Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | pandafood's comments login

I don't think that Lars Ulrich lives in New York.


Is wanting a social net because you think it will benefit you somehow more moral than not wanting one because you think it won't?


I'm not sure I like that it makes me pick where I am from a list with one element. I'm also not sure that I like that it makes me pick where I am before it tells me why. That being said, it does add an element of suspense. Otherwise, it's kind of a neat idea. I'd use that in NYC if it had more content. At the same time, I don't know if I'd ever write a review for it. Maybe if you made giving feedback easier to do - like just allowing the upvoting of particular restaurants or something.


We import them from American universities though. Our high schools are way more broken than our colleges.


That disconnect has always confused me. How does country manage to maintain the best universities and among the worst high schools in the first world?


This sort of sneaking in is pretty pointless though. The only really good reason to go to one of these schools is that everyone knows how hard is is to get in. If you go to a different part of the school that isn't as hard to get into (this is what GS is at Columbia) then you throw away that advantage and you're left paying three times what you should be for an education that, as was alluded to elsewhere in the comments, you could have gotten for 1.50 in late charges at the public library.


But you get to put Columbia on your resume either way. That's all most companies care about.


That's true for most employers, but the extra value of the Ivy League degree isn't that it's slightly more impressive to employers that would have employed you anyways, it's that it's pretty much essential to impress the standard gatekeepers to American high society: investment banks, law firms, and - to a lesser extent - medical schools, all of whom definitely make the distinction.


Law firms and medical schools, maybe, but not investment banks. If you're a programmer, anyway.


10 years down the road, when you're up for that VP position that requires a degree from a "good school," nobody is going to notice.


I think more importantly it ignores the networking effect that being in the general undergraduate program has. While I'm sure that people who attend the GS type programs at the various top universities are bright, you don't generally get to make the same connections as regular undergrads do (at Penn most GSE classes were later at night and I believe it was much harder for GSE students to take the regular undergrad classes).

I would say that while I loved everything I did while I was in school, it was the outside the classroom opportunities (student government/organizations) which were generally restricted to just undergrads that really taught me the most useful skills and connected me to a much broader network of people that I've found very helpful in my professional life. While I wouldn't say that it's a bad idea to "sneak in" I don't think it's the same experience/value as the regular undergrad program.


Harvard has a similar option called Harvard Extension, its also where Hillary Duff attended.


I finished my bachelors at Harvard Extension. As far as I'm concerned, it's been a worthwhile investment. As a guy in his late 30's, I didn't want to deal with the traditional college experience. I also didn't want some sham degree from a for-profit degree mill. HES was a perfect option for me.

What isn't often mentioned is that the courses at HES are often live streamed from actual Harvard College courses. Same course, same grading. I've directly questioned my profs about this and they say that they don't differentiate between students in either population even if Harvard sometimes lets people believe they do.

The CS courses are the bomb, BTW. The CS faculty at Harvard are very supportive of nontraditional students.


What I resent is being tricked into spending my time reading 1000 words that could have been edited down to "why is populism an effective political strategy?" just so that an author that I've never heard of can tell me that they went to Yale.


It seems like this article is trying too hard to justify something that actually has a pretty easy explanation: if women are under-hired relative to their skill level, then a skilled woman is cheaper to hire than an equally skilled man.


It really depends what you mean by highly successful. I doubt that there are many successful mathematicians that missed more than one or two questions when they took it. I also doubt that there are a lot of professional athletes with perfect scores. If what you mean is "rich" then, well, athletes make a lot more money than mathematicians.


Most of those other countries have pretty dismal mathematical output. Not only that, but the country with the best mathematical output of the ones you listed is the UK, which I think has the most "American" tax code. Whenever anyone produces a good mathematician, that mathematician seems to always come to the US. There's a reason Terrence Tao didn't stay in Australia. I'm not actually saying that this is because of our lower tax rate, I'm just pointing out what you likely already knew but disregarded to make a point.


Mankiw isn't a mathematician; he's an economist. Ranked by impact factor, Europe's universities are indeed outclassed by those of the US (attempt to control that by population and by the radically different systems those institutions operate under). I don't think you can really defend the claim that Europe's academic output is "dismal" compared to, like, the Earth, though.


No, but it is dismal compared to America's, which is what I said. And you said "academics like Mankiw", not "economists like Mankiw." Also, stipulating "by impact factor" seems like a sneaky way of suggesting that that's not a legitimate way to rank. That's fine; it's still true when you rank by "quality of output factor."


I chose impact factor because it's easy to look up. I suspect any other reasonable metric will produce similar results. I object only to the emotional word "dismal" here. Europe simply isn't a wasteland of academic economic thought.


Arguing against higher taxes because they discourage people from working is like arguing against jailing people for drug offenses because it overcrowds jails. It could be right (though in the case of raising taxes, history doesn't seem to bear this out), but it's not the real reason that we shouldn't want to pay higher taxes. The reason is that they do bad stuff with our money. There's a sense in which it can be said that all of your tax money goes towards paying down interest on the national debt, but if you take a look at what that debt is for, you'll likely be unhappy. If we (the people who don't want to pay higher taxes) pretend that it's for some reason other than it is, we put ourselves at risk of being told that our made up reason is stupid.


People who want higher taxes don't agree that they do bad stuff, or they wouldn't want higher taxes.


There are those people, and there are the people that don't know about the bad stuff. Actually, to be fair, there are also the people who know about the bad stuff but dont think lowering tax revenue is a good way to get them to stop doing the bad stuff. I think the first group of people might have a strange set of values (unless you mean that they don't think the net effect of what the government does with taxes is bad, in which case I agree with them), but it's still worth arguing about to convince the second and third groups.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: