You could if you chose to do so, but that's a straw man.
Refugee health doesn't happen solely in Syria. There are Refugee Health Centres in most major cities, and refugee health is only a small facet of medicine, and medicine is only a small subset of activities that can make the world a better place.
Writing a better javascript framework will not make the world a better place.
Why wouldn't writing a better JS framework improve the world? Jquery helped a lot of people get into web development, got them jobs, inspired them to enjoy programming and maybe life itself, helped the economy, helped make websites exist that directly and indirectly help people, etc.
There is no reason anyone should be ashamed of doing what they love (unless of course, it's genuinely shameful). Yes, some things are more noble than others, and some things help people more directly, but the world needs a complete diversity of interests to be wholly "good". We shouldn't just rank all tasks from most to least noble, pick the most noble one, and pursue that solely.
>Why wouldn't writing a better JS framework improve the world? Jquery helped a lot of people get into web development, got them jobs, inspired them to enjoy programming and maybe life itself, helped the economy, helped make websites exist that directly and indirectly help people, etc.
Oh please. This kind of smug self-congratulatory attitude is what makes me hate echo chambers like HN. You enjoy writing code on the side? That's fine.
But don't pretend that your competitor to Uber (or whatever other startup that gets funded and is only really valuable to people in first-world countries) makes you a humanitarian.
I didn't say that JS frameworks are a humanitarian effort. I'm just saying that non-noble things can be valuable too. Not everything has to be a cure for cancer. Just because people have bad lives in 3rd world countries doesn't mean positive experiences by more fortunate people are trivial.
All I said was that inspiring someone to enjoy life and to give them the tools to live a good life is something valuable, and is something worth doing. You're the smug one, by choosing to misinterpret what I said so that you can feel righteous about being the only person who acknowledges their trivial life.
Ah yes, if you aren't working a job that is directly helping the poor and/or wounded, fuck you for being a leech right? People lives and humanitarian efforts are solely measured in how many sick people you can save today right?
How can you be so short sighted to believe that unless you are working on a cure to cancer, that all your efforts on this planet are for naught. Does this mean if I am able bodied and finically stable, any service that benefits me and my 70 or so years on this planet are "a waste of time?" A guess every and all artists should kill themselves for not being good enough for becoming doctors right? Art never changed the world and those smug artists shouldn't believe that their paintings actually mean anything.
Someone should have told Gates back in 1975 to give up because building a better BASIC interpreter would never change the world.
> But don't pretend that your competitor to Uber [..] makes you a humanitarian.
He didn't claim he was one. But you started out basically implicitly demanding that we all be humanitarians. It's fine to help people, but it's also fine to build web-apps for cat pictures. If you feel so strongly about humanitarian work, just go to Syria or where ever, and help people yourself.
Great open source software has in fact helped our organisation build apps and services, which supports making the world a better place. I wouldn't be quite as negative as that.
And you can't work all the time. It sucks the creativity out of you. At least for me. So hobbies are important to make the other side function well.
So go and invent some new vaccines instead of whining about it on HN like a little bitch. Invent the vaccines, manufacture them, secure the patents and all that, and then distribute them to the needy. You, yourself, personally.
Once you've done all that, come back here and link to a blog where you explain how you did it, so that we may follow in your shiny, saintly path.
Until that moment, you're a whiny little bitch who thinks their opinion on what other people should do with their free time and money means more than diddly squat. (It doesn't).
Refugees from war torn regions need medical care, not yet another JavaScript framework.