Rocket man | Hacker News Reader

Rocket man

queensu.ca

18 pointsfloetic13 comments

“I was going to do physics and engineering at Waterloo, but then I visited the campus … and, you may not want to print this,” he says with a laugh, “but there didn’t seem to be any girls there! So, I visited Queen’s, and there were girls there. I didn’t want to spend my undergraduate time with a bunch of dudes.” - Elon Musk

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Am I the only one growing tired of this fawning over Elon Musk? I want to see more articles about the technology and fewer human interest pieces

You're probably not the only one, but here's a tip... HN uses a system of up and down votes to allow the users to decide what is on the front page. So if something is on the front page it probably means more people want to see it than don't.

Amazing hey?

FYI you can't downvote posts. You can only flag.

There are also emerging voting rings which are hard to protect against, especially if it only takes 6 votes in an hour to get to the front page

His comment is the second I've seen referencing mythical post downvote buttons. Very curious.

Downvotes exist. You just don't have enough karma to see them.

For comments, not for stories.

Right. I'll take another stab at it (and risk losing another point of karma for it).

You have the power to filter what is displayed in your browser. A quick google returns a chrome extension which allows you to filter on keywords.

https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-Filter

If you're not using chrome, then maybe take a shot at being a hacker and make something that turns hackernews into what you want it to be.

Queen's University loves saying Elon went there. He left though ...

Must have been more girls at UPenn.

No wonder he left, Canada is the worst anglo country when it comes to business (Australia only slightly better). US and UK are way better for anyone with ambition.

Why is that?

There's less of an investment industry (in Canada there's an oligopoly of a few shitty banks). And of course, London, New York, and Silicon Valley are special places.

Also, very anecdotally, in the US and southeast UK you get more of a enrepreneur/go getter vibe. There's some of that in Vancouver as well. This is all anecdotal personal experience though.

Why the hate towards Canada? Please back that up with some actual reason.

I doubt Elon could have accomplished what he has in Canada, much of his support has been American. It would be unlikely he would have gotten as far as he has without being a member of the PayPal Mafia,and that was strictly an American affair. It is questionable if that business could have succeeded in any other country in the 90s (or was it 00s?).

Solar City I suspect would have had a very small chance of surviving in Canada as well, with too small a market of businesses likely able to install the solar cells.

Tesla could have a chance of being built in Canada, and may have actually been cheaper, but the idea of creating a convertible sports coupe just sounds a bit too strange.

Though their is a decent amount of rocket technology expertise in Canada, the risk and cost of the venture would require significant external investment, and again, it was likely easier to manage this in the US.

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