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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

The thing that makes me admire Bill Gates more than most others:

There are two types of currencies in the world: time and money, and most of us trade one for the other in various forms (pay for convenience, or spend time working for a paycheck).

For the richest man in the world, he has all the money he'll ever need, but just like the rest of us, he only has limited amount of time left on this planet. Yet he is fully devoted on spending that form of currency, which is infinitely more valuable to him than even others, on the causes he believes in.

That alone convinces me on his sincerity and his true desire in making a difference.

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Eh, sincerity does not make a person right. Look into the eyes of any religious extremist for evidence of that. Gates thinks the internet won't save the world, but he's dead wrong. The internet, in it's current form, allows information to flow at will. And if there is any silver bullet for society's ills, it's certainly education. Teach a man to fish...

See my comments in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668578

The situation for the people Gates is thinking of is very, very different from what we can even imagine.

I actually don't find it hard at all to understand the situation they are in, and I suspect not many people do.

That being said, I agree with Gates. There are far more important things than 100% global connectivity.

I strongly disagree. Our society is awash in information, and has been for decades now (the internet isn't exactly new, at least in the United States), yet life over the last 30-40 years has been pretty consistent. Arguably the automobile had a more fundamental impact on the structure of our society than has the internet.

The idea that information and education are a silver bullet is a romantic idea that's rarely evaluated on its own merits, certainly not by people who make a living pushing bits of information around.

So many people have lost so much time because of Windows and microsoft products. The progress of computer science have been a lot slower because of his monopolistic fight. As a proof, look how things have evolved since Microsoft is not relevant any more.

1 point of karma lost. Sorry for the young generation, but you just had to be there to know. I will not forgive Bill Gates so easily.

You're forgetting past history and the present times. It's not just Bill. IBM and Xerox before Bill Gates was worse. Apple now is far worse than Microsoft was in the "golden days".

Microsoft stole ideas, improved on them, and made them accessible to the public for far cheaper than anybody else. It wasn't just anti-competitive practices that put them at the front.

Apple stole ideas that others have done, improved on them, and made them accessible for a price HIGHER than everyone else because of marketing. It isn't just their anti-competitive practices that have put them at the front.

If you are going to make a claim to history and "you had to be there", then remember ALL of history and don't be condescending and assuming it was someone young that voted you down.

I am not forgetting. Your comparison of Microsoft and Apple is unfair, I have another way to present it: "Apple stole ideas from laboratories and created a market for them. Microsoft copied successful market products to make them better integrated in windows and to sell them better."

The article http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/pops/pop7.4microsoftmonopolyf... gives irrefutable facts. Do not accuse me of rewriting the history. I was there to see the birth and death of many good products that have been killed by Microsoft tactics (dr dos, stacker, framemaker, borland C++, ...). One of my most usefull book at that time was http://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-Windows-Programmers-Micro.... Many people have lost a lot of time because of the monopoly of Microsoft. How much time lost because of IE6 ? I have lost a lot of time between 1999 and 2002 because visual C++ was not compliant at all with the standard published in 98.

My opinion is that all the time lost because of Microsoft has been detrimental to computer science progress.

This argument is faulty, implying that Gates' time is more valuable than others'. We need both time and money to survive, when you need not worry about the later, logically you can approach other pursuits with more dedication.

When did the parent post claim Gate's time is more valuable than others? I only saw that the parent comment claimed that to Gates himself his time is much more valuable than his money, but even so he spends all of his time pursuing good things. He was never compared to anyone else.

With this phrase: is infinitely more valuable to him than even others I believe. The tone of the post must be taken into account.

What he means is, Gates time is so much more valuable to him than his money is to him, where most people time or money might be more valuable than the other, but not to such an extreme. My time is more valuable to me, but there is only so much money I'm willing to spend on convenience. Gates however would probably be willing to spend thousands of dollars on convenience that would seem like huge waste to the rest of us.

He makes the point that despite his time being so much more valuable to him that he is still willing to spend his time doing good things instead of just having a stress free easy life.

> his time is much more valuable than his money

That is the case for everybody, for time is limited and money can be created arbitrarily.

Don't take my comment as an attack to the OP, I'm just stating that the situation is the same for everybody, and there are many people out there with less resources, but I claim their contribution is as valuable, if not more.

Most of us are willing to sacrifice time for sometimes even small amount of money. For example, I used to wait in line on Black Fridays for cheap deals on electronics. After I got a decent job I stopped doing that kind of things but I would probably still wait in line for a couple hours if I can save a thousand dollars. For someone like Bill Gates, he would probably easily PAY $1000 to save an hour of time, so the relative value between money/time is different for everyone.

For a billionaire like Gates, he effectively only has one currency left to worry about, since time is the only thing that's important and worthy of consideration for him. That is why I said time is more important to him than it is to rest of us, since he is unlikely to trade his time for anything other than what he truly desires.

His point was that Gates already has all the money a person could ever want, so he no longer values it enough to waste any time trying to make more. For a normal person, money is often valued more than time, which is why the majority of us spend most of our days working for someone else. If I ever became wealthy, my time would become more valuable than money too, and I would spend most of my time doing the things that I really want to do. Right now, However, I need money more than I need time.

> money is often valued more than time

I argue that time is always worth more than money. You can transform time into money, but not the other way around.

> which is why the majority of us spend most of our days working for someone else

You can use time, money or both at the same time. In your example, you have both every day: first money, then time.

Are you self-employed, or do you work for someone else?

If you work for someone else, as almost all people do, you have made the decision that the time you spend at work is less valuable than your paycheck.

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