9 ms·

An MIT Underwear Exposé (and Sorting Hat)

163 points by aardvarks 10y ago

leblancfg 10y ago
Reading this made me downright sad that I didn't, and probably never will, attend MIT. Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects! How I wish I had worked harder.
- my_opic_farseer 10y ago
  From what I heard, working hard is like 10% of the effort to get into over-hyped shit schools like MiT. The rest is who you know, what you can pay, and what you're willing to do to get in.
  - azinman2 10y ago
    I wouldn't actually say that's true. Maybe Harvard but not MIT. I didn't know anyone, didn't pay (they paid me), and I didn't do anything specific for MIT admission. What makes you say it's a shit school?
    - leblancfg 10y ago
      I agree. And certainly don't think MIT, nor Harvard, are shit. You get what you put in. Mostly, I was educated in the Québec system, and had no idea before I was 16 that if I got good grades I could get into interesting universities -- even the American ones. Reading up voraciously on Richard Feynman, only to discover that if things had been different, I, too, could have gone to that school. By that time, it was too late, I simply didn't have the grades. My parents' perception that it would cost a fortune certainly didn't help. Not that I'm complaining, I can't change the past. But the idea of never attending MIT is one of those very few, recurring what-ifs? that will sometime keep me up at night, half a lifetime after.
      - azinman2 10y ago
        There's always grad school. I didn't get in undergrad, and I probably wouldn't have been ready had I.
      - tjalex 10y ago
        You're not missing out, don't sweat it :-) I went to a similar university, and one of the best things about working in tech is that the culture is so similar to that environment.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - ridgeguy 10y ago
        Referring to another current HN post, if Hugh Everett was right, at least one of you did attend MIT.
        MichaelGG 10y ago
        If Everett is right then doesn't that mean that one of him also, say, choked to death on his acceptance letter? I like the idea of immortality (no matter what happens, I'll always wake up OK in some branch, and that is me), but I'm not sure it actually helps otherwise, day-to-day. In fact, I'd guess there's more potentially bad universes so it seems rather much of a downer in that sense.
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  You really don't need to attend MIT to work on projects with people like these. Near me there's a tool library, a makerspace, two hackerspaces, a biotechspace, an art college, several medical schools, many different kinds of collectives, and several big art-focused festivals with grants. As a person who dropped out of high school and never went to college, i've worked on big art builds involving mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, thermodynamics, biotech, and mixed media art. The only thing i've ever worked hard on are these projects, which were all for fun. I'm sure a school like MIT is great, but thankfully you don't need it :-)
  - akhilcacharya 10y ago
    There is a massive difference in how credible you seem (and ergo, are treated) if you have an MIT, Ivy, or Stanford degree. I'm not 100% sure, but my hunch is that very few YC founders come from state schools like mine (although I know at least one did).
    - peterwwillis 10y ago
      Schools only give credibility as a replacement for experience. If you don't have school credibility, go get some experience. This applies to practically everything in life, the exception being when a degree is legally required to do a job.
      - akhilcacharya 10y ago
        I'm sure, but that takes a heck of a lot longer.
- noname123 10y ago
  FWIW, I never went to MIT (went to a small liberal arts college); but I work at an MIT affiliate, so by virtue of proximity and affiliation, go to talks given on campus, eat at their cafeteria, have audited classes and play basketball at their gym. But basically a third-party observer to campus culture, my subjective $0.02: The undergrad population is much to my dismay similar to any American school trained on the professional treadmill; most conversations I overhear involves seniors applying to medical school or law school or consulting or underclassmen discussing Google internships. To use a Bostonian (maybe NYC too?) metaphor that Bostonians can understand, there are just as many people with Canada Goose jackets on MIT campus as on Newbury Street. Like any school, it is not a homogenous population, "nerd's paradise" as parodied in the 80's movie "Real Genius"; although there are people who are genuinely interested in tech, there are people who want to pursue academic route who don't care for the Slashdot culture, jocks who are also science nerds, theatre geeks, int'l students who don't get the "American geek" culture... The only real insight I can offer in a Computational Biology class I audited, I've never seen so many interruptions in lecture when the professor is flying through the slides on the derivation of this algorithm and that proof. Hands fly up right there asking for clarification on what is this greek variable on the previous slide... whereas during the same undergrad class I took years ago, none of us would have spoken on the spot due to lack of confidence to avoid looking dumb/lack of drive to try to understand something right there on the spot.
  - phd514 10y ago
    You're definitely missing a significant subculture that exists among MIT undergraduates. The kinds of MIT-affiliated events that you describe are certainly not the ones where you are likely to discover it. You are correct, though, in observing that not all MIT undergraduates fit into that subculture and many will go into finance, law, or medical careers. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
    - noname123 10y ago
      Hi phd514, in reading your comment, you are absolutely right; my comment did paint a broad brush. In reconsidering my response, I'd retract what I said about MIT culture and say my remarks really says more about me and my own cynicism/preoccupation at my age, late twenties. It is in direct response to the parent post where the poster lamented about missing out a chance to experience the idealistic/radical youth culture when he was young, I responded more cynically about how in college I and my other friends did live in creative undergraduate communities; but whereas it was easy and natural to take on that attitude during undergrad, I found it became much harder to sustain those ideals in adulthood, as hard choices and realization of human nature creeps in, whether to truly sacrifice precious time and energy in your adulthood working towards them vs. "establishing" oneself professionally and socially; and because I struggle mightily with this, I put more value on what imperfect choices that people commit to as adults vs. the exciting (albeit memorable/enriching) experiences that they partook in as undergrads.
gyardley 10y ago
'Creepy' is right. I wonder how many people refrained from using an otherwise-useful mailing list because of someone they didn't want thinking about the color of their underwear. I further wonder if reluctance to talk about their underwear color publicly impacts different genders disproportionately.
- GuiA 10y ago
  This tradition plays so lightly with a taboo so mundane and it is so easy to just send a one word email ("white") to the mailing list to pass the test that I have to wonder about the state of mind of anyone calling this "creepy".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Thriptic 10y ago
  You could just lie, or not do it, or use an anon email, or use a MIT mailing list, or just not take things so seriously...
- Laaw 10y ago
  I actually do wonder how many people refrained from using this mailing list because of the underwear color requirement, because I honestly suspect it to be literally zero, and would be fascinated by any other answer.
- DanBC 10y ago
  It is creepy. But US colleges have done far far worse. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-lea... > ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing. > Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.
tomatoman 10y ago
Ofcourse Senior House had a lot of black underwear ;)
- kkylin 10y ago
  Of course! Would be interesting to see BC broken down by floor...
rajeevk 10y ago
So, if you are aspiring to attend classes at MIT then you know what to do now. If you are applying for the admission, then you can choose your underwear color to increase your chances to get in.
Symmetry 10y ago
Of course it was a fellow Randomite who put this together. :) Also, of course it was Senior Haus which had the highest prevalence of black underwear.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rosser 10y ago
This might be my favorite data science post ever to grace the front page of HN.
justinlardinois 10y ago
> Reasons for emailing all undergraduates include event announcements for student groups and departments, flame wars, and occasionally lost items. In contrast, the kinds of emails sent within a dorm mailing list include, at the top of my inbox right now, parties, house meetings, and foodmobs to restaurants in Boston; decisions about when to turn off the heating for spring, invitations to test food experiments, and a memo to the person who left their clothes in the middle washer; and requests for empty gallon jugs, superglue, cooking scales, male-to-male audio cables, MIDI cables, 120V twist lock connectors, funnels, and hairdryers. I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- bannus 10y ago
  Gmail makes it very easy (via the "Filter messages like these") to filter all messages from a mailing list. You can apply a label and skip the inbox so you just browse the list when you need to.
- mayneack 10y ago
  most are mailman or moira https://ist.mit.edu/email-lists https://ist.mit.edu/email-lists people just make filters.
- doctorwho42 10y ago
  Sort all from: EC-Discuss into folder: EC-Discuss ... Try to sort through it when you are bored... Realize you don't get anything out of it anymore -> Un-Subscribe to EC-Discuss email list. Clarification: EC-Discuss = East Campus (of MIT) discussion email list... it is known for this mass email of random nature.
- Kadin 10y ago
  This is exactly what filters are for and why every decent MUA has them. You just filter each list to a folder, or all the lists into a folder, and read them there rather than in your inbox.
ayw 10y ago
This type of thing makes me proud to be at MIT :)
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  This type of thing made me kind of sad to be unimpressive 2 years ago :) :(
curyous 10y ago
How were those pie charts generated?
- bannus 10y ago
  From article: > so I made pie charts from the parsed data and traced and colored them in BMF kitchen.
  - doug1001 10y ago
    i think this is a oblique way of saying the OP isn't going to open source their data visualisation code. :-)
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
Shouldn't MIT pay royalties if it's using Harry Potter references in its marketing material?
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
This is the best thing. I'm sorry, but I don't feel the need to qualify that statement. This is just one of those absolutely crazy projects that people do from time to time (although MIT certainly has a reputation for hosting a lot of them), and I love that sort of thing. As much as we talk up the importance of Bayes' theorem and other algorithms as things that can change the world, etc., sometimes, you can just build something cool, and have a laugh.
stared 10y ago
A silly question for the insiders: what does "teal with cameras" mean?
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  I assumed that the underwear was teal, and had cameras printed on it.
doug1001 10y ago
this is awesome. Eg, "There is a sad, persistent decrease in multicolored underwear, ending with none by senior year." Does "none" refer to NA (None, null, etc.) or to the lack of color in the respondents' underwear, or to going commando? i suppose like all great research, it raises more questions than it answers. more seriously, The OP seems to be inspired by a well-established tradition at the institute--MIT's sand mandala, perhaps. I graduated in 1992 and i remember some of my classmates from time to time, engaging in self-assigned projects that (i) seemed to lack any discernible purpose or utility whatever--certainly none for the student and (ii) that required a mind-boggling amount of meticulous effort. Somehow seeing these two attributes juxtaposed in a single endeavor, was hilarious to us (likewise the OP). Sometimes, though not always, these projects were deemed "pranks" but separate in my view.

163 points by aardvarks 10y ago

Reading this made me downright sad that I didn't, and probably never will, attend MIT. Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects! How I wish I had worked harder.

my_opic_farseer 10y ago
From what I heard, working hard is like 10% of the effort to get into over-hyped shit schools like MiT. The rest is who you know, what you can pay, and what you're willing to do to get in.
- azinman2 10y ago
  I wouldn't actually say that's true. Maybe Harvard but not MIT. I didn't know anyone, didn't pay (they paid me), and I didn't do anything specific for MIT admission. What makes you say it's a shit school?
  - leblancfg 10y ago
    I agree. And certainly don't think MIT, nor Harvard, are shit. You get what you put in. Mostly, I was educated in the Québec system, and had no idea before I was 16 that if I got good grades I could get into interesting universities -- even the American ones. Reading up voraciously on Richard Feynman, only to discover that if things had been different, I, too, could have gone to that school. By that time, it was too late, I simply didn't have the grades. My parents' perception that it would cost a fortune certainly didn't help. Not that I'm complaining, I can't change the past. But the idea of never attending MIT is one of those very few, recurring what-ifs? that will sometime keep me up at night, half a lifetime after.
    - azinman2 10y ago
      There's always grad school. I didn't get in undergrad, and I probably wouldn't have been ready had I.
    - tjalex 10y ago
      You're not missing out, don't sweat it :-) I went to a similar university, and one of the best things about working in tech is that the culture is so similar to that environment.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - ridgeguy 10y ago
      Referring to another current HN post, if Hugh Everett was right, at least one of you did attend MIT.
      - MichaelGG 10y ago
        If Everett is right then doesn't that mean that one of him also, say, choked to death on his acceptance letter? I like the idea of immortality (no matter what happens, I'll always wake up OK in some branch, and that is me), but I'm not sure it actually helps otherwise, day-to-day. In fact, I'd guess there's more potentially bad universes so it seems rather much of a downer in that sense.
peterwwillis 10y ago
You really don't need to attend MIT to work on projects with people like these. Near me there's a tool library, a makerspace, two hackerspaces, a biotechspace, an art college, several medical schools, many different kinds of collectives, and several big art-focused festivals with grants. As a person who dropped out of high school and never went to college, i've worked on big art builds involving mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, thermodynamics, biotech, and mixed media art. The only thing i've ever worked hard on are these projects, which were all for fun. I'm sure a school like MIT is great, but thankfully you don't need it :-)
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  There is a massive difference in how credible you seem (and ergo, are treated) if you have an MIT, Ivy, or Stanford degree. I'm not 100% sure, but my hunch is that very few YC founders come from state schools like mine (although I know at least one did).
  - peterwwillis 10y ago
    Schools only give credibility as a replacement for experience. If you don't have school credibility, go get some experience. This applies to practically everything in life, the exception being when a degree is legally required to do a job.
    - akhilcacharya 10y ago
      I'm sure, but that takes a heck of a lot longer.
noname123 10y ago
FWIW, I never went to MIT (went to a small liberal arts college); but I work at an MIT affiliate, so by virtue of proximity and affiliation, go to talks given on campus, eat at their cafeteria, have audited classes and play basketball at their gym. But basically a third-party observer to campus culture, my subjective $0.02: The undergrad population is much to my dismay similar to any American school trained on the professional treadmill; most conversations I overhear involves seniors applying to medical school or law school or consulting or underclassmen discussing Google internships. To use a Bostonian (maybe NYC too?) metaphor that Bostonians can understand, there are just as many people with Canada Goose jackets on MIT campus as on Newbury Street. Like any school, it is not a homogenous population, "nerd's paradise" as parodied in the 80's movie "Real Genius"; although there are people who are genuinely interested in tech, there are people who want to pursue academic route who don't care for the Slashdot culture, jocks who are also science nerds, theatre geeks, int'l students who don't get the "American geek" culture... The only real insight I can offer in a Computational Biology class I audited, I've never seen so many interruptions in lecture when the professor is flying through the slides on the derivation of this algorithm and that proof. Hands fly up right there asking for clarification on what is this greek variable on the previous slide... whereas during the same undergrad class I took years ago, none of us would have spoken on the spot due to lack of confidence to avoid looking dumb/lack of drive to try to understand something right there on the spot.
- phd514 10y ago
  You're definitely missing a significant subculture that exists among MIT undergraduates. The kinds of MIT-affiliated events that you describe are certainly not the ones where you are likely to discover it. You are correct, though, in observing that not all MIT undergraduates fit into that subculture and many will go into finance, law, or medical careers. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
  - noname123 10y ago
    Hi phd514, in reading your comment, you are absolutely right; my comment did paint a broad brush. In reconsidering my response, I'd retract what I said about MIT culture and say my remarks really says more about me and my own cynicism/preoccupation at my age, late twenties. It is in direct response to the parent post where the poster lamented about missing out a chance to experience the idealistic/radical youth culture when he was young, I responded more cynically about how in college I and my other friends did live in creative undergraduate communities; but whereas it was easy and natural to take on that attitude during undergrad, I found it became much harder to sustain those ideals in adulthood, as hard choices and realization of human nature creeps in, whether to truly sacrifice precious time and energy in your adulthood working towards them vs. "establishing" oneself professionally and socially; and because I struggle mightily with this, I put more value on what imperfect choices that people commit to as adults vs. the exciting (albeit memorable/enriching) experiences that they partook in as undergrads.

gyardley 10y ago

'Creepy' is right. I wonder how many people refrained from using an otherwise-useful mailing list because of someone they didn't want thinking about the color of their underwear. I further wonder if reluctance to talk about their underwear color publicly impacts different genders disproportionately.

GuiA 10y ago
This tradition plays so lightly with a taboo so mundane and it is so easy to just send a one word email ("white") to the mailing list to pass the test that I have to wonder about the state of mind of anyone calling this "creepy".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Thriptic 10y ago
You could just lie, or not do it, or use an anon email, or use a MIT mailing list, or just not take things so seriously...
Laaw 10y ago
I actually do wonder how many people refrained from using this mailing list because of the underwear color requirement, because I honestly suspect it to be literally zero, and would be fascinated by any other answer.
DanBC 10y ago
It is creepy. But US colleges have done far far worse. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photo-scandal.html http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-lea... > ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing. > Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.

tomatoman 10y ago

Ofcourse Senior House had a lot of black underwear ;)

kkylin 10y ago
Of course! Would be interesting to see BC broken down by floor...

rajeevk 10y ago

So, if you are aspiring to attend classes at MIT then you know what to do now. If you are applying for the admission, then you can choose your underwear color to increase your chances to get in.

Symmetry 10y ago

Of course it was a fellow Randomite who put this together. :) Also, of course it was Senior Haus which had the highest prevalence of black underwear.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

rosser 10y ago

This might be my favorite data science post ever to grace the front page of HN.

justinlardinois 10y ago

> Reasons for emailing all undergraduates include event announcements for student groups and departments, flame wars, and occasionally lost items. In contrast, the kinds of emails sent within a dorm mailing list include, at the top of my inbox right now, parties, house meetings, and foodmobs to restaurants in Boston; decisions about when to turn off the heating for spring, invitations to test food experiments, and a memo to the person who left their clothes in the middle washer; and requests for empty gallon jugs, superglue, cooking scales, male-to-male audio cables, MIDI cables, 120V twist lock connectors, funnels, and hairdryers. I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bannus 10y ago
Gmail makes it very easy (via the "Filter messages like these") to filter all messages from a mailing list. You can apply a label and skip the inbox so you just browse the list when you need to.
mayneack 10y ago
most are mailman or moira https://ist.mit.edu/email-lists https://ist.mit.edu/email-lists people just make filters.
doctorwho42 10y ago
Sort all from: EC-Discuss into folder: EC-Discuss ... Try to sort through it when you are bored... Realize you don't get anything out of it anymore -> Un-Subscribe to EC-Discuss email list. Clarification: EC-Discuss = East Campus (of MIT) discussion email list... it is known for this mass email of random nature.
Kadin 10y ago
This is exactly what filters are for and why every decent MUA has them. You just filter each list to a folder, or all the lists into a folder, and read them there rather than in your inbox.

ayw 10y ago

This type of thing makes me proud to be at MIT :)

akhilcacharya 10y ago
This type of thing made me kind of sad to be unimpressive 2 years ago :) :(

curyous 10y ago

How were those pie charts generated?

bannus 10y ago
From article: > so I made pie charts from the parsed data and traced and colored them in BMF kitchen.
- doug1001 10y ago
  i think this is a oblique way of saying the OP isn't going to open source their data visualisation code. :-)

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

Shouldn't MIT pay royalties if it's using Harry Potter references in its marketing material?

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

This is the best thing. I'm sorry, but I don't feel the need to qualify that statement. This is just one of those absolutely crazy projects that people do from time to time (although MIT certainly has a reputation for hosting a lot of them), and I love that sort of thing. As much as we talk up the importance of Bayes' theorem and other algorithms as things that can change the world, etc., sometimes, you can just build something cool, and have a laugh.

stared 10y ago

A silly question for the insiders: what does "teal with cameras" mean?

PhasmaFelis 10y ago
I assumed that the underwear was teal, and had cameras printed on it.

doug1001 10y ago

this is awesome. Eg, "There is a sad, persistent decrease in multicolored underwear, ending with none by senior year." Does "none" refer to NA (None, null, etc.) or to the lack of color in the respondents' underwear, or to going commando? i suppose like all great research, it raises more questions than it answers. more seriously, The OP seems to be inspired by a well-established tradition at the institute--MIT's sand mandala, perhaps. I graduated in 1992 and i remember some of my classmates from time to time, engaging in self-assigned projects that (i) seemed to lack any discernible purpose or utility whatever--certainly none for the student and (ii) that required a mind-boggling amount of meticulous effort. Somehow seeing these two attributes juxtaposed in a single endeavor, was hilarious to us (likewise the OP). Sometimes, though not always, these projects were deemed "pranks" but separate in my view.