Brian J. Hall
13 HN mentions · mentioned in 13 months, 2020–2026
1:32 · 347K views · Apr 26, 2019
A short montage from HBO's Silicon Valley of the TechCrunch Disrupt scene, in which founders repeat the phrase 'making the world a better place'.
HN mostly cites it as a joke or parody whenever startups or tech companies claim lofty missions.
13 comments from Hacker News
I feel like we've entered a new era of HN. First there was the excessively dismissive era that spawned the infamous Dropbox comment (Which was widely misunderstood). Then came the functional programming era, where people worshipped Haskell and frequently got posted to /r/ProgrammingCirclejerk. Eventually we got past that one as people discovered that Haskell isn't really useful for anything besides showing off how you can implement Quicksort in a single line or starting arguments over what the hell a Monad is. Then there was the needlessly pedantic era, which basically spawned the "ACKCHYUALLY" meme. The pedantry was often a huge distraction, never added anything to the conversation, and often was actually incorrect. If you've ever said "Actually, that's not ray tracing, that's ray casting!", then congrats, you're part of this era. We're now in the era of being dismissive, not for technical merits like the previous dismissive era, but for being unproductive. Any time a project is done purely for fun or personal reasons (ie, nostalgia), there's someone in the comments talking about how useless it is, and that the time could be better spent Making The World A Better Place(tm)[0]. [0] this video
The thing I don't see mentioned in this thread is how incongruous Robinhood's image is (a professed goal of fighting inequality by giving the working classes access to the same return on capital as the wealthy enjoy) in relation to their business model. Say what you will about Wall St, but customers of traditional brokers tend to know what the brokers are in it for: the money. Robinhood's big product innovation might be zero-commission trades and a gamified UX, but their big marketing innovation is to wrap themselves in the ever-dingier cloak of Silicon Valley "changing the world". I can't help but think of this absolutely spot-on parody from "Silicon Valley": this video .
Your product could be boring and useless except to a niche audience, but still a great business opportunity. In that case, people will only work on it for the money, and that is fine. Some ideas are simply harder to sell to potential employees: “We’re making the world a better place through paxos algorithms for consensus protocols.” “We’re making the world a better place though software defined data centers for cloud computing.” “We’re making the world a better place through canonical data models to communicate between end points.” “We’re making the world a better place through scalable, fault tolerant distributed databases with acid transactions.” this video
"Making the world a better place" is a trope that Silicon Valley was making fun of. Every startup thinks they're making the world a better place and the phrase has lost its meaning. this video [LINK] Unless your goal is to eliminate poverty, homelessness, disease, hunger, human trafficking, climate change, or assist with any other humanitarian effort, then claims of "making the world a better place" are eye roll worthy. I would groan if someone said Atlassian was making the world a better place by creating Jira so managers and engineers can track work more effectively.
Curious how you arrived at lumping "reinventing healthcare" with "not doing something good for the world". Your list looks like just companies you don't want to work for. Which is fine, just don't confuse it with morality. There's nothing inherently immoral about most items on that list. At the end of the day, "good for the world" is overblown (see this video ). Most software is boring, but it makes the lives of _some people_ better. If you want to impact a billion lives, chances are someone made a billion on it. Good luck.