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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Because we have higher standards for achievement for a 30 year old than a 20 year old.

>>Because we have higher standards for achievement for a 30 year old than a 20 year old.

Then your form doesn't really allow for that. You're only asking to list the coolest thing someone has built. Why not change the form to: List the coolest thing you have built (maximum of three).

This enables the 30+ year crows to show their broader list of accomplishments and not artificially tilt it toward the younger audience.

You say you have higher standards but then you don't allow the higher standard to show. What if someone has consistently hit singles (to use a baseball metaphor) and a rookie has one home run. You're rewarding the onetime home run over consistent delivery. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but you need diversity and your system discriminates against that.

Hey, this is your show and you're going to run it the way it fits your need. However, with risk of blacklisting my name, I feel it's important for someone to speak out and help you see it from another perspective.

But I feel both pg and yc have been quite consistent about this: They're not trying to optimize for proven consistently good performance, they're looking for potential to be great. They're trying to discover the next Einstein, not merely put together a decent physics faculty.

The form only asks for education and where you've worked. That's a limited definition of higher standard (especially for hackers and designers).

You also wrote this [1] back in 2007. Have your views changed since then?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

It asks what's the coolest thing you've built.

Indeed it does. When I posted my comment, the additional questions about tools and coolest thing you've built, were not appearing.

Edit: As mentioned in a sibling comment, This appears to be an issue with Safari where items 'below the fold' don't render. Strange.

When I open the form in Safari and the window is shorter than the length of the form, the portion of the form below the bottom of the window isn't always rendering when I scroll or expand the window. This may be hiding the rest of the questions for you. To fix, just expand the window and hit refresh.

Would you not have filtered out the novice Larry Ellison through this standard? He started Oracle when he was 33 and I can't find anything substantial he did prior to that.

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