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Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?

177 points by bkmn ↗ HN
What is 'positive impact', you ask. Well, I'm eager to hear your ideas but I'm thinking software that tackles the big challenges: energy usage, preventing armed conflicts, reducing poverty, STEM training, improving access to sustainable environments, implementing AI, et cetera.

I would argue Wikipedia continues to be a very important software project (albeit with an emphasis on the database on content than the wiki software itself), and Linux as this specific piece of software serves as a platform for many other applications and services.

What do you see?

258 comments

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fsflover
1. https://qubes-os.org, security-focused operating system, relying on hardware virtualizaton.

2. Various mobile operating systems targeting GNU/Linux phones, e.g., Mobian and PureOS. They have convergence by design (running desktop apps) and absolute freedom without walled gardens for the user.

idontwantthis
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

Actually take a dent out of cyber attacks by unifying cyber, physical, and personnel security all in a single program that can record every type of incident and automate responses ahead of time.

brailsafe
macOS and GDAL. macOS because it gets out of the way and helps people generally get their work done faster, so they can do much more important things than their work sooner and more often. GDAL because it's the most powerful mapping toolkit I'm aware of. Anything that fills that space is going to be the most critical bit of any impactful software for the next 10 years.
ISL
A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption.

If you extend from five years to fifty, then the answer will be climate-related.

dimatter
>A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption. signal?
ISL
Can I use Signal to prove the authenticity of authorship on documents?
riidom
Now I'm not sure about the biggest potential, but let's say, some positive impact, then I'd throw OpenStreetMap into the list as well.

Also, in terms of AI, reducing the energy demand and solving the black box problem.

Not exactly software, but the concept of eco-certified software can surely have a positive impact as well, when it gains traction beside KDE's PDF-viewer Okular.

akavel
<crazy-fanboi mode="on">

Oh, easy - https://enso.org, of course!

impjohn
This looks amazing. I always imagine my scripts and programs like this in my head, can't wait to play with this
kaetemi
An imaginary power user build of Windows that doesn't include all the builtin cloud nonsense and other useless distractions. And custom themes support instead of forced white menu bars that override the system pallette because some designer thinks they're clever.
fsflover
Did you hear about Linux?
Cthulhu_
Or MacOS as an in-between; it has "cloud bullshit" but it doesn't nag your about it as much.
skummetmaelk
Except if you don't want to sign into icloud.
kaetemi
Not sure if dropping all my essential software counts as positive, though.
fsflover
AFAIK most of it works with Wine nowadays.
kaetemi
I still get mails for bugs that I and dozens of other people already submitted working patches for over a decade ago. Let me know when drawing tablet pen pressure finally works correctly in a released build.
fsflover
> Let me know when drawing tablet pen pressure finally works correctly in a released build.

It will happen in a week after the documentation for the hardware is released.

kaetemi
I meant Wine bugs. Dozens of people submitting working patches, but nothing ever gets applied to release.
mxuribe
As @fsflover noted, there is Linux as an option...But i'll do you one slightl;y better: try Ubuntu Mate. This is a specific "type" of Linux. This is a distribution of Linux named Ubuntu with a desktop environment named Mate...And the Mate desktop environment allows for a layout - named Redmond - that resembles the typical Windows UI: https://guide.ubuntu-mate.org/#panel-layouts-redmond

In other words, you get more power (and yes, freedom but i won;t dive into that aspect now) but the look-and-feel resembles Windows that it sounds like you are familiar with/prefer. Full disclosure: i am a diehard linux user, so am biased in favor of linux. I invite you to explore Ubuntu Mate (or any other distribution of linux)! Enjoy!

kaetemi
I prefer Linux Mint Cinnamon.
mxuribe
Ah ok, so you are clearly familiar with linux. :-) Your comment made it seem like you were a Windows user. If linux mint cinnamon works for you, that's great!
ComradePhil
> power user build of Windows that doesn't include all the builtin cloud nonsense and other useless distractions.

Windows Server?

benjaminwootton
I know crypto will be a controversial one, but in terms of potential surely even a skeptic would acknowledge it.

Decentralised Finance in particular could take a huge chunk out of retail banking, investment banking and insurance.

latexr
OP gave a handful of examples regarding what they consider “positive impact”. You don’t even need to get past the first one (energy usage) for cryptocurrencies to be on the actively negative side of the scale.
benjaminwootton
I know they can’t be decoupled, but I think smart contracts have more potential than coins or tokens.

There is no reason why whole swathes of saving, lending, derivatives, fx and insurance products couldn’t be implemented as decentralised smart contracts.

I suspect the smart contracts to do all of this would use less energy than a single office block.

astoor
A big chunk of the people working in the "office blocks" of "saving, lending, derivatives, FX and insurance companies" are there to deal with support and exceptions. This is a feature not a bug - if something goes wrong you want it to be fixed, especially when you are dealing with large sums of money. With smart contracts, if there's a bug it can't be fixed, if your money gets lost or stolen you can't get it back, if you lose your keys then tough, etc. This is considered a feature not a bug, e.g. to quote Satoshi "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more." However, in most people's view, this would be considered a backward step, and so not an example of a technology with a positive impact.
_benj
Idk why this is being so downvoted but how open the crypto ecosystem is, how much access to data, how DIY it is… to me it looks like open source financials vs proprietary government issued money.

I think we have challenges with its exorbitant use of energy, but giving more access to more people regarding is a positive IMHO.

f7ebc20c97
Hacker News commenters have hated (and been wrong about) cryptocurrency ever since the first Bitcoin article appeared here. It's very strange. I chalk it up to some sort of Dunning-Kruger contrarian effect + demographics skewed toward cynical authoritarian statists (not sure why, since tech used to be full of libertarians).

It's all just a repeat of the negative comments over and over... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

_benj
I’m noticing that! It seems to that instead of straight up hate, curiosity and exploring might yield better results… but seems like this is the wrong forum for that
Cthulhu_
Could, but it's not going to while the people pushing it are in it for the money.

At least retail banking is controlled and guaranteed by national and international governments and banks. If a crypto exchange goes fucky for whatever reason, you're fucked. If the value of your cryptocurrency of choice varies, you're fucked.

I mean how much did a pizza cost 10 years ago vs today in BTC vs USD. In BTC it was a few BTC, now it's 0.00025. In USD it was $10, now it's $10.

There is nothing wrong with retail / traditional banking, investment and insurance. Cryptocurrencies / blockchain technology does not solve a problem.

tjansen
I think Unikernels like NanoVMs (https://nanos.org/) will become more important. They are more efficient and more secure than than full operating systems. Right now, I think there are no good monitoring solutions available (or at least I am not aware of any). You can't just ssh to your server, so if something goes wrong, it can be hard to debug. And they are certainly not integrated into bigger monitoring solutions like Dynatrace. But once the infrastructure is available, I would expect a large percentage of Linux servers to be replaced with unikernels.
andix
Easy mode for Kubernetes
leetrout
The next evolution will be branded "kubeless"
eldelshell
Pffft! And what next, running software on fat clients? Preposterous!!!
Cthulhu_
Isn't that just running your own server? Just say "we are at capacity, sorry" if it starts to give issues from load.
andix
Exactly the opposite. You build a container and Kubernetes just runs, updates and scales it, and also connects your dependencies (DBs, Queues, ...). It even creates and manages your dependencies.

Without thousands of lines of yaml and funky environment variables. Magically. So let's call it Magic Kubernetes then :)

compsciphd
i.e. you want an operator with CRDs for your application. (my former role was writing one). a good operator does make a specific application work "magically".
jka
Nice idea - I wonder whether a Duolingo-style gradual-progression approach to learning Kubernetes would make for an effective educational environment.
andix
If it's very complicated to learn how to use your software/framework, there is probably something wrong with it in the first place.
jka
A lot of {large/complex} concepts can seem more difficult to learn when we're older; learning languages is valuable for the collective group achievements that it makes possible, though.
mg
I think that aggregating medical research studies could lead to a significant improvement of the worlds health situation.

There are tens of millions of medical studies available online. But no system to look at the data in an aggregated way.

I have been doing data analysis and aggregation in several fields. Every once in a while, I dabble with the concept and implementation of a tool to do it for medical studies. It would need quite a bit of effort to get it right. But the potential is epic.

andix
Even more interesting would be, to automatically link patients medical history with studies, and show the doctor some suggestions: did you consider rare disease X?; there is not enough data, do test Y&Z because then we know much more
xenocratus
You mean like this https://blog.tjcx.me/p/40k-fantastic-startup-idea ?
mg
I remember reading that post a while back.

I was surprised the author gave up after he didn't find doctors who would pay for access. The post says he met 10 doctors in the bay area and when none of them became a paying customer, he shut his project down.

If you really think you are making a dent in the worlds health situation, why give up so fast?

Bedon292
10 seems like such a small number. Was he was getting specific feedback that caused him to shut it down? Like were there some sort of legal liability issues or something that made it something they weren't interested in?
dannykwells
The mistake he made was selling directly to doctors, instead of to pharma, insurers or medical systems (Kaiser). Most individual doctors are not necessarily prioritized to provide better care; the other entities are.
cupofpython
Please remember that we do not have a perfect litmus for every disease, especially rare diseases. And statistics nearly falls apart entirely when assessing a single individual. So although i agree there is potential.. I believe the potential is more along the lines of "You have 15 patients in your practice with X, Y, Z active symptoms - it is incredibly likely that 1 one of them have A, or 3 of them have B"

There is significant reason to be hesitant about having an algorithm suggest every sickness under the sun that hasn't been "ruled out" by testing or statistics yet. Ever use WebMD to try to diagnose yourself?

In other words, I worry about what this approach would do the signal to noise ratio for doctors.

beardedetim
I know one of the programmers that built Origami for ORNL and the DoH

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/913790

seems to go down this path. It is doable and they were able to beat IBM Watson to find some thing or another (_can't find the article off hand_) and won an R&D 100. But as you can tell, no one actually wants to use it.

notacoward
Closely related, but not quite the same: personal genomics. If everybody could get completely personalized nutrition and medication (including preventive) we could be a lot healthier for a lot less expense. AIUI most of the fundamental technologies are here or close, but there needs to be a way to make that information more accessible/usable on the "front line" of patient care and that's where software comes into it.
nus07
I agree and for a start since most medical data come from hospital and outpatient systems -there is a very desperate need for something more modern and useable than a painful 'Epic' or 'Cerner' systems. Honestly how has silicon valley and newer tech not replaced those companies and their way of doing things?
junon
I went down this road a few times. Tax laws, contract bidding, and money are the main reasons. Plus, writing such systems requires a large overlap of technology and medicine, which means a lot of high salaries on your payroll. Then you need to find places to buy it. That means getting hospitals and the like to break their usually multi-year contracts with Epic (they are largely subject to Sunken Cost problems as Epic costs a LOT of money).

And so on.

anotherhue
Android implementing ad tracking limitations.

EU tackling big tech because the US sure won't.

Greater role out of automatic breaking systems.

Greater role out of demand management (energy).

Remote work decentralising our cities. I expect to see new cities being built.

ethbr0
> Greater role out of demand management (energy).

Would be curious hearing from someone in the space how open or closed the existing solutions are, in the sense of being able to make future changes or drive them from new systems?

Is it a world of vendor-locked black boxes? Or pretty reasonable for future evolution, without gut-and-replace?

(Presumably we're talking about the entire generator-utility-consumer loop here?)

fsflover
> Android implementing ad tracking limitations.

Google will not fight against itself. GNU/Linux phones already provide this functionality.

visarga
Hugging Face for their ease of use and large collection of trained models. They can be applied to a variety of tasks or fine-tuned for new ones.

HF could power a grassroots revolution in search, translation, question answering and other NLP tasks. How cool would it be to be able to search without disclosing your keywords, or filter your content based on your rules and not theirs?

sleepycatgirl
Lets see... I believe Mainlining effort of android phones + Pinephone/Mobian is big for positive impact, at least in phone area. No more being stuck on old insecure kernel and outdated software!

And second one, even a bit more niche, And its a bit more of positivity in terms of usage. Distros like Fedora Silverblue and NixOS. Confidence in that, even if update breaks something, you can just boot back into previous setup, and have working system, not bothered by breakage for the time being.

ComradePhil
> Confidence in that, even if update breaks something, you can just boot back into previous setup, and have working system, not bothered by breakage for the time being.

This was the goal of Ubuntu distro called snappy Ubuntu core [1]. Does anyone know whatever happened to it?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlcTDz9ogug

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mysore
self driving cars could save the world from millions of deaths per year and reduce stress and wasted time from sitting in traffic in cities like LA/NYC
cbetti
I think you're spot on. Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about.
pjerem
> Self driving software seems to me like it will handle the vast majority of driving situations much better than humans could within the 5 year horizon OP is asking about.

I remember this being said as far as a decade ago, and still, Teslas from 2022 are emergency braking on the highway.

Retric
At scale safety is just a numbers game. A car model could be 10x as safe as human drivers and still occasionally drive directly into oncoming traffic.

Tesla isn’t anywhere close to that, but self driving cars have no reason to get worse. Systems good enough for fully self driving taxi services are already on the road and the the software is steadily getting better.

pjerem
I know that Tesla's FSD is already safer than human drivers. But the society is not ready for children dying because of an erroneous data point in the training model that we can't even debug, let alone fix it.
pjerem
Interestingly, I thought like you some years ago. But since then, I realized that, nah, we just need to make cities that don't require cars at all.

I'm not against self driving cars, they'll totally save millions of lives. But we must not make the mistake to build our society around the fact that self driving cars are a thing. We must build our future around the fact that any city should be livable without a car.

agloeregrets
This. Coming from the rust belt, NYC was shock and awe for me and it isn't even a good example. But I get a bunch of people who ask me "How do you park when you visit?!" I don't...in town. I get a PATH train in NJ and forget the car. It is freeing and the Subway system works well enough for anyone. I wish I didn't live in a Stroad hellscape.
Turing_Machine
Some of us (maybe most of us) don't want to live in a human Habitrail like NYC.
pjerem
Still, you can live without cars outside NYC.

I’m currently living in the French countryside in a 3k people village. I do have a car but I barely need it on a daily basis : I WFH or take the 20 min train to my office (currently writing from my train running at 160kmh - 99MPH) and I have a grocery shop at 5 min of walk from my home.

I do have "luck" (well, it’s not really luck since I choose to live there) because even in France/Europe, it’s far from the norm.

But it’s possible and working solutions exists all over the world, just waiting to be copied.

mxuribe
I came to the conclusion myself. So, yeah, the primary goal should be to make communities that do not require cars at all...but the second-best thing i think we can do is to take the humans out of the control of cars for communities that already built. (Obviously, as we change even the established communities, any changes should shift towards a place without the need for cars too.)
eddieroger
I think it's important to acknowledge that not everyone wants to live a life that doesn't require a car. A car is a surrogate for other problems, like poor city planning and bad public transit, but even in the best of cases, it's a perfectly valid desire to be removed from urban centers and living and being willing to transport in to those areas when needed.
Cthulhu_
It's a solution to a problem, but said problem is not the root cause. Reduce the need for driving in the first place; normalize public transit within city limits, improve city designs by putting shops and work closer by, redesign cities to be more pedestrian and cyclist-friendly (and I'm aware cyclists get plenty of accidents too, I live in a cyclist country), etc. These are not easy things to fix, because especially in the US where I believe this is about, cities aren't designed like this in the first place and can't be redone easily.

First, if drivers make mistake, make them more accountable; require better training, enforce laws more strictly, etc. What are the causes behind traffic accidents? I'm confident the majority is from reckless driving, disregarding other drivers, speeding, impatience, alcohol / drugs, etc. Another percentage will be from unsafe driving conditions, which self-driving cars won't fix because they'll refuse to work in those conditions.

logicalmonster
There are some real positives to self-driving cars, but the negatives concern me far more.

A lot of people who have great trust in the system probably won't see this as an issue until its too late, but one of the things that greatly concerns me about this notion of self-driving cars is its possible negative impact on human freedom.

To some extent, a car represents freedom because its a tool that lets you go anywhere you want to go without requesting permission from anybody. Particularly for cars with internal combustion engines, the ability to quickly fuel up and travel anywhere affords you some measure of control over your life and choices, particularly in an emergency.

A car that's run on software is effectively no longer yours and cannot be relied on as a tool to ensure control over your own fate. And electric cars (at least current versions) cannot quickly be refueled in the same way.

A corporation decides to demand extra payments for some software that lets you travel on highways? What can you do about it when your new car is maxed out the wazoo with DRM?

Government decides that it doesn't want its subjects to travel too far? Software update refuses to take you anywhere besides approved destinations and alerts authorities. This is no longer dystopian speculation or some distant past authoritarian experience: we've seen in modern western democratic countries in very recent experience that it was made illegal to travel too far from your house.

I love a lot of the tech behind Teslas and electric cars, but I don't trust the scenario where my car can be manipulated entirely by software and there's no absolute fully physical manual override that ensures a human can control it.

dmitriid
I'll be a skeptic and will say: none.

There's no current tech that will have a marked positive impact in the next five years.

juliushuijnk
non-profits need to write all sort of reports to stakeholders to justify their funding, etc.

Software that would make this easy, or otherwise make that problem go away or smaller on a global scale, should have huge positive impact:

- increase positive impact of all non-profits. - improved feebackloop should also make quality better (less funds to bad non-profits that write great documents).

Seems to be a problem where software can be part of the solution.

mxuribe
Having worked for a non-profit myself, I agree that there are plenty of areas to optimize...and what you noted is only one of them. At least at the non-profit where i worked, there are tons of people who do it for good of humanity, but who are...let me state as kindly as i can: not very efficient. They're intelligent people and who have big hearts, but often get in their own way to achieving their goals. So, yeah, making better software tools and systems for many aspects for non-profits will certainly (100%!) help make a more positive impact on the world.
frozenlettuce
Recently the city that I live was hit by pretty bad landslides and floods - some folks organized how to distribute donations to support centers, but as there was no tool for that they used a public google sheet. At some points there were dozens of people using it at the same time. Luckily no one vandalized it
mxuribe
Its funny you mention Google Sheets...At the non-profit where i worked we would research whatever available software/tools would help...and sometimes we looked at software/tools built specifically for non-profit use cases...but you know what? Almost half the time, for many reasons (sometimes because time is of the essence, or because non-techie non-profit people can not wrap their heads around some fancy non-profit tool/app), someone just ends up spionngin up some google sheet or share an excel file via sharepoint/oneDrive, etc. I used to get annoyed with this approach but then realized that i can't fully blame my former colleagues because sometimes they had to get stuff done and didn't have time/other luxury to research the "perfect tool"...Or, the landscape of available tools built for non-profits either sucks, is expensive for the value they supposed to bring, or non-profit folks don;t know how to take advantage of the purpose buolt tools,. etc. So, i learned to not get all annoyed when someone reaches for google sheets, office docs, whatever if it means that a human is helping out another human. ;-)
mynameismon
I think it is also a combination of - the power that spreadsheets bring (a Turing complete machine, can't get any better) - the UI that they pack (essentially a fancy freeform DB)

Together, they are easy to grok, use and manipulate for most tasks. Add in the observation that most CRUD apps are basically slow spreadhseets, and you have a deal.

AtlasBarfed
Programmers have instinctive contempt for spreadsheets, both legitimate (I had to scale/implement a real system to do what ridiculouly spaghetti-coded spreadsheet X did) and illegitimate (this allow untrained office person X to do what I, awesome programmer, could be doing for 10x the cost).

Spreadsheets are by now almost... 40 years old? And they are ubiquitous in business still despite the explosion on software written for various purposes. The spreadsheet model is a powerful computing and automation platform, with good-enough zero-code UI and organization.

FWKevents
Software to quickly and easily determine the tax implications of crypto purchases and trades.
floodle
How does this lead to positive impact?
rocgf
I guess the argument is that crypto is the future, which I would not agree with, but if you actually think that crypto will be _the way_ in which the world will run in 50 years, then I guess a lot of crypto-related software will bring positive impact.
GartzenDeHaes
There's an existing interstate tax system called streamlined sales tax that could be used [1]. This is the system that computes and pays state sales tax on internet purchases and was implemented around 2008.

1. https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/

FWKevents
Software that would be attached to your crypto exchange, and would easily and quickly figure out the tax reporting and implications of each trade or purchase for you personally. Also - Parth Balla here on YC already has this - a nickname feature for your crypto wallet to make sending money more certain and less of a hold-your-breath and hope you didn't get a number wrong moment
Cthulhu_
It'd be convenient for cryptobros, but I'm not really seeing how pushing crypto will have "positive impact" in the OP's definition. It's a libertarian capitalist concept, and I'm not open to debate about it because I've yet to see anyone use crypto for anything but a way to make money.
tyronehed
You're asking people to give away their billion-dollar startup ideas...
m12k
Saving the world very seldom makes you a billionaire - if it did, a lot more effort would be going into it.
impjohn
It's ok, they'll keep the trillion-dollar startup ideas to themselves:)
stubish
Skin cancer screening using a smart phone.