_pius

I'm surprised to hear this, as I've had the opposite experience with a similar toolchain, especially since the advent of Homebrew. What problems are you running into exactly?

Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything.

Again, never had this experience. I would love to hear how you're managing to FUBAR your Mac.

Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.

Have all of these issues been on a Hackintosh? If so, that might explain things ...

This kind of flame retardant has been built in since 2009:

We also have some new features to prevent flamewars. The most conspicuous is an exponential delay before reply links appear on deeply nested comments. We'd noticed these were rarely the most interesting comments on the site. We're hoping that instead of killing stupid arguments, it will be sufficient to apply gradually increasing drag to them.

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Adrian Holovaty et al.

I understand you may not like the guy, but I'm pretty sure DHH's fame came mostly from creating Ruby on Rails.

I'm not saying you're bad at picking people. And, for partially self-serving reasons, I don't think MIT is bad at picking people, either.

I'm saying that your ability to pick people is orthogonal to whether or not YC solves Chris Dixon's credential trap. The "trap" is a pathological behavior in the seeker, not a claim that credentials are meaningless or that the people who award them are incompetent.

Moreover, one can't arbitrarily claim that graduating from a top program in one's field is merely a credential, but completing the top accelerator isn't. They're both valuable, but neither of them is "solving" the credential problem.

True, but an equivalent statement can be made by a decision maker at any other reputable credentialing institution as well. How is this substantively different from what an admissions officer at MIT would say?

I think the GP's point is that, for the credential obsessed, "getting into YC" is just the "getting a Rhodes Scholarship" or "getting a Supreme Court clerkship" for our milieu. I don't think that is an indictment of YC in the least.

Ultimately the OP's argument boils down to the claim that YC solves the credentials trap by ... transforming starting a startup into a credential, as long as it's done with the YC imprimatur. Hardly a solution at all.

(Ironically, there is a solid argument to be made about how your essays have done a huge amount to legitimize the act of founding a startup and embolden erstwhile credential seekers to take that risk, even if it doesn't come with a name brand institution attached to it. The author fails to make that point, though.)

Well that's quite a bit harder to refute. ;)

Fair enough.

Obviously MIT and Yale and CMU all select from the very best students, so their graduates are correspondingly better than average as well. The question is whether they are more-better after attending prestigious schools.

Sure.

[The] null hypothesis (or the dominant prior if you're bayesian) should be that schools provide equivalent educations unless you have some reason to believe that's not the case.

See, this is where the argument gets pretty flimsy. The prior should take into account the data we have on hand and practically all of it points in the opposite direction. Some data we have includes:

* professors (in many cases, learning techniques from those who invented them)

* quality of students you're interacting with

* laboratory resources available

* the "wisdom of the crowds" about the schools in question

Sorry, but the burden of proof is yours (or Justin's) — practically ipso facto — given that this is a contrarian claim.

From a pure common sense perspective, we should be surprised if there is literally no difference between the CS education at MIT and, say, UC Irvine, just as we should be surprised if there is literally no difference between the dining experience at a restaurant with multiple Michelin Stars and that at one without.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.

Memes aside, that contrarian claim may or may not be true, but where's the evidence to support it?

On a related note, the OP lost me with the claim that "Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools [just] teach you credentialing and ladder climbing." That doesn't match what I've seen at MIT or CMU, but perhaps it's true at Yale? :P

At the very least, it's an extraordinary claim (for engineering majors) presented with something falling far short of extraordinary evidence.

You do realize you live in Texas, right?

You can't possibly think that there are no non-white or non-male developers qualified to speak at this conference.

MIT and Harvard solve this by partnering together for HST.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard%E2%80%93MIT_Division_of...

While Harvard is an exceptional research institution, I think it falls just a little too far short of Stanford and Berkeley in engineering and applied science to qualify as the top research institution.

... all of which would be hard-pressed to try to claim that they deserve that title more than MIT.

What relevance does that have?

Should be obvious. You've claimed that Harvard "absolutely dominates" MIT in law, but MIT doesn't have a law school.

Would you consider a university the greatest in the world if it didn't have any engineering or science programs?

Not sure the relevance here, as MIT has a full complement of humanities programs.

I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program.

Doubt it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Sloan_School_of_Management

Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance [and] business

No. http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

... [and] all the fields of the humanities.

No. http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

If you actually do want to see domination, though, feel free to check this out. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articl...

You're very confused. Related: MIT does not have a law school or medical school.

Here's one: http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/01/sacca-styleseat-is-likely-t...

Amusing to see someone so cynical that they've become naïve.

Surely you see the problem with that line of argument.

His piece was hardly insightful. In fact, he did not show a basic understanding of the issues he was pontificating on and the piece was mere noise, not worth defending by anyone.

Once you start trying to parse out who's right, you're missing the point of free speech aren't you?

Yes, he did ... so what? That's his opinion. Didn't you just write an entire blog post about how everyone should be entitled to their own views?

This whole thing is little more than hypocritical whining on your part. You wrote an offensively naïve opinion piece about problems you've never faced and now you're shocked — shocked! — that those whom you've offended have responded in-kind with their own opinions that now offend you?

Embracing free speech also means recognizing the right of others to respond to you.

Based on the current composition of the Supreme Court, replacing a single judge could have dramatic, fairly immediate, and nearly irreversible real-world consequences to the citizens of this country. Whether you agree with those consequences or not, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that the stakes aren't high.

Touché. :)

Fair enough, but you made some pretty bold statements about what this exam is supposed to measure and I don't think this lives up to it.

For instance, I happened to have taken an intro security course taught by Ron Rivest; thus, I know the difference between a MAC and a hash function. But I wouldn't claim that another developer who didn't have exposure to the material was deficient in basic knowledge, anymore than I would make that claim about a security researcher who didn't know the basics of how a support vector machine works. These things are pretty specialized, even if they're not particularly difficult to learn.

These questions are indeed trivial, but obviously biased towards security — your area of expertise. What makes these questions anywhere close to a compelling measure of a developer's mathematical knowledge? Seems pretty presumptuous to me.

Yes: most customers don't think about the question you're posing.

For that question to even arise in a customer's mind, they would have to know what an iframe is. Otherwise, it's just a cool little popup that the website opened.