It must have crushed your soul to have Neovim in the support list and no Emacs to be seen anywhere. Hilarious post, though... Don't let the Marketing folks keep you down. :)
Loved this article. It presents a compelling case that most colleges are providing near-equivalent education, and that the variance is mostly in selection bias. My only objection: at the end, the author takes issue with the fact that it's nearly impossible to get people to take selection bias into account when choosing where to send their kids. However, there's another possible factor that I think parents might be considering: the network of connections that I build when I go to school X. Even if Harvard gives my daughter the same educational quality that, say, Florida State gives her... if she's likely to form a network of friends that are all approximately 100x higher in net worth, then if I care about her long-term economic outcomes, I'd still try hard to send her to Harvard, no?
I'm not saying that's ideal, and it's most certainly an outcome of the exact selection bias you're talking about... just that it's a semi-rational choice for the parents, because school choices can often be about non-educational effects.
Just my two cents, though... I could be way off. And regardless, thanks for the article.. definitely made me think about the topic more than I had.
FYI, since you're here: visiting your site on FF in Windows 10 is throwing an insecure error, saying you're using an invalid certificate. 100% possible that's somehow an error on my end - but just in case it isn't, thought you'd want to know. Sample URL throwing it: https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/books-chapter-three
Side note: I'm hugely grateful for all your work on OpenBSD.
This is probably repetitive with some of the other comments, but I'd absolutely be willing to pay $3/mo for a service that will do the following:
1) Most importantly, de-dupe contacts on all devices. Get VERY good at fuzzy matching algorithms, they can't possibly be too hard. I have an iPhone that for no obvious reason to me, has 8 different versions of a single contact, despite having near-exact replicas of the contact's data. I want a 1:1 match of people:contacts. Even a basic flow wherein you say "Here's all the contacts we're merging... uncheck any you think we messed up" would be hugely useful on all devices. But for this, you need to be able to write/delete contacts.. no idea if that's possible in an Apple world. I'm staggered that no one is doing this today (that I know of).
2) Import from all normal places where people store contacts (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, ICQ, Twitter, AOL Messenger, LinkedIn, Myspace, iCloud/Apple, Exchange, Linux datastores, etc... this obviously takes time).
3) Once you've imported, provide re-export / de-duping for all sources (in other words, after you've gone through and classified my contacts, allow me to say "Sync all that information back into Google contacts, Plaxo, etc.").
4) Really ideally, don't store the raw data on your servers, only store it encrypted so that you can't answer government requests. This requirement conflicts with your ability to get raw data to feed those fuzzy algorithms, though, so it'd probably have to get dropped, I'm guessing.
5) If you want to increase your viral coefficient dramatically, start building identity profiles of people based off of publicly-available information on the Net, and offer it to people who already have that person as a contact. Increased stalking capabilities are always popular (if evil).
6) Export not just to services, but to any popular data formats (Sounds like you have CardDav taken care of, but even just raw XML exports, CSV exports, tab-delimited exports, exports of just address data or phone numbers or names, etc.)
7) Allow an option whereby a user can have a personal profile, and when that user's contact info changes, notify anyone connected that their contact info has changed. (Probably not that important until you get to Facebook scale)
8) Allow for groupings, and allow a person to be in multiple groupings (while still understanding that that person is the same person). Start with some basics (Family, Friends, Co-workers), and import say Exchange contacts into Co-workers by default). Also, sync groupings with external services on demand.
There's probably more, but even just solving #1 would be a huge deal.