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Most 'good hackers' are wasted in Silicon Valley. You're right in that you can accomplish a lot more good in the world by focusing on solving problems at a high

Most 'good hackers' are wasted in Silicon Valley. You're right in that you can accomplish a lot more good in the world by focusing on solving problems at a higher level of abstraction than ground-level work, but at the same time most people working in tech aren't focusing on problems that are anywhere near as important as those that public service tackles.

peterwwillis 13y ago
most people working in tech aren't focusing on problems that are anywhere near as important as those that public service tackles FUCK. YES. This is exactly the point that should be made more. Can you imagine how much we could improve the quality of life of everyday people if everyone in Silicon Valley focused on economic, environmental and social issues for a couple months? There are so many problems whose solutions are dead simple for hackers, but hackers aren't working on them! Quick, someone go make an Uber+Match.com for volunteerism.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > There are so many problems whose solutions are dead simple for hackers, but hackers aren't working on them! Do you have any specific examples? Perhaps the issue is that hackers are not good at perceiving social issues that their skill sets make them particularly well-suited to tackle.
  - hilko 13y ago
    Perhaps hackers tend to be a little more structured and in-crowd, or downright strangers to most of the world. I'm not sure. Or perhaps hackers can easily be distracted by any type of problem, no matter how trivial, no how much it benefits others over them, or no matter how insignificant it is. I think the latter is true very often. The hackers I do know tend to be, generally speaking, wonderfully excited by problems presented to them, and have a childlike exuberance solving them. They are 'moral' individuals, but often seem to be unburdened by 'grander scheme' questions. My uncle, for example, had a really important job but got paid relatively little. He was just... happy and never bothered to ask for a raise. I've been trying to think of ways to 'prod' hackers to solve these problems that are 'bigger' in a way, but often still relatively trivial to solve.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I think my problem is that compared to many hackers, I think that technical solutions that hackers might be able to provide are rarely the proper solutions. What are the major problems today? Hunger? Overpopulation and access to family planning? Sanitation? Malaria, and other diseases? LGBT rights? Are any of these things really suffering for lack of hackers proposing technical solutions?
      - rayiner 13y ago
        Lots of these things are amenable, at least partially, to technical solutions. Example: A major problem poor countries have is that donors donate medical equipment, but the healthcare systems have no ability to maintain or sometimes even not the knowledge to use that equipment. There is a ton of equipment that could be easily fixed, or even just unpacked and used, that instead sits gathering dust. Don't you think something like that is amenable to a technical solution?
        jlgreco 13y ago
        It sounds like they need training and skilled labor, not hackers. Could a bunch of hackers get together and say "I know, lets roll Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about!"? Sure, a bunch of hackers could say such a thing. But is the real problem here really a lack of technology for online training? If you really want to attack this problem, you would talk with the donors that donated the equipment in the first place and work on allocating the donations in a more sensible manner. That could be as simple as prioritizing donations to teaching hospitals and using some of the donation money to attract and retain skilled teachers instead of just using it all on equipment.
        oblique63 13y ago
        > Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about! That example could actually work, you know. There's nothing stopping you from automating some intelligent scraping for each item that gets registered into the db, and presenting the users with tid-bits of what that item can be used for and how to use it, with a couple of links to places. It may not seem like a lot because it's so simple, but just trying to gather that tiny bit of preliminary information is probably a huge bottleneck in places that aren't used to automating everything and have better things to worry about. At least with this service they'd be able to quickly dive-in, get an idea of what something does, and if they need to, click on a few links for more information and have their questions answered within a few minutes. The problem here is just assuming that this is a 'hard' problem that we lack the skill sets for. If we start looking at it that way, we prevent ourselves from even really trying to find any solution because our minds have already hinted at us that it's useless. "Nothing is impossible", and a community of entrepreneurs like HN should know that by now; but for some reason that curiosity, ambition, and cleverness just shuts down when looking at bigger problems that we might be a bit detached from. That doesn't make sense.
- w_t_payne 13y ago
  Picking the right problem is really, really hard.
hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
The problem is that we have a tension between what provides value to people vs. what makes money to investors. Our economy has no concept of "social capital". Government doesn't have a pressure on profit since it can print money and can back projects whose objective is not measurable in dollars.

peterwwillis 13y ago

most people working in tech aren't focusing on problems that are anywhere near as important as those that public service tackles FUCK. YES. This is exactly the point that should be made more. Can you imagine how much we could improve the quality of life of everyday people if everyone in Silicon Valley focused on economic, environmental and social issues for a couple months? There are so many problems whose solutions are dead simple for hackers, but hackers aren't working on them! Quick, someone go make an Uber+Match.com for volunteerism.

jlgreco 13y ago
> There are so many problems whose solutions are dead simple for hackers, but hackers aren't working on them! Do you have any specific examples? Perhaps the issue is that hackers are not good at perceiving social issues that their skill sets make them particularly well-suited to tackle.
- hilko 13y ago
  Perhaps hackers tend to be a little more structured and in-crowd, or downright strangers to most of the world. I'm not sure. Or perhaps hackers can easily be distracted by any type of problem, no matter how trivial, no how much it benefits others over them, or no matter how insignificant it is. I think the latter is true very often. The hackers I do know tend to be, generally speaking, wonderfully excited by problems presented to them, and have a childlike exuberance solving them. They are 'moral' individuals, but often seem to be unburdened by 'grander scheme' questions. My uncle, for example, had a really important job but got paid relatively little. He was just... happy and never bothered to ask for a raise. I've been trying to think of ways to 'prod' hackers to solve these problems that are 'bigger' in a way, but often still relatively trivial to solve.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I think my problem is that compared to many hackers, I think that technical solutions that hackers might be able to provide are rarely the proper solutions. What are the major problems today? Hunger? Overpopulation and access to family planning? Sanitation? Malaria, and other diseases? LGBT rights? Are any of these things really suffering for lack of hackers proposing technical solutions?
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Lots of these things are amenable, at least partially, to technical solutions. Example: A major problem poor countries have is that donors donate medical equipment, but the healthcare systems have no ability to maintain or sometimes even not the knowledge to use that equipment. There is a ton of equipment that could be easily fixed, or even just unpacked and used, that instead sits gathering dust. Don't you think something like that is amenable to a technical solution?
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        It sounds like they need training and skilled labor, not hackers. Could a bunch of hackers get together and say "I know, lets roll Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about!"? Sure, a bunch of hackers could say such a thing. But is the real problem here really a lack of technology for online training? If you really want to attack this problem, you would talk with the donors that donated the equipment in the first place and work on allocating the donations in a more sensible manner. That could be as simple as prioritizing donations to teaching hospitals and using some of the donation money to attract and retain skilled teachers instead of just using it all on equipment.
        oblique63 13y ago
        > Yet Another(tm) online training service to teach these doctors how to use and maintain complex medical equipment that we know nothing about! That example could actually work, you know. There's nothing stopping you from automating some intelligent scraping for each item that gets registered into the db, and presenting the users with tid-bits of what that item can be used for and how to use it, with a couple of links to places. It may not seem like a lot because it's so simple, but just trying to gather that tiny bit of preliminary information is probably a huge bottleneck in places that aren't used to automating everything and have better things to worry about. At least with this service they'd be able to quickly dive-in, get an idea of what something does, and if they need to, click on a few links for more information and have their questions answered within a few minutes. The problem here is just assuming that this is a 'hard' problem that we lack the skill sets for. If we start looking at it that way, we prevent ourselves from even really trying to find any solution because our minds have already hinted at us that it's useless. "Nothing is impossible", and a community of entrepreneurs like HN should know that by now; but for some reason that curiosity, ambition, and cleverness just shuts down when looking at bigger problems that we might be a bit detached from. That doesn't make sense.
w_t_payne 13y ago
Picking the right problem is really, really hard.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago

The problem is that we have a tension between what provides value to people vs. what makes money to investors. Our economy has no concept of "social capital". Government doesn't have a pressure on profit since it can print money and can back projects whose objective is not measurable in dollars.