
Ask HN: What problems can techies solve to help world? - marmot777
I&#x27;m using the term techie to be more general as clearly one could use a variety of skills to solve problems, not just coding.<p>Sure, there are all kinds of domains that the market will pay for and even more that investors will fund. I&#x27;m for the free market.<p>That said, I think that there are a lot of problems in the world that are barely noticed much less focused on by techies. First of all, why is that? It seems like more and more it&#x27;s stuff like _Beerme,_ an app that connects people with beer with thirsty people or whatever. Is it because there&#x27;s no money to be made in solving more important problems?
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p333347
Techies can only assist the scientists in bringing their successful lab
experiments into the real world. I expect scientists to solve problems in two
fields - agriculture and water resources (especially drinking water) - before
tackling fancier things like interplanetary exploration, brain computer
interfaces etc. I understand not all scientists (or their domains) are equal
but I expect science to solve basic problems first. Science created the
problem by making people live longer, so science must solve the problem as
well (half kidding). Once a solution is in beta mode, the techies can go crazy
building software and gadgets for it, which is what they do well.

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IpV8
This is an underrated point. I believe that as an average techie, your highest
social impact is in building the tools required to solve these problems. We
don't need better phones and advertisements, we need better tools for out
scientists and doctors. I currently build research devices for applications in
marine science and water quality research. Though my day to day is a bit
removed from the social benefit, it is uplifting to hear about the companies
and universities that but these products to good use.

~~~
marmot777
Yes, agreed, strangly underrated, as perhaps most people have their awareness
of tools running in the background. We already see the importance of tools so
it's not a hard leap to understand EVERY domain needs better tools to be more
effective.

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

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mtmail
Have a look at
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Humanitarian_OSM_Team).
You can help by adding streets based on satellite images from home (armchair
mapping). Or you can work on tools. Almost any tool used for openstreetmap can
also be used to help areas (before and) after a major disaster happened.

~~~
marmot777
I took a look at these again and will again later. A friend of mine who does
web dev showed me some pretty cool and powerful stuff he's done for some well
known non-profits. It was good stuff. One cool thing about my quest for
knowledge is I've learned more about the good things.

~~~
marmot777
When you say your quest for knowledge ended up with you seeing some good stuff
was it because you were asking around or you put the intention out in the
universe or what? It's awesome when someone says something like, "one cool
thing about my quest for knowledge is that I've learned more about the good
things" but it leaves you wanting to know exactly what it was that you were
seeking, why, and where did you look?

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

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

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

0:
[http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopmen...](http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/resources/energydevelopment/energyaccessdatabase/)
1: I worked at a solar NGO in Tanzania.

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maramono
IMO, first we need to solve the smaller issues, most importantly to have
developers start making high-quality software _consistently_.

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

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

More of my thoughts here: [http://ortask.com/why-your-mindset-might-be-
setting-your-sof...](http://ortask.com/why-your-mindset-might-be-setting-your-
software-for-failure/)

~~~
bbcbasic
I agree that we need to aim higher in quality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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pesfandiar
As a techie, you can just help the economy by making/providing whatever
widget/service the market needs. That creates employment and keeps people's
retirement funds afloat. If the growth stops, many people will suffer.

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

~~~
marmot777
I don't really think affecting how markets work is something I think's a good
idea nor do I think it's an optimal path for me anyway. God bless those who do
it. The thing is I don't even see fundamental changes to the way the market
works is even a good idea to attempt, however incompetently or well, it's
going to be a buggy mess.

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

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HeyLaughingBoy
There are important problems being solved by techies every day all over the
place. Transportation, medicine, funding, housing, clothing. Why are you
choosing to ignore all those areas and the businesses that are involved with
them to focus on BeerMe?

~~~
marmot777
I want to reiterate that this question wasn't meant as a criticism or
lecturing or to diminish the tremendous accomplishments thus far. I genuinely
think we live in times of great change and serious problems that need
addressing. I don't I even grok the problems much less the solutions at this
point so that was my goal to increase understanding to be able to particate in
a more meaningful and useful way myself. I've not exactly spent my years in
the tech industry doing work that I think was anything more than services that
helped business people accomplish some of their goals. That's something but
not exactly the most important problems. Any side projects I've worked on I've
done so simply because it was something that caught my interest. So god knows,
many if not most of people who read HN are probably contributing more than I
am.

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

