Bill Gates: AMA on Reddit

Thanks for the reminder about topiama. I knew something like this existed, but forgot where. I was thinking recently about writing my own as a quick pet project. Still might, just for fun.

It's actually a bit surprising to me that reddit themselves have not written an IAMA question-answer view. Celebrity AMAs have become a pretty big draw for reddit, but browsing them from the default view sucks. Perhaps they view it like they do the mobile clients (the community does them better), but it would be nice to have something native to reddit for this behaviour.

I appreciate the link! I created topiama and posted it on hackernews almost 2 years ago.

As a fellow user of topiama... I am a bit annoyed at how it looks on mobile. What I plan to do is use bootstrap to make a nice responsive layout for all devices. Stay tuned. Probably Spring/Summer.

Eventually went ahead and wrote a small chrome extension which injects some css and javascript into IAMA threads to make it easy to switch between the full thread and a simplified Q&A thread. See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cleanama-for-reddi... if you think you need something of the sort.

For ending poverty on a global scale, wouldn't weather and chemistry seem like a decent place to start? Consider immunobiology and agriculture.

Also: I know it's a cheap shot, but I had a good laugh when I saw a book called "The Blue Death" on his shelf.

I assume it's only a tiny slice of his library. Inferring from the fact he's the world's richest geek, and that he's spent $30 million on a set of da Vinci papers,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester

Weather control, obviously.

He lives in Seattle so he has plenty of weather to be interested in. :-)

His primary interests now are fighting poverty and hunger. Having a basic understanding of weather sounds like something nice to have in that situation, and if he spent the time in high school and college thinking about computers and businesses, a "for dummies" book might not be the worst place to start.

Brushing up on his cloud computing.

Wow. Just the other day I was looking at the clouds and wondering how it all works up there and not some three-hundred word blogpost; seriously, why are there different clouds? The sky is such a big part of my everyday life, yet I know nothing about it. I searched around but couldn't find any good books on clouds.

This seems like a good start though. Mad respect for Bill.

* Linus Pauling's General Chemistry

* Richard Dawkins' Ancestor's Tale

* Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science

* Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos

That's overly generous. Gates didn't just have an evil image for a while, he was evil for a while. It happens to the best of us.

In his AMA he contrasts his younger self from other young billionaires and millionaires by stating that they are often much more interested in "giving back" than he was until he was much older. He was a ruthless man who cared only for himself in his younger days and that led to some rather unethical business practices. It wasn't until much later that he chilled out and learned some compassion for the rest of the world.

I'd rather think it's a personality trait. Even someone who's not busy, or successful, can come across as direct and succinct.

That's true, but the responses seem to be specific and tangible, rather than vague, which is what I might expect from someone worried about being taken out of context.

A few minutes ago, the top voted questions were about whether he uses Internet Explorer, Bing, etc. It is a bit disappointing to see such inane questions getting upvoted to visibility. All I can think of about that commenter is: You have one question to ask one of the greatest businessmen and philanthropists of our time, and all you can think of is some re-hashed 10 year old joke? I think in general, r/all is pretty stupid. However, many other subject-specific sub-reddits are awesome!

I find it depends on the subreddit. It's like HN, if there's a consistent effort at civility and on-topic discussion in a particular community, then it can be ok. All of the default subreddits are a disaster for discussion, some of the smaller niche ones are ok.

On such an important AMA, a mod should be able to cut off some of the child comments (just hide them under the [-] button), especially on the top answer. It would be like a haircut on a tree of comments, but it would look better than ruffled.

yep. not asking softball question wont gather you the karma. hence why i laugh hard every time people suggest those (this?) sites are even a slight replacement for editorialized news sources.

Your questions are awful questions. It is much more important to focus on what he is doing now, which is bigger than what he has done in the past. He is actually helping millions of people around the world now, and you want to focus on what he did in business 20-30 years ago.

Of course he was over aggressive in his running of Microsoft in the past. Does it matter if he says so? Or does it matter what he does today with his billions?

What's the point ? He would give diplomatic answers about events 20 years ago. What would that accomplish ?

His energy right now is behind a really great thing and a great inspiration for all of us - to apply ourselves and our geek brains to doing something useful in the world, not just optimizing hip city limo rentals for inflated multiples.

So I think these so called soft ball questions are great. They set him up to hit the ball out of the park. Go Bill ! Hit that thing ! Let even the shallow and dull minded hear the message and see that this is what great people do when they have the opportunity.

Public opinion is fickle and there is far too much snark and strife. He is going in the right direction so God speed.

But I'm not going to start using SQL-server or anything.

"Microsoft's actions in the past over aggressive maybe hindering the progress of open source and stuff like that"

Take your pick from:

1) Why do you think Bill Gates cares about open source given that he made his fortune from closed source software?

2) Sure it hindered the progress of open source, that was the whole point, open source was a potentially significant competitor to the corporation Bill Gates was running and he'd have been negligent in his role as CEO if he'd not looked to undermine and damage it at any opportunity.

You may not like those positions or agree with them but it would be somewhat odd to think that they weren't relatively close to what Bill Gates was thinking at the time and still thinks.

Neither of those would be what he'd say of course, he'd almost certainly point out that MS do embrace FOSS far more these days and also that while Windows may have been closed, by becoming a defacto standard for desktop computing it did an enormous amount for standardisation (in a practical, that is what people are actually using, rather than an open standards sense) and spreading computing to the masses.

Ultimately it might be an interesting subject, but it's not one you can expect to get an honest answer on. Even if he weren't involved in MS day to day and a major shareholder still, he's very unlikely to perform an about turn that says "I was basically wrong about my entire career".

>I'm pretty disappointed by how softball questions they were

This is not the way to look at it.

The answered questions were just that: answered. More hardball questions were ignored by the VIP. The VIP chooses which questions to ask. In short reddit IAMAs are basically free marketing exercises masquerading behind some kind of idea of "we did it, reddit" - that the audience has some kind of power. It doesn't, it's basically a false idea.

  Note that he didn't say "go to school".

Quoted for Emphasis.

Hinton is where it really starts of course, but a lot of our researchers were involved in making it practical (e.g. train quickly on GPUs).

Seriously? That seems incredibly wasteful, not to mention boring. No way I'd be doing that if I had a fraction of his wealth.

Always wondered how that worked for the person answering

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https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reddit-new-comment...

On the other hand it's not called 'I will answer anything' unfortunately. People are generally nice so a lot of 'comfortable' questions get a lot of votes rather than questions that could be seen as provocative.

But I would lose my status of a social outcast if I used service as popular as Reddit :)

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