Ask HN: What is something you deeply care about?
Doesn't matter whether it's something big or small, personal or societal, get's a lot of attention or little. What is something you personally find important and care about?
Doesn't matter whether it's something big or small, personal or societal, get's a lot of attention or little. What is something you personally find important and care about?
Screaming. I'm against it.
When I see someone on the other side of a political divide screaming, I think they're dangerous and evil. When I seem someone on my side of a political divide screaming, I think they are ALSO those things, plus ignorant, useless, and counterproductive.
This has been growing on me very slowly, but very steadily over the decades: we really need to base the digital aspects of our society and our governments on Open Source, Free/Libre software. I don’t want to take away anyone‘s iPhone or PS5 or PC with Windows and Photoshop and Steam, that’s all fine.
But stuff like registering an appointment with my local Citizens Office, or the people at the Citizens Office workers writing a letter to some other government agency, or this other government agency storing said letter on a hard disk somewhere — this whole „digital operating system“ of a country and its people must work without any involvement of closed-source Microsoft, SAP, Apple, Google, AWS stuff being involved.
It was okay to depend on products of Big Corp back when Computers and Networks and Data where a small side quest to everyone‘s life.
But this stuff is now a fundamental building block of society.
Every line of this building block must be publicly available for everyone under a OSS license, period.
I‘m naively hopeful that stuff like the „Deutschlandstack“ is going to be tackled in all seriousness.
I pray that the EU ramps up investment in OSS projects into billions of Euros rather sooner than later.
Censorship.
All kinds including tech. People not wanting to allow someone to read a book because the person is "in trouble with the law." What does their breaking the law have to do with their explanations of how a technology works? Nothing...and the removal of a book says more about the vendors than it does about the supposed criminal. Generally censorship as practiced in this country is more about politics (ie: someone not liking someone else) than it is about accuracy.
Everyone should use interoperable instant messaging platforms like XMPP or Matrix.
Why can't WhatsApp users talk to Facebook Messenger users? That's ridiculous. It'd be like Gmail users not being able to talk to Outlook users.
RCS is not the answer because it has a hard dependency on carriers and Google - I'm extremely tired and irritated that people like it and tout it as some amazing saviour. I am convinced nobody has read past all the marketing propaganda to find out how it actually works.
Quality user experience in things that are core functions of use, and specifically them not getting bogged down (or potentially “bricked” by) the need for luxury, or ads, or ease of use.
In a car, the driver seat should, in my mind, be manually adjusted. Why? Because if the motor breaks because it has to adjust each time you sit down, and the last person to use the car is my mother or girlfriend, I literally cannot drive my car until it gets fixed because I am too tall.
But something like heated/cooled seats is perfectly fine to have as a luxury, because if my seat cooler fan breaks, I just have a sweaty back as if I didn’t have a seat cooler.
Same with manual transmissions: if I ever have my transmission start acting up and I don’t have the money to bring my car to the shop, I could probably fix it, albeit with a lot of difficulty and cursing. But an automatic? No way in hell.
Plus, my manual lasts longer, stays cooler, tows more, is more fun, provides more control, keeps me more aware and focused while driving, and is a theft deterrent.
You can apply this logic to anything: if the object becomes useless without it, it should be as basic, durable, strong, resilient, and/or foolproof as possible, but when the object would not break without it, it can have as much luxury as desired.
I hear you and in a city with daily stop and go traffic, a manual transmission becomes a bother.
I’ve seen people in Ferraris in LA traffic and it looks like agony.
So I guess context often determines an additional threshold of complexity.
Freedom of computing/information, i.e. having ability to control computer hardware from software as one wishes. Windows and macOS + driver systems are not anymore allowing this freedom, so on the software-side Linux is our only hope as of 2025.
I love this question. My answer is Beauty. we are surrounded by ugliness and it pains me. almost everything could be made more beautiful.
Yes ! I love how Jim Simons talked about Beauty:
"Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right."
We are also surrounded by unspeakable mystery and beauty. At the same time.
In the Civil War movie there’s a moment where the group is cornered by a sniper, pinned to the ground, not knowing if they’ll live beyond a few minutes or not. One of the characters looks at the flowers and the sky and is overtaken by the simple beauty of their existence. This.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44469/endymion-56d223...
I thought of quoting the end of Ode on a Grecian urn, but thought it might be distracting.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Family, truth, beauty
Knowledge as understanding, embodiment, and wisdom.
Consent and respect. Kindness as the default.
Care beyond the transactional.
Art as an expression, healing, experience.
Awareness and reasoning beyond thinking and analysis.
Coral reefs.
They cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor yet support approx. 25% of all marine species.
They are very beautiful indeed.
They provide coastal protection.
Also, they will be gone in a few decades.
A lost cause for the most part, communication. Seems like most of what passes for communication these days is one way; what can I get out of it? how can I use this? do I agree or disagree? do I like this? what does this say about me? etc? etc? etc?. These days, people love to blame this sort of narcissism on the internet but things were not much different in the 80s, it was just easier to believe there was something better, we still had our ignorance.
You might like Robert Kegan's work, specifically "A discerning heart" as a quick primer.
What you'd describe is a proliferation of stage 2 personalities that can take perspectives only alternatingly, but not simultaneously as in stage 3. It has become a fun and at times enlightening pastime to view the world through his framework.
We are experiencing late stage capitalism which by its nature expands to monetize everything and make every interaction transactional. This requires poisoning our worldview and minds on a global scale.
It is however up to us to let that happen or not. Friendship, community, caring support are possible and exist.
The secret of abundance is not having more but giving from a place of generosity.
Your general sentiment is nice and all but ultimately reinforces my point regarding communication being one way.
Personal accountability
Doing good and making the world a better place, finding love, having good relationships with friends and family, solving interesting problems, intellectual growth
Life. All life. Though, mosquitos, bacteria, and parasites are a struggle.
Also, I try constantly to be a better father and husband. This too is challenging.
Protecting the natural world.
Freedom, including the ability to own and use tools as I wish.
Community.
The internet as an open and interoperable space for end users
Math and kindness
climate + democracies
And AI is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what we need for these to thrive...
My parents, pets, and friends.
Every problem stems from roughly half the population fearing the idea of people and practices that are different from their own. It feels like addressing any other problem is palliative. There has to be a way to improve this.
It's not so much the fear and prejudice that's the problem; it's the idea that violence (or the threat of violence) is an acceptable way to force others to do what we want. You might think that most people don't think violence is acceptable, but every time someone says "there ought to be a law..." they are implicitly accepting the the use of force.
Our prejudices tend to be hard earned, life beats them into us and that makes it difficult to acknowledge that the other side is somewhat correct even if they are wrong in most every way. Extremists have bits of truth in their views; their failing is that they use those bits of truth to validate their extremism, the fault of the rest is in using extremism to invalidate those bits of truth.
Kindness. Be kind to your colleagues. To your friends. To your family.
And that will show in your product. It will be kind to your users and customers.
- My wife
- My kids
- My family
- My house
- Empathy
- Kindness
- Equality
- Usability
- Design / beauty
Interactions.
Feeling
You, me, them over there
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