2014 Fields Medals announced

^suspect this is incorrect.

The outcome of this is simple: you'll have selected top N individuals from an exam of half a million people and put them in a single school. Of course you're going to see those people shine. That says _nothing_ about the absolute quality of what that school gives you, just how good it is relative to its peers in the country, and I define quality as "output - input". The "input" is high quality, but the delta is merely meh in my opinion. Also, the students are high quality--the faculty are generally not (unlike what's mentioned in the article), but they do end up taking some credit.

In terms of the contribution of the country, I can just say that she is a survivor of an accident years ago, where seven talented math students died, whom had similar achievements to hers at the time. Overall, the contribution of the country to its mathematicians has been negative, specifically so to the female ones.

Since 1990, at least one Fields Medal winner has worked in France -- until this year. France has a culture of supporting mathematics and mathematicians. It has its quirks and difficulties, but national support for research has played an important role.

The whole thread is really incredible. Just a bit further down[1] you see someone criticize him and his startup (Tarsnap) for having a "phenomenal misunderstanding of what it takes to create a successful software startup."

And then Drew Houston of Dropbox chimes in to say that he's building a similar backup solution.

Doubtful. First, Forbes says that dhouston has a net worth of $1.2B; and even if I had been an extra cofounder, splitting the cofounder shares more ways would have brought it below $1B.

Second, I really doubt I could have stuck it out at Dropbox for the necessary time. I like to do things in ways which are technically right rather than necessarily financially right; Dropbox is a phenomenally successful business, but it's not a product which I like.

W/ respect to your specific "sad" example, the topmost comment on that thread gives the relevant information and has not been downvoted (as I'm reading it). The downvoted comment below it doesn't seem to add anything useful (but I didn't downvote it).

Plus, if you think something's been downvoted inappropriately, vote it up. People make mistakes sometimes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's not about being afraid, it's about not lowering the signal/noise ratio any further.

You should post a comment when, and only when, you have something substantive to say. There are many more downvotes than there are substantive things to say, which is why subthreads about downvotes invariably degenerate.