot777
Yes, agreed, strangly underrated, as perhaps most people have their awareness of tools running in the background. We already see the importance of tools so it's not a hard leap to understand EVERY domain needs better tools to be more effective.

Your day is close enough to the action. My dad, a mechanical engineer, worked on part of the breathing apparatus used in the Apollo program. That's a part of that problem, small and perhaps not glamorous but close enough. I'd say you're damn close. Closer than I've ever been to anything real unless you count buying a programmable robot vacuum cleaner kit instead of the normal one so I could in theory program my vacuum cleaner to do cool stuff, not to mention at modules!

dhruvkar
The free market skews towards quicker gains. Most __important__ problems will, almost by definition, take longer to solve than less important problems.

Non-profits often fill this gap by solving an important problem until it's profitable to solve, at which point the free market can take over.

One problem that (in my view) is important, solvable, hard and profitable is rural electrification. There's ~1.2 billion people without access to electricity [0] and more with intermittent access only. The problem is, there's no one solution fits all. It needs to be chipped away methodically [1], building products and finding traction in different locales that allows the free market to work.

0: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopmen... 1: I worked at a solar NGO in Tanzania.

Axsuul
Solving important problems take a lot of customer research, domain knowledge, and years of developing product and finding product-market fit. You won't be able to come up with a MVP over the weekend. Naturally, the lower hanging fruit is first picked. But these services and products that first get built will become the shoulders that startups solving more important problems get built on.