montrose

This quote

"We're feeding it to the public in bite-sized chunks."

from a non-paywalled article

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/dozens-heard-amel...

makes it clear that this story is part of a carefully managed PR campaign. Not that that makes it false. But it means we should treat it with extra skepticism.

Does this make these worms the oldest living things?

Privacy nightmare perhaps, but actual threat to SV cos, no.

Reading this, I was reminded of Hardy's Mathematician's Apology. He mentions several of these points.

Though this article sounds plausible, I became more skeptical when I noticed he put the word "facility" in scare quotes.

I've worked at home for decades. In the beginning when I had small apartments, I used to put a table with my computer on it inside a closet. I'd open up the closet door, pull up a chair, and voila, office.

In those days, monitors were thick, and the web didn't exist. Now that monitors are thinner and computers have become many people's de facto TVs, there would be less advantage in doing this.

Ask them what they would pay for.

If this trend is real it will be really good for social mobility.

Than the general population possibly, but not than the applicant pool, which is the comparison that matters.

It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.

"Legacy applicants, or students with a parent who attended Harvard, were accepted to the school at the rate of about 34%, according to data from six admissions cycles analyzed by an economist hired by the group suing the school. That’s compared to an admissions rate of about 6% of non-legacy students, according to an analysis of Harvard data."

How could they be moving faster than the speed of light?

Do you think the state of the art in quantum computing is already more advanced than we realize, in the same way that the state of the art in cryptography was when R, S, and A thought they had discovered RSA?

Blaming the "startup mentality" makes a good linkbait title, but Occam's razor suggests that when the latest cool-sounding attempt to reform public schools in cities fails, it's probably for the same reasons that previous cool-sounding attempts to reform public schools have failed: politics, turf wars, existing vested interests, and so on.

Ah, thank you.

I notice that although Zuse's patent applications are mentioned in the Wikipedia article on stored-program computers, the Z3 is not included in the list of candidates for first working hardware. Can anyone explain to me why it would have been disqualified?

"Founders rank speed as their 3rd most important criteria and VCs, in fact, ranked it as the least important one."

This disconnect represents a significant opportunity for new VC firms.