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Comment by thewhitetulip | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that kids aren't taught to handle pressure, that is the main problem because parents pamper kids until they go to college!

as a child, you are not allowed to have your own decisions, like ever. You eat what your parents tell you to eat, you take admission to undergrad/postgrad about what your parents tell. You study hard as they told you, they even decide when and to whom you lose virginity! (arranged marriage)

No wonder if there is a little pressure then kids can't handle it. This is not a governmental issue, this is societal one. and the government can't do shit, pardon my language.

Now what will happen? The govt will panick and reduce the quality of exams, the exams which are already pathetic in quality, the proof for which can be found by counting the number of Indian instituties in top 100 in the world, ONE!!

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I have studied in Indian and American universities. Many "top ranked" American universities have considerably milder requirements than what is required for passing IIT JEE.

Ranking is based on a number of factors like funding and number of foreign faculty and students. It has nothing to do with the toughness of the entrance exams.

In fact, if you rank institutes according to acceptance ratios, IITs will nearly be the top institutes in the world (the acceptance percentage, roughly 10000 among 1200000, or approx 0.8 percent), along with places like University of Tokyo. If you say restrict to the 5 old IITs, the acceptance ratio is around 0.4 percent. Acceptance ratios have been kept out from ranking parameters.

Screw acceptance ratios

Tell me how many googles, facebooks have been started by IIT grads. That number ought to count for something right

Sun Microsystems was started by an IIT grad (Vinod Khosla), and is responsible for the most popular software platform in the world. Without it, we wouldn't have a lot of the software we do today. I mean... I'm really not a fan of Java, but you'd be hard-pressed to deny its impact on computing.

Arguably, Sun Microsystems has had a much larger impact than facebook or google, which are mainly notable for their money making ability rather than their technical prowess. In comparison to Java, Google's attempt at programming languages (Go, for example) are exceptionally pathetic. Coming from someone who thinks Java is awfully engineered, that's really saying something.

I can give countless such examples about Harvard stanford. You can give me one and that too not a unicorn.

Can't you see my point? Sun was bought by Oracle because of Java, so Khosla basically developed a language which Oracle bought.

I am not belittling the achivements of Khosla, but other institutes outside India have achieved far greater than what Indian institutes can hope to attain

you can't compare Go and Java. Both languages have widely different. Java was meant to writing softwares for systems like fridges Go was meant to write softwares by a large team and exploit parallel processing architecture of modern CPUSs

And trust me, Go is much better when it comes to writing backends and web services

Java is good for enterprise software

Actually, the list is quite extensive. I called out Sun mainly because it is a class above Google and Facebook. Also, Sun contributed significantly more than just Java: Solaris (one of the first widely used kernels that had containers), SPARC, VirtualBox, OpenOffice, ZFS. I think it's really sad that people have forgotten the contributions of the first-generation of large computer companies. I rank Sun Microsystems with the likes of Microsoft and Apple.

Also, other than Google or Facebook, I can't mention any company of that size founded by Harvard or Stanford Alums (in the computation industry at least). Can you?

Other examples BTW are Cirrus Logic, Zoho, Infosys, etc.

https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/unicorn-universities-where-mos...

The top school on the list, Stanford University, claims 51 unicorn founders as alumni while runner-up Harvard University has 37. Rounding out the top three is the University of California with 18.

This is the truth but I can just tel you the truth, I can't make you believe it.

I'm not sure what there is to believe. Obviously, Stanford and Harvard are at the top of the list when it comes to founders. However, you claimed that IIT has never produced a company the likes of Facebook or Google. I pointed out a few companies that are in the same league. Moreover, the source you linked to points out that IIT is the fourth highest unicorn founder producer. This is quite notable, given that it's an institute in a relatively poor country. It's more notable given that Indian graduates are at a disadvantage when competing in the united states as well, due to extra regulation on foreign companies or the overhead of immigration.

I'm not sure what point you were trying to prove with your graph. I never claimed that IIT produced more superstars than Harvard or Stanford, only that it does produce some.

You said:

> Tell me how many googles, facebooks have been started by IIT grads.

The number is 18, according to your data, which makes it #4 in the world, which is a very respectable position.

I agree with you on most things but not the last part. Have you even seen Indian Engineering/Medical entrance exam questions? North American high school exams are a joke compared to Indian Engineering Entrance tests. And IITs are good schools. They aren't ranked as high because they don't fulfil the breadth requirements for those ranking studies. They are purely engineering schools.

And yet there hasn't been one unicorn out of any IITs. All IITians or most of them go out of India. What di I do of the tough entrace exams? What is the use if IITs?

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