<story><title>The Unexotic Underclass</title><url>https://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/</url><text> &quot;But if you were to go to Bulgaria to volunteer or to start a social enterprise, how would the folks back on Facebook know you were helping ‘the poor?’  if the poor in your pictures kind of looked like you?&quot;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyllo</author><text>I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they&apos;re boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans&apos; medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in &lt;i&gt;minutes&lt;/i&gt; rather than &lt;i&gt;months&lt;/i&gt;, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can&apos;t afford to pay much for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>All the technology in the world won&apos;t make those veterans&apos; benefit claims go through any faster. The problem there isn&apos;t the technology (it&apos;s not all that hard of a problem) but getting it into the right place, past all the gatekeepers who want to keep it out.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s not that nobody is building the technology because they&apos;re concentrating on other things, but rather nobody is building it because they know it won&apos;t sell, because it would have to go sixteen thousand layers of red tape and many tours through Congress before anything got done.&lt;p&gt;I think there&apos;s probably a lot of scope for solving problems with fairly simple apps, but this example seems like a terrible one.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Unexotic Underclass</title><url>https://miter.mit.edu/the-unexotic-underclass/</url><text> &quot;But if you were to go to Bulgaria to volunteer or to start a social enterprise, how would the folks back on Facebook know you were helping ‘the poor?’  if the poor in your pictures kind of looked like you?&quot;</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kyllo</author><text>I noticed that devs on HN often sneer at CRUD apps because they&apos;re boring to build, but meanwhile a simple CRUD app could do something like make all these veterans&apos; medical benefit claims paperless so that they can get filled out and approved in &lt;i&gt;minutes&lt;/i&gt; rather than &lt;i&gt;months&lt;/i&gt;, and they could get the care they need sooner. One could do a lot of good by just making CRUD apps for people who need them and can&apos;t afford to pay much for them.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>arkades</author><text>The VA has the largest, best-maintained electronic medical records system in the country. It is open-source and available to the public.&lt;p&gt;The problem with vets is not the absence of software. I am rather tired of seeing this particular horse beaten.</text></comment>