Letterman
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2022–2025
7:54 · 1.8M views · Feb 1, 2022
A 1995 Letterman appearance in which Bill Gates explains the origins of Microsoft and tries to convince Dave to get a computer and get online.
It is mostly linked as a joke or period piece about how the internet was viewed in the 1990s, not recommended for content.
4 comments from Hacker News
Lots of developers DO work with the next generation of stuff, from solidity to matrix.org to LBRY to Dat to IPFS etc. And our stuff too. I am not upset at all! In fact I know where you’re coming from because I have seen it so often on HN. It just seems very strange to me that this is happening on a site that started with promoting a “hacker ethos” and “hacking on things” — which is totally associated with rebelling AGAINST large centralized institutions and their power imbalance. Whether it’s ham radio operators or DYI culture or the indie engineering… anyone remember the indieweb movement? How about the Decentralized Web with Tim Berners-Lee? He wrote this: [LINK] (2014) [LINK] (2019) A month before, I wrote this in CoinTelegraph, and it is still true today: [LINK] What do you disagree with in Qbix? My cofounder and I met Tim’s SOLID team at MIT in 2014 (scroll down on [LINK] ) and since then he left MIT and started Inrupt. His vision is not unlike Dorsey and Web5 — but Dorsey will work with way better technology rather than Tim’s HTTP and SPARQL: It uses ION from Microsoft (championed by Daniel Buchner for years until M$ finally relented) that is based on the open Sidetree Protocol anchored by Bitcoin (or any other blockchain). And self-custodied private keys. I met the lead developer of SOLID - Dmitri Zagidulin — and briefly recruited him to work with us part-time and document our own decentralized identity solution, that was based on pseudonymous identies similar to xAuth
> what could web3 make for my family? You sound just like David Letterman when interviewing Bill Gates in 1995 ("why would I need a computer?", "oh, you mean I can listen the baseball game. Does radio ring a bell?") this video > Of course if you are talking about the possibility that your shady or illegal business This, right here, is the problem. The problem is that because you have all the privileges (SEPA, access to international transfers and open markets, etc, etc, etc) you think that only "shady" and "illegal" business will want to do these things. Try being someone living in Argentina or Venezuela, who simply wants to work as a web designer with someone else from another continent. See how much Paypal (and by PayPal, I mean any money transmitting service) will eat in fees. See what exchange rate will be made available by the government.
Does radio ring a bell? this video Tell me how David letterman was wrong and I’ll tell you how you’re wrong. You got triggered by my comment and went through my post history. That’s pathetic
I'll admit there were a few people doing the "HN thing" and saying "nothing really changed" when the Internet came out... but it was as a joke: this video