When I get rich I'm going to take YC's approach and fund about 40 different girlfriends a year with a little money rather than just one with millions.

The economics have changed. With a recession looming, it will be less expensive than ever before to fund a girlfriend or mistress. They'll just be happy you're one of the few percent not worrying about getting his car repossessed! Sure, in the old days, you had to buy them a big shiny rock and take them jet-setting all over the globe. Now? Why, you can use open-source software and services like MySpace and Facebook to entertain them for free while you're gone with one of your other "investments". You can even hook up webcams all over the apartment to make sure they're not cheating on you while you're out cheating on them! Track them with Loopt and monitor their activities with Twitter.

You'll be sitting pretty while 95% of the people your age are stuck living at home because it's too expensive to move out and all the jobs pay minimum wage. There's never been a better time to win the Darwinian Game of Life while simultaneously investing in porn futures to exploit all the frustrated L^H... almost-winners!

In the near future, everyone alive will have an ancestor who founded a start-up.

One of my biggest motivations for getting rich is so that when I have kids, I can afford to home-school them.

When I was taking an education theory class we had to do simulated admissions. We had to do three applicants every ten minutes, which works out to just over three minutes per app. In that amount of time you can quickly scan over the grades and SATs, and maybe read the first paragraph of each essay if you're lucky. The other thing I learned is that the real admissions officers got statistics updates twice a day for the average GPA and SAT score, and also the projected US News rank. This means that whether or not your grades and SATs were good enough depended largely on whether your app was read before or after lunch, because what it took to get into the college completely changed every time they were handed the new report.

For low income minority students there was an option to set the app aside for a second reading in order to learn more about the student's situation and if there were an ameliorating factors, but for the rest of the students the admissions officers were expected to make a decision on the first pass after the three minutes.

Athletes also largely got pre-approved by the academic department they were applying for, so they pretty much knew whether they'd be accepted before they ever applied. The flip side is that they only got an edge in admissions if they applied early decision, because if they were going to bring down the average GPA then they had to bring up the average matriculation in order to not affect the overall US News rank.

I think it's one of those things like eVoting. That is, people with no CS experience think eVoting is totally secure whereas CS experts know it isn't. Similarly, I highly suspect that anyone who thinks getting admitted to an Ivy shows a certain baseline level of respectability has never worked in admissions. I'd guarantee it.

As for the importance of college GPA, if you want to see something funny then apply for a wall street job. If they ask you what your GPA was in college, ask them how GPA correlates with alpha. :-)

The craziest thing was that Google did a massive HR survey and determined that there was basically zero correlation between college GPA and value created for the company. Because of this they decided that they would give jobs to five or six people with sub 3.0 GPAs each year. Well if there is little or no correlation, why should it matter what GPA is at all? I suspect the psychology behind the Google hiring process has a lot in common with the psychology of female circumcision. That is, it was done to me so it must be a good thing. And if it's a good thing, then by definition it must be good to do unto others.

edit: fixed a few grammatical errors

I think you missed the part where he doesn't give a shit.

Peter Norvig in his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" says, "If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. # Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because they make you do it for them)."

He is referring to Jamie Zawinski. http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Slow news day.

Analogue: no one ever gets penalized for upvoting comments that have already been upvoted several times.

Same basic idea.

Validating XHTML Strict does not increase your valuation.

> when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?

Considering how many there are of them, probably within the last couple days. But instead of me giving you an example to which you will predictably reply "that's not really new," how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new, so we can see what level of really-newness it would take to satisfy you?

Though as a reader I start sympathetic to both the thesis (it matches my priors) and the author (always enjoy PG's essays), this struck me as hand-waving.

For all the talk of, "I have a lot of data" and "[w]e're just finally able to measure it," there are no supporting numbers, just general impressions.

C'mon, give this topic the rigorous Bayesian treatment. How does the population of YC market-successes compare with YC-chosen and YC-applicants, along the 'prestigious college' dimension? How do these compare with the college-graduate population as a whole, and the college-graduate population succeeding in other competitive fields?

Those numbers would be great, and I'm rooting for the "college-doesn't-matter" result.