pgbovine

Edit: Or they wanted to start a business in a field where graduate level credentials are required for people to take you seriously (e.g., biotech, clean energy, medical devices, etc.)

but yes, i agree with you that for an intro class, students should focus on writing clear code and then optimizing for performance later.

Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born!

what an awesomely productive intern! now that's a way to secure yourself a full-time job!

and your point is?

or ovaries-out, i suppose?

My oversimplified view of the world is that there's a 2x2 matrix: {need to work hard, don't need to work hard} x {doing what you love, doing what you don't love}. you're obviously in (1,1). i think the goal is to avoid (1,2) at all costs. i imagine that most people's jobs are in (2,2), which is fine and better than (1,2).

From wikipedia: "Stallman then enrolled as a graduate student in physics at MIT, but abandoned his graduate studies while remaining a programmer at the MIT AI Laboratory. Stallman abandoned his pursuit of a doctorate in physics in favor of programming."

perhaps he has an honorary doctorate?

on a side note, perhaps this is a benefit of attending college that a lot of the anti-education crowd here on HN might not realize --- connections with alumni from your alma mater. of course, you still need to take massive initiative like OP did, but at least that option is available to you.

having a security sub-section in TOS is great, but it might be buried in google searches. anyways, it seems like this is a common concern amongst bloggers as you guys are exponentially rising in popularity, so some good PR on that front might be needed.

as usual, we're all rooting for you :)

seems a tad cliched, don't you think? i'd bet that most people wouldn't want to self-associate with an emotionless android

How would the HN crowd react to that? probably not nearly as favorably as to Woz saying that hacker-like projects should be the marks of success in school. But one could argue that those skills (persuasion, fund-raising, crowd psychology) are important for success in life as well.

The point I'm trying to make is that this project-centric view of success is very biased towards hackers, and it's an oversimplification to believe that most of the population would also find this appealing.

I think the point I was (not so eloquently) trying to convey in my parent post was that hackers value 'creating something unique that they can keep' more than most people in the population, and since woz is the ultimate hacker, it makes sense that he's pushing for this sort of project-based education. I don't have any good examples off the top of my head, but you could imagine other cultures or even personality types within your own culture where people place value on something other than projects that they can hack on and show off to the world on github.

what kinds of projects would you propose for kids who want to be lawyers? doctors? hairstylists? law enforcement? military? basically anything except for engineering?

if you wanna write a blog post speculating on that, i'd gladly post it to HN

best of luck to you, though!