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'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't seem to see much press for them here or anywhere for that matter.

To those of you in that camp: what'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

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

[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...

[Dev4Xbuilder]

We are working on the Moonshot Education Project :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.

[_tlf7]

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.

[monkcoder]

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

[avmich]

Could you better support new space entrepreneurs?