[YuriNiyazov]

I understand that the comment you are replying to here says "nobody in the US is even attempting to train effective programmers, let alone 'star' ones." However, a few comments up, you say "The fundamental issue you mentioned above is that companies want stars, and you can't train stars."

Can you elaborate on how you envision things like hacker school to solve the problem of stars, if those can't be trained? I am not trying to be semantically nit-picky - I don't think I understand how star programmers come about, and maybe you have better insight.

The only thing I can think of is that you might imply that being a star programmer is an innate talent that needs to be developed, and things like hacker school would allow for this talent to be discovered. Is that about right?

[balsam]

PG's reply here is still consistent, if we assume that hackerschool is meant to train effective programmers, not so much star ones. But you raise an interesting parallel, though. It seems that a premise of YC is not so much to train great startup founders as to distil them out of the world population. I don't know whether that the former is hard, inefficient, or impossible, but I'm sure a lot of people would like to know. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6091086 for a special case of "waking people up".