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This was a pretty good article -- certainly one of the better portraits I've read of SA.

However, I usually see better writing in the New Yorker. Take "as a result, the once nerdy Y Combinator is now aggressively geeky." What the hell does that mean? (Nothing.)

OTOH, a few memorable quotes:

> Growth masks all problems. (Steve Huffman)

> Despite having raised a robust $1.6 million after Demo Day, the founders were ridden with angst. Fredrik Thomassen said that they wanted to make their war chest last forever, and Sondre Rasch mentioned that he’d frugally chosen to live in a twelve-entrepreneur collective in a nearby forest.



Nerds are obsessive about and skilled at one thing. Geeks are good at academics in general.


Here's a post that tries to solve the geek vs nerd argument with Science!: https://slackprop.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/on-geek-versus-ne...

P.S. The mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/747/


and "upload"?

"what intrigues him is their potential effect on the world. To determine that, he’ll upload all he needs to know about, say, urban planning or nuclear fusion."


I read it as somewhere between "skim" and "learn" - it's probably a term sama used himself in the interview. If you think of yourself as a machine it's probably a term than makes sense; it doesn't feel particularly aspirational to me :)


Even so, wouldn't you use download?


Yep -- this one puzzled me so much that I assumed I was in the wrong, because surely there's no way that a writer for the New Yorker would make a mistake that egregious. I must have read that sentence twenty times.




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