skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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 really quarrel with the first, since it's been demonstrated pretty often, and YC's results support it as well. The second, on the other hand...

The main problem with trying to assert that college doesn't make a difference in life is that there's really no easy measurement you can do over "net change" in life. That's due both to the long span of time a life consumes as well as the complex and/or fuzzy cause-effect relationships that are at play throughout. At best, I think, you would need to argue over objective differences that have some immediate effect, and then hope that those actually do make a difference. As an example, here are some of the things that I think made Paul Graham successful that are pretty strongly related to his going to graduate school at Harvard:

- he met RTM and Trevor there

- he got to spend his time in Boston, where he's acknowledged startups can thrive

- being able to drop the H-bomb almost certainly helped give credibility to his company

- he learned Lisp (not really the most popular language at the time, except at certain places)

Would Viaweb have happened had he gone elsewhere, or skipped grad school altogether? Well, maybe. But I doubt it. Harvard's name is what convened the talent (peers, advisors, mentors, investors) that shaped much of that company, and it's there that Harvard's value lies. I think this essay horribly undervalues the magic that happens when everyone in the world thinks your university is amazing.
I agree, from my read, his 'information age' refers to laying out the communication shell, to have the ability to share documentation, which i consider just the beginning.
Schoolboy to sell $59 iPhone hack
>...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.
This is the first of PG's essays I've seen with comments at the bottom. It seems they're brought to us courtesy of Disqus, a YC startup.

http://paulgraham.disqus.com/news_from_the_front/
Facebook comes out of the walled garden.
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.
Gmail - The Missing Features
My one suggestion: invert the color scheme to black on white. It will make the site look more professional.
The small speech bubble icon seems to be used for commenting.
I think it'd be handy to have tool where users can type in or mark certain companies they'd like to follow, and then get a feed of all the recent news pertaining to said company.
> 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 as success depends more on measurable results, it will play much less of a role.
I don't know much about this world, but it seems like the idea could be a good one. I found it pretty hard to read though. Might have been the color scheme, or that everything was too close together, or both.

I also don't see the username of the person who submitted the story. This might not actually be important, but I did catch myself scanning for who submitted each story. In this case, it was to see if it was all one or two submitters (i.e., you guys), or if you already had a real community going.
It might make it look more uniform, and less chaotic, if you move the voting, commenting and other elements that have static widths to the left side of the link.
There's no question they are pondering - and pondering. Beating Apple in appliance design is something else than manufacturing mice and keyboards.
>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).
Django, Accelerated
Helma, the closest thing to a convenient Lisp web app server
Why Microsoft deserved to lose the OOXML standards vote
There's an extra "#more" in the link.
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.
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.
PG: Here's a good way to test this: Please ask the next round of applicants to NOT mention the school they went to.

What do you think?
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"
The second paragraph reminded me of this Alan Watts talk: http://www.freshminds.com/animation/alan_watts_life.html.

But unlike the Watts talk, the essay does converge to a very rigid notion of "success".
As someone who took 1 term of a bad C++ class at a community college, and primarily studied Italian prior to dropping out of the University, I can't help but vote this one up.
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.
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."
being able to drop the H-bomb

You do know that's a sexual euphemism, right? ;)
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...
Root problem: journalists are fucking morons who don't report important issues properly. And then they wonder why we don't read their blessed newspapers.
Can Google Do What Amazon Couldn't? The Search For Steve Fossett In The Nevada Desert
New boom-time for British tech?
So long as they can act as a gate keeper for facebook applications, they are still a walled garden, IMHO.
Healthcare might actually be a pretty interesting option. It's cost-prohibitive for small companies, but reasonable for a program as large as YC.
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"

Good Will Hunting.
One hundred years from now will an "elite college" still exist? The reputations of today's elite colleges stem from a perceived legacy of alum achievement 25, 50, 100 years ago. Are factors operating now that will more evenly distribute this achievement in the future? Or is this "legacy of achievement" and conferred eliteness already BS?
They're like, "Don't screw this up...or you won't get into
honors math in 7th grade...and you'll just die poor and lonely."

http://www.eslnotes.com/movies/word/Bowling-for-Columbine.do...
that would be good will hunting
The Microsoft Silverlight
Why don't you fund a few (or at least one) "crazy" startups like Anybots? Because that's probably the coolest thing YC-related! Are you only interested in web stuff, or is it a lack of serious applications?

Here are a few "cool" ventures I have in mind:

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com

http://www.intellasys.net

http://www.teslamotors.com
Too bad about those school email addresses...
50 Designers x 6 Questions
Some months ago we've selected 50 prominent designers and design companies, contacted them and asked to answer five design-related questions, sharing their knowledge and experience with fellows developers... The result was 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the renowned web-developers all around the world.
No, college is more like this: You see somebody, "Jd", (except let's call him "Harvard") who already got a lot of upmods, and you attach yourself to him by replying (except, let's say "applying") and bang now my comment is closer to the top of the page.

More people read it, leading to an extra opportunity to gain Karma. Of course, if I don't stay "on topic" (let's say "go to class") people will notice and downmod me (let's say "flunk me"). Staying "on topic" leads to a dull uniformity.
We considered that, but there's more information there than just a scalar value representing impressiveness.
Yeah: France and Germany started Quaero for a mere $2.5 billion, which seems similarly doomed to failure. Germany recently pulled out and have started their own project, "Theseus".
Google's Newest Role: Venture Capialist
It's a pretty overloaded term.
Can you expand on that? What kind of information?
You don't count justin.tv as crazy?
Go Big or Build Small?
As long as not everyone has facebook I'm not sure this is a big threat to other people search startups. As long as personal information is still spread over several websites having one place to go search for people that indexes all of this third party data (including Facebook or LinkedIn) is still a good thing. Now if Facebook were to go start indexing third party data on people and make that searchable together with the personal data that they store that would be a big threat. But I'm not sure those are the intentions of Facebook. I think the recent move is primarily used to attract more users to Facebook. You can see if some of the people you know have accounts and then decide if you should sign up. When you have 30 million users you can take advantage of that to attract more members.
I'm not sure if I buy that Japan is trying to fight Google. That might very well be what the author of the article understood from the whole thing but to me it seems they are simply trying to support a move by Japanese companies into services. Adding decent search to a car navigation system is not exactly competing with Google. As long as they don't try to make a general purpose search engine I'm not sure if they are really competing with Google, just making their devices more attractive and differentiated from the replicas that South Korea and Taiwan are pumping out.
It was a risky joke. Looks like I am losing some karma for it.

Like I fucking care!

:P
Apple Event - Live Coverage
Absolutely. My comment was more directed towards those that evaluate/hire ivy-league/equiv. grads. Yours is correct re: why people attend such schools.
But it DOES matter where you go to college, and the essay itself argues for that.

In this context, we can say there are three things that can determine someone's success:

1) confidence others have in you

2) self-confidence

3) actual ability

Going to a "good" college affects 1 and 2 the most, and arguably 3 the least. In a startup 3 and 2 are arguably the most important, and 1 the least - so I guess that agrees with pg's argument. In the corporate world, 1 and 2 matter the most, and 3 the least - aligned with what a brand-name college provides.

So the argument seems a bit circular: based on the yc sample set, college doesn't matter because college doesn't matter to the yc sample set. Even if that SHOULD extend to the world at large, it doesn't.
We can tell which founders went to the same school. We can ask people who teach at or went to school x about applicants from there. If they went to a school we know about first hand, we can ask more specific questions about what they did in college. If they went to a big hacker school like MIT, we can suggest that they recruit friends and/or launch their beta there.
It's tempting to dismiss the experience gained at college as being not useful or applicable, but from my experience, there is generally a noticeable difference between those who learned all the fundamentals (e.g. college level math, physics, language theory), and those who are self taught.

There are alot of really talented self-taught coders out there, but for the rest of us, the breadth of understanding from slogging through those boring lectures on BNF, multi variable calculus, and linear algebra gave us an incredible analytical base thats easy to assume we always had.
Uh oh. Actually the second half is about the latter. Is that not clear?
Steve Jobs live  Apple's "The beat goes on" special event
As Prostitutes Turn to Craigslist, Law Takes Notice
When I was taking an education theory class we had to do simulated admissions. We had to do three applicants every ten minutes, which works out to just over three minutes per app. In that amount of time you can quickly scan over the grades and SATs, and maybe read the first paragraph of each essay if you're lucky. The other thing I learned is that the real admissions officers got statistics updates twice a day for the average GPA and SAT score, and also the projected US News rank. This means that whether or not your grades and SATs were good enough depended largely on whether your app was read before or after lunch, because what it took to get into the college completely changed every time they were handed the new report.

For low income minority students there was an option to set the app aside for a second reading in order to learn more about the student's situation and if there were an ameliorating factors, but for the rest of the students the admissions officers were expected to make a decision on the first pass after the three minutes.

Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the academic department they were applying for, so they pretty much knew whether they'd be accepted before they ever applied. The flip side is that they only got an edge in admissions if they applied early decision, because if they were going to bring down the average GPA then they had to bring up the average matriculation in order to not affect the overall US News rank.

I think it's one of those things like eVoting. That is, people with no CS experience think eVoting is totally secure whereas CS experts know it isn't. Similarly, I highly suspect that anyone who thinks getting admitted to an Ivy shows a certain baseline level of respectability has never worked in admissions. I'd guarantee it.

As for the importance of college GPA, if you want to see something funny then apply for a wall street job. If they ask you what your GPA was in college, ask them how GPA correlates with alpha. :-)

The craziest thing was that Google did a massive HR survey and determined that there was basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company. Because of this they decided that they would give jobs to five or six people with sub 3.0 GPAs each year. Well if there is little or no correlation, why should it matter what GPA is at all? I suspect the psychology behind the Google hiring process has a lot in common with the psychology of female circumcision. That is, it was done to me so it must be a good thing. And if it's a good thing, then by definition it must be good to do unto others.

edit: fixed a few grammatical errors
Thanks for the effort, but I think he phrased it differently.
The software involved is more of a key issue. You can always get more machines off the shelf, but you can't just go to Dell.com and place an order for a few killer algorithms. If you have awesome software, you can get funded. IIRC, Powerset is already backed by some big players.
"The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department."

I wish this would be repeated more often. I've implemented many interesting algorithms based on papers written by people at, like, Louisiana State University. Noname places.
It doesn't take a Paul Graham to realize this nor do I think this is the first time the thought hit him. There are also things that I, and others, would argue about, in favor or not, but nonetheless,

thank you for writing this.
I think it's the scale inherent in attacking these problems that's the main thing stopping YC from funding them. How much of a humanoid robot are you going to get built on 15k and 3 months?
Here's another dirty little secret: Your grades don't matter either.

I still chuckle when I think of the drones in my fraternity that missed the best 4 years of their lives because their heads were stuck in their books. Sure, they got 4.0 averages, but who cares now?
For me the biggest thing about going to an elite school is expectation.

The more you expect for yourself, the more others expect from you the more you are driven to succeed or make something of your life.

Elite colleges are like the newsweek article on octopart, it makes you want to beat the expectations on you, only several order or magnitudes less.

I think getting an education is secondary in college.
Finding people who live with passion used to be a problem when we didn't have the internet. And working/studying in elite institutions gave you a higher chance of meeting passionate people.
Is it just me or is this a silly article? I'm not really sure what the point is. There's the overweighted focus on hardware which isn't what makes writing a search engine hard. Then there's the pseudo code towards the end which really made the whole things bizarre.
Though as a reader I start sympathetic to both the thesis (it matches my priors) and the author (always enjoy PG's essays), this struck me as hand-waving.

For all the talk of, "I have a lot of data" and "[w]e're just finally able to measure it," there are no supporting numbers, just general impressions.

C'mon, give this topic the rigorous Bayesian treatment. How does the population of YC market-successes compare with YC-chosen and YC-applicants, along the 'prestigious college' dimension? How do these compare with the college-graduate population as a whole, and the college-graduate population succeeding in other competitive fields?

Those numbers would be great, and I'm rooting for the "college-doesn't-matter" result.
As a followup:

Even with hard data, two major sample-selection issues would make me hesitate to generalize the YC experience. First, the YC process attracts especially confident and ambitious people -- not representative of all graduates of the same colleges. Second, prestigious college graduates may have found high-fulfillment work or more traditional startup financing before even considering the YC route. So YC may be rigged to attract an A-team of general collegians (smart go-getters still with something to prove) but a B-team of prestigious collegians (those not already swept up by other plentiful opportunities).

Indeed, "Notes from the Front" can be read as a YC recruiting letter to ambitious prospects from less-prestigious academic backgrounds.
"The common failing of programming groups today is too little management control, no too much"
-F. Brooks in the mythical man-month

A-kill-ease,
Is this still true today? True in your experience? Would it have been corrected simply by the addition of technically-skilled managers, as you suggest, or were there too many other things wrong to begin with?
They matter in different ways. High grades are like the good college. It's instant attention. If your goal is to work on Wall Street, good grades are an advantage. Just depends on what you want to do.

Similarly, high IQ implies smart, but low IQ does not imply unsmart.
Wireless jennicam? Not crazy.
Comparison of two Ruby approaches to Facebook API
Please please port anywhere.fm to this.. If it's possible. Can iPhone/iPod touch do flash?
Nuclear Bombs Mistakenly Flown Over US
I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything.

My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?
I read it as 23 paragraphs making strong statements about the former, and 3 paragraphs making weaker statements about the latter. But that's just me. Someone who sees college as a stamp of destiny would say you made a strong statement about the latter.

In general, I find myself a poor judge of what will or won't be clear to other people in a given essay; I read differently from most. I discover what did and didn't work in your essays from reading comments. I have a hard time extracting general communication principles from each essay's success or failure, because audiences differ. Still, I hope to learn something; writing is important.