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Comment by ilkhd2 | Hacker News Reader

My answer: Google. Drastically different from all the companies created by entrepreneurs mentioned in the article. (The difference is that Google is truly innovative - built on a very original idea of PageRank, while neither MS, nore FaceBook, nor even Apple invented anything new). Why? May be because the founders are not dropouts?

Now if you want to be drug addict - be a college dropout. The best addicts I know are dropouts. Do you want to be a crank - be a college dropout. The best cranks I know are dropouts.

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built on a very original idea of PageRank

careful about this slippery slope ... it's rare for something to be 'very original'. PageRank is based on well-known academic research by Jon Kleinberg and others on graph reputation algorithms ... of course, the application to web search and wonderful execution was what made Google's start possible. You could argue that MS, Facebook, Apple, etc. also innovated greatly on existing technologies and created something 'very original'.

To understand the scientific paper, nonetheless you need to have a degree. Even to know about its very existence, you would still need a degree.

i totally agree ... if larry page hadn't been in a Ph.D. program, he would've likely not gotten exposed to that sort of research, especially because back in the early 1990's, it was much harder for people to get access to or even knowledge about research papers (you couldn't just, ummm, Google for them!)

In addition there's long standing research in the field of Library Science about the importance of citations. It seems like a natural progression from judging the quality of a paper by the number and quality of papers citing it, to PageRank.

This book basically described something very similar to PageRank in 1993 (5 years before Google): http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-Classification...

Some of the best addicts I know are writing their doctoral theses or doing post-grad work.

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