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| | Ask HN: Developers changing the world? | | 4 points by holland_k on March 27, 2013 | hide | past | favorite | 1 comment | | I'm curious- I'm a junior developer, but my past experience is in public health research. I want to join these two and really make a difference in the world using technology to build tools that improve people's lives. Anyone have any advice, or startups/companies to point to? I know this is a really broad question, but I'm interested to get thoughts from this community, which I really respect. |
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Most of the startups that have grown up to have a true impact didn't start out tying to be "world changing." Instead, they identified a specific but narrow problem or market, found an elegant solution for that problem, and over time ended up growing into something that facilitated the improvement of lives. From my observations, most start-ups that have tried to change the world are way too ambitious and end up crashing and burning.
That being said, if you want to have a direct impact on people's lives, a startup you may want to look into is Watsi (https://watsi.org/). I have no idea of they are hiring, but they seem to be very much in the intersection of public health and technology that you seem interested in. If you're looking to start your own start-up, you may want to think about doing something that involves data-mining for side effects/ drug interactions/ or possible illness cures. There's a wealth of data on the internet that could be very useful if properly organized and analyzed, and pilot studies that have done this have produced really interesting results (for example, a Stanford/Columbia study found that patients that take both paroxetine and pravastatin have an increased risk of diabetes).