I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. AMA
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Even Woz had said that the film accurately portrayed all the personalities.
However, we should appreciate Bill for his honesty. He is not shown in good light in that movie.
I only talked once w/ Steve for a couple of minutes, in the same era. He seemed like a jerk.
Q: "How was your relationship with Steve jobs? I always hoped that y'all were really good friends and competitors."
A: "He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications."
So Bill might be giving away some money nowadays, his character doesn't seem to have changed much, still taking credit where it isn't due.
Anyone know if there's any public evidence that they shared a mutual respect? If there is, I'd like to read / watch it.
Video: http://allthingsd.com/video/?video_id=60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB...
Transcript: http://allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/
I'm going go finish the video now. I appreciate it.
Based entirely on the movie, Steve Jobs is clearly shown as the worse of the two.
There are definitely worse ways to spend your time and money.
http://cms.givingpledge.org/#larry_ellison
The full letter is an interesting read
I'm not judging Ellison at all. Bill could have done the same, but I think it's cool that he is choosing to oversee how that money is spent while he's still alive.
By spending the money on charity while alive, Bill is celebrated as a benefactor while he is alive and charities (and people) worldwide will mourn his death.
Larry, on the other hand, is not celebrated as a benefactor while alive, and charities will celebrate after he dies and they finally get the money.
I don't know about you, but I don't begrudge a man worth $41B who plans to give away nearly all his wealth, a yacht or two.
Give me Ellison over Gates any day.
He's trying to eradicate disease and help people who don't have billions of dollars, or even millions...or even hundreds of dollars to their name.
Bill Gates didn't screw up computing. The Microsoft that exists today is an entirely different animal than it was when it was just a startup, just as Google and Apple are different.
This isn't cynicism about startups' growth trends; this is a point that Bill Gates has revolutionized the entire industry multiple times over. How he chooses to spend his wealth is what most people would call generous and altruistic.
Although I wasn't comparing the operating systems, I was comparing the pattern of the companies' growth and changing management over the years. That's why I included Google.
Grow up guys, you can upvote your Apple and Google posts all you want, you don't need to go out of your way to flag this post out of spite and abuse your moderator privileges.
What do you call people who go out of their way to flag even product announcements and posts like this? Tech enthusiasts? I'll be happy to use a less abrasive substitute.
http://i.imgur.com/hFFueFf.png
This isn't the first time anyway. Pretty much any post mentioning Microsoft in a not bad light seems to get flagged by people with good karma abusing it.
Edit: It's at 325 points(posted 4 hours ago) right now and stuck at #14. Has to break some record for the most upvoted and flagged story.
From the HN guidelines:
If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)
Also, Reddit has the same guideline as you quote (only downvote things that don't belong) whereas HN has the creator saying that downvotes can be used to express disagreement.
Amazing. Bill has had his fair share of flak and has made some decisions in his career that I wouldn't approve of, and I am not particularly a fan of Microsoft, but his humility, modesty, and great work has made him one of my greatest inspirations.
He's a multi-billionaire with a heart that is worth so much more.
EDIT: Ah, I didn't notice the sarcasm tags, +1.
If there's anyone who doesn't want to dig deep into the comments, here's a cool thing:
Bill Gates intends to eradicate Polio within the next six years and then eradicate Malaria within his lifetime.
Kudos, Bill.
A: "Don't die..."
He has some humor too :P
A.Free software. Just kidding.
Books actually.
Of course, he presume he doesn't do much hard core software engineering anymore, but I assumed that family was pretty much a thing of the past (and legacy code).
Why hasn't reddit's AMA been surpassed by a dedicated AMA site with a user interface designed for AMA?
Especially since any focused site that came up to do this would almost certainly put way more barriers to entry into the community than reddit (which still allows you to create a new account virtually instantly, with no email verification) has.
I think there just aren't enough interesting people doing Q&As for a business model based on this to make much sense.
Reddit's AMA format is pretty bad, especially if it's a woman/girl answering questions, though.
voomly.com
Fred Wilson wrote about them here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/01/voomly.html
(The "Woody Harrelson"/Rampart AMAs would be the norm if not for the chaotic nature of reddit).
I would like to marry you... or just buy a pair of your
used undies. It's funny that people actually do that.
Just hi-larious.
And if it's a trade-off where more "impulsive" comments are deleted, then I prefer that to subjecting female respondents to constant come-ons from pubescent, sad human beings.
I think it's clear what Emmy Rossum prefers.
Emmy Rossum went to reddit for an AMA, and used the site's commenting functionality to ask people not to be rude. She did not cancel her AMA, ask to have the rude comments deleted, etc.
Not the best interface, but it is what you asked for...
The context link will show the comment he is replying to.
That's already almost half the net upvotes of what Obama got: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...
But Obama's IAMA got 239,221 upvotes total. Which means he got 225K downvotes...which I guess is feasible, but for all we know, that was just an arbitrary result Reddit's strange algorithm of adding downvotes to obscure the upvote count.
I guess it doesn't matter in the end, it just seems that upvotes should be a real reflection of how liked (or polarizing) a thread/discussion was.
[0] http://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s_...
The FAQ you linked to gives this example: a submission with 5 upvotes and 3 downvotes may be tweaked to say 23 upvotes and 21 downvotes.
So the net number of upvotes remains the same. But the ratio of approval, a statistic that is prominently listed for each submission, changes:
5 / (5+3) = 62.5%
23 / (21+23) = 52.5%
This is the entire point.
That said, I wish they'd just ban spammers and give everyone accurate metrics.
The best they can do is make spammers be unclear on if they're having any effect or not, by obscuring votes, or by secretly banning them without them realizing.
It's a tough problem to get right, especially without making the experience worse for everybody else. I think they've found a happy medium.
... for crying out loud.
>That said, I wish they'd just ban spammers and give everyone accurate metrics.
As long as spammers are banned, there's no reason to screw up a site feature for everyone else.
"Higher is better."
Probably the funniest part of this entire thread is the slew of comments now trying to establish an out of context quote in response to that:
"Higher is better." ~ Bill Gates
Wind it back to 98, and you've got it.
Really great to have him in public this way, I mean, most of the celebrities have help teams, that post for them, which is kinda boring, but there are always haters and weeners, that would fill up such pages with some meaningless crap, so my biggest concern is Bill Gates, getting err... unlovey to Reddit ? :( that would be sad
Q: What's the cheapest thing that gives you most pleasure? A: kids, cheeseburgers... Q: where are you acquiring cheap kids? A: the stork
> What's your favorite book?
> "My favorite [book] of the last decade in Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature."
Hadn't heard of that book before, but definitely going to read it now.
I hope people can get interesting information, Bill Gates III is seemly a interesting character.
'Anyone good at QBasic?
'I haven't written it in years.
ANSWER = INPUT
PRINT ANSWER
PRINT "Thank you for playing."http://i.imgur.com/ao8qgdG.png
This is ridiculous, and proves that HN is filled with closed minded fanboys and hater zealots instead of technology lovers who otherwise have good karma.
Can anyone who flagged this post tell us why they did so?
If this is not moderator abuse, I don't know what is.
Reminds me of the Germany jury system that had to be abolished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury#Germany
>Trial by jury was introduced in most German states after the revolutionary events of 1848; however, it remained controversial and early in the 20th century there were moves to abolish it.[34] The Emminger Reform of January 4, 1924, during an Article 48 state of emergency, abolished the jury system and replaced it with a mixed system including bench trials and lay judges. In 1925 the Social Democrats called for the reinstitution of the jury, and a special meeting of the German Bar demanded revocation of the decrees, but "on the whole the abolition of the jury caused little commotion".[35] Their verdicts were widely perceived as unjust and inconsistent.
You should email them if you're convinced it's flagged and you have an issue with it.
You don't see a problem with a section of posters with good karma flagging posts like this?
Edit: I do think a better parallel is Digg's bury brigades.
But honestly, I don't take Hacker News seriously enough for it to bother me. I use it to build connections in the community, keep up to date on tech and news matters, and post things from time to time.
It's not as though I need my posts to hit the front page. I post intellectual curiosities and some of my more interesting blog posts around the internet, but I couldn't care less if a small but powerful "1%" holds voting power on Hacker News.
How does one email them?
>draw parallels with any part of Germany less reputable history
Erm, it's about a jury system that failed, not really about German history.
And I said the catch-all about German history because it's still one facet of Germany. It was just a more eloquent way of saying it.
Though it looks like he won't get to answering this popular question: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/q9qzn/iama_former_nasa...