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Paul Graham: News from the Front

paulgraham.com

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Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#21

Post by henning »

the idea that college is necessary is a relatively recent aberration that from what I can tell dates back to the end of WWII and the GI Bill. before that, going to college was rare.

college is not for everyone (we need good plumbers and auto mechanics, fer chrissakes). i didn't apply myself as well as i could have at college, but about 40% of the value I got was from reading interesting books I found in the library, which I could have got for $100 a year while working in the real world and gaining money and experience -- which is what I'm doing now.

that said, some things are very hard to learn outside of a classroom and the mathematical maturity I gained from taking math classes will serve me for a life time.

Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#22

Post by bharath »

jey wrote: post #18
cperciva wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new... The first example which comes to mind is powerset.

Vaporware? That's not really new. Anyway, they're probably at +3 standard deviations for "newness" compared to all tech startups. Kind of a high bar to match.

Well.. its not so much the vaporware aspect of things... Succeeding in search today is all about scaling. Only the big three have what it takes to build huge data centers. A startup the size of powerset -- not really. Natural language search is something that the average search engine user would consider a "cool feature" at best. The real power of a search engine comes from its ability to cater to the long tail -- which translates to its ability to build huge data centers.

Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#24

Post by marrone »

I liked this article, if for the simple fact that it can only help my cause (I graduated, though not from a prestigious school)!

The whole time I was going to school I was super impatient to get done so I could actually get working on something real. I was really just after the piece of paper they give you at the end (though I never attended my graduation to get that paper, and the original was sent to the wrong house).

Once I graduated I started my own project so that I would have some work to show when applying for jobs. I found that that experience led to as much or more knowledge gained as my best year in school. And that is not a knock against the school I went to (I thought the staff there was awesome).

I am always reminded of a quote from some movie (cant think of the name of it now)... "You spent x thousands of dollars on an education you could have got for 2 dollars in library late fees"

Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#27

Post by aston »

pg wrote: post #19
aston wrote: post #15

First, I'd just like to point out that PG is in an interesting place to report that college doesn't matter, having himself attended two Ivy League schools. There are two arguments happening here. The first is that entrepreneurship and business success are not so well correlated with where you go to undergrad. The second is that where you go to college doesn't make much of a difference in life in general. I won't real…

> strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough. > undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing Sure, but not by accident. The whole thesis of this essay that this "magic" is bullshit, and that a…

Yeah, I didn't realize grad school wasn't part of these considerations. That said, I think the graduate school vs. undergraduate line gets kind of blurry for hacker types. An awesome Scheme hacker coming into MIT freshman year is going to have access to Gerry Sussman right out of the gate. No need to go to grad school for that sort of thing. And it's not entirely clear that a Master's buys you much in the software industry regardless of whether you do a startup or work for BigCo, so your chance to meet hacker types is sorta limited to your undergraduate days in many cases.

Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#28

Post by bluishgreen »

I have thought about this a lot.In fact lot of my teen years were spent thinking about this. I went to an elite school in India. And I leave a comment here just to confirm that its the same all over the world. These lines are gold. ( I mean very valuable :)

"The unfortunate thing is not just that people are judged by such a superficial test, but that so many judge themselves by it. A lot of people, probably the majority of people in the America, have some amount of insecurity about where, or whether, they went to college. The tragedy of the situation is that by far the greatest liability of not having gone to the college you'd have liked is your own feeling that you're thereby lacking something. Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs in this respect. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you wouldn't be missing much if you weren't. When you're excluded, you can only imagine the advantages of being an insider. But invariably they're larger in your imagination than in real life."

Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#29

Post by dpapathanasiou »

aston wrote: post #15

First, I'd just like to point out that PG is in an interesting place to report that college doesn't matter, having himself attended two Ivy League schools. There are two arguments happening here. The first is that entrepreneurship and business success are not so well correlated with where you go to undergrad. The second is that where you go to college doesn't make much of a difference in life in general. I won't real…

being able to drop the H-bomb

You do know that's a sexual euphemism, right? ;)

Re: Paul Graham: News from the Front

#30

Post by abstractbill »

cperciva wrote: post #20
pg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough. > undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing Sure, but not by accident. The whole thesis of this essay that this "magic" is bullshit, and that a…

>This essay is about college, not grad school. I tried to make that clear by always using the word college rather than university. Maybe it was not clear enough. Certainly not clear enough for this non-US reader. But of course the word "college" has a different meaning on this side of the border (and an entirely different meaning in Oxford).

A bunch of other education-related words have different meanings on different sides of the pond. For example,

UK: You write a dissertation for a masters degree and a thesis for a PhD.

US: The opposite.

I wonder if the terminology will converge...

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