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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

A good hacker is wasted in public service.

Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar? Who has more impact on education, a good elementary teacher or Sal Khan? Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor, why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi?

The hacker skillset is a lever big enough to move the world. Working for a nonprofit is no better than working for a bank, you're still frittering away your greatest opportunity to improve the world.

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This is a great example of why a good hacker should work in public service.

Why bother working for an environmental non-profit when you can make many orders of magnitude more difference by founding Tesla Motors or Nanosolar

Because an environmental non-profit might make immediate changes that save people's lives. A non-profit might put enough pressure on a company to stop polluting groundwater or destroying fragile ecosystems. With Tesla you'll help rich people use less gas.

Why campaign for privacy when you can write PGP or Tor

Because PGP and Tor are used by computer nerds and edge cases, but privacy legislation is used by everyone.

Why work as a fundraiser when you could build Kiva or Watsi

Either way you're fundraising. You could work as a fundraiser for a political appointee, and they could get elected to office and change how the entire country works. Or you could fund a lot of tiny things.

None of these things are a waste. There's no reason to do one over another other than personal preference. And nobody said a 'good hacker' was obliged to save the world (and oh, the hubris of thinking they could!).

Sometimes being the one guy who does want to do public service makes the difference, because all the other 'good hackers' are more concerned with one solution that will solve all the world's problems (which never happens) and making a quick buck.

> A non-profit might put enough pressure on a company to stop polluting groundwater or destroying fragile ecosystems.

The most fulfilling thing I've done in my life so far (other than starting a family) was helping to represent an Illinois village devastated by water pollution from a former industrial site. It would be amazing if some hacker would come along and figure out a cheap way to keep heavy metals from leaching out of industrial sites into water supplies. But in the meantime, maybe we could use some hackers that used their skills to help raise public awareness of the issue, put pressure on governments to stop cutting their environmental disaster cleanup budgets, etc?

I agree with jdietrich on this point: hacker skills are an incredibly big lever. The skills that programmers have: being able to decompose problems into constituent parts, apply reasoning to solve those sub-problems, and combine the solutions into a working whole, are skills that can be leveraged in any facet of life. Combine that with the ability to pitch (a skill which hackers turned entrepreneurs must develop), and you have someone that can contribute meaningfully in lots of different domains, even if they don't end up making a world-changing invention.

While I can appreciate what you are saying, it's unfortunate that by saying so you're also contributing to the noise that hackers aren't already doing these things, which they are.

I'm not saying that hackers aren't doing those things. But the article tries to paint them out to be morally superior, and in my experience, my hacker buddies are the least likely out of all of my friends to be involved in that sort of thing.

With Tesla you'll help rich people use less gas.

With Tesla, you slowly eliminate gas and help the environment. Imagine in 20 years a world where Tesla cars are the norm, all electric, travelling forever, no payment for gas, free charging. That is an incredible world change and shift.

It is so much more than helping people use less gas.

Exactly this. It may start with "rich" people, but eventually can become the norm. There are so many examples to support this, I think it should be enough to just mention the personal computer.

Yes, i'm sorry for being dismissive. The industry push toward hybrid and electric cars will definitely be benefited by Tesla's sole engineering prowess, and we will all benefit in at least 20 years. But you bring up another great example! The personal computer.

From more efficient personal entertainment to not having to retain information, the personal computer has enriched our lives in countless ways. We would all be much worse off without the novel inventions that made it such a success. (Please excuse my snark, I know the PC has had positive impacts, though I believe many are overblown)

Unfortunately, the pollution caused by the production and disposal of personal computers has not only become an ecological disaster, it's destroying the health and habitat of human beings around the globe. The biggest challenge today is not in creating a new gadget, it is how to clean up the damage done by the industry and prevent it from continuing.

I'm not saying you should stop focusing on your start-up and flipping it for cash in the Silicon Valley Gold Rush. I'm saying, if no good hackers focus on solving the problems that affect the general public, the cash you make will be invested in purchasing a habitable plastic bubble to live in.

All too true. Hopefully these tools we've been able to build and refine over the years will help lead to further advancements in 'green' computing.

> Unfortunately, the pollution caused by the production and disposal of personal computers has not only become an ecological disaster, it's destroying the health and habitat of human beings around the globe. The biggest challenge today is not in creating a new gadget, it is how to clean up the damage done by the industry and prevent it from continuing.

I am not a fan of the guy, and they don't focus on ecological damage, but I would assert that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone has more than offset that. You don't even need to get into how computers themselves have improved the world.

I agree the BMGF has done wonderful things. But what specifically are you saying they have offset, and how? I am not very aware of anything they do other than working on malaria and perhaps food/aid assistance. The PC industry has kids living in toxic waste dumps and farms are growing crops and animals with high levels of toxic substances, to say nothing of cancer killing off families in droves.

If I were given the option: "1) Have the BMGF and an extensive e-waste problem, or 2) Have neither", I would choose 1) without any hesitation. Wouldn't you?

(Of course Bill Gates cannot possibly be held responsible for all e-waste, but suppose that we do for the purposes of this discussion.)

Malaria killed 660,000 people last year alone, with 219,000,000 cases. From the WHO 2012 Malaria Report:

> Between 2000 and 2010, malaria mortality rates fell by 26% around the world. In the WHO African Region the decrease was 33%. During this period, an estimated 1.1 million malaria deaths were averted globally, primarily as a result of a scale-up of interventions. [1]

Malaria is a far bigger problem than e-waste. I'd suggest that you are the one with the backwards priorities, not the BMGF (though I disagree with some of their methodology, their goal makes a lot more sense than "eliminating e-waste" would).

[1]: http://www.who.int/malaria/publications/world_malaria_report...

Clearly, then, malaria is a much bigger problem than e-waste. Kudos to BMGF for tackling this deadly issue.

So there are many issues, such as malaria, that would benefit greatly from good hackers working on them for the public good instead of for private wealth. BMGF is unfortunately a very rare case of a technologist doing good for humanity's sake instead of his own.

Yeah - I do agree with your main point, it was just the malaria thing that bugged me. Saying that hackers can't be effective in the public sector, whether as hackers or jut as people, seems myopic to me, which we appear to agree on.

The computer begat large scale information systems. Eventually, it brought open large scale information systems. What's more important, having people volunteer to go to a village in Africa and build some wind turbines in a poor energy deficient village, or providing free plans for villagers to do it themselves using local or very low cost materials?

That's a complex question in its abstract form, and I don't believe it always yields the same answer when applied specifically.

Tesla exists because environmental groups managed to get subsidies, tax credits, green-grants and (as terrible a feather in cap as they are) trade-able carbon credits.

Also in 20 years electric cars might be the norm for new cars, but people are still driving >50 year old cars today, unless some one manages to pass a bill where the government buys everybody's ICE cars for some ludicrous multiple of their value most cars on the road will still be running on petrochemicals.

Most? I agree with you there will always be some but it definitely won't be the majority. I doubt the average lifetime of use for a car would be more than 10/15 years?

no payment for gas, free charging

Wait, what? When did Tesla's vision become "free electricity for everyone"?

I know we're discussing the company, not the man. But I got a good chuckle out of this comment.

Elon Musk wants to cover the country with charging stations that are free to use so that you can travel forever, for free. No more gas refills. Nine stations now provide free electricity for Model S owners, and the company has said it wants 100 along U.S. and Canadian highways by 2015.

I thought the free electricity was only for people who bought the most expensive model of the Model S?

All existing Tesla vehicles that can use the superchargers can use them for free. Unfortunately that means no Roadsters, for reasons involving AC-vs-DC charging (c.f. Q&A at the 2013 shareholder's meeting). You also only get the supercharger gear for free with your car if you buy one 85kWh models (which does necessarily not mean the most-expensive... 85kWh models start at $72.4k but go up from there, into six-figure territory). If you buy the cheapest Model S, at $63k, you can pay an additional $2k to buy the equipment necessary to use the superchargers.

Model Xs will have a similar situation, I think.

I haven't yet seen a commitment that the "third-gen" cars (currently touted as aiming for a $30k price-point, though we shall see in a few years), but it's certainly how Elon talks about it. He's also said that OpEx on the supercharger stations is very very low: little or no rent, little or no power costs. And it's obvious that a major goal for him is moving personal transport off of fossil-fuel; charging at home off the grid doesn't _actually_ achieve that, but giving away solar-powered juice at stations does. So we'll see.

<snark> If only there were a way, on the internet, to spend half a minute researching one's uncertain theories, before posting comments on HN. Yes, half a minute is all it would have taken to learn that your claim was mistaken. </snark>

If only there were a way to contain one's snark.

This is what comments are for! Now I know.

There is one big difference:

In Government / from within, hackers generally don´t have the skills to be able to change the system - Government is run by politicians - the effect of a good hacker is about as small as in your typical old-world corporate run by finance guys…

Compare that to companies where hackers are the CEOs…

We're not talking about being filing clerk #4325 in the bowels of the Veterans Affairs administration. There are many parts of the government where a good hacker could have a major impact.

>Sometimes being the one guy who does want to do public service makes the difference, because all the other 'good hackers' are more concerned with one solution that will solve all the world's problems (which never happens) and making a quick buck.

Speaking of things that never happen.

I find this strange and short-sighted (and also a little naive). Does the "hacker skillset" now suddenly include the ability to navigate complex regulatory environments, deal with sales, irate customers and the myriad other things that come from running a business (since that's what most of your examples are about)? I've no doubt that people can learn those skills but to presume that they're the default skill set of "hackers" is unreasonable.

Also, if no-one with technical skills ever goes into public service, how can anyone expect the technical competence of those services to get any better?

How many engineering graduates end up being Sal Khan? Or writing something like PGP or Tor? He didn't say all engineering graduates should go into public service, he said that more of them should. It takes working from both sides to create a better world. Without reasonable people in government, Tesla would have been crushed before it ever got off the ground (without even talking about the subsidy buyers of its products can get).

One good teacher is, perhaps, less valuable than Sal Khan. But we only need a handful of Sal Khans, at most. So one good teacher is more valuable than one more person trying to be another Sal Khan with basically zero chance of success. Am I saying that no one should try to be another Sal Khan? Nope. I'm just saying that most people won't, even if they try, so they should have a good backup plan, like becoming an awesome teacher. Really, it's the same type of advice people give to promising young athletes, shoot for the top, but have a plan to land on your feet if you miss.

The hacker skillset is a big lever, but it isn't magical, and most people will never change the world in a big way. So if a few more engineering grads decided to go into public service instead of writing database apps or starting another mobile social network, I think the world would benefit.

"A good hacker is wasted in public service."

Absolutely wrong. I take issue with this statement. A few points to the contrary:

1. Is it that you consider any non-profit pursuit beneath a competent hacker? What about open source projects and all the work that has been released under various public licences, literally as a "public service"?

2. Is it that you think for profit organizations are more influential and beneficial than non-profits? Tesla Motors and Nanosolar are still businesses at their heart; their markets happen to be environmental. A non-profit is literally devoted to public service first. As such, they have different priorities.

3. Is it that you think every competent hacker has every skill necessary to start Tesla or Nanosolar? Does every hacker that founds a startup succeed? Or is it still the case that most startups fail miserably? Do you think every hacker has this utopian skillset and can do whatever they want to impact the world?

Some hackers are incredibly efficient and merely competent. Some hackers are not so efficient but are incredibly skilled. Some are both. Not everyone can be Elon Musk, and Elon Musk wouldn't be well suited to working in a non-profit. But it's not fair to say that every hacker is above public service. That's elitist.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

> 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.

I think perhaps this generation has lost sight of what it means to be a hacker. It isn't about creating a new website. It's about taking a problem, and figuring out a solution, using any and every means.

Need to genetically engineer some grain to work better in drier climates? Learn just enough molecular biology to make it work. Economically-depressed nations don't distribute contraception effectively? Develop a cheaper alternative or find a way to incentivize its use. LGBTQ community being told they're sick, or they can't raise an effective family? Spearhead studies to show the actual effects of LGBTQ people's lives in society.

Hackers are not limited in the scope of the issues they tackle or the methods they use to solve them. That's why it's crazy that more hackers aren't hired to do public service or work in NGOs... they're the ultimate problem-solvers.

> Need to genetically engineer some grain to work better in drier climates? Learn just enough molecular biology to make it work. Economically-depressed nations don't distribute contraception effectively? Develop a cheaper alternative or find a way to incentive its use. LGBTQ community being told they're sick, or they can't raise an effective family? Spearhead studies to show the actual effects of LGBTQ people's lives in society.

I'm not talking about "building websites". I'm wondering about problems that have technical solutions, not policy solutions, that require the skills that "hackers" have, but established people in the area do not. If you want to make new grains, invent new contraceptives and fund studies, then there are better people for the job in every case.

It is hubris to think that established genetic engineers are lacking some sort of "hacker spark" that renders them unable to find a solution to that problem. The materials and medical science needed for cheaper contraceptives is not something that needs consult from an external hacker. Sociology doesn't need hackers barging in and demanding more studies about LGBTQ communities, they've got the importance of that one pretty much figured out themselves.

The extent that "hackers" can work on any problem is the extent to which they already are. You are basically just saying "these things need clever people to work on them." Well they already have clever people working on them. Clever people with degrees and/or experience in the subject matter. I consider myself a clever person, and my experience is in software development. Other clever people have experience in medicine, or materials sciences, or just about anything else you can think of. What makes my brand of clever something that they need?

Software development is not filled with some sort of "unique" sort of clever person that the rest of the world is somehow lacking. That sort of thinking is just developer exceptionalism. If the theory is that software development is creating some sort of "brain drain", then perhaps we could talk about policy solutions to drive more clever people into other fields. But I really don't think that there are not enough clever doctors because software development is gobbling up more than its fair share of clever people.

These things do need clever people to work on them. And yes, there are better people out there. But those better people are not working in droves to solve public issues. If you think there's an army of genetic engineers working on food shortage in an effort just to feed more people, you're crazy. The ones working in the field are working for private companies for profit so they can make a buck, not to help less fortunate people.

At not-for-profits there's usually a person who has the drive to help people, and has studied some particular way of solving a problem and will use the same hammer for every single nail they face. They are not applying creativity, they are applying the one rigorous discipline they learned.

My brother works on social issues for latin americans, for example. He is not a genius, he does not have a PhD. But he is trying to solve real, multifaceted problems that people have with the only skills he has available - communications skills. He is only interested in attacking problems from one angle. But that may not be the best way to approach it.

This isn't an isolated example. I lived in DC and worked with volunteers who would all study essentially one thing ad-nauseum. The idea of going outside their field was preposterous because they had no idea how to go about it.

You should also consider that my definition of hacker has nothing to do with software development. Most software developers I know have got jack shit in the way of a hacker mentality.

I get that you don't think "hacker" implies developer. But you said: "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?"

Those "Silicon Valley people"... what are they going to do? Do you really think "Silicon Valley people" are going with a crash course in genetic engineering are going to make a difference? What are these people going to bring to the table, besides being clever (like people in every other field) and being inexperienced?

If you think there are not enough biomed people volunteering to work with non-profits to find super-crops, then fine, that is a legitimate complaint. Don't focus on importing Silicon Valley people to fill that gap though, focus on telling the biomed people to get their act together and start volunteering.

There is nothing unique about the Silicon Valley brand of clever. Really what you are complaining about is that a bunch of clever people have acquired skill sets that are not particularly useful for solving most remaining social problems. Go convince students to switch majors if you really want to correct that.

I would... but it's much easier to just complain on HN.

Picking the right problem is really, really hard.

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.

Your definition of "good hacker" must narrow down who is a real hacker to a few thousand people in the whole world. Many of the best computer hackers I've known could barely organize a picnic if they had to, let alone run an industry-changing company.

Not to mention that ten of us (at mid-level) could basically fund an activist if we really believed in it enough. A hundred of us, together, could fund lobbyist. (I'm talking including expenses, of course.)

And frankly, if ten thousand of us were willing to pledge 25 dollars a month, we'd have enough money to have a place at the table.

Just don't go out and build some bullshit Zygna for pets app and call it "changing the world"...

Note that it's also hacker mentality to always seek for greater leverage and spend some extra time so that you can squash a million flies at once. It's not a bad mentality but it's not the only one.

To change the world it's necessary to do small work, too. It's like where one brick layer sees himself building a brick wall and his working pal sees himself building a cathedral.

The thing is that we only need so many people to build Nanosolar or Tesla Motors. But there are a lot more people than that and everything is interdependent in the most unforeseen ways, so you can't rule out anyone. That great elementary school teacher might be needed to connect with and set the right course for a hacker kid today who goes build the proverbial cold fusion in 2050.

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