Bill Gates's new website: The Gates Notes | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates's new website: The Gates Notes

thegatesnotes.com

I think that Bill can do a world of good by sharing his thoughts via a blog like this. Assuming he is candid and fosters real communication, that is. Sections like 'What I'm thinking about/what I'm learning' is exactly the right attitude.

The problem is that Bill Gates only reads books that reinforce his existing beliefs. That's why he's so pro-KIPP, because he doesn't have any interest in authors like John Taylor Gatto. (Or at least this is what I heard from someone who had lunch with him recently.)

KIPP?

Also, I'ma huge fan of the Underground History of American Education (http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/)

I'm not familiar with it but there is an article on his site about it: http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Learning/article.aspx?ID=29

That site reminds me of reading a Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet once in college...

Just out of curiosity but how do you know this?

EDIT: I am not being sarcastic or anything.

Basically my friend tried telling him about how John Taylor Gatto's new book suggested that there were some unstated assumptions behind KIPP that were worth examining, but Gates wasn't at all interested in even talking about this, let alone reading the book.

Wow, and from just that you were able to determine that he only reads books that reinforces his existing beliefs? Holy assumptions, Batman!

That, and the fact that his articles and speeches on education reflect a shallow thought process that lacks a real nuanced understanding of the problems and tradeoffs.

Yeah, I'm sure he could learn a thing or two from you.

Guys, can I suggest that your points can be made more forcefully by stating a position, and not simply attacking each other?

And before replying to this, read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006657

I've been guilty, and occasionally still am guilty, of exactly what PG is observing. You can disagree without attacking each other, and you can make your points without snide asides.

Please.

That wasn't a snipe. My issue with Gates literally is not his ultimate position, but rather the fact his arguments for his position are shallow and lacking nuance.

There is a lot of research out there suggesting that while this program may be a fast way to teach troubled kids to read, there's also a lot of research suggesting that it'll completely destroy their intrinsic motivation to learn and, frankly, to do much of anything in the future. Now maybe there is some special reason why the research doesn't apply in this case, or maybe Gates believes it does apply but the tradeoff is worth it. But most likely I don't think Gates even knows that this research exists, and more generally about this wider branch of theory that suggests that this whole approach is going to be really harmful to these kids.

That's what bothers me, the fact that he's pushing this program really hard without an honest discussion about its merits and drawbacks.

Stating that someone who doesn't even want to discuss something they disagree with is closed minded seems more a matter of reason than assumption.

It could also be the case that he disagreed with it and simply did not feel like talking about it at the time he was trying to enjoy his lunch.

This second-hand anecdote is light on details so I think we cannot draw too deep of conclusions about Gates' character from it.

That's hardly unique to Bill Gates. People rarely re-examine what they presume to be correct, and when people call that a "problem" I tend to think that it just means "he's wrong and pig-headed." Which he may likely be, but let's at least speak plainly.

I also take it as an indication that the person saying "he's wrong and pig-headed" is also so entrenched in their viewpoint that they are not likely to examine evidence to the contrary either.

Well in my case I've read a couple books about KIPP looking for evidence that I was wrong, but I didn't find any. The problem is that while KIPP is probably the fastest way to improve kids performance on Things That Can Be Measured, there's a lot of research showing how this approach is really bad for kids. And the pro-KIPP literature doesn't take any of this into account. My problem with Gates specifically is that not only does he not know what these problems are, but even when told about them he has no interest in learning about them despite the fact that they are extremely serious.

So are the really bad things you mention things like obliterating intellectual curiosity, fostering dependence on authority, crushing children's self-esteem and so on?

Because it seems like there are some people for whom those results define cruelty and failure and others for whom those kinds of critiques ring hollow and self-serving.

This looks like a debate of preconceptions, the most intractable of arguments.

"This looks like a debate of preconceptions, the most intractable of arguments."

The issue is that this debate isn't even taking place, and people don't know about the research on what happens to kids' intrinsic motivation and such under these programs. Now if the parents knew this and thought it was an acceptable tradeoff then that would legitimately be an intractable debate, but for Obama and Gates to force this onto inner city minorities without informed consent seems extremely wrong.

"The problem is that while KIPP is probably the fastest way to improve kids performance on Things That Can Be Measured, there's a lot of research showing how this approach is really bad for kids."

I don't understand this point here. If you cannot measure something, how can you determine what is an improvement and what is not?

I think what he means is: you can't measure a specific metric but you can see from the end result that some other technique ended up with a better overall result.

Could you point me to some further reading about the criticisms of KIPP? I've noticed obvious incompatibilities between their philosophy and the research catalogued by Alfie Kohn, but he obviously doesn't bring up KIPP by name.

As far as I know, there are no real criticisms of this program specifically yet. Most of what I have read from about KIPP comes from Paul Tough, both his series of NYTimes Magazine articles and also his book Whatever It Takes. He's clearly a supporter of KIPP, but in his book he also briefly acknowledges that the ideas underlying the program are not supported by science, unlike many recent initiatives to improve parenting ability. (IIRC the school he writes about in the book is not run by KIPP, but it uses their methodology.)

would be interesting. too bad the comments are turned off.

I dunno, I think that a comment section for an author as famous as this would just be a fire-hose blast of noise.

Yeah, it would only work if he had paid moderators.

Why don't they implement a point voting system like HN? It's usually quite a good filter.

That's more a function of the community here. No guarantees that billg would have an equally good community. How many "windoze suxx" comments do you think would get voted up on every article?

I was wondering why there wasn't more functionality too. I guess he follows the release early and often philosophy.

I saw that one of the people that Gates follows said this:

http://twitter.com/inafried/status/8000814417

Why am I not surprised that it is using both WebForms and Silverlight... I see that big chunk of viewstate there Bill.

I honestly wouldn't have guessed. The layout is understated, the page loads quickly, and it's easy to navigate and read. I wonder if the site is based on some existing content management system, or if it's something custom. It would be kind of a cool surprise if it turned out that Bill authored the site himself for fun (but that seems unlikely).

Why does it seem unlikely? It could be that he is using these technologies purely out of personal interest.

I think it seems unlikely because we all think of BillG as a business man and not a hacker. Maybe I should only speak for myself, but the thought of him tinkering away into the early morning on his new site is such a wonderful juxtaposition of my image of him.

But remember, Bill Gates started out as a hacker. He spent his whole high school days learning on a computer his Mom's Club purchased for their kids. He says he was probably one of 50 kids in the country that had that much access to a computer in his High School days.

Yeah totally, I certainly meant no disrespect. The man can hack. It'd be nothing but exciting to hear about him doing more of it.

Page doesn't load quickly at all for me.

Well he does have a very large interest in the success of technologies still being a large shareholder. I prefer websites to use silverlight over flash, I think you like silverlight a lot more after using it, even if it is exactly very web friendly.

Silverlight does have some technical advantages over Flash on Windows (eg, event timing in Flash is still tied to frames on the back end), however it's just another old-style proprietary plug in we don't need these days. made even worse by the ghetto OS X and Linux versions.

Flash is the lowest common denominator right now, it's replacement should be HTML video or canvas.

I'm viewing in Chrome 3.0 and haven't experienced any problems. I do not have silverlight installed at all.

Wouldn't that be ironic - If a large number of visitors were using Firefox, Safari & Chrome?

I'd expect most visitors to be [so-called] technorati and hence less IE than other browsers.

Should have used ASP.NET MVC. It's wonderful. I'll never use ASP.NET forms again, unless I'm forced.

Just confirming.. built with Microsoft technology :)

http://builtwith.com/?http%3A//www.thegatesnotes.com/

The .ASPX extension in the URLs led me to make the same assumption

// Workaround for a bug in ASP.NET Ajax Beta, you don't need this in the final version

and this is also kind of funny: <!--[if lt IE 7]> ...

This is doing the rounds on the net too:

http://www.thegatesnotes.com/robots.txt

It doesn't mention Bing. Amusing, and useless.

Why is it useless (I've never worked with robots.txt)? Are the /css and /js files not large enough to bother skipping?

Useless in the sense it doesn't really need to mention Bing.

Blocking /css and /js makes sense because they don't add value in being crawled. Not necessary, but doesn't hurt.

Best practice: Always have a robots.txt file, even if it's empty.

What is the reason for your Best Practice advice?

Look at the comments...

# robots.txt # # This file is to prevent the crawling and indexing of certain parts # of your site by web crawlers and spiders run by sites like Yahoo! # and Google. By telling these "robots" where not to go on your site, # you save bandwidth and server resources.

It's a cut and paste from some sample file, so this doesn't indicate anything much.

google search for the text in the comments ( http://tinyurl.com/ygtuanh ) has 49 hits, there would be more if I had not joined the lines together, I'm sure.

Bing ignores robots.txt anyway: http://blogs.perl.org/users/cpan_testers/2010/01/msnbot-must...

Really pretty, really well-done website. (Even if it's going to get grief because it uses Silverlight).

I humbly disagree.

The fonts are microscopic here and when I increase the size to something half-readable then stuff gets pushed out the right side. (on the section-overview pages that is)

I also found this sidebar on the right of the articles very distracting. Don't throw unrelated content at me while I'm reading.

This is one of the few sites I've browsed on a Windows machine that made me instinctively think "oh the fonts look like crap because someone designed it on Windows and didn't think about Mac usability", since I'm usually on a Mac. That the fonts look nearly unreadable at any size on a windows machine is hilarious.

Some notes on the design: IMO { The navigation feels a little fragile, maybe because of the small font size and delicate lines. But it's also quite original, especially the "view by topic" branch. The right column (only visible on some pages) could easily be mistaken for advertising, possibly because of the tiny sans-serif type. Overall the style and copy gives a personal, likable impression. }

No favicon

Do you think he's actually writing/doing all this himself? (vs. having an intern or something like that be his social media face)

I'm sure he's got some other people doing stuff on the site (code, server, etc), but I'm likely to believe that this is indeed him writing the content. Maybe he's got someone proofing it, but Bill like most of us probably find something nice about writing out your thoughts and interacting with people through a blog.

Doesn't validate for HTML or CSS and has to include IE specific fixes for proper display of PNG.

Wish he'd had to code it to spec for himself.

No RSS feed? :/

In the introduction note, Bill says:

"I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through email"

Besides email (which isn't that great if you don't have GMail style threads), I wonder whether he and other prominent personalities use a closed discussion forum to engage in discourse about interesting topics like HN does. I can understand why he would be hesitant to comment on a public forum like HN.

That said, it's great to see people like PG, DHH (and others) mix with the no-names (or future-names) on HN.

First twitter and now a website?

Looking over the content on the site I was depressed by all the philanthropy and environmentalism. Not that these aren't good things but I think Bill has been so successful at building software and corporations that his time would be better used teaching people these things.

Imagine the articles and insight we could get if he would convert into someone like Paul Graham.

I'm as much of a believer in the power of entrepreneurship as it gets, but I disagree. Having his brain power, management ability, and billions of dollars directed towards helping humanity's least fortunate is just about as optimal a situation as I can imagine.

actually, I completely disagree.

What Bill was truly good at, was hiring smart people and getting them to all work towards something big. Putting a computer on every desk was a big goal. Eradicating Malaria and the other things the foundation is working on are big goals. And to be honest - I'm impressed by the way he is going about it.

This site isn't about him resting on his laurels - looking back at the success he had. This is the posts/information on what he is working on now. So it wont have the deep insight that he would have about software/corporations. But the fact he is applying that insight to Philanthropy and to the world of NGO's is fantastic and I applaud him for it.

Totally agree - and also at the very least I rest comfortable knowing that such a large amount of wealth (Most of Buffets' empire also) is bookmarked to at least try and do good. Not somewhere else (ie: funding weapons)

rich nerds are the best hope for major change IMO (a rather randian outlook I admit). humanity is currently stuck in a quagmire of democracy and egalitarianism that doesn't seem nearly as beneficial as it would have us believe.

As much as I'd like his feedback on my Twitter clone, I'd rather see him continue to work on extreme poverty.

I find this line from the greeting letter a bit odd, "It often feels like I'm back in school, as I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I'm passionate about." Didn't he drop out of college to start MS presumably because he felt like the things he was learning in school were a waste of his time?

What about elementary, middle and high school?

I don't think that's accurate - from interviews, speeches and his own writings, he's always sounded complimentary towards his Harvard experiences; it's just that starting Micro-Soft was the right opportunity at the right time, and he grabbed it.

There's no conflict there. In an actual school, you're not the one setting the curriculum. This involves a lowest common denominator of a variety of subjects, some of which you'll never apply. I imagine that now he's spending his time studying things he's interested in and likely directly related to things he's doing or trying to accomplish.

It's amazing how the design of the website almost cries "don't read me".

Several typos on the front page... I guess it's just another blog but, I don't know, I would expect Bill Gates to put his stuff through some proper proof-reading.

I can has rss feed?

Such a childish signature.

Yup, he'll never make it in the real world if he doesn't master this fourth grade handwriting course.

<tin-foil-hat>

He could be doing all this because he wants to run for office. The site frequently refers to Gates in the third person, it's kinda structured like a lot of political candidates sites.

</tin-foil-hat>

Microsoft for President!

I think Gates should turn comments on. People should be registered, perhaps using Facebook/LinkedIn credentials.

I do agree he needs to be exposed to opinions outside his comfort zone.

Lulz:

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