Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bill Gates, Hero

blog.redfin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 239 posts

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#201

Post by mkramlich »

rbanffy wrote: post #158
mattmaroon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way to look at it is that Gates used his very generous gifts to give 100s of thousands of people jobs, make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people, then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history. Meanwhile the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs, who has broken plenty of laws himself (backdating is fraud), done most of the things that have insp…

> give 100s of thousands of people jobs Would have jobs with or without Gates > make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W). > then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history He is the richest man in history. > the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs False dichot…

> then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history He is the richest man in history.

Exactly. If you're a multi-billionaire it's very easy to be a philanthropist. Now instead be somebody making say $30k a year with a net worth of say $10k, and if that person is a philanthropist, I'm much more impressed by that person's character.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#202

Post by mkramlich »

storm wrote: post #132
MaysonL wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an old hacker, and proud to admit that I have never owned a Microsoft product.

I am a young(ish) hacker, and I'm proud not to engage in religious nonsense like this at all. Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares? Get on with the coding already.

> Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares?

Because they're different. Craftsmen like to learn and make distinctions and use the best tool for the job.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#203

Post by donaq »

mattmaroon wrote: post #162
raganwald wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the standard litany of complaints That phrase is sufficient to earn an upmod all on its own. Reading your reply, I immediately thought of people huddled in a church listening to the Vicar preach against Microsoft's evil. But it isn't a passionate speech full of fire and brimstone, it's a standard reading that he has given so many times, his voice is now a monotone and the parishioners know every word by heart.

Ha, good visualization. I find much of what I read here to be like that. Especially when people or corporations (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) are called evil. At that point it always feels like we've left the realm of enlightened conversation. There's never a recognized gray area. It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.

It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.

Amen. I have several times tried to comment to that effect, but couldn't come up with the words. Thanks for saying it. Especially irksome to me are comments that go something like "You're on HN, you're better than that." in response to a comment on which the poster disapproves. Let's skip the childish reverse psychology attempts, shall we?

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#204

Post by _b8r0 »

nailer wrote: post #88
stackthat wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get over yourselves , have you used *nix systems in 90s as desktops? If you not you can't compare Windows's quality with something else. OSX wasn't even properly exist.

Yeah, they were as bad compared to Windows as Windows was compared to GEM on Atari and Amiga, or MacOS 10 years earlier.

Gem was Atari and C64, not Amiga. The Amiga used Workbench, so there was no need for Gem.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#205

Post by tome »

mattmaroon wrote: post #95
edw519 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but this part above strikes me as petty... Sorry if it came across that way; that was not my intent. Everyone's starting point is relative. No one ever gave me the gifts that Bill Gates got. But then again, I've had gifts that 99% of everyone who ever lived couldn't imagine. With those gifts comes responsibility. Whenever I have an opportunity to use my gifts to do good things, I think of how proud those who made…

From your comments its clear that you're zealously anti-capitalist and, as a result, anti-Microsoft, so you're simply not applying logic. Bill Gates did his legal duty. When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft. The theory behind free market capitalism is that enough companies doing the same will average out to…

When you run a corporation you have a fiduciary responsibility to it. He would be doing something immoral if he didn't do what was best for Microsoft.

This is a meme that desperately needs to die. I don't care how true it is legally. If the law says that then the law is an ass. Some moral principles override legal requirements. If you're in a position in which you can't do what's morally right within the bounds of the law then you shouldn't be in that position in the first place.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#206

Post by ohashi »

pyre wrote: post #163
ohashi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of the comment about people not knowing what the real game being played is. They think the rules are a certain way when in fact reality has a very different set that they are incapable of operating within. They faced innovation outside the technical arena and got beat. Then they want to complain about the 'rules.'

Based on this logic, assassinations are 'fair game' so long as you don't get caught. Would I be an 'innovator' if I developed a way for corporate-directed assassinations to become a reality?

You would be an innovator. Whether assassinations are within the rules is a question I am not qualified to answer. It IS within the rules in some places and not others, I suspect that evolves over time.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#208

Post by Tichy »

edw519 wrote: post #62
mattmaroon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is silly all the way through. He's got an IQ of 160, which means he actually is considerably smarter than most of the rest of us. He was born into money, but so are hundreds of thousands of people in our country. Most accomplish little of value. Much more common in his situation would be a career in investment banking, sucking money out of the middle class's retirements. It's ludicrous to say that he's…

I cannot see into alternate universes You don't have to see into alternate universes. You just have to be old enough to have already lived in one. The one before Microsoft. I suspect that alot of the Bill Gates/Microsoft love/hate splits along age lines. If you're under 40, you're not old enough to have experienced the glorious pre-Microsoft days. We worked on all kinds of cool stuff, IBM mainframes (the good and the…

Well all these wonderful technologies were probably really expensive. Microsoft managed to make the cheap PCs usable, that is why they won. As for OS 2, I don't know why they failed, but I suspect it is not because of Microsoft.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#209

Post by rbanffy »

sutro wrote: post #155
rbanffy wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and has probably helped his fellow man more than any single individual on the planet. I was with you until that point. Gates didn't help anyone before helping himself. It's easy to be altruistic, to "do the right thing" with a billion dollars in the bank. I know a lot of businessmen that would not consider entering the kind of shady plans he devised to further Microsoft's (and his own) interests. Those are the real…

No, what's easy is to sit here from our current vantage point and call what he did easy. So what if he had an upper-middle-class family willing to put him through college. He walked away from that when he dropped out of Harvard and lit out for the middle of nowhere with no significant funds or support system to bootstrap a "software company" before such a thing even existed. He wasn't given his fortune, he built it h…

> And because he didn't always play nice with competitors you and the other holier-and-smarter-than-thou HN commenters want to call his incredible accomplishments "easy."

Now that's a straw man. I never said it was easy to build Microsoft from its humble beginnings in Albuquerque into whatever it is now. I said it's easy to decide you'll try to start a company (Microsoft was his second attempt) when you know that your future is ensured whatever happens (the first company went bust). I also said it's easy to be the biggest philanthropist in history when you also have the deepest pockets in history.

And no, I am unwilling to forget his unethical, borderline criminal behavior, his despicable disregard for the law and the damage he did to what was once a competitive, diverse and flourishing industry. Microsoft's monopoly (and the consequent lack of diversity) has set the advance of technology back years, if not decades. Like many HN'ers you call "holier-than-thou", I have lived - and worked - in the pre-monopoly years and I can tell you, from first-hand experience, the world is a much more boring place because of him.

He may donate all his money to whoever he wants, but that won't erase his past.

Re: Bill Gates, Hero

#210

Post by rbanffy »

gnaritas wrote: post #180
rbanffy wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> give 100s of thousands of people jobs Would have jobs with or without Gates > make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W). > then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history He is the richest man in history. > the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs False dichot…

> He is the richest man in history. Small nitpick, adjusted for inflation, no he isn't, not even close. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt were all much richer. Also, it needs to be said that these were the richest Americans, not necessarily richest ever worldwide.

Nitpick accepted. Thanks.
Post reply on HN