For months (maybe even for a year) I wanted to ask this question, or something similar, but I always felt uneasy to do so.
An hour ago I was browsing through HN and found posts like these:
- “User Engagement” Is Code for “Addiction” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153331),
- Does anyone find strange that sport is part of daily news? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26153670) etc.<p>Basically, companies are doing whatever it is needed to attract users, keep them as long as possible (I think that's called churn or so), and extract whatever they can from them (money-wise of course).<p>I'm pretty sure that most companies are responding to the market needs (does this sound too naive?) and that the main goal of companies is to make money (I really dislike this idea, and I even have a bitter feeling in my stomach when I even think of this - but that's how the world works) but - what companies do you know of that are "adding value" to the world?<p>By that I mean, companies that are doing research and (I guess) selling info/stuff/whatever that are increasing the human knowledge in fields like:
- medical/biotech (Crispr companies; Crispr Therapeutics, Editas Medicine etc.),
- robotics (Boston robotics?),
- physics
- chemistry (there was a hairdresser that invented Starlite, a thermal shielding material. Interesting project. What happened there? )
- mathematics
- aerospace (BOOM, Lilium)
or maybe even
- legal
- ai + language
- ai + medicine
etc.<p>As often happens here on HN there are heated debates. Please be polite, even when you don't agree.<p>p.s. Also I'd like (no, scratch that; love) to work for some type of the aforementioned organisation/company (especially if it's something connected with natural, or even technical sciences). That would allow me to extend my self-learning project(s) and I would enjoy doing that kind of a job. One of the things very close to my heart is open-source...