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

One thing we see over and over again leading to social injustice is the externalization of costs.<p>Examples:<p>* burning fossil fuels externalizes the cost of dealing with climate change<p>* during the housing market crash of 2007, lots of risks were ultimately externalized to the state<p>* plastic waste ending up in the ocean means somebody[tm] externalized the cost of not properly disposing of &#x2F; recycling their waste<p>... and so on, once you think in these terms, you find that pattern nearly everywhere.<p>If we had some kind of software solution to track externalized costs, that would be a huge step towards reducing it.<p>I know, this is <i>very</i> abstract, and I don&#x27;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.<p>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.

So many communication platforms are proprietary walled gardens these days. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Discord, and so on. Their incentives do <i>not</i> align with what&#x27;s best for their users, or society in general. We absolutely need open solutions become the standard dominant medium for communicating.<p>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 &quot;social&quot; networks.

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.<p>Gossip protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt allow for each application login to have it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s computers and historically accurate.

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.<p>Often it&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>There is so much underused existing hardware that only a change of law and a few small projects (a consumer&#x2F;hacker&#x2F;small business friendly re-installer) could have significant environmental benefit with close to zero environmental cost.<p>Phones are amazing tech these days but they get thrown away at the same time newer&#x2F;larger&#x2F;less powerful single use devices (Alexa&#x2F;music players&#x2F;home automation) are purchased new.<p>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.<p>Two clear examples.<p>Software to re-purpose an unsupported phone into a iot device, voice activated device, media player or back into a working &amp; secure phone.<p>Software to turn an unsupported self-driving vehicle back into a manually driven vehicle or vehicle with driver assistance.<p>I think the software required is easily within reach in a five year time frame.

Now I&#x27;m not sure about the <i>biggest</i> potential, but let&#x27;s say, some positive impact, then I&#x27;d throw OpenStreetMap into the list as well.<p>Also, in terms of AI, reducing the energy demand and solving the black box problem.<p>Not exactly software, but the concept of eco-certified software can surely have a positive impact as well, when it gains traction beside KDE&#x27;s PDF-viewer Okular.

Someone needs to solve online identity and reputation (in a privacy-preserving way) so that you can accumulate trust on one site&#x2F;service and carry that over to another. Ideally such a system shouldn&#x27;t devolve into trusting just a few large American corporations to decide who is and isn&#x27;t allowed an online existence.<p>It feels like we can&#x27;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.<p>By &quot;resource&quot; I mean anything that accepts and displays user input from the internet, whether that&#x27;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&#x27;t emerged yet because innovative creators have given up after their first bot raid.

I think that aggregating medical research studies could lead to a significant improvement of the worlds health situation.<p>There are tens of millions of medical studies available online. But no system to look at the data in an aggregated way.<p>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.

I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don&#x27;t choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s no <i>requirement</i> 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.<p>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&#x27;s not enough to hope adults who enroll will &#x27;do their best&#x27;, you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel.<p>Now...I don&#x27;t know what such a system would look like or even if it&#x27;s possible to implement on a large scale.

Maybe a social network that prioritizes high-quality content rather than fresh content. High-quality content (in terms of being e.g. persuasive &amp; informative) may have a better chance of creating positive change than one&#x27;s typical posts..<p>I&#x27;m working on an experiment at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toplists.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toplists.app&#x2F;</a> that tries to leverage existing social networks, but this would probably work much better if e.g. Twitter expanded its &quot;pinned&quot; posts so that the UX would be seamless.<p>Also - perhaps software that improves visibility&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;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

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.<p>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?

I&#x27;d recommend you to have a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;</a> or at least their job boards: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;job-board&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;job-board&#x2F;</a><p>They focus on the very problem you&#x27;re asking about.

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.<p>With out it, people have to use the walled gardens to stay safe. Software innovation is stifled, and it&#x27;s always there as an possible trigger for overbearing legislative answers to a technical problem.

Websites for non-technical people. I don&#x27;t think this is a solved problem.<p>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.<p>I think something like Gatsby+&lt;some CMS&gt;+Github Actions+Azure Static Apps in one tool.<p>Everyone should have a personalized web page that they own.

Lets see... I believe Mainlining effort of android phones + Pinephone&#x2F;Mobian is big for positive impact, at least in phone area. No more being stuck on old insecure kernel and outdated software!<p>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.

<i>&lt;crazy-fanboi mode=&quot;on&quot;&gt;</i><p>Oh, easy - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enso.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;enso.org</a>, of course!

Something like YouTube for learning videos, only.<p>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.

The things you mentioned are directionally in line with the movement called &quot;Effective Altruism&quot;.<p>They concern themselves with finding things that empirically would have the biggest impact, or if we don&#x27;t do it, we have the biggest consequences.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;problem-profiles&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;80000hours.org&#x2F;problem-profiles&#x2F;</a>

While my current projects are a little less ambitious than what you are asking for, and focused only on improving software, I&#x27;ll say them anyway.<p>* An implementation of Nix&#x27;s ideas for mere mortals.<p>* Version Control for non-technical users and for any kind of binary files.<p>The last one is interesting because most users will just see it as a more powerful undo&#x2F;redo system.

non-profits need to write all sort of reports to stakeholders to justify their funding, etc.<p>Software that would make this easy, or otherwise make that problem go away or smaller on a global scale, should have huge positive impact:<p>- increase positive impact of all non-profits. - improved feebackloop should also make quality better (less funds to bad non-profits that write great documents).<p>Seems to be a problem where software can be part of the solution.

Android implementing ad tracking limitations.<p>EU tackling big tech because the US sure won&#x27;t.<p>Greater role out of automatic breaking systems.<p>Greater role out of demand management (energy).<p>Remote work decentralising our cities. I expect to see new cities being built.

An imaginary power user build of Windows that doesn&#x27;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&#x27;re clever.

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 <i>very</i> alarming ways. Courtesy of Google and Facebook.<p>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.<p>It is an uphill battle though. This much is obvious.

I&#x27;m not sure about biggest, but on of the biggest sure.<p>Two problems.<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;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.<p>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.<p>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.

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&#x27;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.

1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qubes-os.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qubes-os.org</a>, security-focused operating system, relying on hardware virtualizaton.<p>2. Various mobile operating systems targeting GNU&#x2F;Linux phones, e.g., Mobian and PureOS. They have convergence by design (running desktop apps) and absolute freedom without walled gardens for the user.

Coordination technology to connect people who “want to help” with good ways to “actually help”.<p>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.<p>(This is a biased answer since I am working on this)

I think there&#x27;s a huge potential for Software Archeology. Maybe not 5 years but within 50 years this will be huge.<p>You could come at it from two fronts. Bottom up there&#x27;s a need for tools that better help you investigate &quot;what the hell is all this, what&#x27;s in it, and where is it?&quot; for software artifacts. Top down there&#x27;s a need for an interactive dashboard executives could use to get a view (<i>on their terms not the programmers&#x27;</i>) what the software that runs their business actually does.<p>If I knew how to implement this I&#x27;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.<p>Or I could be wrong: in general other people consistently don&#x27;t care about the things I think they obviously should care about.

I&#x27;ll be a skeptic and will say: none.<p>There&#x27;s no current tech that will have a marked positive impact in the next five years.

AlphaFold, and to be honest, most of the software&#x2F;research coming out of DeepMind. For better or worse, they&#x27;re the Bell Labs of the modern era.

Reproducible builds. There is <i>no</i> (!) other way to trust binaries you download from the web. And the best E2EE is worthless when your client is compromised.<p>Nix. Makes dependency management kind of magic (but requires so much more development to make it practical for common people).<p>Data being a liability. Stuff like data breaches being adequately punished to make overreaching tracking unprofitable and encourage E2EE everywhere.<p>Open platforms. Apple being forced to allow <i>running software</i> on iOS devices.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Explicitly not mentioned: Distributed databases (blockchain), VR.

I think Unikernels like NanoVMs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nanos.org&#x2F;</a>) 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&#x27;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.

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)<p>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.

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&#x27;s rights they probably shouldn&#x27;t be eating at Chick-Fil-A. There&#x27;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.

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.<p>(Feel free to steal this idea)

Software for automated transversal of the chemical reactions graph. Basically a CAD for synthetic chemists. See for example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cell.com&#x2F;chem&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;S2451-9294(18)30085-8.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cell.com&#x2F;chem&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;S2451-9294(18)30085-8.pdf</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;founder-of-four-20493205" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;founder-of-four-20493205</a>

&gt;Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?<p>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 &quot;you&#x27;ve just won x&quot;, &quot;paid thank you&quot;, or even &quot;congratulations you&#x27;ve been hired&quot; AI could ensure there is not someone on the other side of the transaction who is actively tricking them. Something like, &quot;looks like you&#x27;re trying to defraud or steal from someone. Here are some coursera courses that are a better path for you&quot;.<p>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.

Two fields I&#x27;m quite hyped about:<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

A keybase equivalent that gains widespread layperson adoption.<p>If you extend from five years to fifty, then the answer will be climate-related.

Any software with application to the field of energy (generation, resources, exploitation, storage, research). The &quot;energy problem&quot; will become more acute in the short&#x2F;medium term. I would invest in a startup that creates software in this domain.

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&#x2F;NYC

Anything that gets people to really see beyond their limited scope.<p>7B people now, another 20B in our children&#x27;s lifetime.<p>We&#x27;re attuned to what bothers <i>us</i> (software introspection, social network garbage). 10 days of just sitting will show you your emotional concerns are meaningless delusions.<p>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.<p>The doomsday clock is mono-dimensional. We need a <i>world dashboard</i> we can all agree upon and fight over. Once it&#x27;s measured, people can optimize it.

Open-source, collaboratively developed software that makes governments&#x2F;societies more efficient, and where standardization helps.<p>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.<p>Or cheaper payment systems, like VISA&#x2F;Mastercard, but in an open system with more operators, perhaps even national.<p>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.<p>You need to be able to navigate the politics, though.

Easy mode for Kubernetes

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 &amp; 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).<p>I am very excited about the project&#x27;s future! One thing I look forward to in particular is hardware developed primarily for GrapheneOS.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;</a>

Personally, I&#x27;m actually quite excited about Fuchsia (related HN thread -&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30827210" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30827210</a>). 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&#x27;d love to have an OS that has security guarantees at least as strong as Android.

Electricity Demand Response &#x2F; Micro Grids. Right now, most electrical systems, even internet connected ones, don&#x27;t have any awareness of electrical supply and demand. Most of the grid is designed for power to flow one direction.<p>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&#x27;t flow &quot;backwards&quot;. Hardware will be a large part of this, but software will be needed too.

I think the ability to share your expertise in video&#x2F;audio&#x2F;text format without any technical know-how will continue to be huge.<p>Everything else is nice but secondary to people being able to communicate, world-wide. Reason being - I think we&#x27;ve solved the food&#x2F;clothes&#x2F;shelter technical problems already. What we haven&#x27;t solved is the willingness to re-distribute the goodies in a sensible way and the way to get there is, is communication.

A peer to peer decentralised internet built on top of middle out compression that uses end consumer devices smart fridges etc. to store data.

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&#x27;t use them.

The ability to crowd fund creators sounds like it will be a positive impact.<p>Details at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theblockcrypto.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;139265&#x2F;avalanche-launches-100-million-creator-fund-with-grimes-and-web3-platform-op3n" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theblockcrypto.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;139265&#x2F;avalanche-launche...</a>

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.<p>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.

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.

A lot of comments here boil down to one underlying problem: self hosting is very hard (backups, security, and so on).<p>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.

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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;bitcoin.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoin.org&#x2F;bitcoin.pdf</a><p>- &quot;Bitcoin &amp; Renewable Energy Transition - Bitcoin Incentivizes Green Energy&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-SX1eCqwd3Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-SX1eCqwd3Q</a><p>- &quot;Can Bitcoin Mining Save the Environment? with Troy Cross&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bFYKq5Qe1Bs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bFYKq5Qe1Bs</a><p>- &quot;This Machine Greens&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b-7dMVcVWgc</a>

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.

I desperately want Blazor to succeed, so that the entire Javascript-based environment can burn.<p>I would accept some kind of world where WASM bindings in browsers become usable as an alternative.

Password-free authentication. Passwords seem so archaic, I&#x27;d love to see them fall out of style already. Whether it&#x27;s biometric or yubikey, I&#x27;ll take whatever.

Definitely Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). My own effort: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lxagi.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lxagi.com&#x2F;</a>

Adult education at quality of MIT&#x2F;Stanford&#x2F;Wharton available to every person and adult on the planet with the internet in their language...

AlphaFold. It&#x27;s very near to cracking the 90% accuracy. And solving protein folding has huge long term benefits for himaniry

The greatest positive impact we can hope for in digital technology is for more reflection and thought. Moving fast and breaking things isn&#x27;t working well any more, and may be our undoing.<p>&quot;Just because you can, doesn&#x27;t mean you should.&quot;<p>It ought to be emblazoned in 10ft high letters above the doorway to every university, company and research institution.<p>We could benefit from a more widespread acceptance of the fundamental utilitarian question &quot;How does this actually make life better for the greatest number, and without inflicting harms as unseen side effects?&quot;<p>This means careful reflection on human values, and less hubris about what we can achieve.<p>To see how far from value-neutral your suggestions might be:<p>&gt; energy usage<p>Unless stated carefully some people may assume that means &quot;use less&quot;. It may well be that the way forward is to use more energy, not less. Renewable non fossil use would seem a better goal.<p>&gt; preventing armed conflicts<p>Some with a more hawkish outlook might say of defence, it&#x27;s actually better to expediently and decisively win conflicts with minimum loss of life.<p>&gt; reducing poverty<p>Seems like a universal good. But poverty is relative. To raise the remainder of humanity to the standard of living that most Americans consider &quot;poverty&quot; would be devastating if done with current technology.<p>&gt; STEM training<p>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.<p>&gt; improving access to sustainable environments<p>Most things that start with &quot;improving access&quot; fail to account for the effects of demand on those resources.<p>&gt; implementing AI<p>Many, myself included, would caution that a naive pursuit of AI is absolutely catastrophic. Instead we should put more into IA.<p>And so on.<p>Now, I am not picking on your values here. If I were to list 10 &quot;bare word values&quot; you&#x27;d be able to make similar objections and shoot mine down.<p>What I am saying is that digital technology has created a &quot;solution trap&quot;, where we see things as monotonic linear progress with &quot;fast&quot; 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 &quot;fishing ecosystem&quot; lecture) and you&#x27;ll see something frightening.<p>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.

tackling communications security and privacy:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;betrusted.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;betrusted.io</a>

Skin cancer screening using a smart phone.

The way I think about software is it&#x27;s basically about processing data. Most of the time that data is someone else&#x27;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).<p>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&#x27;t work out for some reason that might not be obvious. The way I&#x27;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&#x2F;medicine is probably the main field that&#x27;s had major new advances, obviously mRNA vaccines but also things related to genetics. So I&#x27;d bet something important would come out of there.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical that software will have a major impact on things like energy usage or preventing armed conflict, etc. Those are more political&#x2F;economic problems.

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.<p>Most organizations, and I&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;ve enjoyed phpbb forums in the past - but it needs to be easier to start using, and probably easier to run.

You&#x27;re asking people to give away their billion-dollar startup ideas...

more powerful &quot;no code&quot; software development tools

The lack of fresh ideas in this thread is discouraging.

Software that tackles russian trolls would be great.

Microsoft Excel.

Google Earth Engine for earth sciences

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&#x27;s the most powerful mapping toolkit I&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.

Bitcoin, no question.

zero trust, homomorphic encryption, biometrics

Adblockers.

I&#x27;m going to be cynical.<p>Energy usage: Software can&#x27;t fix this; rewriting your workload more efficiently doesn&#x27;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.<p>Software cannot prevent armed conflicts, that&#x27;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&#x27;t matter that you can vote remotely on the blockchain if you&#x27;re in a two-party system where your vote is for the lesser evil. Ban nukes. Stop voting for oligarchs, authoritarians, and fuckwits.<p>Poverty is a political problem too. The free market didn&#x27;t work. Raise the minimum wage, give people money if they can&#x27;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&#x27;s totalitarian, but we tried the free market and the illusion of free choice and it didn&#x27;t work. We&#x27;re rich enough to give everyone a happy life but we refuse to because &quot;I got mine&quot;.<p>STEM training, see above. Make it free for anyone to attend.<p>AI is not needed, it&#x27;s used to sell you more stuff. I&#x27;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.

I see Rust with a lot of potential, especially if&#x2F;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&#x2F;or huge amounts of money.<p>Machine learning definitely has potential, if we have another surge of breakthroughs in the future amazing things will become possible<p>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.

Ethereum ?

Democratic Government Backbones

Software to quickly and easily determine the tax implications of crypto purchases and trades.

I know crypto will be a controversial one, but in terms of potential surely even a skeptic would acknowledge it.<p>Decentralised Finance in particular could take a huge chunk out of retail banking, investment banking and insurance.

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&#x27;t get a number wrong moment