http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt That's more advanced stuff than most web apps or frameworks do today. If viaweb had been done now instead of 15 years ago, they probably would have spun off lots of open source projects.
Doubtful. Yahoo rewrote Viaweb in C or C++, didn't they? There's a reason why so many programmers still use CGI scripts. And why they depend on a host of scripting languages that rely on external libraries written by others. Perhaps it's because they just don't grasp what Paul Graham is describing. They can't comprehend languages like Lisp or Forth or developing incrementally from an interpreter prompt. And they don'…
That quote was the highlight of the class :) He's not only playing the audience-- In an earlier class (class 3 or so), Peter Thiel justified his views on Stanford vs. Berkeley based on their track record with creating successful companies. Maybe someone can find the exact quote, but he said that between the two, vast majority of successful companies start at Stanford and that he's only aware of 1 or 2 that started ou…
Yet Craigslist is filled with "idea guy" ads touting Stanford pedigrees much (much!) more often than Cal.
I think those are the B-school people...but point taken
"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past." I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.
I read it as a joke just playing to the audience (ongoing good-natured rivalry, etc). It's like when someone really likes reddit. Okay, it's not HN. They can tell a complicated story about how they like cats and populist rage politics, but it's a hard negative signal to get past.
You're probably right ... it was likely a good-natured joke. However, I see the elite school bias happen a lot in tech. When you're a young person trying to get that first job, etc., it really stabs you in the heart. The idea of signaling is reasonable but taking it to the extreme is just plain stupid. Peter jokes about the poor family with a big mortgage ... that isn't a sob story ... a lot of people have that or worse. My folks immigrated to the west with very little. I went to the best school (not Stanford) I could afford and tried to make the best of it. And I know for sure that I'm not the only one like that. All I ask is that we don't take these things as innocent jokes. It is just another form of discrimination ... we should point that out every time we see it.
One of the more interesting asides here is PGs idea that our society is starting to reflect a power-law distribution. Not sure what he was thinking about specifically, but it certainly seems to be true in terms of wealth these days.
How does a society deal with that for the long-term?