Going to echo the suggestions for the Art of Problem Solving books, particularly I recommend the contest books (vol 1 or 2). Several very talented people have said to me that these books taught them how to think. Maybe a bit exaggerated, but they’re very good.
That’s true, but my view is even if the original article is unbiased, the selection process by which it was chosen to appear on this periodical with the reach it has introduces some statistical bias.
Human Revolution was wonderful, but Mankind Divided had such bizarre pacing… I was ~15 hours into Prague, waiting for the transition to the next locale like in all of the other Deus Ex games, and then the story ended… sigh
Linux kernel has a bunch of gotos, primarily used to just jump to exit / deallocate on kmalloc failure, without having to unnecessarily complicate the control flow to handle that.
This take seems a bit pessimistic about the longevity of society to me. If we still have tens or hundreds of thousands of years to go, just going with whatever was best by 2020 seems a bit ad hoc. Not that I know the future.
I thought modern computers are primarily cache limited and even running an os entirely on ram (on a system with no hdd/sdd) isn’t that much faster. I would be curious to see some data.
> I went to a mid-tier state school and my friends were just people I happened to be lumped together in housing. Is it "optimal"? No, but I enjoyed it. My friend crew consisted of a stoner, a very religious dude, a meat head and a Brooklyn hipster. I don't know, I liked it like that. None of them really taught me anything (wtf does an 18 year old know), but it might be different in technical fields. Both have trade offs.
Yeah, my ug friend group was similar. It’s completely valid to have different preferences in what one wants out of life. However, I personally did feel much happier / interested later on in life being in friendgroups where everyone had some kind of serious career aspiration.
I strongly encourage you to contact MIT about your situation and family’s situation and try to negotiate out more financial aid.
As someone who went to a flagship state school for undergrad and ivy for phd…
A) Most of the people I know who turned down higher-ranked schools for lower-ranked ones because of money regret it. You will make a lot of life-long friends in college, and you will just be exposed to a different caliber of person on average at mit. Random people you meet through friends of friends at brunches or happy hours will be weirdly accomplished and teach you things.
B) Your analysis seems to hinge on doing a phd at a top-n school. What if it turns out after a few years of college that you don’t want to do a phd after all? Then instead of being either mit phd, or mit bs, you are z school bs. This may not be terrible, but not optimal.
D) On the other hand, I think the differences in career outcomes on average are small, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the probability of starting a company with any given level of success x is 10 times higher for mit alum than Z school alums. Anyway, median mit cs alum has some faang-y job throughout their careers, and these companies all know/understand that many top students can’t all afford top colleges, and so they recruit from state schools as well. So the tail outcomes can be quite different, mean/median isn’t that much.
E) For careers like management consulting or investment banking, some top firms only recruit at top-n schools. However, eg mckinsey even does on-campus recruiting at places like ut austin or georgia tech now, so then it doesn’t matter. You just need yo be at an on-campus recruitment target school.
In my opinion, the lifetime of friends and network effects is most of the benefit, and not to be underestimated. You only live once.