I wish HN had a ``show only informative replies'' button, if you'll excuse this cheap shot at you.
Perhaps I don't understand and/or notice some of the ways the article fails. I lurk here to learn something new, so I wish fellow HNers would explain the reasoning behind their critique.
But if you were referring to the submission title only, that's another story...
Feels highly political, especially with the original title.
We're not trying to get into Harvard, so not particularly relevant.
While you may be a lurker here, and so may not have it, many of us have a "flag" button. This will delete the article from the site if a pretty small number of us click it.
Therefore, I wish, in addition to this button, I also had a button that said "has some value, just get it out of the curated HN space, and transfers it to reddit".
So if it's interesting to hackers, it's via politics (which HN tends to be flag happy about), and about a stage in life where pretty much everyone here is past (college admissions), to an institution which isn't really that common for the startupy type of person to strive for (usually preferring Stanford or MIT).
I do think it's interesting, I just would prefer to see it on a site where the politics can be discussed without the stink of political opinion interfering with the startup community.
I view sticking stuff like this on HN is akin to having heated political discussions before interviewing for a job or partnership: a universally bad idea.
I wasn't being glib. It is an interesting article, just not one I want to see change my opinion of people I discuss technical things with all the time. People tend to be more blind to assumption about politics than many other topics, so it's a good way to make yourself think less of people.
Things close to this I would think on topic for HN:
A blog post going into how the hacker community isn't like this.
The ways that scions of tech are different than other parents when the second generation comes around.
The article isn't really about university admissions at all, they're merely provided as one cause of an environment which also has its parallels in startup life.
Arbitrary illustrative excerpt:
Whether American or Chinese, individuals who focus too much on ‘achievement,’ and who believe the illusion that they’ve achieved everything simply through their own honest hard work, often think very little of everyone else as a result.
Yes, the article repeats examples of the fundamental attribution error then draws some conclusions about it. However, the subject matter is the founders of the testing moment, and their failure to achieve their goals.
Again, the only interesting part of the article is highly political which is basically stating "be nice to the proles before they eat you". Aka, it belongs on reddit, not here.
If it makes you guys lay off, I agree with the blog post, I just don't think it belongs HERE.
Isn't making it rich why most people get involved in the startup communities?
And is the state of the education system - and a realistic view of who walks into the best jobs - not a topic that should interest hackers / entrepreneurs - a lot of whom have gone to the top schools, etc?
Should HN only be about pure VC/startup content, rather than the mix of subjects it has always been?
While this conversation is a bit meta: I feel politics and religion are ones that should be kept off HN.
People tend to be less rigorous, more entrenched and less able to truly debate about these things than 95% of things we could talk about. This leads to people we may meet one day, try to give money to, try to get money from, try to make a business with, exhibiting some ideas we disagree with, with no useful or easy way to come to a synthesis.
Just like I don't get in large political discussion at work except for bills that specifically effect us in the small (i.e. the 1099 for vendors you spend $600 or more at part of the new health care legislation), I don't want to see them here, and feel they're off topic as they're not particularly any more apropos to us than members of the larger population.
Do I think the new government venture funding goes here? Yes. As it's on topic and relevant in the small to us.
Do I think a discussion of abortion law goes here, even if it has interesting tech in the article? Not in a billion years.
