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

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• huqedato 5y ago
  Any software with application to the field of energy (generation, resources, exploitation, storage, research). The "energy problem" will become more acute in the short/medium term. I would invest in a startup that creates software in this domain.
• kaetemi 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Did you hear about Linux?
    • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
      Or MacOS as an in-between; it has "cloud bullshit" but it doesn't nag your about it as much.
      • skummetmaelk 5y ago
        Except if you don't want to sign into icloud.
    • kaetemi 5y ago
      Not sure if dropping all my essential software counts as positive, though.
      • fsflover 5y ago
        AFAIK most of it works with Wine nowadays.
        • kaetemi 5y ago
          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 5y ago
            > 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 5y ago
              I meant Wine bugs. Dozens of people submitting working patches, but nothing ever gets applied to release.
  • ComradePhil 5y ago
    > power user build of Windows that doesn't include all the builtin cloud nonsense and other useless distractions. Windows Server?
  • mxuribe 5y ago
    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 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 5y ago
      I prefer Linux Mint Cinnamon.
      • mxuribe 5y ago
        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!
  • emptysongglass 5y ago
    What you're looking for is Windows LTSC.
• benjaminwootton 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
    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.
• dmitriid 5y ago
  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.
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  The lack of fresh ideas in this thread is discouraging.
  • hvl2 5y ago
    The plethora of solid ideas in this thread is encouraging.
• lifeplusplus 5y ago
  Adult education at quality of MIT/Stanford/Wharton available to every person and adult on the planet with the internet in their language...
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  Certainly not AI. There are very few applications of AI that do not tip the scale in favor of more powerful against the less powerful. It enables government and big tech surveillance, mass mind control, smart weapons, deepfakes etc.
• nickd2001 5y ago
  I would think anything that improves renewable energy, electric transport, energy use. Even something mundane like better intelligent controllers for heat pumps, thus reducing dependence on gas boilers, would help.
• metageneralist 5y ago
  zero trust, homomorphic encryption, biometrics
• mistrial9 5y ago
  Google Earth Engine for earth sciences
• fsflover 5y ago
  1. https://qubes-os.org 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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption. If you extend from five years to fifty, then the answer will be climate-related.
  • dimatter 5y ago
    >A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption. signal?
    • ISL 5y ago
      Can I use Signal to prove the authenticity of authorship on documents?
• riidom 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  <crazy-fanboi mode="on"> Oh, easy - https://enso.org https://enso.org, of course!
  • impjohn 5y ago
    This looks amazing. I always imagine my scripts and programs like this in my head, can't wait to play with this
• andix 5y ago
  Easy mode for Kubernetes
  • leetrout 5y ago
    The next evolution will be branded "kubeless"
    • eldelshell 5y ago
      Pffft! And what next, running software on fat clients? Preposterous!!!
    • marginalia_nu 5y ago
      My money is on "NoCloud"
      • leetrout 5y ago
        Cloudless
  • Cthulhu_ 5y ago
    Isn't that just running your own server? Just say "we are at capacity, sorry" if it starts to give issues from load.
    • andix 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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".
• tjansen 5y ago
  I think Unikernels like NanoVMs (https://nanos.org/ 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.
• mg 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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
    • cupofpython 5y ago
      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.
    • xenocratus 5y ago
      You mean like this https://blog.tjcx.me/p/40k-fantastic-startup-idea https://blog.tjcx.me/p/40k-fantastic-startup-idea ?
      • mg 5y ago
        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?
• anotherhue 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 5y ago
    > Android implementing ad tracking limitations. Google will not fight against itself. GNU/Linux phones already provide this functionality.
• ramboldio 5y ago
  Democratic Government Backbones
• visarga 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlcTDz9ogug
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mysore 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
          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 5y ago
    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.
• juliushuijnk 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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. ;-)
• FWKevents 5y ago
  Software to quickly and easily determine the tax implications of crypto purchases and trades.
  • floodle 5y ago
    How does this lead to positive impact?
    • rocgf 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    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/ https://www.streamlinedsalestax.org/
• southpawflo 5y ago
  tackling communications security and privacy: https://betrusted.io https://betrusted.io
• FWKevents 5y ago
  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_ 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  You're asking people to give away their billion-dollar startup ideas...
  • m12k 5y ago
    Saving the world very seldom makes you a billionaire - if it did, a lot more effort would be going into it.
  • impjohn 5y ago
    It's ok, they'll keep the trillion-dollar startup ideas to themselves:)
• stubish 5y ago
  Skin cancer screening using a smart phone.
• kapsteur 5y ago
  Ethereum ?
  • timeon 5y ago
    Is it still PoW?
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      "Ethereum 2.0 with Proof of Stake (PoS) could be launched in June this year. After the launch of Kiln, which is considered the last testnet before the final launch, there was speculation that the merger ... leading up to the final arrival of Ethereum 2.0, will arrive in mid-2022." https://investmentbusinessu.com/2022/03/16/ethereum-2-0-appears-to-have-a-merger-date-says-specialist/ https://investmentbusinessu.com/2022/03/16/ethereum-2-0-appe...
• loudmax 5y ago
  So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do not align with what's best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating. If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts, they could undo much of the harm done by our culturally divisive "social" networks.
  • ehnto 5y ago
    Slack/Discord are just hosted community platforms, I wouldn't put them in the same vein as Facebook/Twitter. Slack/Discord/IRC communities have intentionally curated walls for specific purposes, just as we do in the real world, I think that is fine. Would love to hear thoughts to the contrary however. It's worth discussing as this is a big problem for an internet hitting critical mass in participation.
  • Mandatum 5y ago
    And they never will for the same reason email, IRC, forums and every other form of commnication gets gobbled up and surpassed by private companies. Open source software isn't driven by a dictator with a better vision - software projects run by good dictators will always win out against "built and design by committee" open source projects.
  • shafyy 5y ago
    I agree that this is a big problem. > If Matrix and Mastodon become as easy to use as their proprietary counterparts The problem is not primarily about usability, but about network effects and economic incentives. First, it's really hard to break the dominance of existing social media platforms, and they will never voluntarily adopt open standards. Second, I fear that if a platform becomes big enough, they have an incentive to close down their standards because, you guessed it, cash money. Therefore this needs to be regulated. The EU is taking a good first step with the Digital Markets Act, and just a couple of days ago decided that big messaging services need to open up their APIs. Now, this is not the perfect solution, but a step in the right direction.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
• martin_a 5y ago
  Something like YouTube for learning videos, only. Spreading _solid_ knowledge about everything all over the world and people will be able to improve their societies, no matter where they are. That will probably have a huge impact.
  • rocgf 5y ago
    I believe there are already such instances, I believe https://nebula.app/ https://nebula.app/ is one of them. The problem is that this does not change the dynamic of what people want to watch. The problem is not necessarily a lack of ways to find and filter such content, but rather that this is not appealing for broad audiences.
    • martin_a 5y ago
      By just looking at the thumbnails of the videos I see that Nebula is not the solution but part of the problem. It's the same clickbaity images all over the place. With regards to being able to find and filter such content, I'm not sure that point still stands. With the various changes YouTube has made, it becomes very hard to see what's good and what not before watching a video or being into the topic and understanding whether somebody is telling the truth and solid information or not.
      • mnadkvlb 5y ago
        I have similar experience with all changes from youtube. Youtube doesnt even want you to see the length of videos by upcoming shorts feature which i absolutely despise. They dont want you to choose which media you consume so they can push more trash down viewers throats.
  • chakkepolja 5y ago
    I am thinking more like a self-hostable coursera, which institutions and companies can use to provide open education resources in form of courses.
• aabajian 5y ago
  I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don't choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there's no later-in-life educational safety net for adults without those early childhood benefits. If you went to a crap high school because of where you lived, you have limited options after graduating, and even less if you dropped-out. Your current options as an adult are to take a course online, take a course at a community college, or buy books and watch YouTube videos all on your own. The problem with these approaches is that all motivation must come from within. There's no requirement that you learn. As soon as you get bored, you can quit. A large majority of kids, even stellar students, study because they are required to do so, out of a fear of the consequences imposed by their parents, by their teachers and even by their peers. Imagine if you had to learn a subject outside your comfort zone. How attentive would you be to an online classes? Even basic courses like algebra are very uncomfortable to adults with minimal mathematics knowledge. It's not enough to hope adults who enroll will 'do their best', you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel. Now...I don't know what such a system would look like or even if it's possible to implement on a large scale.
  • thephyber 5y ago
    There is nothing in this post specific to adult education. The same exact issues interfere with exercise, diet, sleep, relationships, career advancement, etc. In a world where adults are given freedom, the government doesn’t generally take part in motivating them to do anything outside of paying taxes, avoid breaking laws, participation in military conscription. Nearly everything else has always been up to the individual or their social circle to generate motivation.
  • nonrandomstring 5y ago
    You're absolutely right that education is broken. It's been captured and commodified by a cult of testing, shallow training, exclusion, competition and normativity that cripples maturation, creative thought human development. Can technology help with that? Maybe. Look at what Wikipedia, Internet Archive, YouTube, Vimeo and other sites have done. We've never had access to more high quality learning materials in history. That is a form of profound freedom. There are many very successful self-educated people in the world. The internet did more for education in a decade than in the millenia between Aristotle and Thomas Mann. On the other hand technologies like Turnitin, proctoring software, and the march of big-tech like Microsoft and Google into our educational institutions is a disaster for freedom, diversity and opportunity. It may be that the internet has been a spearhead that ushers in an era of thought control and "epistemological management" unseen in history. The universities need an enema. To fix education we need technologies that address the monopolies/centralisation of reputation, certificate issuance, commercial hiring practices, student debt, paying teachers, access to specialised research equipment and much more. I know people like Peter Theil have said the've given up on education reform, but I'm still optimistic the institutions can be rescued.
• Tepix 5y ago
  The ability to crowd fund creators sounds like it will be a positive impact. Details at https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/139265/avalanche-launches-100-million-creator-fund-with-grimes-and-web3-platform-op3n https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/139265/avalanche-launche...
  • tchock23 5y ago
    We have this. Patreon, Kickstarter, Wefunder and countless others.
• gameswithgo 5y ago
  I see Rust with a lot of potential, especially if/when it moves into domains like aerospace and other control of critical physical hardware. These are places where a reduction of bugs saves lives and/or huge amounts of money. Machine learning definitely has potential, if we have another surge of breakthroughs in the future amazing things will become possible Something I would like to see is a movement for software user rights. Between hardware that locks you into to the manufacturers store, and software that is constantly interrupting you and pushing ads at you instead of allowing you to do your work, some kind of social movement to push back against these UI dark patterns is sorely needed. Using computers is absolutely horrible compared to what it could be because of these issues.
• lumannnn 5y ago
  https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf - "Bitcoin & Renewable Energy Transition - Bitcoin Incentivizes Green Energy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SX1eCqwd3Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SX1eCqwd3Q - "Can Bitcoin Mining Save the Environment? with Troy Cross" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFYKq5Qe1Bs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFYKq5Qe1Bs - "This Machine Greens" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc
  • tgv 5y ago
    The cognitive dissonance is off the charts.
  • lumannnn 5y ago
    - "Bitcoin’s Clean Energy Revolution with Nic Carter & Troy Cross" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu156PvA-NI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu156PvA-NI
• nonrandomstring 5y ago
  The greatest positive impact we can hope for in digital technology is for more reflection and thought. Moving fast and breaking things isn't working well any more, and may be our undoing. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." It ought to be emblazoned in 10ft high letters above the doorway to every university, company and research institution. We could benefit from a more widespread acceptance of the fundamental utilitarian question "How does this actually make life better for the greatest number, and without inflicting harms as unseen side effects?" This means careful reflection on human values, and less hubris about what we can achieve. To see how far from value-neutral your suggestions might be: > energy usage Unless stated carefully some people may assume that means "use less". It may well be that the way forward is to use more energy, not less. Renewable non fossil use would seem a better goal. > preventing armed conflicts Some with a more hawkish outlook might say of defence, it's actually better to expediently and decisively win conflicts with minimum loss of life. > reducing poverty Seems like a universal good. But poverty is relative. To raise the remainder of humanity to the standard of living that most Americans consider "poverty" would be devastating if done with current technology. > STEM training Plenty would argue that we have a STEM excess and what is needed is broader application of the arts and humanities to balance life and create a nicer culture. > improving access to sustainable environments Most things that start with "improving access" fail to account for the effects of demand on those resources. > implementing AI Many, myself included, would caution that a naive pursuit of AI is absolutely catastrophic. Instead we should put more into IA. And so on. Now, I am not picking on your values here. If I were to list 10 "bare word values" you'd be able to make similar objections and shoot mine down. What I am saying is that digital technology has created a "solution trap", where we see things as monotonic linear progress with "fast" ideas that can be made into a product and a company. We see trajectories toward unquestionable good without pausing to consider the cost elsewhere. I recommend reading systems theory (I start my students with Dana Meadows "fishing ecosystem" lecture) and you'll see something frightening. The trick is not to recoil at the complexity but re-imagine technology as a way to understand it, reflect on it in a less reductionist way.
  • simne 5y ago
    > preventing armed conflicts Move armed conflicts to virtual ;) Something like idea of Mortal Combat movie.
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I'm going to be cynical. Energy usage: Software can't fix this; rewriting your workload more efficiently doesn't matter if during that rewrite, a hundred companies wrote workloads that cost a hundred times more power did. The issue is that electricity is too cheap. Raise the cost of electricity and it will force the big consumers of electricity to use it more efficiently. Also ban proof-of-work blockchain technology. Software cannot prevent armed conflicts, that's a political problem. That can be solved by voting or assassinations, to be blunt. Politics is broken, and software cannot fix that, revolutions can. It doesn't matter that you can vote remotely on the blockchain if you're in a two-party system where your vote is for the lesser evil. Ban nukes. Stop voting for oligarchs, authoritarians, and fuckwits. Poverty is a political problem too. The free market didn't work. Raise the minimum wage, give people money if they can't work or are between jobs, give everyone an education for free (it pays itself back within a few years through income taxes no problem), give people health care (and control the prices). Yes it's totalitarian, but we tried the free market and the illusion of free choice and it didn't work. We're rich enough to give everyone a happy life but we refuse to because "I got mine". STEM training, see above. Make it free for anyone to attend. AI is not needed, it's used to sell you more stuff. I've yet to see a beneficial application for AI. I hope it can be used for medical science at least but a lot of it is gimmicky.
  • Bedon292 5y ago
    I guess it depends on what OP means by Energy usage. I thought it was more about clean energy than about the energy usage of individual workloads. And there are certainly opportunities for software in clean energy. Things like improving site selection, grid optimizations, and the like. Although a lot of it is probably going to be hardware side.
  • loudmax 5y ago
    Paying for universal education, health care, and basic income via taxation is not totalitarian. With sensible regulation all of these can be accomplished without giving up on the free market. That is, the free market as understood by Keynes, not necessarily by Ayn Rand. If you take an extremist definition of the free market, where healthcare mandates equal socialism and taxation equals theft, then yeah, that version of the free market doesn't work. (Where "work" means having leading to the general benefit to society as a whole.) Believing that any economic regulation is incompatible with a free market is equivalent to believing that any law is incompatible with freedom. Just as anarchy won't lead to freedom, a complete absence of economic regulation will not lead to a free market.
• dane-pgp 5y ago
  Someone needs to solve online identity and reputation (in a privacy-preserving way) so that you can accumulate trust on one site/service and carry that over to another. Ideally such a system shouldn't devolve into trusting just a few large American corporations to decide who is and isn't allowed an online existence. It feels like we can't have nice things because if you want to put a user-editable resource online, you first have to solve the Sybil attack problem. The more valuable the resource is, the more friction you need to put in the way of users to make them prove their humanity and divulge more of their offline identity, and this takes up engineering time which could have been devoted to making the resource itself more useful. By "resource" I mean anything that accepts and displays user input from the internet, whether that's a wiki or a poll or a form or a multiplayer game or an online review or some completely new type of content that hasn't emerged yet because innovative creators have given up after their first bot raid.
  • webmaven 5y ago
    > Someone needs to solve online identity and reputation (in a privacy-preserving way) so that you can accumulate trust on one site/service and carry that over to another. The problem is that most of the existing ways of transferring reputation (or the appearance of it) between contexts result in opportunities for arbitrage: celebrity endorsements, scientists supporting theories outside of their field, con artists leveraging social proof escalation, phishing, etc. We've seen some of the strictest mechanisms of reputational transference leveraged for illicit purposes: https://cromwell-intl.com/cybersecurity/pki-failures.html https://cromwell-intl.com/cybersecurity/pki-failures.html Everything that makes reputation and trust transfers useful and convenient for users creates a huge attractive nuisance for illicit actors, from state level APTs on down to 419 scammers and everyone in between.
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      > transferring reputation ... between contexts The problem is, the systems we have today don't put walls between contexts but between implementations. If someone is a famous actor, and they have millions of followers on Twitter, then they can tweet out some hot take on vaccines and all their followers will see that. However, if a scientist has a lot of followers on Twitter, but wants to move their account over to Mastodon, they have to start from scratch and lose their audience.
• pikrzyszto 5y ago
  I'd recommend you to have a look at https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/ or at least their job boards: https://80000hours.org/job-board/ https://80000hours.org/job-board/ They focus on the very problem you're asking about.
• huhtenberg 5y ago
  Near complete erosion of personal privacy and absolutely astounding levels of ignorance of that in general populace is a massive issue that continues to reshape the society is very alarming ways. Courtesy of Google and Facebook. So both technical and non-technical counter-measures are dearly needed. From federated messaging systems to the privacy-oriented legislation, every little thing will help. It is an uphill battle though. This much is obvious.
• Artistry121 5y ago
  I think a project based social network will emerge with some long term planning features and built for easy collaboration by hundreds and thousands of people. As this grows i imagine we can coordinate large groups of people towards goals Like improving local communities, permaculture, and goals from the effective altruism community.
• metta2uall 5y ago
  Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive & informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one's typical posts.. I'm working on an experiment at https://toplists.app/ https://toplists.app/ that tries to leverage existing social networks, but this would probably work much better if e.g. Twitter expanded its "pinned" posts so that the UX would be seamless. Also - perhaps software that improves visibility/transparency/understanding of energy usage, the lives of people in poverty, victims of human rights abuses, farmed animals, political votes, the impact of donations (Effective Altruism), etc
  • samtho 5y ago
    > Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive & informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one's typical posts.. One could argue this exists in some way through forums that rank posts through a voting system like HN or Reddit, so my question would be around what would a “2.0” version of this sort of forum look like? How can good behavior be incentivized, I.e positing high quality, original content without allowing older top posts from being reposted by spam bots in order to karma farm? Much of what happens on mainstream and default subreddits is bot generated, in the sense that they pick popular things and repost them at optimal times of day for as many upvotes as possible.
    • metta2uall 5y ago
      Well, in addition to the current algorithmically generated pages (where the algorithm highly values new posts and can be gamed by bots), social sites could do more to help users maintain & publish high-quality material. The high-quality stuff would be more static since more effort is required to generate it, and others could view it through user profiles or a follow/subscribe mechanism. I think YouTube does this to a large extent. They use algorithms to help discovery but users can easily click on a channel and view all of a creator's high-quality material. But YouTube is video-only..
  • jslakro 5y ago
• mrfusion 5y ago
  I think tutoring software designed on a tictoc like platform. It would hit all your dopamine centers and keep you engaged but actually teaches you a whole field in micro lessons. (Feel free to steal this idea)
  • xuki 5y ago
    You might find this interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical.ly > Musical.ly Inc. was founded by long time friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China.[7][8] Before launching Musical.ly, Zhu and Yang teamed up to build an education social network app, through which users could both teach and learn different subjects through short-form videos (3–5 minutes long).
• RankingMember 5y ago
  more powerful "no code" software development tools
• mikewarot 5y ago
  I think that computer security causes a lot of other issues, like the Walled gardens, and the constant thread of cyber-attacks. A solid OS that is microkernel based, and ends up with a track record of stability is one of the most important things we need right now. With out it, people have to use the walled gardens to stay safe. Software innovation is stifled, and it's always there as an possible trigger for overbearing legislative answers to a technical problem.
  • chakkepolja 5y ago
    Walled gardens are popular due to comfort & financial viability, It has nothing to do with security. People will still use Android or iOS even if you build a state of art mobile OS based on SeL4 completely written in Rust & ATS, with more features and customizability than Android or iOS. Because it doesn't come preinstalled on their devices, and does not have popular apps. I am afraid walled gardens are logical conclusion of the field, for the things industry tends to optimize.
  • fsflover 5y ago
    > constant thread of cyber-attacks. A solid OS that is microkernel based Not microkernel-based, but hardware virtualization based, which is even more secure: https://qubes-os.org https://qubes-os.org.
• perlgeek 5y ago
  One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs. Examples: * burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change * during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state * plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of / recycling their waste ... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere. If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it. I know, this is very abstract, and I don't even know what a software solution for that would look like, but if somebody comes up with a really good of tracking that, it could have a huge impact on society in the long run. Try to think of a society where nobody could quietly externalize a cost, and we had an effective way of tracking who externalizes how much, and go after the big offenders in a very data-driven way. There could even be general laws that make certain externalizations illegal, in a much broader way than current regulations do.
  • shafyy 5y ago
    I guess projects like Our World in Data and Carbonplan track negative externalities. I mean, other organizations track them, but they make them visible and readily understandable. And I agree, their impact is extremely outsized. For example, there only work a dozen+ people at Our World in Data, but what they do has an outsized impact. https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ https://carbonplan.org/ https://carbonplan.org/
  • jedharris 5y ago
    Changing the laws or enforcement will take a while and software won't help directly. But extensive crowd-sourced measurement of externalities would be a big deal and software should help with that. Actual measurement (and definition) of externalities will be very diverse, so the tracking will have to evolve and expand. Crowd-sourcing can handle that. Once externalities can be clearly documented, public opinion will shift and companies will start to change their behavior in response. Then enforcement and laws will follow.
  • gearhart 5y ago
    This is what Route2 is building. It's not a pure-play software solution or an external policing force; it depends on large amounts of work done by analysts and cooperation from the companies themselves. However, the motivation to drive internal actors in companies to care about tracking externalities has always been the hardest part of this problem, and that's starting to be solved for us by society and the market. Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and we're hiring
• alexashka 5y ago
  I think the ability to share your expertise in video/audio/text format without any technical know-how will continue to be huge. Everything else is nice but secondary to people being able to communicate, world-wide. Reason being - I think we've solved the food/clothes/shelter technical problems already. What we haven't solved is the willingness to re-distribute the goodies in a sensible way and the way to get there is, is communication.
• codethief 5y ago
  Personally, I'm actually quite excited about Fuchsia (related HN thread -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30827210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30827210). Not at all because of its Flutter-based UI but because of its security features. Security on Linux is really lacking and Qubes OS requires too many resources (in particular: battery power), so I'd love to have an OS that has security guarantees at least as strong as Android.
  • junon 5y ago
    There are a number of projects in that space btw. I'm working on one of them. OS development has picked up considerable interest in the last few years for similar reasoning.
    • codethief 5y ago
      Would you mind sharing a list of those projects (including yours of course)? :)
      • junon 5y ago
        I don't have a comprehensive list, but the #osdev channel on Libera.chat has a lot of very active, very colorful, very smart people all working on their projects. Some hobby, some not. But the Fuchsia devs hang out in there too and are very pleasant and helpful folks. My project hasn't been announced yet but follows similar design principles to Zircon. I plan to announce sometime in May if all goes well.
• logicallee 5y ago
  >Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years? sentiment analysis and nudging, when people are angry with each other it is easy for AI to analyze; likewise if people are being tricky, defrauding, etc, it could be analyzed from their interactions facial expressions etc. These behaviors are a drain on the economy and within a few years AI could help solve it. Basically, five years from now when someone gets a "you've just won x", "paid thank you", or even "congratulations you've been hired" AI could ensure there is not someone on the other side of the transaction who is actively tricking them. Something like, "looks like you're trying to defraud or steal from someone. Here are some coursera courses that are a better path for you". I feel like these things are a real drain on the economy, and lead to mistrust or markets that fail. Successful economies need trust, it is a prerequisite, and lawsuits or law enforcement are a poor substitute. I feel like AI could be used for productive purposes to increase trust in the world. At the limit, imagine if everyone had a helpful friend, who was also friends with everyone else. Within five years, AI could be that friend.
• jasfi 5y ago
  Definitely Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). My own effort: https://lxagi.com/ https://lxagi.com/
• nanomonkey 5y ago
  Conflict-free Replication Data Types (CRDTs) and private cryptographically signed ledgers (not proof of work public blockchains, but similar) are what excites me these days, as they allow for users to own their own data, securely create transactions and collaborate without the overhead of their data being held hostage on one companies servers. IPV6 rides along with this as something I look forward to, only because so much of the hassle of doing P2P networking is NAT traversal. Gossip protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt allow for each application login to have it's own feed that others can verify through public key encryption, therefore marketplaces and collaborative tools can be built without relying on the servers of one corporation. Ideally something more compact like RSON can be incorporated. CRDTs allow for consensus building applications were each individual collaborates on designs, documentation, contracts, voting, feedback, etc. Your data is usable without a network connection, backed up on your peer's computers and historically accurate.
  • nanomonkey 5y ago
    This is important to me because I am currently working on an open source Distributed Consensus and Resource Planning tool, where people can build markets, supply chains, feed-back loops for goods and services that they care about in a distributed manner. Imagine an Amazon marketplace or Task Rabbit built on a open gossip protocol. You can start with your own Inventory Management, building up suppliers that you trust, and then build out your own Products and Services to offer up within your network. You follow the companies or individuals you trust, thus sidestepping ad networks, and know the providence of all of the items your purchase, and the reputation of the individuals that you support, filtering out anything that you don't want to be bothered by. The tool is also flexible enough to be used as a collaborative tool, building organizations to accomplish tasks from your network. The value that each person brings to the table can be tracked, allowing for invisible labor to be surfaced and properly compensated.
  • Beltiras 5y ago
    The term for the ledgers is minted, as opposed to mined.
    • 5y ago
• teknopaul 5y ago
  If the right to repair bills get anywhere I think a small amount of new software could have massive environmental impact. É.G. Ability to put a new os on an unsupported phone. That issue will soon apply to cars, which are fabulously expensive to build and to dispose of. Often it's cheaper in terms of marginal cost in dollars to buy new, but this does not factor in the environmental cost of having built two devices and disposed of one, or the opportunity cost of unused devices. In the same way that initially Linux enabled users to repuporse old pcs and eventually that tech made it to revolutionize many other areas. I get the feeling that, if right to repair bills had teeth, we would see similar innovation phones, vehicles and other consumer devices. There is so much underused existing hardware that only a change of law and a few small projects (a consumer/hacker/small business friendly re-installer) could have significant environmental benefit with close to zero environmental cost. Phones are amazing tech these days but they get thrown away at the same time newer/larger/less powerful single use devices (Alexa/music players/home automation) are purchased new. Economies rarely measure wealth (because its hard) and target income and profit. For humanity and the planet, wealth and efficient use of that wealth is what matters. Two clear examples. Software to re-purpose an unsupported phone into a iot device, voice activated device, media player or back into a working & secure phone. Software to turn an unsupported self-driving vehicle back into a manually driven vehicle or vehicle with driver assistance. I think the software required is easily within reach in a five year time frame.
• Randolf_Scott 5y ago
  As far anything that humanity develops, I would say in the software arena would only be for educational purposes. This would not be advantageous to immediate returns, but would be the best way to develop something with the smallest amount of collateral negatives. Basically create software that teaches reading, writing and arithmetic. If humans can learn those, then other educational pursuits would be allowed. Things such as [science and history], [Engineering and Technology] Once they are competent in these, then things like psychology, philosophy, religion, sociology would be unlocked. Basically software should be centered around focusing the human toward educating themselves in a way that mitigates presumptions and self-destructive tendencies. Or any combination of the cores: reading, writing and math combined with a soft-science. Honestly, I can't figure out a way to mitigate humanities need for laws. People always prefer to be bad than to be good if they can get away with it.
• jeffreyrogers 5y ago
  The way I think about software is it's basically about processing data. Most of the time that data is someone else's, but sometimes it is generated either by the software itself (e.g., CAD or audio applications), sometimes it is free information but just collected in a useful way (e.g. Google), and sometimes it is proprietary stuff that is hard to access in other ways (lots of financial stuff fits in this category). The market for software ideas is pretty efficient. So most ideas that you can come up with off the top of your head either already exist or didn't work out for some reason that might not be obvious. The way I'd approach this question is to look at what new data sources have become available. One of the comments mentioned OpenStreetMap and that seems pretty reasonable to me. Improvements in facial recognition and object classification are probably enabling new applications (not all of them will be positive though). Biology/medicine is probably the main field that's had major new advances, obviously mRNA vaccines but also things related to genetics. So I'd bet something important would come out of there. I'm skeptical that software will have a major impact on things like energy usage or preventing armed conflict, etc. Those are more political/economic problems.
• Qem 5y ago
  Software for automated transversal of the chemical reactions graph. Basically a CAD for synthetic chemists. See for example: https://www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S2451-9294(18)30085-8.pdf https://www.cell.com/chem/pdf/S2451-9294(18)30085-8.pdf and https://www.patreon.com/posts/founder-of-four-20493205 https://www.patreon.com/posts/founder-of-four-20493205
• ericfrazier 5y ago
  Right now, government holds corporations accountable. I think the people themselves should hold corporations accountable and stop relying on the state, which is owned by the corporations. Consumers need to be conscious of where their money is going and what causes it supports. If a person believes in trans-person's rights they probably shouldn't be eating at Chick-Fil-A. There's no faster feedback for bad corporate behavior than direct and instant consumer action. Software that addresses this need to make the consumer more knowledgeable will benefit the future most.
  • rfrec0n 5y ago
    > Right now, government holds corporations accountable I know that you meant that the role of government is that they are supposed to hold corporation's accountable but as you said, when the same people that run the government are the same people that run the large corporations, that will never be possible. We need to find a new way for everyone to be able to hold them accountable. However I don't think that consumers really have any influence with their wallets nowadays. Consumers have very little financial influence in the grand scheme of things because as long as other corporations or the government is willing to continue doing business with the targeted corporation, it's profits will never be significantly damaged.
    • ericfrazier 5y ago
      When corporations lose large chunks of consumers, they notice. The problem is that it's too easy for corporations to hide behind a million brand names and subsidiaries. Even people who are adamant about boycotting Nestle still end up buying from a Nestle subsidiary because it's almost impossible not too. Nestle has so many subsidiaries how can anyone keep track? An easy solution to this problem, of not easily knowing if the product you want to purchase is made by a company you boycott, would change the future the most.
  • 1270018080 5y ago
    Like an app where you input your opinion on an issue, and you can find businesses with leadership or lobbying efforts that don't oppose you? You'd run out of places to shop pretty quickly with 5 corporations run by oligarchs that own basically all consumer products in America.
• maxthegeek1 5y ago
  AlphaFold, and to be honest, most of the software/research coming out of DeepMind. For better or worse, they're the Bell Labs of the modern era.
• 1270018080 5y ago
  Password-free authentication. Passwords seem so archaic, I'd love to see them fall out of style already. Whether it's biometric or yubikey, I'll take whatever.
• simne 5y ago
  I'm not sure about biggest, but on of the biggest sure. Two problems. 1. DNA sequencing, now is two part process (I simplify a lot, sure) - at first stage, target DNA divided for small pieces, and those pieces sequenced to digital codes and saved to database. Than in second part, computer cluster works few months, to connect those pieces to one chain. And this is very expensive process even considering few gigabytes storage to store all these data for few months. The problem is that currently used algorithms are very naive, even in some projects used Perl implementation, not C or some other fast language. So exist opportunity, to create new special algorithm/software, or may be also some hardware support, so this will be at least 5 times faster, and if costs will drop under 100$ for one human DNA, this will lead to very new type of medicine - genetic checks of everything. 2. connected to 1st problem - find protein folding structures from DNA, and how they interact with other proteins, with drugs and with chemical molecules. As I know, this now solved in similar way as 1st problem, but in partially 3d space - programs try to calculate some positions, in which parts of structures are attracted to each other and calculate power of attraction. This way for example, calculated probability of drugs, which will attract to spike protein of Covid and neutralize it. Also this way calculated effects of new drugs, like interaction with proteins in human organism, etc. In ideal world, possible, that for example for cancer, 1st will create fast DNA of cancer cells of some human, and 2nd will create DNA code of artificial protein, which will be printed on DNA-printer and inhibit cancer, but will not affect normal cells, and all this will be done in just few weeks.
  • jhallenworld 5y ago
    The is an interesting related opportunity: given a existing desired protein, find its sequence- needed so that you can determine the corresponding genetic sequence so that your custom organism can synthesize the protein. Protein sequencing is not so easy... very basically you can do it one amino acid at a time based on the fact that amino acids are "sided", meaning side A of each can only connect to side B of the next one. So you attach the end of the protein to some kind of substrate (which can only attach "A" sides), then cut off each amino acid one at a time. There are some companies in this space: https://www.quantum-si.com/ https://www.quantum-si.com/
    • 5y ago
• blenderdt 5y ago
  A lot of comments here boil down to one underlying problem: self hosting is very hard (backups, security, and so on). If self hosting would be as easy as installing an app on your phone the need for a big entity that hosts your service fades away.
• olau 5y ago
  Open-source, collaboratively developed software that makes governments/societies more efficient, and where standardization helps. For instance, software for implementing national ID systems, so people can submit their taxes, get health care, etc. and that banks and similar requirements for know you customer (anti money laundering) can tap into. Or cheaper payment systems, like VISA/Mastercard, but in an open system with more operators, perhaps even national. I think this is fruitful area because governments, like big corporations, struggle with developing effective software and they struggle with cooperation. You could make a real impact on millions of people. You need to be able to navigate the politics, though.
• nabaraz 5y ago
  Websites for non-technical people. I don't think this is a solved problem. We have a lot of choices with WordPress, Wix, etc., but the drawbacks are too much. 1) You don’t own the domain. 2) Personalization is limited, so you end up with a generic page. 3) They cost too much. I think something like Gatsby+<some CMS>+Github Actions+Azure Static Apps in one tool. Everyone should have a personalized web page that they own.
  • midiguy 5y ago
    It comes down to the inherent tradeoff of flexibility vs ease of use. Wix is easy to use because it does not offer much customizability. If you made it flexible enough to create any layout, theme, etc, you would probably end up with a GUI that is straight up harder to learn and still less flexible than code (remember Dreamweaver?) For what it's worth, most musicians, small business owners, etc. I know are pretty happy with things like Wix and don't care much about technicalities like owning domains as long as they can choose what shows up in the URL. Those that have more custom needs usually just want to delegate to someone else.
    • nabaraz 5y ago
      > remember Dreamweaver? Reminds me of Frontpage days. Most of the web pages had marquee (floating text?) and sound those days.
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      > the inherent tradeoff of flexibility vs ease of use But it’s not inherent. Making a UI that can do both is hard, but possible.
• olau 5y ago
  A decent, really easy forum system to allow groups based on existing organizations to flourish, with multiple operators so that you are not beholden to something like Facebook. Most organizations, and I'm using the word here to describe the local stamp collector club of a dozen people too, need some way of communicating effectively. With GDPR, Facebook is out of the question in the EU. I've enjoyed phpbb forums in the past - but it needs to be easier to start using, and probably easier to run.
• rootsudo 5y ago
  Microsoft Excel.
• ghoward 5y ago
  While my current projects are a little less ambitious than what you are asking for, and focused only on improving software, I'll say them anyway. * An implementation of Nix's ideas for mere mortals. * Version Control for non-technical users and for any kind of binary files. The last one is interesting because most users will just see it as a more powerful undo/redo system.
• phaedrus 5y ago
  I think there's a huge potential for Software Archeology. Maybe not 5 years but within 50 years this will be huge. You could come at it from two fronts. Bottom up there's a need for tools that better help you investigate "what the hell is all this, what's in it, and where is it?" for software artifacts. Top down there's a need for an interactive dashboard executives could use to get a view (on their terms not the programmers') what the software that runs their business actually does. If I knew how to implement this I'd quit my job tomorrow to work on it. Unfortunately I have no idea. I can only see in vague terms what it might look like and the hole in our current way of interacting with software that drives this need. Or I could be wrong: in general other people consistently don't care about the things I think they obviously should care about.
  • wcerfgba 5y ago
    Software archaeology is discussed in the Vernor Vinge novel "A Deepness in the Sky": > Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. > So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. > “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. > “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. > “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” > Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” > “Almost precisely.”
• aaron695 5y ago
• sidcool 5y ago
  AlphaFold. It's very near to cracking the 90% accuracy. And solving protein folding has huge long term benefits for himaniry
• sidcool 5y ago
  A peer to peer decentralised internet built on top of middle out compression that uses end consumer devices smart fridges etc. to store data.
• nanochad 5y ago
• gavanwilhite 5y ago
  Coordination technology to connect people who “want to help” with good ways to “actually help”. Right now it is very difficult for people to figure out good ways to help causes they care about. Whether in big ways, like career shifts, or small ways, like writing a letter on behalf of a divestment initiative. (This is a biased answer since I am working on this)
• gadders 5y ago
  Adblockers.
• chimprich 5y ago
  One of the biggest problems of our age, even more so than previous ages, is misinformation. This includes wrong information passed through ignorance, and deliberate lies spread by bad actors. Many of our other biggest problems, including climate change, disease, and wars become much easier to tackle if we could make a substantial improvement in the quality of information being shared.
• bakuninsbart 5y ago
  Two fields I'm quite hyped about: There are tons of cool companies and non-profits driving the digitalisation of the medical sector, and a lot needs to be done to truly realize the potential of all the data we are gathering currently. Aggregating medical research, data mining actual operations, and leveraging smart devices to personalize therapy are all just beginning to transform the sector. The second thing would be the digitalisation of Africa, especially in banking and healthcare. Same as above, tons of startups and non-profits are engaging with this now on very promising paths. Already, millions of people gain access to banking and healthcare through these platforms beevry year, and it is transforming lives and economies at large. Maybe it is just my limited perception, but while I realize that efforts in both of these topics have been going on for well over 20 years, I feel like it has been accelerating greatly in the last couple of years, and is beginning to show real tangible differences.
• thrower123 5y ago
  I desperately want Blazor to succeed, so that the entire Javascript-based environment can burn. I would accept some kind of world where WASM bindings in browsers become usable as an alternative.
• w10-1 5y ago
  Anything that gets people to really see beyond their limited scope. 7B people now, another 20B in our children's lifetime. We're attuned to what bothers us (software introspection, social network garbage). 10 days of just sitting will show you your emotional concerns are meaningless delusions. Meanwhile, the forces that determine actual lives - availability of food, housing, health care, transportation, energy; education, rights and corruption, political capture; cultural goodwill and compassion - go largely unseen, mainly driven by people seeking power. The doomsday clock is mono-dimensional. We need a world dashboard we can all agree upon and fight over. Once it's measured, people can optimize it.
  • tashbarg 5y ago
    > 7B people now, another 20B in our children's lifetime. The UN projects ~11B total by 2100 [1]. Most of the growth currently is and will be because of people surviving birth and living long. Global fertility rate is already down to 2.4 (from almost 5 in the 50s) and very likely will keep going down. That's why projections even see a decline of total population after 2100 as likely. [1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900 https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
• codethief 5y ago
  GrapheneOS[0] has been an absolute godsend for me. For the first time in more than ten years I no longer have to distrust my phone and am still able to use pretty much any application (including Google apps) on a modern phone. Moreover, I regularly get updates & fixes – sometimes even several times a month – not just for the OS but also for the built-in apps (e.g. the Google Camera replacement). I am very excited about the project's future! One thing I look forward to in particular is hardware developed primarily for GrapheneOS. [0] https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/
• g8oz 5y ago
  ObservableHQ from the creator of D3....notebooks in javascript make so much sense and I believe will unlock their power for a much larger non-pro community than python based tools will.
• danlugo92 5y ago
  Bitcoin, no question.
• enjoyitasus 5y ago
  The things you mentioned are directionally in line with the movement called "Effective Altruism". They concern themselves with finding things that empirically would have the biggest impact, or if we don't do it, we have the biggest consequences. https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/ https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/
• jonpo 5y ago
  Software that tackles russian trolls would be great.
• contingencies 5y ago
  A respawn of mobile phones with local mesh networking and a user-oriented security model instead of the manufacturer-owned, carrier-tracked, state-tapped state of affairs we have now. Oh, and upgradeability would be great. We are all walking around with supercomputers in our pockets, and due to software issues we can't use them.
• gregable 5y ago
  Electricity Demand Response / Micro Grids. Right now, most electrical systems, even internet connected ones, don't have any awareness of electrical supply and demand. Most of the grid is designed for power to flow one direction. As we bring more intermittent power supplies onto the grid, things get harder. The batteries in electric cars are a small, but growing storage capacity that currently can't flow "backwards". Hardware will be a large part of this, but software will be needed too.
• solarkraft 4y ago
  Reproducible builds. There is no (!) other way to trust binaries you download from the web. And the best E2EE is worthless when your client is compromised. Nix. Makes dependency management kind of magic (but requires so much more development to make it practical for common people). Data being a liability. Stuff like data breaches being adequately punished to make overreaching tracking unprofitable and encourage E2EE everywhere. Open platforms. Apple being forced to allow running software on iOS devices. Federation. Imagine the E-Mail model for everything. Matrix and Mastodon are leading the new bunch, but still have quite some adoption gains to make by improving the UX. GUI programming. Think Blockly, but for real work. This will first be used to extend end user application with scripting and eventually make its way into general programming. A lot of tooling potential can be unleashed when you stop forcing the semantics of code into a linear text representation. Traditional SaaS ceasing to be a viable business model. Ok, this is just a wish, but you can’t depend on something that can change or completely go away at any time. The JetBrains model is reasonable. Explicitly not mentioned: Distributed databases (blockchain), VR.