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2018 Annual Letter from Bill and Melinda Gates

216 points by shaki-dora 9y ago

tcd 9y ago
Why is this page rendering 19654 lines of code? And what the hell is this about: https://i.imgur.com/5tREuGB.png https://i.imgur.com/5tREuGB.png Just for a blog? Yeah, I'll pass. Anyone who wants to bypass this crap can do so here: https://archive.fo/teorC https://archive.fo/teorC Guess they're liking mopping up all that data as we know MS likes to do :)
- goatherders 9y ago
  Yes, Bill Gates has nefariously plotted to "mop up" your data as you read his annual letter...in stark contrast to all of the world's most popular sites that don't touch your data, ever.
  - aje403 9y ago
    Once he knows what browser version you're using, he's going to steal your wife. Till death to us part, until she realizes you haven't upgraded to Microsoft Edge, the superior browsing experience, yet.
- userbinator 9y ago
  Leave JS off, you won't need it for this page.
- taneq 9y ago
  Welcome to the new normal.
- simias 9y ago
  Welcome to the internet in 2018. That's pretty much the standard boilerplate these days.
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  17 MB for 5900 words. And you are getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious.
  - diggan 9y ago
    It's true that it's a waste and a shame that it's the new normal today. But the person is not being downvoted for pointing out something obvious, the person is being downvoted for not adding to the conversation that is relevant, the actual content of the letter. But by all means, create a new post or link a blogpost in a new submission on how terrible this world we live in with 2MB of JS for just a bit of text. I would agree with that sentiment. But when the topic is optimism, foundation spending, education and other topics, the size of the embedded JS is simply not interesting.
    - dna_polymerase 9y ago
      > But when the topic is optimism, foundation spending, education and other topics, the size of the embedded JS is simply not interesting. Okay, look at it this way. If it was all about the foundation and the content of the page it would look like a Word Document. Just a wall of text, maybe some graphics with stats. But this is not the case here. Somehow the Gates Foundation decided they need 17MB of sugar to get this message out. If the JS to content ratio is that blatant I'd argue that they know they don't have anything of value to say.
    - carlmr 9y ago
      Both the content and the execution are worth mentioning. Especially on an article about inequality of access. 17MB text is not an issue if you're in one of the few broadband enabled rich locations of the world. But there are large parts of the world where you'd need a few hours on dial-up to read this article. Heck, even a sizeable portion of Americans are still on dial-up (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dvd-rental-windows-3-aol-2017/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dvd-rental-windows-3-aol-2017...),
      - diggan 9y ago
- ryu2k2 9y ago
  I doubt the site is maintained by Gates personally. There's a company sitting behind it doing PR work for his foundation I'd assume.
  - mrworldwide 9y ago
    Of-course! That's the case with most celebs. Maintaining a blog/site cannot be Gate's personal priority anymore.
  - sureaboutthis 9y ago
    In fact, I doubt he wrote it and, if anything, might only gave it a cursory review.
    - rfrey 9y ago
      I'm not sure why you think that, this sort of thing seems to be his priority for the last, what, decade? We need a new dog-whistle term for this kind of reflexive skepticism. I propose "cynisignalling".
      - sureaboutthis 9y ago
        I KNOW that because multi-billionaires running multiple super large companies do not sit at their desks and think about PR releases or blogs or, sometimes, even have a computer on their desk. Yes, there are exceptions but I can guarantee Gates does not sit and write this up.
- sureaboutthis 9y ago
  Well, it is Microsoft software.
  - soundwave106 9y ago
    I honestly can't fault Microsoft alone per se for this, TBH. It's just, as someone said, the modern web. The highest KB bloaty JS I see is the Youtube embedded video player (about 500K of JS and CSS). There's also a bloaty 200-300K "sprite sheet" gifs, which per the code I guess they are using as some sort of video. (I wonder if that could be optimized.) There's a lot of the usual tracking and analytic scripts, of course. Microsoft has their own in this (Application Insights) but of course you've got the Google and FB and other standard social media scripts.
mattmanser 9y ago
Another comment prompted me to look at the source. There's a bunch of inline javascript with commented out code there, console logs, etc. for the sharing plugin. Great little comment of: message: '', //not sure what this does It doesn't seem to be a plugin as I've been searching for snippets of the code and I can't find it online anywhere. Wonder who wrote it, it's functional but pretty sloppy, e.g.: FB.ui( { method: 'share', name: 'Name', href: 'https://www.gatesnotes.com' + document.location.pathname.toLowerCase(), caption: 'www.gatesnotes.com',//line 3 // auto adds meta name="author" tag prop to end description: '' + htmlEncode(FBDesc),//line 2 link: 'https://www.gatesnotes.com' + document.location.pathname.toLowerCase(), message: '', //not sure what this does picture: FBPic, title: '' + htmlEncode(FBTitle),//line 1 }, function (response) { if (response && response.post_id) { //alert('Post was published.'); } else { //alert('Post was not published.'); } SharingItemInProgress = 0; }) SharingItemInProgress is an undeclared global variable, no error handling apart from commented out logs, etc. Also, just found this just before a closing form tag:  There are even some commented out p tags like . Just found an empty $(document).ready( too. Bill Gates has a site that looks like it's been put together by the eponymous 14-year old nephew.
- mrworldwide 9y ago
  HN has got some real geeks. And geeks notice everything.
  - jxub 9y ago
    I love the sort of creative destruction that happens here.
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      Hehe, I have no idea who wrote it. To be honest it looks like someone just trying to get stuff done asap who's working alone and at worst it's a bit old fashioned, if functional. It's generally quite clear, it's compact and direct and it's not confusing or spaghetti-fied. But there's on element onclick js binding, inline stylesheets, inline javascript, poor scoping on variables, lots and lots of commented out code. The commentated out code is a personal bug bear of mine. I'm always reminding junior programmers to delete commented out code from the system, I tell them they should never check in commented out code and that's what source control is for. It's a simplistic explanation to deter discussion, in reality it's because of YAGNI and that personally it always dis-orientates me and slows me down while I'm working on code. I get distracted by trying to figure out why it's there and usually it's out of date and within a year it will still be there but now refers to functions that have been entirely removed. Commented out code becomes stale very quickly. People fear to remove it because they think it must have a purpose, when it rarely does. It becomes unnecessary noise and the person who was best placed to delete it is the one who commented it out in the first place. I think it's a bad coding habit that you have to consciously break at some point, I certainly used to do it.
rllly 9y ago
As of now there are 12 comments on this post. All are about the javascript on the page. None are about the substance of the page. This is why Bill Gates is Bill Gates and you are and always will be a codemonkey.
- _ironslab 9y ago
  I am amused by our priorities as a community.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  I'd like to offer that those interested in the article are still busy reading the article (which just got to the frontpage minutes ago), while those interested in whining about it are much more efficient at hitting Ctrl+U and looking for js tags. What I'm saying here is, don't judge a community by its early comments on high quality articles, just downvote & move on. (Some people here have nothing of substance to contribute because they're out of their depth, so they try to push early comments in any way they know and they happen to know javascript...)
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    Thanks for doing such a wonderful critique of me. You are right, I am an utter wanker. I forgot no-one's allowed to be curious or go off on a tangent on HN, because the H means Homogeneous, not Hacker.
- Jedd 9y ago
  > This is why Bill Gates is Bill Gates and you are and always will be a codemonkey Bill had a rare opportunity (wealth, access to equipment, an opportunity to take advantage of IBM and Tim Paterson, etc) and a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth. There's lots of differences between him and most people, and not all of them are unfavourable to 'most people'.
  - nolok 9y ago
    > a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth Oh please, windows was taking over the world long before microsoft was abusing its position. Frankly, "Windows on every desktop" was set the day win95 released. > Bill had a rare opportunity A disproportionately large percentage of people in tech get opportunities that can lead to massive improvement of life (maybe not "richest man of the world" level, but "rich" nonetheless), most of us don't actually act on them or don't use them properly. Him getting one is par for the course, really. So his point still stand. I genuinely say this as a well meaning comment: if your view of Bill Gates is of "someone that got everything handed to him, and succedded only due to lucky timing and illegal methods" you need to open up your horizons, read a few books on the matter and inform yourself, because you've gone so far as to seeing a grey-white person as black (in terms of morality, of course).
rmm 9y ago
Wow. Those questions are way more intense than I thought they would be. Kudos.
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  It’s addressing the sort of questions and conspiracy theories HN usually raises when discussing the Gates Foundation, i. e. “Saving children only creates overpopulation” and “BG is just trying to raise the MS stock price by getting more users hooked on Windows”. Of course, judging by this rather depressing comment section, next year they will answer 10 questions on JavaScript and Wordpress.
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    Raising the MS stock? No. The GF is invested in big pharma companies and they are heavily influencing the WHO. Those are the things you should have an eye on. Also nobody is hurt when we point out that you could have used way less data to get this message out.
    - lifeformed 9y ago
      > The GF is invested in big pharma companies That's talked about in the article.
piker 9y ago
Re: "demographic dividend" > When more children live, you get one generation that’s relatively big. > Then, when families decide to have fewer children, the next generation is much smaller. > Eventually, a country ends up with relatively more people in the labor force producing economically—and relatively fewer dependents (very old or very young people). What happened to the now old people in the bigger first generation?
- matt4077 9y ago
  The "eventually" points at a new steady-state, after these changes have settled down: Previous: 2 Old / 4 Adult / 20 children born, of which 10 survive = 3 dependents per adult "1. bigger gen" = 2 Old / 4 Adult / 20 children, all surviving = 5.5 dependent / adult "Next generation" = 4 Old / 20 Adult / 60 children = 3.2 dependent / adult "eventually" = 20 Old / 20 Adult / 20 Children = 2 dependent / adult (Real numbers are better than this b/c productive adulthood is more than 1/3 of life. It's simplified here to make the math easier to follow).
- mrlinx 9y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
- oblio 9y ago
  The young ones have to eat something and they need proteins. On a more serious note, I assume that they compare the situation with the previous generation. Generation one dependents: 2 parents, 4 grandparent's, 6 kids, let's say. Generation two dependents: 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 2 kids. I'm guessing this is what they mean, maybe I misread it?
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Perhaps a better word than "Eventually" would have been "Temporarily". There's a large gap that a society must cross to go from third-world to developed. Education, infrastructure, technology, culture, and politics, and career changes take time and money, and when you're competing against other nations making the same transition, and others exploiting the system through corruption, black markets, disguised slavery, wealth extraction by foreign corporations, etc. it's very difficult to make the transition. I believe that the assumption is that after making the transition, the resulting society will have sufficient economic excess that it will be able to support the large elderly population and will be better off in the end.
Shivetya 9y ago
The take away for me is that we need constant reminder that there are people in our own states and towns, the story they mentioned of the apartments in Atlanta is something I read in our local paper and seen in local news. Yet it is so easy to dwell on what is wrong in our own lives, so easy to see a wealth disparity that exists between us and the Gates of the world yet completely be oblivious to the gap that exists between us and people like those in the apartments mentioned. Every generation seems to always have a family that steps up. The question becomes, who do we think will step into their shoes when gone and make the next big contribution to bettering the world around them?
Jedd 9y ago
While I'm really, really happy that Bill and Melinda are doing Good Things with their wealth these days, it's easy to overlook the mechanisms by which they (but mostly Bill) acquired their wealth. I find people under the age of about 35 really have no clue about Ye Bade Olde Days, and seem to consider the Microsoft Corporation to have always been a force for good. Look, it's clear that he's changed a lot, but how much of this is genuine altruism rather than some guilt mitigation. For anyone unfamiliar, Bill's deposition (part 1) on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE There's myriad resources on the net that describe the USA's DoJ's case against Microsoft, and their three days (!) of deposition recordings with the guy.
- davidmr 9y ago
  I’m afraid I fail to see the relevance of this post to the matter at hand. Did his company do some despicable things, and did he have anything to do with it? Yes. I think most corporations of a certain size do. The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad that posts like yours above just seem catty to me. I’ve found it kind of funny and ironic that Bill was always the evil one and Steve Jobs was the cool “think different” upstart, but looking back on their entire lives, Bill has done so, so much more to make the world we live in a better place for everyone.
  - Jedd 9y ago
    FWIW I've never thought of Steve Jobs as a force for good in the world. I didn't mean to seem catty. Rather, if someone exercises some philanthropic tendencies, but the wealth that backs those things up came from illegal, immoral, unethical, or dubious business practices, should we celebrate, or be cautious about our hero worship? For my own part, I find the sentiment: > I think most corporations of a certain size do. To be particularly apologetic -- we really should be holding our elites up to higher standards than 'many people do wrong stuff, so it's okay'. Also: > The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad ... This attitude implicitly discounts the benefits that other people may have done with that wealth, had it not been redirected into Microsoft / Bill Gates. Yes, look, undeniably, as I said from the outset, they're doing some really good work -- but it's impossible for us to know what may have been done, or may be being done right now, in a more ethical history.
icantdrive55 9y ago
$500 million a year in United States. $4 billion we spend to help developing countries. So .00125% of the money? I hope I'm wrong. O.K.---no matter what I say; I'll be accused of something sinister, or greatly misinformed. It's almost like they hate this country? I think Melinda/Bill need to walk around any big city, and see for themselfs the little problem of Homlessness. There's nowhere to shit, and sleep if you don't fit in, or have a hiccup in life. Even as a kid, I knew being an American is also being selfish. Hell--it's not selfishness; It's charity begins at home. I don't like it, but I don't like becoming immune to stepping over people on our streets. (My percentage might be wrong. I'm just another lazy American who can't sleep because I'm close to driving to that one patch of desert land in Imperial County that I can pitch a tent without breaking any law.)
dalbasal 9y ago
Better immunization is one reason why the number of children who die has gone down by so much, from almost 10 million in 2000 to 5 million last year. What a staggering scale to be dealing with. Two of my grandparents lost siblings, as children. Both mourned the loss for their entire (long) lives. Enough so that I was affected by the stories. Years of tears, stories, missing. Those are just two children, who died 80 years ago. 5 million...
- sambe 9y ago
  per year (with some adjustment for the changing success rate).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- anc84 9y ago
  Loss of young children is considered and handled differently in different cultures though. Where it is more normal, the impact on the parent's lifes will not be as heavy.
  - dalbasal 9y ago
    They were from different places, but childhood mortality was common everywhere then. My grandmother was a teenager, in 1930s Poland. My great grandmother had 3 children. All three died the same winter, from dysentery. My great grandmother was near catatonic in her depression. Later she had three more children. The youngest (my grandmother's baby brother) died of infection. These were common stories, and I was witness to that suffering even though I saw only the shade of that loss decades later. His older sister (my great aunt) is alive today, 97 years old. She still misses him. The Grandfather was Irish. He lost a 7 year old sister to a farming accident, when he was 18. The girl was with him, and he felt that his own carelessness caused her death. I witnessed his mourning too. I even saw him cry at her grave, unusual for a man of his time and place. Every one of those stories is a tremendous tragedy, scars on the souls of many.
  - 9y ago
uptown 9y ago
Gates' interview with Axios was somewhat surprising: https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-ce4ef8c4-95b3-4c81-ab87-eb7494d74c07.html https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-ce4ef8c4-95b3-4c8... Gates said in a phone interview: "The tech companies have to be ... careful that they're not trying to think their view is more important than the government's view, or than the government being able to function in some key areas." Asked for an example, Gates pointed to the companies' "enthusiasm about making financial transactions anonymous and invisible, and their view that even a clear mass-murdering criminal's communication should never be available to the government." When I said he seemed to be referring to being able to unlock an iPhone, Gates replied: "There's no question of ability; it's the question of willingness." So he seems to imply that devices should be built with backdoors to enable law enforcement.
- tptacek 9y ago
  That's not an especially uncommon perspective to have on the issue. It only feels like it's a line that all of civil society is holding because we're on a message board where almost everyone agrees.
- ikeboy 9y ago
  With regard to the iPhone case, the backdoor was already built, Apple can sign any software they choose to. It was 100% about their unwillingness to cooperate.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    Sort of. But the moment they sign that software, they’ve created a backdoor which didn’t previously exist, and that fundamentally weakens the security of the platform.
    - ikeboy 9y ago
      Not really, because the signature is tied to a specific device and a specific upgrade. It can never be used again unless Apple signs it again. Apple had some arguments about precedent and the like, and that’s fine, but from a technical perspective they could have easily done it and it wouldn’t have weakened anything else, unless they decided to sign the software again later.
buvanshak 9y ago
Bill gates is no saint as he tries to project himself to be. Look what this foundation tried to do in India, but it seems that it didn't work out, thanks to a number of brave doctors who questioned and blocked it.. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/heath-ministry-to-study-2017-spike-in-vaccine-related-adverse-events/article22537462.ece http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/heath-ministry-to-st...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
losteverything 9y ago
Those questions seem self asked. I'd want to know if?they tried or interested in tiny short term gifts to help a person today, right now. We have gofumdme. But no way to give the coworker $200 to fix her car; $35 for gas; $100 till next oay; or one year of Uber so they dont spend 1.5 hrs pay to from work. Some silent gates ambassador who knows help when it's needed
- peacetreefrog 9y ago
  What do you mean? What's stopping you from giving your coworker $200 to fix her car? Or do you mean you want Bill Gates to give her $200 for her car?
  - losteverything 9y ago
    A new way to give..a new way to receive... Sometimes i see it simply as a match game of need v supply. Our filter system for need is still pre internet
- Kluny 9y ago
  > But no way to give the coworker $200 to fix her car; $35 for gas; $100 till next oay; or one year of Uber so they dont spend 1.5 hrs pay to from work. Why don't you do it?
  - losteverything 9y ago
    Because of my insight i get to know a group of people barely making it. i do help when i can. I see absolutely no financial help for the one time and many time needs of this group. Yet there are plenty of people with a lot of money. If i asked them a question it would be have they considered helping people with tiny gifts. Did u read the article? They made up and answered 10 questions. I made one

216 points by shaki-dora 9y ago

tcd 9y ago

Why is this page rendering 19654 lines of code? And what the hell is this about: https://i.imgur.com/5tREuGB.png https://i.imgur.com/5tREuGB.png Just for a blog? Yeah, I'll pass. Anyone who wants to bypass this crap can do so here: https://archive.fo/teorC https://archive.fo/teorC Guess they're liking mopping up all that data as we know MS likes to do :)

goatherders 9y ago
Yes, Bill Gates has nefariously plotted to "mop up" your data as you read his annual letter...in stark contrast to all of the world's most popular sites that don't touch your data, ever.
- aje403 9y ago
  Once he knows what browser version you're using, he's going to steal your wife. Till death to us part, until she realizes you haven't upgraded to Microsoft Edge, the superior browsing experience, yet.
userbinator 9y ago
Leave JS off, you won't need it for this page.
taneq 9y ago
Welcome to the new normal.
simias 9y ago
Welcome to the internet in 2018. That's pretty much the standard boilerplate these days.
dna_polymerase 9y ago
17 MB for 5900 words. And you are getting downvoted for pointing out the obvious.
- diggan 9y ago
  It's true that it's a waste and a shame that it's the new normal today. But the person is not being downvoted for pointing out something obvious, the person is being downvoted for not adding to the conversation that is relevant, the actual content of the letter. But by all means, create a new post or link a blogpost in a new submission on how terrible this world we live in with 2MB of JS for just a bit of text. I would agree with that sentiment. But when the topic is optimism, foundation spending, education and other topics, the size of the embedded JS is simply not interesting.
  - dna_polymerase 9y ago
    > But when the topic is optimism, foundation spending, education and other topics, the size of the embedded JS is simply not interesting. Okay, look at it this way. If it was all about the foundation and the content of the page it would look like a Word Document. Just a wall of text, maybe some graphics with stats. But this is not the case here. Somehow the Gates Foundation decided they need 17MB of sugar to get this message out. If the JS to content ratio is that blatant I'd argue that they know they don't have anything of value to say.
  - carlmr 9y ago
    Both the content and the execution are worth mentioning. Especially on an article about inequality of access. 17MB text is not an issue if you're in one of the few broadband enabled rich locations of the world. But there are large parts of the world where you'd need a few hours on dial-up to read this article. Heck, even a sizeable portion of Americans are still on dial-up (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dvd-rental-windows-3-aol-2017/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/dvd-rental-windows-3-aol-2017...),
    - diggan 9y ago
ryu2k2 9y ago
I doubt the site is maintained by Gates personally. There's a company sitting behind it doing PR work for his foundation I'd assume.
- mrworldwide 9y ago
  Of-course! That's the case with most celebs. Maintaining a blog/site cannot be Gate's personal priority anymore.
- sureaboutthis 9y ago
  In fact, I doubt he wrote it and, if anything, might only gave it a cursory review.
  - rfrey 9y ago
    I'm not sure why you think that, this sort of thing seems to be his priority for the last, what, decade? We need a new dog-whistle term for this kind of reflexive skepticism. I propose "cynisignalling".
    - sureaboutthis 9y ago
      I KNOW that because multi-billionaires running multiple super large companies do not sit at their desks and think about PR releases or blogs or, sometimes, even have a computer on their desk. Yes, there are exceptions but I can guarantee Gates does not sit and write this up.
sureaboutthis 9y ago
Well, it is Microsoft software.
- soundwave106 9y ago
  I honestly can't fault Microsoft alone per se for this, TBH. It's just, as someone said, the modern web. The highest KB bloaty JS I see is the Youtube embedded video player (about 500K of JS and CSS). There's also a bloaty 200-300K "sprite sheet" gifs, which per the code I guess they are using as some sort of video. (I wonder if that could be optimized.) There's a lot of the usual tracking and analytic scripts, of course. Microsoft has their own in this (Application Insights) but of course you've got the Google and FB and other standard social media scripts.

mattmanser 9y ago

Another comment prompted me to look at the source. There's a bunch of inline javascript with commented out code there, console logs, etc. for the sharing plugin. Great little comment of: message: '', //not sure what this does It doesn't seem to be a plugin as I've been searching for snippets of the code and I can't find it online anywhere. Wonder who wrote it, it's functional but pretty sloppy, e.g.: FB.ui( { method: 'share', name: 'Name', href: 'https://www.gatesnotes.com' + document.location.pathname.toLowerCase(), caption: 'www.gatesnotes.com',//line 3 // auto adds meta name="author" tag prop to end description: '' + htmlEncode(FBDesc),//line 2 link: 'https://www.gatesnotes.com' + document.location.pathname.toLowerCase(), message: '', //not sure what this does picture: FBPic, title: '' + htmlEncode(FBTitle),//line 1 }, function (response) { if (response && response.post_id) { //alert('Post was published.'); } else { //alert('Post was not published.'); } SharingItemInProgress = 0; }) SharingItemInProgress is an undeclared global variable, no error handling apart from commented out logs, etc. Also, just found this just before a closing form tag:  There are even some commented out p tags like . Just found an empty $(document).ready( too. Bill Gates has a site that looks like it's been put together by the eponymous 14-year old nephew.

mrworldwide 9y ago
HN has got some real geeks. And geeks notice everything.
- jxub 9y ago
  I love the sort of creative destruction that happens here.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    Hehe, I have no idea who wrote it. To be honest it looks like someone just trying to get stuff done asap who's working alone and at worst it's a bit old fashioned, if functional. It's generally quite clear, it's compact and direct and it's not confusing or spaghetti-fied. But there's on element onclick js binding, inline stylesheets, inline javascript, poor scoping on variables, lots and lots of commented out code. The commentated out code is a personal bug bear of mine. I'm always reminding junior programmers to delete commented out code from the system, I tell them they should never check in commented out code and that's what source control is for. It's a simplistic explanation to deter discussion, in reality it's because of YAGNI and that personally it always dis-orientates me and slows me down while I'm working on code. I get distracted by trying to figure out why it's there and usually it's out of date and within a year it will still be there but now refers to functions that have been entirely removed. Commented out code becomes stale very quickly. People fear to remove it because they think it must have a purpose, when it rarely does. It becomes unnecessary noise and the person who was best placed to delete it is the one who commented it out in the first place. I think it's a bad coding habit that you have to consciously break at some point, I certainly used to do it.

rllly 9y ago

As of now there are 12 comments on this post. All are about the javascript on the page. None are about the substance of the page. This is why Bill Gates is Bill Gates and you are and always will be a codemonkey.

_ironslab 9y ago
I am amused by our priorities as a community.
scrollaway 9y ago
I'd like to offer that those interested in the article are still busy reading the article (which just got to the frontpage minutes ago), while those interested in whining about it are much more efficient at hitting Ctrl+U and looking for js tags. What I'm saying here is, don't judge a community by its early comments on high quality articles, just downvote & move on. (Some people here have nothing of substance to contribute because they're out of their depth, so they try to push early comments in any way they know and they happen to know javascript...)
- mattmanser 9y ago
  Thanks for doing such a wonderful critique of me. You are right, I am an utter wanker. I forgot no-one's allowed to be curious or go off on a tangent on HN, because the H means Homogeneous, not Hacker.
Jedd 9y ago
> This is why Bill Gates is Bill Gates and you are and always will be a codemonkey Bill had a rare opportunity (wealth, access to equipment, an opportunity to take advantage of IBM and Tim Paterson, etc) and a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth. There's lots of differences between him and most people, and not all of them are unfavourable to 'most people'.
- nolok 9y ago
  > a subsequent disregard for the laws of his nation that led him to acquire massive wealth Oh please, windows was taking over the world long before microsoft was abusing its position. Frankly, "Windows on every desktop" was set the day win95 released. > Bill had a rare opportunity A disproportionately large percentage of people in tech get opportunities that can lead to massive improvement of life (maybe not "richest man of the world" level, but "rich" nonetheless), most of us don't actually act on them or don't use them properly. Him getting one is par for the course, really. So his point still stand. I genuinely say this as a well meaning comment: if your view of Bill Gates is of "someone that got everything handed to him, and succedded only due to lucky timing and illegal methods" you need to open up your horizons, read a few books on the matter and inform yourself, because you've gone so far as to seeing a grey-white person as black (in terms of morality, of course).

rmm 9y ago

Wow. Those questions are way more intense than I thought they would be. Kudos.

shaki-dora 9y ago
It’s addressing the sort of questions and conspiracy theories HN usually raises when discussing the Gates Foundation, i. e. “Saving children only creates overpopulation” and “BG is just trying to raise the MS stock price by getting more users hooked on Windows”. Of course, judging by this rather depressing comment section, next year they will answer 10 questions on JavaScript and Wordpress.
- dna_polymerase 9y ago
  Raising the MS stock? No. The GF is invested in big pharma companies and they are heavily influencing the WHO. Those are the things you should have an eye on. Also nobody is hurt when we point out that you could have used way less data to get this message out.
  - lifeformed 9y ago
    > The GF is invested in big pharma companies That's talked about in the article.

piker 9y ago

Re: "demographic dividend" > When more children live, you get one generation that’s relatively big. > Then, when families decide to have fewer children, the next generation is much smaller. > Eventually, a country ends up with relatively more people in the labor force producing economically—and relatively fewer dependents (very old or very young people). What happened to the now old people in the bigger first generation?

matt4077 9y ago
The "eventually" points at a new steady-state, after these changes have settled down: Previous: 2 Old / 4 Adult / 20 children born, of which 10 survive = 3 dependents per adult "1. bigger gen" = 2 Old / 4 Adult / 20 children, all surviving = 5.5 dependent / adult "Next generation" = 4 Old / 20 Adult / 60 children = 3.2 dependent / adult "eventually" = 20 Old / 20 Adult / 20 Children = 2 dependent / adult (Real numbers are better than this b/c productive adulthood is more than 1/3 of life. It's simplified here to make the math easier to follow).
mrlinx 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI
oblio 9y ago
The young ones have to eat something and they need proteins. On a more serious note, I assume that they compare the situation with the previous generation. Generation one dependents: 2 parents, 4 grandparent's, 6 kids, let's say. Generation two dependents: 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 2 kids. I'm guessing this is what they mean, maybe I misread it?
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Perhaps a better word than "Eventually" would have been "Temporarily". There's a large gap that a society must cross to go from third-world to developed. Education, infrastructure, technology, culture, and politics, and career changes take time and money, and when you're competing against other nations making the same transition, and others exploiting the system through corruption, black markets, disguised slavery, wealth extraction by foreign corporations, etc. it's very difficult to make the transition. I believe that the assumption is that after making the transition, the resulting society will have sufficient economic excess that it will be able to support the large elderly population and will be better off in the end.

Shivetya 9y ago

The take away for me is that we need constant reminder that there are people in our own states and towns, the story they mentioned of the apartments in Atlanta is something I read in our local paper and seen in local news. Yet it is so easy to dwell on what is wrong in our own lives, so easy to see a wealth disparity that exists between us and the Gates of the world yet completely be oblivious to the gap that exists between us and people like those in the apartments mentioned. Every generation seems to always have a family that steps up. The question becomes, who do we think will step into their shoes when gone and make the next big contribution to bettering the world around them?

Jedd 9y ago

While I'm really, really happy that Bill and Melinda are doing Good Things with their wealth these days, it's easy to overlook the mechanisms by which they (but mostly Bill) acquired their wealth. I find people under the age of about 35 really have no clue about Ye Bade Olde Days, and seem to consider the Microsoft Corporation to have always been a force for good. Look, it's clear that he's changed a lot, but how much of this is genuine altruism rather than some guilt mitigation. For anyone unfamiliar, Bill's deposition (part 1) on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_2m1qdqieE There's myriad resources on the net that describe the USA's DoJ's case against Microsoft, and their three days (!) of deposition recordings with the guy.

davidmr 9y ago
I’m afraid I fail to see the relevance of this post to the matter at hand. Did his company do some despicable things, and did he have anything to do with it? Yes. I think most corporations of a certain size do. The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad that posts like yours above just seem catty to me. I’ve found it kind of funny and ironic that Bill was always the evil one and Steve Jobs was the cool “think different” upstart, but looking back on their entire lives, Bill has done so, so much more to make the world we live in a better place for everyone.
- Jedd 9y ago
  FWIW I've never thought of Steve Jobs as a force for good in the world. I didn't mean to seem catty. Rather, if someone exercises some philanthropic tendencies, but the wealth that backs those things up came from illegal, immoral, unethical, or dubious business practices, should we celebrate, or be cautious about our hero worship? For my own part, I find the sentiment: > I think most corporations of a certain size do. To be particularly apologetic -- we really should be holding our elites up to higher standards than 'many people do wrong stuff, so it's okay'. Also: > The good he has done the world since then so dramatically outweighs the bad ... This attitude implicitly discounts the benefits that other people may have done with that wealth, had it not been redirected into Microsoft / Bill Gates. Yes, look, undeniably, as I said from the outset, they're doing some really good work -- but it's impossible for us to know what may have been done, or may be being done right now, in a more ethical history.

icantdrive55 9y ago

$500 million a year in United States. $4 billion we spend to help developing countries. So .00125% of the money? I hope I'm wrong. O.K.---no matter what I say; I'll be accused of something sinister, or greatly misinformed. It's almost like they hate this country? I think Melinda/Bill need to walk around any big city, and see for themselfs the little problem of Homlessness. There's nowhere to shit, and sleep if you don't fit in, or have a hiccup in life. Even as a kid, I knew being an American is also being selfish. Hell--it's not selfishness; It's charity begins at home. I don't like it, but I don't like becoming immune to stepping over people on our streets. (My percentage might be wrong. I'm just another lazy American who can't sleep because I'm close to driving to that one patch of desert land in Imperial County that I can pitch a tent without breaking any law.)

dalbasal 9y ago

Better immunization is one reason why the number of children who die has gone down by so much, from almost 10 million in 2000 to 5 million last year. What a staggering scale to be dealing with. Two of my grandparents lost siblings, as children. Both mourned the loss for their entire (long) lives. Enough so that I was affected by the stories. Years of tears, stories, missing. Those are just two children, who died 80 years ago. 5 million...

sambe 9y ago
per year (with some adjustment for the changing success rate).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
anc84 9y ago
Loss of young children is considered and handled differently in different cultures though. Where it is more normal, the impact on the parent's lifes will not be as heavy.
- dalbasal 9y ago
  They were from different places, but childhood mortality was common everywhere then. My grandmother was a teenager, in 1930s Poland. My great grandmother had 3 children. All three died the same winter, from dysentery. My great grandmother was near catatonic in her depression. Later she had three more children. The youngest (my grandmother's baby brother) died of infection. These were common stories, and I was witness to that suffering even though I saw only the shade of that loss decades later. His older sister (my great aunt) is alive today, 97 years old. She still misses him. The Grandfather was Irish. He lost a 7 year old sister to a farming accident, when he was 18. The girl was with him, and he felt that his own carelessness caused her death. I witnessed his mourning too. I even saw him cry at her grave, unusual for a man of his time and place. Every one of those stories is a tremendous tragedy, scars on the souls of many.
- 9y ago

uptown 9y ago

Gates' interview with Axios was somewhat surprising: https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-ce4ef8c4-95b3-4c81-ab87-eb7494d74c07.html https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-ce4ef8c4-95b3-4c8... Gates said in a phone interview: "The tech companies have to be ... careful that they're not trying to think their view is more important than the government's view, or than the government being able to function in some key areas." Asked for an example, Gates pointed to the companies' "enthusiasm about making financial transactions anonymous and invisible, and their view that even a clear mass-murdering criminal's communication should never be available to the government." When I said he seemed to be referring to being able to unlock an iPhone, Gates replied: "There's no question of ability; it's the question of willingness." So he seems to imply that devices should be built with backdoors to enable law enforcement.

tptacek 9y ago
That's not an especially uncommon perspective to have on the issue. It only feels like it's a line that all of civil society is holding because we're on a message board where almost everyone agrees.
ikeboy 9y ago
With regard to the iPhone case, the backdoor was already built, Apple can sign any software they choose to. It was 100% about their unwillingness to cooperate.
- jrs95 9y ago
  Sort of. But the moment they sign that software, they’ve created a backdoor which didn’t previously exist, and that fundamentally weakens the security of the platform.
  - ikeboy 9y ago
    Not really, because the signature is tied to a specific device and a specific upgrade. It can never be used again unless Apple signs it again. Apple had some arguments about precedent and the like, and that’s fine, but from a technical perspective they could have easily done it and it wouldn’t have weakened anything else, unless they decided to sign the software again later.

buvanshak 9y ago

Bill gates is no saint as he tries to project himself to be. Look what this foundation tried to do in India, but it seems that it didn't work out, thanks to a number of brave doctors who questioned and blocked it.. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/heath-ministry-to-study-2017-spike-in-vaccine-related-adverse-events/article22537462.ece http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/heath-ministry-to-st...

deleted 9y ago
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losteverything 9y ago

Those questions seem self asked. I'd want to know if?they tried or interested in tiny short term gifts to help a person today, right now. We have gofumdme. But no way to give the coworker $200 to fix her car; $35 for gas; $100 till next oay; or one year of Uber so they dont spend 1.5 hrs pay to from work. Some silent gates ambassador who knows help when it's needed

peacetreefrog 9y ago
What do you mean? What's stopping you from giving your coworker $200 to fix her car? Or do you mean you want Bill Gates to give her $200 for her car?
- losteverything 9y ago
  A new way to give..a new way to receive... Sometimes i see it simply as a match game of need v supply. Our filter system for need is still pre internet
Kluny 9y ago
> But no way to give the coworker $200 to fix her car; $35 for gas; $100 till next oay; or one year of Uber so they dont spend 1.5 hrs pay to from work. Why don't you do it?
- losteverything 9y ago
  Because of my insight i get to know a group of people barely making it. i do help when i can. I see absolutely no financial help for the one time and many time needs of this group. Yet there are plenty of people with a lot of money. If i asked them a question it would be have they considered helping people with tiny gifts. Did u read the article? They made up and answered 10 questions. I made one