Ask HN: Choosing a college - <AUTHOR> I'm a high school senior, and I can't see myself doing anything but technological entrepreneurship (although not necessarily software) for a career, initially anyways. I applied to the usual suspects in the fall, but was rejected from all the colleges that both seemed like good fits and offered good financial aid. (Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Princeton) I thought my application was strong (2400 SAT, A average, placed in top ~50 of my grade nationwide in math competitions, strong history of programming projects, et al), but even Rice waitlisted me. Anyways, that's irrelevant now, although I'm still curious as to what might have sunk me at those places.
Now, I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself for next year. I know that I want an atmosphere of smart, driven, people (for both rub-off effect and cofounder potential) and professors I can both learn from and do good work with. The problem is that there's no place I've been accepted to that offers all that and an affordable price. My options seem to be as follows:
-Get into Yale off the waitlist: Seems like the ideal outcome, considering their financial aid and overall atmosphere; the main drawback seems to be the lack of engineering focus, although I get the impression there'll be plenty of technical things there to keep me occupied and more.
-Cornell (Engineering): Everything's good, except that my family can't afford to pay for Cornell with the aid package they've sent us. Some negotiation may help, but most likely, the only real option will be to try to secure a guaranteed transfer after a year at Tufts and graduate in two years with AP and Tufts credits.
-Tufts: Tufts is tuition-free for me thanks to my mother working there, but the atmosphere there strikes me as a bit indolent and even less technically focused than Yale, although the students seem talented enough. On the positive side, Tufts is close to Boston, and I could work on research somewhere in Cambridge if I didn't find what I needed at Tufts. A downside would be continuing to be the "too-intense guy" I come off as at my high school, and potentially continuing to feel slowed down by my peers.
-McGill: This strikes me as a not particularly good option, unless someone has something positive to say. It's more than affordable, though.
-UMass Amherst: Possible full ride scholarship. That summarizes the pluses, as far as I can tell.
So I guess the more general question amounts to: Is it worth paying large sums of money for me as a budding entrepreneur to be around smart, like-minded students for my college years?
(Sorry for the novel, but I feel that the HN community is the best place to get solid advice from those who have been through my current situation, and I needed to get the situation across)
Thanks for the help. <comment><USER2> My best advice to you is to take none of our specific "go here" advice...

Take a good week off to just step back from the college admissions process and recollect your thoughts so you can look at it objectively. I'm sure right now it's a bit stressful and probably overwhelming, not to mention getting spanked by the rejections is a bit of a blow to the ego... especially coming from somebody who sees themselves as _slowed down by my peers_...

Once you take that break, spend a good couple hours alone and not distracted to just write out (and I mean write, not think) what you really want out of your life for the next couple years. You don't need to have concrete goals, but something as simple as "I'd like to start my own software business before I graduate" or "I want to get involved with mathematics research projects" are examples. You seem like someone who is very driven, so I bet you'll have no problem with this.

Secondly, write down who you are and what are your values. Are you the type of person that needs the structure of class to be motivated, or can you stay focused on your own? How much personal time do you want? Obviously a less demanding class-load gives you more time to work on your own projects.

Once you lay down the big picture of who you are as a person and your overall goals/purpose for the next few years, it's going to be 1000x easier to choose a college. It's like finding the shoe that fits you best.

Finally, you'll find plenty of people who are smarter than you, even at a state school. I knew many people "smarter" than myself when I went to a state school, yet I was the one who was making a 5 figure income by my senior year in college from my own business (as if money is the only thing that matters). For the record, I was _only_ a 1400 SAT.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations on getting Cornell -- I'm graduating from there this May. Though I'm clearly biased, I'd recommend Cornell all the way. Definitely speak with the financial aid office to see what they can do for you; they're trying to get better about offering students everything they can. If you have to take some private loans not through the school, that's okay too -- just more work for you is all.

Cornell Engineering really is good, and I have nothing but good things to say about the CS department here (okay, I can criticize them on using SML/NJ for CS 312/3110, but meh. It's still a functional language). Every one of the students I've worked with has been great. Another thing is that engineering here isn't looked down upon. It's sort of looked at as one of the hard colleges to be in here. If people want a group of students to make fun of here, there's plenty of Hotelies. :)

The CS education you'll get here is great. If you can find the money to come here, it's worth it. I know someone graduating with something like $80,000 in loans, but from the opportunities Cornell has given her, it's worth it.

About the rejections from those good schools, I've heard it's possible to reject some really good students because they're literally too good. If a school thinks that you're likely to apply to a bunch of really good schools and get into some of them, they may reject you so that they don't end up extending an offer and getting turned down.

</comment><comment><USER4> > I'm still curious as to what might have sunk me at those places.

I'm guessing that you seem too one-dimensional. Admissions committees look for someone that'll add diversity to the campus - not just racial diversity, but diversity of interests too.

I went to Amherst (College, not UMass). Something like 1 in 8 of my admitted class had a 4.0 and 1 in 10 had perfect SATs, but we all had something _else_ besides that. Like my astro-major dormmate who was also a nationally-ranked scrabble player. Or my friend who'd been left for dead at age 10 in Liberia, and had started his own organization dedicated to eradicating child soldiers. I'd worked in an all-teenage dot-com in my gap year before college, too.

Anyway, here's my somewhat heretical advice:

Don't go to college - yet. Instead, if you're really set on tech entrepreneurship, take a year off and found a startup. Take it as far as you can - pick out a market, talk to people in that market, try to design and build a product that satisfies that market.

If you succeed, great - you don't need college. You can always pull a Woz and go back anyway. But even if you fail, it'll teach you lots about what you _really_ want to do. It may not be what you think now. One of my biggest regrets is that I basically planned my college career based on what I thought I wanted to do in my last year of high school, completely ignoring the lessons from my gap year. I could've saved myself a lot of aggravation and made my college experience a lot more meaningful had I adjusted my plans for where I wanted to go and what I wanted to study based on my experience working in a tech startup.

And if you fail - great. You'll look so much better to colleges for having given it a shot. Maybe you'll even get into Stanford or MIT next time around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I'm an avid mixed martial artist, skier, and violinist on top of the technical stuff, although those might seem superficial since I have so many interests.

As for the gap year - wow, that could be a really good idea. I had considered that option, but I guess I didn't think about it enough. The lack of co- founders and money could pose problems in certain areas, but I could either just keep pushing the web app I've been developing to commercial release, or go to work at someone else's startup. Do those sound like potentially good ideas? (I can probably even defer enrollment to a college to have a safety net in case rejections round two comes around)

Also, what did you learn during your gap year, more specifically? (if it's not entirely specific to your case)

Thanks for the insight; I have a lot more thinking to do, but taking a gap year could be a very good option for me.

Edit: Posted before I saw your comment, fuzzmeister; that's probably a good way to have my cake and eat it too, although the downside is that I won't exactly be motivated to succeed with the startup no matter what if I have a spot at a college waiting for me.

<comment><USER4> No idea why they turned you down then. :-)

As for whether to join someone else's startup or start your own - I'd say do whichever will answer more questions about your future life (in answering them, it'll raise more). If you feel you absolutely must start a company to be fulfilled, go do it. That's how I felt, though I waited until I was out of college and had a couple years of work experience under my belt. I started it, it failed miserably, and it was still one of the best decisions I made in my life.

In my case, I worked for someone else's startup in my gap year, just because the opportunity presented itself. My math teacher was starting a company; his company had a wholly owned subsidiary that was doing a teen-content .com; it was being staffed exclusively by teenagers (many of whom were my friends from high school); did I want to join? Of course I did. You will probably learn more technical skills working for someone else than you will on your own; there's a vast body of knowledge in everyday software engineering that's largely passed from engineer-to-engineer, and you miss out on a lot of it if you only learn from the Internet. OTOH, you will probably learn more about yourself and what you want if you start your own company.

It's hard for me to say precisely what I learned in my gap year, because most knowledge takes the form of skills, not facts, and you can't reduce skills to words. I do think it was one of the most educational experiences, perhaps the most educational, that I'd had up to that point in my life. A quick list, based on what I remember 8 years later:

I learned Perl scripting (actually, I sorta knew it before, but I learned it better.) I learned how there's always a core group of people that actually get things done while the rest of the office takes long lunches and bitches about how the core group is usurping their authority. I learned how to exaggerate your PR budget so companies pay attention to you. I learned how to feed newspapers a hook so that they do a story on you ("all teenage dot-com" actually got us a lot of free publicity), and I learned that all this PR doesn't matter if your product sucks. I learned that what you think of as "intelligent" content usually just seems pretentious to other people. I learned that even if you start with users, they'll leave if you take away the reason they came - and that reason is not always obvious to you as the designer of the site. I learned that teenagers can be just as vicious at office politics as adults. Actually, this last one is a really broad lesson. Next time you think "That guy is evil; I could do his job so much better", think about what you would actually do if you were placed in his job and had to operate under his constraints. Chances are, you'd be just as incompetent and evil as he is.

Anyway, I'm only 3 months into my gap year...

I learned about version control and IDEs. I learned Java Swing. I learned about maintaining other people's code, and that it's basically a waste of time to fix their formatting (other than mixed tabs/spaces, which should always be converted to spaces. ;-)) I learned about OOP and how to split up responsibilities between classes. Unfortunately I didn't learn about avoiding cyclic dependencies, but at least I was primed so I could understand why this was a problem when I learned it in college. I learned that your first attempt at a program usually turns out badly, even if you have 30 years of experience under your belt, and so you should always be revising and refactoring your code. I learned that companies will often shift their business plan entirely when they are a week away from beta. I learned that this is not always a good idea.

I learned that cool projects often go to the guy who happens to be in the office at the time someone dreams them up (sorry, Trevor). I learned how to design UIs myself and get them working. I learned that you should always, always try to code things up incrementally, working in small chunks, though I had to relearn this about 5 times more before it really sank in. I "learned" C++ and why manual memory management sucks. While I should've been debugging those segfaults, I learned that thousands of fangirls will go wild for Draco Malfoy in leather pants (this turned out to be very important for my career later).

I learned InstallShield, and why just about every desktop software package leaves behind a ton of junk when you uninstall it. I learned that manually testing installation executables on a half dozen VirtualPC boxes kinda sucks. I tried to learn WinRunner but it never sunk in. I did learn design patterns while I was avoiding WinRunner though.

I learned that companies that stay "2 weeks away from beta" for more than 2 months have a tendency to stay that way indefinitely. (Though not always: I've heard that offline GMail was "2 weeks away from launch" for a year, and they _did_ eventually get it out.) I learned that code quality matters _a lot_ , and that if you write sucky code in the name of just getting it done, you will pay for it later, possibly forever. I learned that you need to know what you're building in order to build it, but I took the wrong lesson from that: I learned that you should always have specs that try to think of every eventuality, when I should've learned that you should always have prototypes and working code that tries to explore every eventuality. I learned that companies should always keep track of their cash very carefully, and they should _know_ when a $6M bridge loan is coming due, and that VCs behave basically like sharks when they smell blood in the water. I learned that certain company founders will also do pretty crazy things with the remnants of their company, like run off to China with its IP when the VC sues them.

All in all, I'd say it was highly educational. :-)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really feel for you...going through the college admissions process three years ago was one of the most daunting experiences of my life.

As a Yale student, let me give you some advice should you get the opportunity to come here. First off, it's truly an amazing place. Kids here are brilliant and Yale will give you money to do absolutely anything you're interested in. All you have to do is ask. There's also the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, an incubator for student ventures. Think of it as a Y Combinator for Yale students; you get a 5K stipend to spend the summer in New Haven, work on your project and attend workshops.

With that said, there are a few things you should be aware of. Yale is obviously not known for its science or engineering focus but among many students there's actually a contempt for any subject involving numbers. Most of my friends fulfilled their math requirement with ridiculous classes like "The Pleasures of Counting" or "Geometry of Nature." I am not even joking.

As a science student I sometimes feel like a second class citizen. Science/Engineering classes tend to meet earlier than usual and on Fridays. The buildings are all on Science Hill which is a 10-15 minute walk from central campus. This isn't a huge deal until December when New Haven turns into an icy hellscape for three months.

Finally, as far as entrepreneurship goes, you'll find a lot of kids here who would be interested in co-founding a venture. The only problem is most of them don't have the technical background to put their money where their mouth is.

I'd be glad to talk to you more about this or answer specific questions. My e-mail address is HN User Name at gmail.

<comment><USER7> I'll second the points about yale culture. Honestly, if you're worried about being A downside would be continuing to be the "too-intense guy" I come off as at my high school, and potentially continuing to feel slowed down by my peers." then if you're as technically / mathematically oriented as you claim, outside of certain parts of mit, caltech and other places with a large engineering culture, you'll continue to be viewed as such.

A simple, but in retrospect insightful bit of advice that I ignored (but shouldn't have) when choosing a university is the following: go through the course catalogue and figure out what percentage of all the classes you would certainly find interesting, all other considerations being equal, choose the school with the best percentage!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm into less technical subjects almost as much as science as engineering; most of the "too-intense" stuff I think comes from me being overall achievement and knowledge focused. So, I'd hopefully be far less out of place at Yale than at my high school, or even Tufts.

Thanks for the advice on the course catalog - I'll definitely do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I went to MIT. At the time I was sure that it was what I wanted - I felt very ready to "take a drink from the firehose" or whatever.

Since actually going there, my feelings about college have changed a lot. It seems to me that I have a whole lifetime ahead of me to work like a dog, if I want to. I would have rather spent my college years exploring things I didn't know much about - like art, travel, people, languages - instead of obsessing over math and science, which I was already pretty good at.

My advice is this: If you want to do technological entrepreneurship, then that path will be available to you in four years. You're already ahead of the curve, and you don't need to do much during college. Go somewhere interesting, relax and have fun.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure kicking back a bit has its merits (and I'll give it a shot), but I can't shake the impression that if I say "OK, I'll stop being relentlessly hungry and relax now, I can work later", there goes my inertia and my expected level of success plummets. Am I wrong?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a college grad who is now employed at a "top" tech company (although unhappily), I would say that it probably doesn't matter where you go. Choose a place that makes you feel comfortable. Don't choose a place based on any perceived benefit after graduation. Your happiness while there is paramount.

I was fortunate enough to go to a small engineering school with many people who shared my interests (Case Western Reserve). It was a great experience that I will cherish for a long time to come. My school is not very famous and the name didn't help me out in any job interviews, but I got a "good" job just the same.

In my experience, the biggest benefit of a college is having an extensive alumni network and lots of cool companies recruit there. If you want to work for a startup, then even that doesn't matter. This didn't matter for me because the company I work for doesn't recruit at CWRU. I got an interview after applying online.

One thing to keep in mind is that I think I learned more from my peers than I did from my professors. I think that is the whole idea behind a university.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm a freshman IT student, but I'm currently in India so I might not be able to give you useful advice about which college to join, but I can tell you this - for Pete's sake, choose wisely. I could have taken an year off to prepare for the college entrance exams (college is a big deal in India, so we have too much competition) and got much better marks, but I chose to just join whichever college I could get into, reputation or no reputation. Now I regret it. My college is more like a 4-year crash course in getting a 9-to-5 job, my teachers care only about academic performance and my peers think I'm a nutjob. Not that it's a bad college, it's just that they don't really _get_ education. You know, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

The environment of your college matters. Your peers matter. In college, a bad crowd will not just slow you down, they'll _take_ you down.

<comment><USER11> get out, transfer and find somewhere that will inspire you. Indiana is one of those schools that as soon as I heard it mentioned, I knew to stay away.

<comment><USER12> dude he said he was in INDIA, not INDIANA.

<comment><USER11> >_<

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't have much to say that other people haven't said already. But: It's unrealistic and silly in my opinion to plan on graduating from college in 3 years. If you really want that atmosphere of smart, driven people you're going to want to be around those people /as long as possible/. I don't advocate 'taking your time' (you know, graduate on time! go on to other things!), but as someone who could conceivably have graduated from college in 3 years and chose not to, I just think you'll get much much more out of college by going there for a full 4 years.

Honestly, you're never going to be 'slowed down' by your peers the way you probably were in high school. A lot of learning in college goes on outside of the classroom. I /think/ a lot about all my classes, go talk to all my professors outside of class (even the humanities ones!) and probably get a lot more out of my classes than everyone else taking them. People aren't slowing me down, I'm just getting more out of the same material. Additionally, there're independent studies, doing research, having a job--you'll find that there are plenty of ways to occupy your time. : ]

So, with that in mind, I'd consider the overall culture of the school. What do you want to be doing in your spare time? What type of people do you want to be hanging out with? That being said, every school (especially the larger ones) have people of all types.

</comment><comment><USER14> Meh. I was similarly crushed when I was rejected from the Ivy league schools I thought I would be going to. The most important thing to do is realize that most of it is ultimately irrelevant. If your department is top 10, the school wont make much of an impact past that point. Once you're in a decent department the rest is up to you.

More importantly, you actually have no idea which one of these schools is a best fit for you. My focus was Columbia in highschool. You know what I realized now? It would have been a horrible fit for me. UIUC is pretty good culture wise (mostly because of the CS department) and it has far better Computer Science. I didn't even apply to the school which I realize now would be the best fit (Berkeley). But I had never even heard of Berkeley outside of the CS rankings because it's not an Ivy.

Recognizing that you have very little chance in correctly reading your own needs, try narrowing down the college by obvious criteria:

1.) Place yourself in a top 10 department in the subject you want to study.

2.) Make sure the campus culture is at least a decent fit for you (i.e., don't go to a big 10 school if you have an aversion to sports and partying. I personally think the hardcore party people here are jokes, but I have no problem dealing or even being friends with them.).

3.) Minimize the amount of money it takes you to get there. Only make a concession if your upgrading yourself from a bottom half of the top 10 to a number 1.

4.) Make sure the campus is a place where you see yourself living for four years.

Academics + Culture + Minimal Money + Location. It really is that simple. I doubt more than one of the colleges on your list fits into the above criteria.

EDIT: Also, don't beat yourself up over not getting in. It's essentially a coin flip when it comes down to it. I thought I had a pretty kickass profile too, but there you go. As PG has written, it's not in the best interest of the admissions committee to spend the time picking the exact best candidates. And believe me, this type of rejection will keep happening. I just got rejected from a NASA scholarship I thought I had a pretty good shot at. In the rejection email, they suggested if I reapplied to improve on pretty much every aspect of my application! I know my app was better than that. Like I said.. meh. :)

<comment><USER15> Haha tsally, I got into Berkeley and UIUC...going to UIUC (see you there!!) cause the cost difference is completely unjustifiable. Unless you're instate...50k vs 10k (merit scholarships)...yeah it's pretty clear which one you go to. Well, unless of course you can afford the 50k. Haha.

<comment><USER14> I just saw this, but hopefully you check your thread tab...

Congrats :)

<comment><USER15> Haha thanks, yeah I check it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure this directly applies to you, but the one thing I wish people had told me when I was applying to college was that if you want to be a Master of the Universe, there's still a significant advantage to going to an east coast Ivy League school. My friends at Harvard and Yale and so on have a valuable network of powerful people looking out for them, making sure they get cushy jobs and lecture gigs and book deals. Stanford, by contrast, was all about pushing you into Silicon Valley, either as a startup grunt or a VC pawn.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd try to negotiate with Cornell. Might be worth going there in person. If not, your scheme of starting at Tufts and transferring seems reasonable. If you worry about lame peers, take upper-level courses as a freshman. Audit them if they won't let you register because of prerequisites. I suspect most profs would even grade your work in a case like that, so you'd get the full intellectual benefit of the class, just not the credit.

</comment><comment><USER18> _I'm still curious as to what might have sunk me at those places._

How did you describe your plans for the future in your application?

 _placed in top ~50 of my grade nationwide in math competitions_

I follow a lot of math competitions, as a math coach. Which competitions were the ones you participated in most avidly?

 _the "too-intense guy" I come off as at my high school_

What specific behaviors are your high school classmates observing as they come to that conclusion about you?

<comment><AUTHOR> _How did you describe your plans for the future in your application?_ My major/career first choices were "undecided", although I sent Cornell, Rice, and Princeton an essay in which I explained how I wished to better the world through innovative engineering startups.

 _I follow a lot of math competitions, as a math coach. Which competitions were the ones you participated in most avidly?_ I narrowly missed the MA Mathcounts team in middle school, and have done well on other less prestigious competitions (HMMT, NEML, CML...), but my AMC/AIME results are probably the best. Unfortunately, my highest AIME score, an 11 (and presumably USAMO qualification), was just this year and therefore probably didn't factor in to decisions much.

 _What specific behaviors are your high school classmates observing as they come to that conclusion about you?_

I focus on my work at the expense of an active social life, and I make an effort to really understand all knowledge that comes my way, rather than just working for grades (if that) and acting anti-intellectual (the prevailing culture). I did lack social skills in middle school, so the reputation carryover could be creating an additional gulf between my classmates and me.

<comment><USER18> Residential colleges are always looking for students who are outgoing to their fellow students. Life is dull on a college campus if the students all stay in their dorm rooms and don't talk to one another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> An important thing to note is that college admissions is really a terrible, fairly unscientific process. You're clearly qualified, so getting rejected shouldn't be a terrible thing for you.

To answer your first apprehension: being around like-minded people is incredibly important. Graduating from one of the best high schools in the nation, I was around people who were intellectuals so there was always wonderful discussions to whet and kindle my growing mind. Two years later, I'm at the local state university whose stigma is entirely accurate. Few people—even in the honors college—are true intellectuals. Living here has been an intellectual nightmare for me, and I can sense my acuity and mental agility suffering.

However, I really didn't have a choice. My family could not afford to send me anywhere else. Basically, the situation I got stuck with was this: paying $40k+/year for a wonderful, private institution or paying $0/year (including room and board) and getting compensated a stipend for the local state university which still made USNWR's top-tier colleges list.

And really, if you're going for engineering, then you're going to learn the same thing anywhere. I'd argue that illustrious universities really aren't a frugal choice. Graduating debt free is really going to free me up financially to start up my company instead of needing to find a job right out of school to fund myself. Also, the local state university offered a lot of options for testing out of classes, so I'm graduating in three years, as opposed to four.

One more thing to consider: student life. You don't want to be miserable, even if it's cheaper or a better school. I've known to many of my peers who went to their dream school and then hated their life. Consider spending time on campus and getting familiar with the local scene.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER20> Check out Olin College. They are built specifically for engineers who also want to get into creativity and design. They emphasize teams with a project- based curriculum. Oh, and there's no cost. They've been cited as one of the next Ivy League schools and have what I've heard to be a very strong engineering program.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was seriously considering Olin before I visited, but it just didn't jive with me. The small size and 100% engineering focus made it feel like such a narrow bubble that I couldn't see myself enjoying more than a semester there, which is too bad, because it seemed like it would have been perfect for me in all respects other than the claustrophobia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sorry for trying to hijack, but I was going to create a similar thread for myself too, and I don't think it would be a good idea to create two. (I got waitlisted at Rice too!) Right now I'm trying to decide between UCLA, UCSD, and Univeristy of Washington. Which one would be best for a CS major?

<comment><USER22> 5 years ago, UW, far and away. They were ranked #12 when I was looking, and even higher before that I think. Seattle is also of course a great town for technology, and not just for Microsoft hangers-on.

<comment><USER23> UW is still a great school. Some great CS research is done there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just my opinion. I went to some random school that nobody here is going to know of or care about, and I had a blast at school. College should be a place to have fun at. Realistically, 3+ years out of college nobody cares about your education anymore anyway.

If you really want to go to MIT/etc. or something and kill yourself for 4 years, go for it. I don't think it's necessary, unless you HAVE to work at <insert name of prestigious company> as your first job out of college.

Also, don't underestimate the effect of a full-ride or close to it. Being debt free or nearly so while making 60k+ a year in your early 20s is nothing to scoff at.

If I were in your shoes, knowing what I know now, at 25, and given the options listed, I would take the full ride in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER25> It is all about being DEBT free, if you can get a full ride somewhere, do it. 60k without debt means you have a few hundred bucks to burn at the bars or on a nice car or saving for retirement or traveling or starting a company, whatever you want to do. Paying for school loans would suck, it is a bill for something you already used up, and probably figured out was a scam along the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a high school senior too and I only recently got accepted at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford (didn't apply to Ivys or MIT). First, you should get over the rejections. Last December, I applied for Cornell ED (36% acceptance rate) and I got rejected! I couldn't quite figure out why but now, five months later, I'm really really happy cos it gave the opportunity to apply for Stanford/CMU during RD. And Stanford had a RD acceptance rate of 7.2%. Only Harvard has a lower rate. So, shit does happen but good things also happen.

Anyway, as an international, I can't get financial aid at most schools (only Harvard, MIT and a few others are need-blind for intls). So, I'm faced with a similar question. Is it worth paying so much for Stanford or CMU?

</comment><comment><USER26> From my experience, Cornell Alumni have a much greater presence in high-end cs industry than any of those other schools. It's probably worth trying to squeeze more money out of them (what do you have to lose by trying?).

Tufts has a generally good reputation, though not particularly technical. Free is good and Boston is good. You might investigate if you can take high-level CS courses at MIT or Harvard with a Tufts enrollment (I think it's possible, but you'll want to know details). It's certainly possible to join the MIT culture without actually enrolling there.

Yale receives a certain degree of contempt in technical circles. It's probably possible to get a solid education there, but certainly don't expect the name to open doors.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think you shouldn't be too sure that Yale et al. will have many "smart, like-minded students". I go to UPenn, studying business and CS and I've found that there are very few people interested in technology startups (they like finance, of course).

I also have found that though students are capable of getting good grades, they tend to be less intellectually curious than, for example, the average HN reader.

So don't make your decision simply thinking that good reputation = great students. I think the ancillary benefits of being in Boston easily outweigh any relative drawbacks of going to Tufts.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's my take: I went to Shit Hole State University, well outside of cali and SV. In the cubicle next to me was a Stanford Master's grad. He and I made similar salary, did similar work. He got to be in more debt, though, and as a bit of a bonus he bragged about stanford and software quality, etc blah blah. I told him all software startup code is garbage and quietly to myself he should just work on the product. He quit, startup got sold and I cashed out. Sure I was lucky but his whole attitude was wrong.

Back at SSU I knew of another Stanford grad who was humble and was genuinely into software and all around a spiffy guy. And he knew more than my cube- neighbor.

Here's thing thing about "it" schools like Stanford, MIT: it's something of an illusion. Sure they great schools and they do the best research, if that is where you want to go (something I had a hard time doing at SSU). Before I got hired I worked on my own stuff, contributed code and had all-around genuine extracurricular fun messing around with systems, hacking, and reading about binary analysis and security. That's the kind of stuff that gets you somewhere. Not going to "it" schools gives you the freedom to pick what your extracurricular stuff is, though. :)

I guess my advice is to do what ever you want. In life there are front doors that are jammed and there are back windows you can slip in unnoticed if you know where to look.

</comment><comment><USER29> Programmers tend to value tangible evidence of technical expertise. Your best bet if you want to operate in software is to build impressive things and go to school wherever you feel most comfortable.

Engineers tend have a more limited idea of how technical expertise ought to be acquired: at a top 10 (maybe 15) ranked university. So, Stanford, MIT, and Cornell are very fine choices for mechanical or electrical engineering. For you then, Cornell is the only way to go for engineering.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tuition-free tufts? I'd jump at it.

Anything close to Boston would be pretty cool. I hear there's a pretty strong hacker scene there... but I've never been there myself.

<comment><USER31> Yep. If you have the option to go to college without paying, you should do it unless there are strong mitigating factors. And you haven't got a free ride to Idaho State University here: You have _Tufts_ , in _Boston_ , for _free_. Swallow your pride and grab that!

There is nothing better for your career as an entrepreneur than to spend four years in _Boston_ , among students, and then emerge debt-free. Save that money you would spend going to Cornell so that you can spend it on your startup later.

The dirty little secret of undergraduate education is: It's much the same wherever you go. You are taught by grad students and by professors who have not got enough seniority to get out of teaching undergraduates. The textbooks are the same everywhere. The engineering schools with better reputations usually get those reputations by having lots of great, well-funded researchers... none of whom have anything to do with undergraduate teaching if they can help it. And if you're smart, curious, have a good library and two or three mentors you're going to learn as much as you want, no matter the surroundings.

Sometimes the smaller schools with poorer research reputations actually have _better_ undergraduate teaching.

Until you get to _much_ lower-ranked schools than any on your list, the major difference from school to school is your fellow students. But Tufts is in _Boston_. If the Tufts scene just isn't for you, ride the train to MIT. I've been impersonating an MIT alum off and on for years, and I'm sure impersonating a student is even easier if you're the right age. Just go to their club meetings, study in their libraries, hang out at Mary Chung's. Get summer jobs in their labs or their startups. You can probably even take their classes if you want.

Now, here's a hypothesis for you [1]: I'm guessing that your otherwise inexplicable rejection from all those top schools is because they took one look at your application, said "hey, this one will be getting an admission and a free ride from Tufts," and decided to expend their precious slots elsewhere.

[EDITORIAL UPDATE: I've removed my interesting sidelight about the old Ivy League admissions collusion scandal, partly because it wasn't important to my wacky hypothesis, but mostly because I misremembered it. See below for correction and link.]

I'm sorry if that rankles. Nobody likes to feel like they're being railroaded. But you are being railroaded into freaking _Tufts_. Count your blessings! Ride the legacy-student rails! Pick another time of life to be crazy and rebellious! And if you get too depressed, go talk to someone who just got out of school and is $50k in debt.

\---

[1] Obviously, this hypothesis hinges on your application containing information about who your mother is and where she works. I'm assuming it does -- financial aid applications have that and more, right? Although for all I know the colleges have a strict separation of financial-aid apps and admissions apps, and they also don't cheat. In which case, on to the next hypothesis! ;)

<comment><USER18> _So the schools would collude: They would quietly agree that Student X would be admitted to Harvard but nowhere else, Student Y would be admitted to Cornell, and so forth._

I'm pretty sure this is mistaken information. The quoted statement is about admission rather than financial aid. The colleges used to confer about financial aid offers. Then, yes, they were told based on antitrust law that they couldn't do that anymore.

<http://568group.org/>

Now, with permission from Congress, they STILL confer to discuss general principles of how they administer financial aid, but I'm sure that the admission decisions are not made in collusion, and I'm even more sure that the college lawyers now don't let the financial aid offices talk about specific applicants before financial aid offers are made.

<comment><USER31> Blast. Thanks for the correction. Should have checked those references!

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/1991/may29/24753.html>

You're right, I'm wrong. I'll see if I have time to edit the submission...

Of course, this still doesn't refute my hypothesis. We'll leave that for the next commenter. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> First of all big congrats on Cornell. I was crushed when they rejected me, luckily it was my one rejection.

I am currently having to choose between Georgia Tech (nearly free) and Emory (50k/year). I'm not a math/engineering person, while that background would be nice I see myself as an Econ major. I hate to hijack the topic, but I'm in a tough situation as well...

Would YC prefer a non engineering grad from Emory or GT?

<comment><USER25> You should go to GT without a doubt, literally NO DOUBT in my mind. I'm not even saying GT is better than Emory, I know people at both and are happy, but if the difference is between 200k+ in debt (don't forget rising costs over 4 years!) vs 10-20k, take the smaller one! Imagine you come out of college making 60k a year, by the time you subtract taxes, rent, food, healthcare, car, cell phone bill, ISP bill at home, you will spend 10 years paying off that debt. It will NEVER be worth it. Seriously break down average pay for your degree, guesstimate your bills after college, and figure out how much it will cost you. My girlfriend and I both make over 60k, we had only a combined 50k in loans, and it is still will take 2 years to pay off. If you are doing it alone with 4 times that amount, forget it.

Second, more people know GT than Emory anyway. I only know Emory because a neighbor went there.

Third, if you get a graduate degree, it will completely over run your undergrad degree anyway. My dad went to a shitty (so shitty it no longer exists) state school in west virginia, and got C's. He then went to work for 10 years, then got an MBA from a good business school. Now he is the CEO of a 160 million a year company. Does anyway care about his undergrad degree? Hell no. Do they care about the MBA? Definitely more than the undergrad, you can't sit at most of the interviews if you don't have an MBA. But the only thing they REALLY care about is his performance ON THE JOB.

Remember, your undergrad degree only gets you the first interview. It might seem huge from high school, but you will eventually realize that teachers only hype it to motivate you in high school. it doesn't matter that much in the business world.

<comment><USER11> thanks, the major thing pulling at me is that I just see Emory as so much more conducive to my personality. I don't think I would stand out at Emory like I would at GT. I suppose I just need to push myself.

<comment><USER25> All you need to have a great four years are 5-10 people like you. In a school of thousands the problem is not are there 10 people I can be friends with happily, but in FINDING those 10 people. Join the clubs that interest you and meet those people and you will have fun anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My theory on higher ed in the USA is that you should make an effort to attend a school with a great brand name reputation like Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford or Berkeley.

If that doesn't work you should go to the best place that costs you the least amount of money.

I'll probably offend the alumni of the schools I mention, but as someone who has assisted with hiring for startups, I don't believe HR really distinguishes between places like McGill, Amherst or Tufts (or even places like Cornell and Brown.) However, Harvard, MIT or Stanford will definitely get you an interview.

I didn't get into anywhere good and instead went to a no-name private school in the midwest that essentially paid me to go there. Since then I've worked alongside, and been paid the same as people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley, as well as people who dropped out of high school.

I would have preferred paying for Stanford if that had been an option. However, I'm very glad I'm not 200K in debt to a "2nd choice" school.

In your situation I'd probably go to Tufts if Yale doesn't come through. Living in that area definitely beats Amherst.

<comment><USER9> Harvard has a terrible engineering reputation

<comment><USER32> It's still Harvard. It ranks #1 in nearly every other subject. A Harvard degree will get you an interview at Google or anywhere I've ever worked. However, I don't think it matters that much for the OP since he (or she) didn't apply there.

<comment><USER9> Google recruits everywhere. I have lots of friends that have interviewed at Google.

Will going to Harvard surround you with like-minded people to learn from and work on projects with? Sure, but probably not as many as some other schools.

<comment><USER32> I didn't intend to start a debate about the merits of Harvard's engineering department. I was just using it as an example of a school with an obvious (perhaps the most obvious) brand name reputation.

<comment><USER25> Agree with the point, except that the true answer is MIT or Caltech, Harvard really wouldn't push you ahead to any HR guy worth his salt at a tech company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> University of Illinois (Urbana/Champaign). World-class CS education at public school costs. ACM is an active place for outside class projects and getting to know some geeks. There's also a newly started IEN - Illini Entrepreneurship Network.

I highly taking a serious look.

</comment><comment><USER34> I got a CS degree from Stanford and looking back I have to say I really regret going to college. If you're interested in building your own business, that time and money is a hell of a lot of opportunity cost.

So my advice to you is: Screw college. Start your business now.

</comment><comment><USER35> Make a call to the Cornell's financial aid office and make a personal case for a better financial aid package. Be sure to mention you have a full ride to UMass and Tufts. They may be willing to help you out, and it definitely can't hurt at this point.

</comment><comment><USER36> Did you apply to Babson? 2400 SAT = baller, props

My friend runs a great site for high schoolers going through the college admissions process. I'd suggest checking it out: zinch.com

Congrats on your acceptances, McGill is a great school, too

<comment><USER11> I must say I regret applying there. I got in, never really planned on going for a pure management education, but they sent in the fanciest most personalized acceptance package. A very "feel good" acceptance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was in your shoes as well, 2350 SATs, 40+ college credits, 4.0 GPA + all the standard extra curricular leadership/community service stuff + a few unique things like being on national radio & tv.

I didn't apply to any Ivy. I thought about MIT but decided not to apply because my brother went to a *IT and for a lot of reasons hated the whole "only guys on campus in engineering degrees" atmosphere.

I'll give you four reasons why a "lesser" school will wind up making you MUCH happier

1) Focus - those schools are not super focused on engineering. You are second fiddle to the business and humanities - always. That applies for all the Ivy's, tufts, amherst, (not sure about mcgill)

2) Legacy - based on the 10 or so people who went from my high school that I knew prior to my college choice, non were happy with their classmates. A lot of the kids who get into ivy are children of alumni, and thus are not as qualified as you are, so your classes are a lot weaker than you would expect.

3) Money - If you can get into one of those schools you can get a full ride at plenty of BETTER technical schools. I got a full ride+, meaning tuition, books, housing, to 5 of the top 20 schools in my major (mechanical engineering), and I only applied to 5.

4 (and most importantly)) If you really are smart and know your stuff. your undergraduate degree does not matter. One of two things will happen to you after college, you will successfully start your own business and your credentials won't matter, or you will get a graduate degree.

It seems to me that you have the list of the north eastern top 10 schools and applied to them without digging deeper into the list of colleges and finding the true engineering gems. Start with US news & world reports rankings for comp eng/comp sci or whatever you want, they are not perfect but they are a good place to start. Then visit them and decide for yourself. Setup private meetings with professors/deans. The group tours done by students are utterly useless. It doesn't matter what the dorms look like or how well manicured the lawns are. Ask if undergraduates are involved in research, what the study abroad programs are like, what areas the school's research focuses on, etc. Specific questions about the program.

For me I had a list of 5 schools that lined up and narrowed them down by program quality, and then focus. For example I liked Penn State's aerospace engineering program, but their focus was on propulsion at the time and I'm not very interested in that. Where as the school I go to now focuses on fuel cells and robotics, both of which interest me. Those are the questions to be asking, not whether people will recognize the name of your school on a resume.

Also I would say that you MUST go to a school on a school day, observing the interactions between students tells you all you need to know about the place. I went to one school over the summer and loved it, and then during the school year people looked so "click"-y I didn't want to go there anymore.

The problem for you is this - transfer students are generally not offered scholarships. So you are a bit late to the party for applying and getting money. I would say nothing is as important as minimizing your college debt if you want to remain flexible to start a company. It might be worth applying scattershot to a bunch of schools before their deadlines and working it out later, or taking a half year off and do something to boost your resume and apply again. Normally I would say transfer but if you have a resume like that, you will get money else where so don't leave that on the table.

Sorry for the rambling but I'm between projects, good luck, email me if you have more questions. Just look back some day and say, the best thing that ever happened to me was getting rejected from the IVYs.

</comment><comment><USER37> Tufts. The differences between colleges don't make as much difference as people think. Being debt-free is awesome. If you get into Yale, go, maybe. Other than that, Tufts. Most of college admissions and college-choosing is just utter bullshit. You've already given it too much thought. People who do anything interesting with their time are incredibly rare and your chances of becoming one of those people will not be adjusted in any direction by any amount by what college you choose. So give it LESS thought. It's not worth any energy. It is worth doing, however, but you'd have to be a complete fucking idiot to go anywhere other than Tufts given that it's free. Unless Yale gives you a fantastic deal, and even then, you'd still want to give Tufts some serious thought.

Best way to get a reality check: make a list of 100 people you admire, find out how many of them went to an Ivy League school. Wikipedia makes it easy as hell. The schools are great but saving that money is much, much better.

<comment><USER37> By the way, I know my vernacular doesn't ever give this impression, but that thing about the differences between colleges is based on statistical analysis I read somewhere. It is scientifically proven that with a very few exceptions, any good school is as good as any other.</comment></comment>


When Having Friends Is More Alluring Than Being Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.theferrett.com/2019/07/29/when-having-friends-is-more-alluring-than-being-right/ <comment><USER2> I lost my dad to this. So far, nothing helps. I have no idea what the solution is. It only works when THEY want out.

But why would they?

We're brutally, brutally mean to people like this.

Every time somebody dunks on a flat earther or their ilk, puts somebody down to defend the superiority of their own worldview, they've added a brick to the wall that keeps these people from feeling like they can rejoin society.

The first time they pop out of the cave, feeble amateurs in the world of normies, they slip up just a tiny bit and get their head bitten off. There is nobody there to to say "if you tried, we'd have you". For most of us, it isn't true.

It seems like few people realize that this is part of the residue we unwittingly leave on the world. That the cost of performative intellectual superiority, even if you're actually right, is the burning of rungs on their ladder back up.

Needlessly dunking on misguided people worsens a world that we ourselves are stuck with.

Be nice.

<comment><USER3> It can't always just be about being nice, unfortunately. Parents who choose not to vaccinate their children could get us all killed. It's a serious threat.

If being nice turns out to be the best strategy for curbing this movement, then I am all for it. If screaming in their faces about it turns out to be more effective, then we have to do that.

I would love for everyone to be able to "rejoin society" but at a certain point we also have to defend society against those who reject it in harmful ways. Not every illogical cult-like community is as harmless as flat-Earthers.

<comment><USER4> Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years with no vaccines. Let's not be needlessly fearmongering when it comes to their necessity.

In this day and age, given the quality of medical treatment available to most of the population, any outbreak of diseases can be handled in a much better way, and with less comparative casualties than ever before, regardless of the use o vaccines.

Vaccines are useful, there is no doubt about that, but they are in no way a necessity without which we cannot live.

<comment><USER5> We also have unprecedented population density. 10,000 years ago I wouldn't have walked within sneezing distance of 1,000 people before lunchtime.

Just because something wasn't needed before doesn't mean it isn't needed now that circumstances have changed. We also existed for hundreds of thousands of years without seatbelts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not merely "lonely being wrong." It's lonely _and_ you face a wall of open hatred and abuse for merely disagreeing or even wondering out loud if maybe the dominant view isn't 100% right and might have some holes in it.

That's completely unnecessary and also often openly breaks a lot of social rules, but people will justify their terrible behavior, the majority will have their back and tell the target of the abuse that they deserve it, it's their fault and the abuse will promptly stop if they will just "stop spouting nonsense."

Only it probably won't. Caving to the demand to pretend to agree will probably be permission to continue to be awful perpetually to someone who once openly disagreed.

The most abusive people typically claim they are _being scientific,_ only they aren't. Because actual science is founded on the idea that we can't really prove anything. We can only disprove things and our current science is all the stuff we have some degree of confidence in because it has yet to be disproven and overturned by something better.

A good example of this is Bigfoot. There are people who believe strongly that Bigfoot absolutely doesn't exist and anyone who allows for the possibility that Bigfoot might be real gets treated like an idiot and a lunatic, never mind that you cannot prove a species absolutely doesn't exist and new species get discovered all the time.

Bigfoot Anti-Believers are typically far more fanatical than Bigfoot Believers, far less rational and far more out of line with scientific principles, yet will justify their terrible treatment of Bigfoot Believers -- or even people who say "I dunno. Could be." \-- with claims that anti-belief is _scientific._

<comment><USER7> But anti-belief _is_ scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is.

<comment><USER8> >But anti-belief is scientific if the belief for something requires a complete overturning of scientific principles. It's not just an absence of evidence for something. It isn't "open minded" to say "could be..." to Bigfoot, Nessie, or the like -- it's closed minded because to even consider the idea seriously is to think that ecologists and population geneticists have no idea what the minimum habitat of a large animal is or of the minimum viable population size is.

That doesn't make sense. What you're saying is that "It's closed minded not to have blind faith in a faceless group of people who get to dictate what you can and cannot say."

<comment><USER7> No. No "blind faith" needed. Non-scientists can, and some do, learn about fields that interest them, sometimes even to a level that lets them participate in the scientific process. There have been new species of insects and new asteroids discovered by amateurs, for example. But to do so, they have to understand where and what types of animal or object are there for the discovery.

<comment><USER8> It's blind faith if its only presentation is snarky commentary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As an egocentric self-righteous narcissist who spent their 20s making friends by being "right", I'm slowly starting to learn that isn't a fun way to live. I think it's the same thing as when someone you care about is "complaining", you don't _always_ have to help them solve the problem, sometimes they just want to talk.

<comment><USER10> There is a fine line as most people don't have very good conversation skill's and will use you as a surrogate to a psychologist. You have to pull them in line with eye contact and silence and then giving them the benefit of the doubt, and finally have to say they're in a conversation/discussion. If that all else fails then you leave the conversation.

<comment><USER9> I totally agree. I also think there is a huge selfishness in allowing yourself to be used as a surrogate to a psychologist. Just because you are lonely due to not figuring out the other things yourself, doesn't mean you should play doctor to feel fulfilled.

<comment><USER10> Do you mean selfishness or low self-wroth? Selfishness is that you're doing it because you only care about yourself and not the other person (In that case you would be talking about yourself). Low self-worth is where you believe you're view point and genuine experiences are lesser than the other person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article gets close to the heart of flat-earthism, bad sadly doesn't quite take the plunge over the edge. The origin of flat-eartherism is people like this author, and his wife's need to convince others that they are wrong in their beliefs and get them in line with the correct beliefs. It's hard to remember at this point, but think back to about 15 years ago, the idea of a flat-earth was held up as the shining example of how clueless people in the past used to be and how far we've come. That story was fake by the way, people have known the earth was round since ancient Greece, in fact they even had a pretty accurate measure of the earth's circumference. In between there were surely less knowledgeable groups of people, but it's hard to find any concrete cases of large scale belief that the earth was flat, rather than people not really understanding what was meant by "the earth" on a planetary scale, vs. their local perception of the earth around them which did indeed appear to be fairly flat. Except for today of course, where each passing year we hit a new watermark of belief in a flat-earth. How did we get here? Like I said, articles like this give you a good insight into that path, when you're constantly barraged with articles whose entire point is to define a group of people and call them dumb it repels people, and some small number of people get caught up in that repelling force, they start to wonder if maybe this barrage of meanness is actually hiding some deeper truth. Over time these people form into their own group and settle into a symbiotic relationship with the first group. As the group gains steam there's more and more evidence that people are dumb, and need to be called out as such, giving the author of this article and others more ammo, which in turn repels more people into joining the group. And around, and around they go, where it stops I have no idea.

Edit: I should add, this article is among the most civil and charitable articles of its type. I don't mean to pick on this author in particular.

<comment><USER12> You might like: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc)

It makes life a lot more pleasant when you realize that most upsetting things you see online are just a meme symbiotic system with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think oftentimes in human interaction you can either be right or be liked. It might seem like a great injustice but oftentimes, being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong and yet a lot of us still take this very personally. Everyone is wrong until someone tells them what is right.

<comment><USER14> > _[...]being right comes at the expense of another being wrong. The problem > is that there is nothing wrong with being wrong[...]_

I think this hits the nail on the head, completely.

I think a large part of it, for me at least, was that school taught me that wrong is bad. Not knowing an answer is bad. Failure. It took many years after school to correct that belief - and I'm much happier for it.

Being wrong is great, in a way. Of course I'd like to be right about everything all the time but I know that's not possible. Being wrong lets me know that I have an opportunity to learn what _is_ right.

<comment><USER15> I think that a great many of the world's problems could be ameliorated if teachers felt comfortable saying "I don't know, but we can find out after class".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This goes way beyond flat earth and the other beliefs he listed. People will laugh at you if you claim that rocks grow out of dead birds, but almost no-one really convinced themselves of where rocks come from or where dead birds go and that it's not the same place. We trust authorities but we don't think it through or investigate it for ourselves. It's much easier to trust authorities because that's what everyone else is trusting too so you get automatic agreement and friends without having to think for yourself. We also have no idea that the Earth isn't flat except from trust in authorities.

What is kind of strange is that even though some wrong beliefs are mocked by people who don't agree (eg flat-earth, Scientology), others are put on a kind of pedestal of respect, such as Islam and native rituals. The justification I can think of is "Let those poor savages have their special beliefs because they're weaker than us and maybe that's all they have to cling onto so we shouldn't hold them to the same high standards that we hold ourselves to." Scientologists and Christians are part of us and have no excuse for being "wrong" so we're more openly critical of them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think this article indirectly highlights why mob rule and direct democracies are so potentially dangerous: people need to feel accepted, and will take many ideas on faith, even dangerous ones, than to risk having an opinion that causes them to feel the scorn of their peers.

<comment><USER3> That may miss the point slightly. These are people who are on the receiving end of scorn, and their decisions to dive deeper into fringe communities only opens them up to further scorn! The very opposite of the issue you are describing, which is a situation in which people conform en masse in order to avoid scorn.

<comment><USER17> It's just the other side of the coin. The key is the need for acceptance in what you believe. The groups in the article find it by seeking a communities that align with their beliefs, while the groups I am describing find it by conforming their beliefs to the group. The end result is acceptance in what they believe, and an avoidance of scorn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sadly, being wrong DOES affect others. My fellow citizens vote and I am compelled by the laws they enact. Every friendly attempt to alter their worldview is ignored and every unfriendly attempt drives them further into a rabbit-hole of unreason. I'm left with only one choice- to isolate myself from the consequences of their actions, either forcing them out of my world, or leaving them in theirs.

and that's why I don't speak with my extended family anymore.

<comment><USER16> How do you know it's not you who's wrong? Do you have access to secret information that they don't? Do you have superior intellect that enables you to understand what they can't? Or did you just happen to be exposed to different influences during your life that led your beliefs in a different arbitrary direction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It wouldn't be such a big deal if these "wrong" communities didn't seem to be so outrage driven, but they tend to be more about the anger than pursuing their "truth".

Acts of "proving" oneself to the community gain a person favor, which ends up being the stuff that effects us "normies", rather than their mere existence.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't single out those communities. Take the top 20 subreddits, and you'll see the ones that aren't just meme feeds are driven by outrage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't like this false dichotomy. It's a truism "you can be right or you can be happy". You can be right and happy. In my experience yes-men are often sad and keep shallow company. If you're getting a lot of pushback from the group you're in you might be in the wrong group.

</comment><comment><USER22> This was a fun read (until the grim conclusion I guess), but what is the word for this phenomena? Tribalism? Religion?

Be sure to stop and consider: would YOU give up all your friends in search of the truth?

<comment><USER23> "I believe too much in truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of speaking the truth." -Foucault

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been thinking of starting a cult. Not a real cult. It would explicitly be a fake cult, and it would have rules to prevent all the evil stuff cults do. But there's a reason that people join and become very committed to them (or religions). They provide a community, a sense of common purpose, and a support network. Artificially replicating that while cutting out the bad stuff, and scaling that to the level of the Catholic Church or Islam would be the biggest thing one could do to improve human happiness in developed countries in my opinion.

<comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The author appears to lump anyone of opposing views together.

Flat earth - trivial to disprove, ok Anti-vacation - not trivial, but a huge amount of work has been done to show anyone who isn't totally shut down the glaring before/after situation of vaccines, so ok

Men's Rights? Seriously? Is the author saying men have no rights? Some of the things that fall under the men's rights umbrella are the draft, lack of help for homeless men vs women, biased family court, little recognition when a victim of domestic violence (interestingly the CDC recognizes that), biased prison sentences, vastly higher rates of on the job injuries, etc.

So is the author saying anything that happens to a man his own fault?

Is there a specific men's rights subgroup the author is referring to that's very loud and just goes around saying men never do anything bad?

This is like saying "civil rights" people are a bunch of angry people with no reason to be angry.

<comment><USER26> >Is there a specific men's rights subgroup the author is referring to that's very loud

Yes, and, as usual with loud, antagonistic subgroups, they look from the outside like part of the larger group's definition. But that's not an excuse - I wish people like the author would be more generous when talking about the larger groups. Men's rights are particularly affected by this, because it's a topic with both a lot of legitimate grievances and illegitimate hatred among its ranks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law?

You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings.

Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.

We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real ([https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/))

<comment><USER28> If this happens, I'm seriously going to consider suicide.

I don't want to live in a world where I have to live in a constant state of doublethink in order to avoid offending some rare snowflake.

<comment><USER27> Hint: it's not happening everywhere in the world, it's a western world thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I thought of tweleve step programs reading this article.

Things get culty. But what community doesn't look inclusive and strange to an outsider? Sports? Reps/Dems? Any system not your own?

I think its a lovely article. Spurs up alot of thoughts. Especially when being wrong is considered so bad in the US.

</comment><comment><USER30> That's why education is so important. If as kinds those people would analyze the evidences of both - flat and sphere earth they would be immune to flat- earth nonsense.

After kinds lose their natural curiosity and gain political views it's nearly impossible to convince them to something different than they believe.

</comment><comment><USER31> How about agree with them? And connect with them?

I don't necessarily mean to agree that the Earth is flat.

But maybe if you think that we don't know all the answers and finding out things we don't know is fun, you could find common ground even with flat- earthers.

Probably 99% of humanity has one element of common ground: we all want to be happy.

So start from there and work outwards. How does believing the Earth is flat make them happier? As you discover the answer to that (one of which is certainly community as the OP points out), maybe there's other shared common ground.

This could apply to almost anything. Even racists want to be happy. They think that they'll be more happy by holding people different from themselves back, but likely part of this is they hold a relative sense of success (are they better off than their neighbors) than an absolute sense (are they better off than they could be). Maybe compare those two pictures of success, and show that even if someone different from them gets successful by getting a good education and curing cancer, they will directly benefit by not needing to worry about cancer.

And connection matters a lot too. Pretty much every instance I've seen of racists dropping their racism was a direct result of direct interactions with people they demonized that they realized they had more in common with than they'd believed (and in some cases more than their racist buddies).

To me the saddest part of the movie was the cross cuts between the science meetup and the flat-earth meetup. Those two groups would actually have got along pretty well, if they focused on shared passion for the unknown and not their differences.

Besides - with everything we are learning about how consensus across entangled observers may be deterministic of the resulting reality (quantum Darwinism, which is supported by recent experiments but not yet proven), perhaps flat- earthers, by abandoning recognition of a shared consensus of the rest of the world, have in fact created a mostly overlapping Venn-diagram sort of pocket reality where the Earth being flat is as real as the notion it is not for the rest of us. And if we adopt that belief we can enter into that reality, and if they adopt the scientific method's application to their premise they'd necessitate returning to ours (perhaps the scientific method is exactly that - a process to evaluate disparate realities and converge to a norm).

In fact, maybe that's what cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias really are -- a desire to stabilize our version of reality by way of consensus. Almost like a psychological gravity both of an equal but unobservable entanglement.

So it stands to reason the only way to get a fringe reality to reconnect with the rest of the herd is to start from consensus and work to re-entangle the detached observations from there.

<comment><USER32> "Observation" in quantum mechanics is not "people looking at stuff" though.

Here is a good video on quantum misconceptions [1]. Just ignore the part about the boxes. "Nobody understands the Alice and Bob analogy" (Richard Feynman)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7v5NtV8v6I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7v5NtV8v6I)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> all of this said can also be true for any kind of community, even extrapolated to religion, leftist ideas, fascism, fad diets.

There is nothing inherent in flat earthers, most communities outside of academia (and sometimes inside it) that is not about the feeling of belonging somewhere. It is stronger than truth and facts. Always.

</comment><comment><USER34> [I'm deleting this, I don't think it is spurring constructive conversation]

<comment><USER35> It's not a wicked problem. It takes very little effort to research and conclude that the empirically established standard of medical care for transgender people is to allow them to transition and allow them to integrate into society as the gender they tell you they are. It takes very little effort to discover that gender has not been and is not a binary in every single human culture, either.

They are different. For a different reason. Flat earthers don't hurt people by having a very wrong belief. TERFs want to deny transgender people their basic human rights and largely succeeded for a great long time. That's injustice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > "And if it was just flat-earthers, I'd say fine, it's harmless. But you've > got anti-vaxxers and Men's Rights Advocates and anti-global warming folks > and TERFs and incels out there, all fueled by one central pivot point of > humanity – namely, that it's lonely being wrong."

It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?

<comment><USER3> Are you familiar with the men's rights movement? The term or concept of "men's rights" could certainly be discussed in a neutral, non-crazy way. But the actual movement as it exists today and the logic that commonly defines it is absolutely as detached from reality as any of those other cult-like ideologies.

<comment><USER37> Do you have any specific examples of what you mean?

Because being angry that Cardi B is still welcome among the Hollywood and Washington elite after admitting to drugging and robbing people (men, specifically) doesn't seem crazy at all.

Nor does concern for child grooms (boys forced into marriage at 12 years old).

Or a divorced father upset that his children are being taken away by the mother in violation of the custody agreement.

(Those are the top posts of r/mensrights right now.)

<comment><USER38> You can see that they're always bashing women and feminism as the cause for these problems, instead of actually trying to fix the issues.

The main difference between feminists and MRAs, is that feminists actually are trying to solve their issues and MRAs bitch on the internet that women are bad. They're doing absolutely nothing to solve the real issues that men are suffering from.

<comment><USER37> The second top post on r/feminism right now says:

"I was just going off on my mom about how all men are horrible"

<comment><USER38> Did you actually read it? They're complaining about double standards in how boys and girls are raised and how "boys will be boys" is shit.

<comment><USER37> And "bitching on the internet that men are bad".

And you're excusing that behavior from feminists. There's a double standard for you.

<comment><USER38> Feminists actually do things to solve issues, they're not just bitching on the internet.

All these "meninists" like /r/mensrights or AVoiceForMen and other toxic communities only make it harder for men. Women are not the enemy.

<comment><USER37> MRAs do things to solve issues too.

For example, when the Department of Education rescinded the guilty until proven innocent policy. That was the work of men's rights groups.

But feminists fight everything MRAs try to do to solve these issues. They complained when that policy changed. When MRAs tried to bring attention to male victims of domestic violence, feminists claimed they were distracting from female victims.

And you're absolutely right, women aren't the enemy. There are plenty of women who support men's rights.

But there are also women who claim that men sitting comfortably are "manspreading", that men speaking are "mansplaining", and who presume that every man accused of sexual assault is guilty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The internet allows misfits to find a place where they can feel accepted. This is the other side of the coin.

On a different note, being right is overrated anyway. Being wrong is a great way to learn... if you're willing to accept it, of course.</comment>


Google App Engine team answering about New Pricing (ongoing FAQ) - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/google-appengine/ob-kMuDAAqc/discussion

<comment><USER2> "Based on the feedback we've received we are changing this $9 fee to be a minimum spend rather than a fee a originally listed. "

That makes a lot of sense, I have a few apps that I get bills for a few cents here and there, that can't be cost effective after credit card fees.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe you misunderstood the point.

$9 will not be a fee, but a minimum spend.

If your effective resource usage is <$9 you'll pay a $9 bill (not $9 + the bill amount, as previously Google stated); if your bill is >= $9 you'll pay that bill amount (not $9 + the bill amount, as previously Google stated).

It is however a good change.

Hope it helps.

<comment><USER3> Yes. On months you go over the old free limit by $0.05, you will be charged $9.00 instead of their proposed $9.05.

On months you go over the old free limit by $12.34 you will be charged $12.34 instead of $21.34.

It is a good change (minimum spend v. privilege to pay) but still quite a big change from the old pricing structure.

<comment><USER4> > On months you go over the old free limit by $0.05, you will be charged $9.00 > instead of their proposed $9.05.

No, you will be charged at least $9 every month because you can't tell in advance when/if you will exceed the free quota, see you must leave billing enabled all the time, just in case.

The new proposal is better than the previous proposal but it still sucks. Large customers get $9 of value and startups get shafted.

<comment><USER5> Are there really startups that can't afford $9 per month?

<comment><USER3> For me, as a potential user of GAE for a personal side project, I am already paying $9/mo (let's assume) for my standard shared hosting with shell access.

Now, I want to try out GAE. I do so with local / dev appserver and free junk until I get things kind of working and start getting traffic / traction.

I guess the ~good~ point to all this is that if you are going over the free limit (ie: start getting serious traffic) what el goog wants you to do is put on adwords, earn $9/mo and then turn right around and give it back to them for "hosting costs".

Really it just leaves a huge sour taste in people's mouth that this is such a dramatic (and un-warned!) change in pricing for really a monopoly service. Assume that you were heavily invested in GAE / DataStore and have... ohh... 1tb of data or something with them. Where / how else are you going to solve these "impossible" problems that the datastore solves for you?

Much better to not get tied down with google's quirky (yet scalable) model in the first place so at least you have the ability to move between competitive providers instead of getting stuck with a monopoly provider that doesn't know how (socially) to charge people for services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now it is much harder for people who haven't got any billing needs to try GAE seriously.

So people can only make testing app that doesn't cost anything or $9 for each paid app. Judging from the "tick" list (marketing props) there is not much you would get for $9 one.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad they listen to us GAE users. I've been advocating the platform to friends since it was first introduced. Any other fellow GAE users here? I remember in the GAE mailing list somebody said that VCs generally don't like GAE. Is the sentiment still like that?

<comment><USER8> I use GAE for a lot of projects that I've worked on (getcloak.com, walkscore.com, wherebe.us) and the pricing changes are going to hit me hard.

I've been a strong GAE proponent since the very early days [1]; GAE's sudden price announcement has made me question my belief in PaaS. Perhaps IaaS really is the level to build on: unless you're using bespoke stuff like AWS auto- scaling you can plausibly keep your infrastructure code "on the outside" of the service itself.

\--

[1] Here's my talk at I/O 2009, when App Engine was young! [http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/AppEngineNitty...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/AppEngineNittyGritty.html)

<comment><USER9> Have you priced out what your projects would likely cost on AWS or other services?

<comment><USER8> Working on it still...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They changed the pricing model to remove the usefulness of the platform for small projects. Getting rid of the riff-raff. Practical evil elitism at work.</comment>


Thinking with Annotated Books: The Honnold-Mudd Fourth Folio - <AUTHOR> https://marissanicosia.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/thinking-with-annotated-books-the-honnold-mudd-fourth-folio/

<comment><USER2> Well, this is a cultural norm worth resurrecting. There's something inherently _better_ about reading with a pen in hand, as the work becomes both a stimulant for your mind, and a repository for it's reactions. This is especially true for something like Shakespear or philosophy (you _need_ a pen to pick quotes out of Marcus Aurelius _Meditations_ ).

Additionally (and non-trivially for those with access to good ones) used book- stores heavily discount books with any marks in them; and yet, I find these marks are often (although not always) quite fascinating.</comment>


The Decline of IE and Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://blog.diffen.com/post/71506995804/the-decline-of-ie-and-firefox <comment><USER2> Those graphs are misleading. The first one visually indicates that Chrome currently has something like 100x the share of Firefox -- while the numbers indicate it's more like 3x.

You should at least have the base of the graphs at 0%. Probably even better to have to top line of the graphs at 100%. That'd give a truer visual representation of the data.

<comment><USER3> That and the use of "Windoze" without a hint of irony makes me label this an unreliably biased source. As much as I'd love to se IE8- vanish and don't care what happens to IE9+, if this article said the summery sky were usually blue I'd want to verify the facts with other sources before taking them as stated.

<comment><AUTHOR> The blog post links to several other sources of browser market share. You are free to look them up. I have nothing against IE and there is no cause for bias in something like this.

"Windoze" is general humor, it's not irony. Check [http://www.isitironic.com](http://www.isitironic.com)

<comment><USER3> You seemed to have missed the words "without a hint of irony" in my post. The use of "windoze" did not give me the impression is was used purely in jest (intentional irony or some other form of humour). It, like other such respellings such as "M$ Widnows", tends to scream _BIAS HERE, ENGAGE LEVEL 2 SALT PINCH BEFORE READING FURTHER_ in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The stats are dramatically different for an enterprise focused website. As a counterexample, we show for our site:

IE (all versions) is 52% of visits in the last month. IE 8.0 is 25% of IE traffic

For the same month in 2012, IE traffic was 62% of all visits, so we are showing drops as well, but not to the extent we can ignore the needs of our IE customers.

In short, know your customer.

I don't like IE, but we like our customers a lot more than I dislike IE.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that is high.

I work in the edtech space myself, and supposedly the IE 8 stats are around ~10% for us, which is high enough to not ignore (unfortunately).

<comment><USER3> With the clients of out main money making application (investment banks for the most part) IE8 is well over 80%, possibly even 90%, though we are increasingly seeing the use of Chrome too as that has started making its way into standard desktop builds to deal with the increaing number of apps that are out right refusing to support IE8. MS are starting to lose a chunk of corporate use here: by not offering an easy way to run modernm IE and legacy IE side-by-side they are essentially giving market share to Chrome as some corporates _can 't_ drop IE8 easily (due to some intranet apps they still rely on) but are starting to _need_ to have something more modern at the same time (they would use IE10 instead if they could easily run that along side IE8).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All those graphs should start the y-axis with 0%, starting at 5% or 10% makes the decline/increase seem bigger than it really is.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it shouldn't start at 0% and shouldn't go to 100%. If I did that then a 4% drop wouldn't register at all. I know Y-axis scams all too well and this isn't one of them. Browser market shares move very, very slowly and on a 0-100 scale all you would see are (almost) flat lines. The story will be lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> if i get this correctly these stats are from one site (diffen.com) - why is this relevant for anything?

<comment><USER8> I would give it at least a little bit of credibility just based on the fact that it's a consumer-oriented site with a wider audience than just us technical people. But I agree it's just one data point among many.

Which brings up an interesting question, since we're on a site for startup founders: what kind of traffic patterns do you guys see on your websites?

<comment><USER9> My guess would be that among tech users, Firefox has gained over the past year, given concerns about privacy and Google's relentless slurping of browsing behavior from anywhere they can get it. That's the reason I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago; I now only use Chrome for Google apps.

<comment><USER10> It's interesting that you'd say this as I've found myself doing the same thing for very much the same reasons. I'm actually a little hesitant to use Chrome at all except in those cases where I need flash (I don't tend to install flash and usually rely on Chrome's bundled plugin).

Chrome is a great browser and the built-in developer tools really seem to be raising the bar but for casual browsing I've pretty much switched to Firefox or Safari (depending on the platform).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's kinda too bad in the case of IE. It has always been a sword in the side of every web developer that we must develop twice. Once regularly and again for IE. Recently I was pleasantly surprised to open up IE and not only did everything look correct and work, but everything worked faster.

Why didn't everyone switch away from IE ten years ago? That would have been so helpful. Now it doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems to be wildly misleading numbers. Why not use something like gs.statcounter.com to get more correct numbers.

</comment><comment><USER13> One question I have in mind: Will Safari be able to keep up, or will Apple become complacent because they're satisfied with being the best option for OS X? (Which they can achieve by being insiders on that OS, and not by being more awesome.)

<comment><USER14> Apple already has become complacent. They are by far the slowest browser to adopt new web features (including IE). For example IndexedDB has been around for like 4 years now and there are no signs of Safari implementing it. WebRTC is another where they are behind the other browsers.

Very rarely is Safari the first to adopt _anything_ , because frankly they almost never are the ones working on drafts. I firmly believe Apple sees the web as "that thing we have to have but don't want to devote too many resources to."

<comment><USER15> I will add to this that Safari 6 added a host of horrible (and bizarre) bugs which seem to have received no attention or even acknowledgement from Apple.

<comment><USER13> Off-topic, but your screen name is the name I chose for my first fictional character, ever. (From almost 4 decades ago.)

<comment><USER16> Off-off-topic, ris means lynx in croatian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ive always wondered why people stick to a browser, for instance why hang on to IE 10 when you can switch to IE 11?

<comment><USER18> Because switching is harder than not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is a chart from my tech site on which people troubleshooting tech things go:

[http://i.imgur.com/KqYcypZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/KqYcypZ.png)

<comment><USER20> Two data points? really?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Firefox has become too slow with too many updates and internet explorer merits no further comment

<comment><USER22> If you think this is still true, then clearly you haven't used Firefox as of recent.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't say Firefox is slow, but the UI still has weird latency issues that I don't see in Chrome.

For the record, I use both Chrome and Firefox, heavily. The Chrome UI is very rarely laggy. The Firefox UI is often laggy. It's maddening, and I wish Mozilla would fix it.</comment></comment></comment>