Education is a good point. New algorithms are often found in academia that aren't exactly on Hacker News all of the time. It doesn't matter which field either -

Education is a good point. New algorithms are often found in academia that aren't exactly on Hacker News all of the time. It doesn't matter which field either - micro architecture, high performance computing, UX, databases, PL, computational linguistics, you name it. Or hell, math has been around for a long time and you might not know planar graph algorithms off-hand unless you were really smart or had taken the course two months ago. This whole debate is nutty. I personally would welcome as much strategic and intellectual diversity as possible onto teams I'm running. I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, either.