i said: "it's not about working at night, but going balls out from waking to sleep."
if you sleep early, ok. but when you're awake, do you want to spend all your time hacking? then you have the passion. if not, then not. that's my point: it's what you want to do with your waking hours, not which hours your prefer to sleep.
it's not about working at night, but going balls out from waking to sleep. how long u stay awake doesn't matter, but the passion that engages your every waking moment, and makes you want to stay awake longer, so great is your desire to hack.
he's not make a point about ordinary people. he's making a point about school not working for everyone.
he's taking the smart, motivated people who don't need school and giving them a head start on changing the world.
these smart motivated people won't be clogging up admissions and class sizes, which will make college better and more accessible for people without the smarts, will, or desire to be entrepreneurs.
the spread of startup accelerators in the style of y combinator suggests that the entrepreneurship-as-education model is growing. not going to scale to everyone, but that's not the point. the point thiel's making is that entrepreneurs fare well without school, perhaps better, because when they're not in school taking instruction, they're in the world building things. if that's true, what's silly about it? if it's true that we're hampering entrepreneurship by keeping a special breed of human being tied up on class during 4 of their prime years, when we could accelerate entrepreneurship by giving them money to start things, then that's actually quite a profound mistake. so if thiel's project succeeds to the point where more such accelerators pop up, siphoning entrepreneurs out of school to achieve success without a degree, then he's made a profound point.
people who work in the dark, but have not achieved total union with the keyboard, appreciate the backlight. forced battery drain isn't an issue: turn off the light if you don't want.
do f and j bumps enable you to touch transcribe this string?
>}[\|:{%^&?`~]*();"'!@_+-=#$,./<
not for me. these keys are the bottlenecks that break my flow and force me to think for a few moments about where things are.
your tactile union with your keyboard may be 100%, but mine is more like 80%. congrats if you've mastered chopsticks, but fork is a no-brainer. i admire the simplicity of those little f and j bumps, but they're just no match for a glance.
why not a choice: a backlight to turn on if you want, off if you don't? i don't want a backlight on all the time either. if i'm banging out email, no need. but if i'm coding, or something else that requires lots of special characters and finger-fu, then a backlight is handy.
backlit keyboard aren't just for looking nice. they're for working at night in dark rooms. before touch typing you need to glance quickly at your hand's position above the keys, to make sure your hand position isn't transposed slightly up, down, left, right--which happens easily when you're blinded by a monitor in the dark, and the key bed is pitch black. yes, you can fold down your monitor till the light illuminates the keys, squint while you orient your hand, then raise the monitor to eye-level...but that is a distraction to workflow when hacking at night. way too much effort just for checking hand orientation. backlit keys solve that problem, which is one of the most serious 1st world problems facing rich people with nice computers today.
if you sleep early, ok. but when you're awake, do you want to spend all your time hacking? then you have the passion. if not, then not. that's my point: it's what you want to do with your waking hours, not which hours your prefer to sleep.