
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 7 Notes - michael_nielsen
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/21869934240/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-7-notes-essay
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vidar
"It’s like getting a degree at Berkeley. Okay. It’s not Stanford. You can a
complicated story about how you had to do it because your parents had a big
mortgage or something. But it’s a hard negative signal to get past."

I agree that YCombinator is head and shoulders above its competitors but is
Stanford really considered that much better than Berkeley? Honest question.

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seiji
I read it as a joke just playing to the audience (ongoing good-natured
rivalry, etc).

It's like when someone really likes reddit. Okay, it's not HN. They can tell a
complicated story about how they like cats and populist rage politics, but
it's a hard negative signal to get past.

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throwaway1979
You're probably right ... it was likely a good-natured joke. However, I see
the elite school bias happen a lot in tech. When you're a young person trying
to get that first job, etc., it really stabs you in the heart. The idea of
signaling is reasonable but taking it to the extreme is just plain stupid.
Peter jokes about the poor family with a big mortgage ... that isn't a sob
story ... a lot of people have that or worse. My folks immigrated to the west
with very little. I went to the best school (not Stanford) I could afford and
tried to make the best of it. And I know for sure that I'm not the only one
like that. All I ask is that we don't take these things as innocent jokes. It
is just another form of discrimination ... we should point that out every time
we see it.

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mukaiji
The whole Stanford vs. Berkeley... Honestly, if you make anything more of it
than the joke it's intended to be, you're wasting time. To be fair, he did
joke earlier this quarter about how Stanford is outscoring Berkeley in terms
of the value of companies started at each school every year. However, those
are jokes. I'm a Stanford student, but I think Berkeley has made incredible
contributions outside the field of making-VCs-rich. Fundamental science,
counter-culture, and engineering (including tech). I'm sure Thiel thinks so
too.

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Simpletoon
Paul Graham: "$50m companies innovate. Mine did. We basically invented the web
app. We were doing complex stuff in LISP when everyone else was doing CGI
scripts. And, quite frankly, $50m is no small thing. "

Of course, no one uses CGI now. It's all complex stuff done in LISP.
Innovation is amazing, isn't it?

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pchristensen
<http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt>

That's more advanced stuff than most web apps or frameworks do today. If
viaweb had been done now instead of 15 years ago, they probably would have
spun off lots of open source projects.

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Simpletoon
Doubtful. Yahoo rewrote Viaweb in C or C++, didn't they?

There's a reason why so many programmers still use CGI scripts. And why they
depend on a host of scripting languages that rely on external libraries
written by others. Perhaps it's because they just don't grasp what Paul Graham
is describing. They can't comprehend languages like Lisp or Forth or
developing incrementally from an interpreter prompt. And they don't need to.
"Web 2.0" is an easy sell, no matter how crappy the "web apps" are, no matter
what library-dependent, inflexible language they are written in. "Market
forces" inhibit the few folks who do understand Lisp and Forth from spending
more serious time with those languages.

The web browser as a UI. Brilliant. Programmers and end-users (a group to
which programmers themselves belong) are getting smarter every day.

Anyway, you're right. It is definitely more advanced. Let's keep that in mind
as we're looking at what's coming down the pipe hence forward and marvelling
at what some will portray as "innovation".

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vmyy99
You can find notes essays of all of Peter Thiel's startup classes here -
<http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/peter-thiels-cs183-startup>

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mukaiji
Anyone interested in the actual slides?

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YAYERKA
Yes please! Also could you tell us about the assignments and exams?

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mattewing
One of the more interesting asides here is PGs idea that our society is
starting to reflect a power-law distribution. Not sure what he was thinking
about specifically, but it certainly seems to be true in terms of wealth these
days.

How does a society deal with that for the long-term?

