2014 Thiel Fellows | Hacker News Reader

2014 Thiel Fellows

thielfellowship.org

30 pointsclayallsopp19 comments

“As student debt soars and the wages of college graduates sag"...

Thiel continues to hand out $100K grants (plus non-cash support) to individuals to would receive full-scholarships to college and PhD placements anyway, some of whome already graduated college and provides no opportunities for average students -- the ones who take on debt.

The fellowhips are interestingm but don't help solve educational debt. The "college sucks" libertarian political agenda is stapled to the side, making the whole program smell bad.

Not to mention, every last one of them seems to be some kind of computer programmer. No offense to HN, and I love programming, but I'd have hoped to see more breadth.

Where are the biologists?

There have been biologists in previous classes.

Do keep in mind that the fellowship targets very very young people, and it's exceptionally hard to show excellence in most fields by that age. Software is a rare exception.

Not just 'show excellence' but actually know enough to contribute to the field meaningfully. For better or worse, one can learn programming and some basic math in order to contribute to the market in the span of a few years. Traditionally to do good physics required a few years doing nothing but math, and then a few years developing a good physical intuition. There have been some great physics papers turned out by early-/mid- 20-year-olds. Modern molecular bio requires a few years chemistry, a few years of either math/stats/systems/programming, a few years of bio, and then a few more years developing an intuition for biological systems. It's just a much longer route to travel. A student - no matter how good - just isn't well suited to being anywhere near 'useful' by the age of 20.

Agreed with all of the above points. What it suggests to me is that the idea of bypassing college and going straight into entrepreneurship may only be testable in a limited number of fields, notably programming.

I imagine there's a bit of a selection bias based on the group of selectors; if you are exposed primarily to software, it is easier to comfortably judge software applicants than biologists, for example.

Looking up one of the fellows who is using "crowd-sourced mobile computing", I came across:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/meet-hyv-a-startup-that-can...

Apparently the idea is to build a pay-to-use BOINC or Folding@Home, except for iPhones, where the startup steps in by actually *paying 3rd party app developers to bundle their distribution code in their app, thereby allowing them to run independent code on a user's phone using the unaware user's computing resources, data plan, and battery life without the user's direct permission?

Not only would this seriously inconvenience consumers, have ample security risks, have a dubious market for legitimate customers (Such a system could never outperform the price of AWS or a custom GPU cluster, let alone volunteer networks like BOINC and Folding@Home), only works at a ludicrously large scale (Are there even enough iPhones out there to reach Folding@Home's 45 petaflops?), would require those running complicated algorithms to port optimized code to Objective-C, but the icing on the cake is it only works on unlocked phones.

So, did Thiel just fund a ridiculous idea which is essentially malware or am I missing something?

Sure, maybe today the concept isn't the right fit for cell phones (all sorts of trade-offs regarding CPU usage, battery-life, data consumption, etc.) but perhaps the concept can evolve to take advantage of the future "internet of things" grid which is likely to connect devices that have plenty of spare processing cycles without the same constraints imposed by a mobile phone.

Aim for where the ball is going. Not where it is right now.

As I understand it, TF tries to pick good people even if they are working on not-so-bulletproof projects at the moment. That's likely the justification here.

Keep in mind that the funding is a grant (rather than equity/royalty/loan) and is not given to the project but the individual.

Nice to see Vitalik Buterin the founder of Ethereum getting backing.

I was pleasantly surprised to see him on this list.

This is a very interesting concept. I wonder how the previous Thiel Fellows are doing. Probably too short of a time period for any definitive results to come out, but it would be interesting if selection of highly qualified individuals is more of a predictor of success than say, Harvard or MIT.

One might argue about the pedigree & network you get from college, but couldn't motivated Thiel Fellows build equally powerful networks by virtue of being a Thiel Fellow too?

Based on previous years, it would likely be difficult to make the comparison with Harvard/MIT (or similar), given a good number of the fellows spent time at either of those institutions. Those who did have had access to the resources of both circles.

Any news on the progress of past classes?

Illegal activities such as impersonation and fraud? http://bluehat.us/posts/tracking-down-the-person-who-tried-t...

You're generalizing and blaming the entire Thiel Fellow community because of one person? If you can somehow justify that, it still doesn't make sense to spam the entire thread with the same link over and over again. Thanks.

I do not think he is blaming the Thiel Fellows. After reading the link, it seems clear to me that there was someone that received a fellowship that clear should NOT have. The person putting in the link is just trying to raise attention to this fact - maybe to try to get the fellowship to help correct the situation. It does come off as spam, but honestly if this happened to you, what would you do? Please read the story of the dead link and then make your judgment. I probably would do the same after someone ruined my reputation

Looks like some kid overreacted to a prank and took it too personally

The Thiel Fellows program is a joke. Apparently, they've been accepting lowlife, criminal script kiddies in recent years. http://bluehat.us/posts/tracking-down-the-person-who-tried-t...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com