I thought you handled it pretty well. Basically, you wrote a big sign saying "here is the bike shed", to make sure bike-shed commenters had something to occupy them. :)
"It doesn't matter much where a given individual went to college."
From Y-Combinator's perspective, yes, I'm sure that's true. The people they're looking at are self-selected, and pretty much guaranteed to be smart, motivated and well-educated, which means that all Y-Combinator needs to do is worry about how they think - not where they were taught.
But that's after the fact. To someone deciding what college to go to, or where to send their children, I think the choice is still very important.
"someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all."
True, of course. But where does that thirst for knowledge come from? With the right support, or the right teachers, perhaps that party animal would have changed his ways. As far as I'm concerned, _that_ is really the purpose of good schools.
In Y-Combinator terms, it's not that they make a founder more likely to succeed: it's that they make him more likely to try being a founder in the first place.
Interesting. So can you increase your voting power by simply upvoting stories that are already popular?
Or does the system favour people who upvote good articles _before_ they become popular?
By the way, I don't bother upvoting articles that already have huge scores (because really, what's the point?) Will this have a negative impact on my voting power?
I suggest the "good voter" system should ignore upvotes on articles that are above a certain threshold.
> It's also possible that there would be logistical
> problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations.
> There might not be enough computing power to continue
> the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual
> world started creating their own virtual worlds with
> billions of inhabitants apiece.
What a ridiculous conclusion. It seems to me, the logical way to handle this is to simulate an entire universe, galaxies to atoms.
That might sound like it requires an impractical amount of processing power... but only to us _inside_ this universe. If you think about it, it's obviously impractical to simulate an entire universe within the universe itself.
In our parent universe, this wouldn't be an issue. Their speed of light must be faster, their atoms smaller. Moore's Law continues apace for them, and they can build computers that seem unthinkably powerful to us.
And the weirdness of quantum physics shows the kind of hacks they've made to get it to run.
I'm thinking about writing a short story where a guy implements a universe in 7 days...