
Ask HN: Who's working making the world a better place? - kingnothing
Lots of us are making incremental improvements across various segments of the b2b and b2c markets. There are plenty of interesting and rewarding challenges in that space, and it&#x27;s what I currently do as well. However, there must be some of us here who are working to better our world and future, but I don&#x27;t seem to see much press for them here or anywhere for that matter.<p>To those of you in that camp: what&#x27;s your company, what are you doing, and what are your growing pains?
======
DanBC
No company but I work to improve the quality of mental health services and to
reduce stigma against mental ill-health.

Recently I've been trying to get people to pay attention to the _appalling_
lack of in-patient mental health beds for children and young people in
England. A young person who needs a bed may have to travel out of county, but
also out of country to Scotland. (Health is devolved; Scotland has a different
legal system. Someone detained under the Mental Health Act in England would
have to be released from that and re-sectioned under Scottish laws. And
Scotland is hundreds of miles away from some people's homes). There is some
movement here - the relevant government officials are worried about it and are
now doing work.

The weirdest part of tackling stigma is not dealing with the general community
but is with tackling self-imposed stigma. I've met a few people who have said
"I was told years ago that I'll never work again", and those people believe
that they are unable to work. Mostly they could do some work, even if it isn't
full time paid employment. Modern models are to keep people at work; or get
people back to work as soon as possible.

------
mchannon
CleanWafer.

Making silicon wafers out of industrial waste products, with zero pollutants
(every byproduct is sold), far less energy usage, 20% of the cost, and a tiny
factory footprint.

The chip powering the browser you're using to read this came from a silicon
wafer.

Growing pains: Finding cofounder-level partners to wrangle up funding and
partnerships. We're post-$250k seed with blueprints ready to go on our
prototype fab.

------
syedkarim
We are building humanity's public library:
[https://www.Outernet.is](https://www.Outernet.is)

We take content from the web and broadcast those bits over satellite; no
subscription required to receive our data broadcasts. We are currently
available in North America, Europe, Middle East, and North Africa (two
separate satellites). We expect to be globally accessible by the end of the
year and will start our mobile service in early 2015.

We are working towards putting a library in every village, home, and pocket.

~~~
oftenwrong
Cool. It's like the RMS version of the web (he browses by sending an email
with a url to a server, which emails him back the html).

------
jtfairbank
I'm not making "the world" a better place, but I will make medical residency
scheduling a breeze. And as a non-profit leaving most of the value created on
the table, I hope to make medical education in the US less expensive.

Long term goal: bring consumer level web apps to the medical administration
(and other public administration) industry, while "investing" the value we
create back into the system for everyone's benefit by doing it as a non-
profit. Right now it's primarily US focused, however I hope to one day port
our technology to other first and second world countries.

I'm super proud of my teammates, who are currently forgoing pay (and even
their own living space) to help me make this happen. Check us out:
[http://resident.cs.illinois.edu](http://resident.cs.illinois.edu)

------
Theranos
What we are working on here @ Theranos is to redefine healthcare by making
actionable health information accessible to people everywhere in the world at
the time it matters most, we’re working to enable early detection and
intervention of disease and empower individuals to live the lives they want to
live. And we're doing it on single drop of blood.

[http://medcitynews.com/2014/09/theranos-ceo-wants-to-make-
bl...](http://medcitynews.com/2014/09/theranos-ceo-wants-to-make-blood-tests-
more-patient-friendly/)

------
Dev4Xbuilder
We are working on the Moonshot Education Project
:[http://www.dev4x.com](http://www.dev4x.com) with the mission to: "Provide a
10X improvement in the education of the world’s poorest children, to reach a
billion children in the next 10 years, and to do so at a 100th the cost of
current approaches."

An XPRIZE was announced yesterday to incentivize much of what we are doing
however finding people willing to work on this project when we just cannot
compete on salary with profit focus companies is a huge challenge. That is our
biggest growing pain at the moment: finding people passionate about Really
changing the world and willing to put their wallets on the line to do so :) We
hope the added support of the XPRIZE will solve this issue by introducing us
to the right people, and for the 1 day since it's launch I think it just may.

------
emcarey
Glassbreakers is making the world a better place by helping women connect with
female mentors that can help them with their careers. The confidence gap in
the work force is real and we believe Glassbreakers will be a confidence tool
for many female professionals. We hope to make the world a better place by
empowering women to break the glass ceiling, together.

Women are the worlds largest untapped resource. We need more women in
leadership roles across industries to start making real social change and to
improve the lives of women every where. There is no clear path to do that but
women at the top credit their career success to mentors who helped them get
there. We hope that by automating the process of mentor matching women based
on skill sets we can lead of movement of global female empowerment, which will
have a ripple affect on improving our society at the macro level.

------
realpundit
Making the world a better place often goes unnoticed because there's little to
no money involved.

And where there is the most need, there is little media coverage. There's a
big wide world outside of the US and Europe.

~~~
skidoo
Almost as though Capitalism itself is against making the world better.

~~~
taybin
Not against. Just neutral.

~~~
skidoo
Placing emphasis on money above and beyond anything else means yes, more than
anything philanthropic. If money is the one and only end goal then everything
else falls behind, and everyone loses in the long run. There is nothing
neutral about conquest.

------
monkcoder
Working at NASA here. (Should be self-explanatory?)

~~~
avmich
Could you better support new space entrepreneurs?

