7 ms·

> Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false. -- On a serious note, interesting idea. It won't happe

by markbao 17y ago

> Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false. -- On a serious note, interesting idea. It won't happen, since the US education system (and the public sector in general) is not open to, well, any kind of change. But as the founder of 9 startups, high school wasn't a huge help for me in any ways other than somewhere to socialize. However, this is the special case. High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%. Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.)

absconditus 17y ago
"High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%." Toward what end? Babysitting teenagers? Forcing people to memorize information that they forget a day after the final exam?
- markbao 17y ago
  The way I see it, high school doesn't really teach content, it teaches learning, which we've been learning (cout << recursive_meta_joke) for about eight years now. The second thing that high school gives is a one-year introduction to the various careers that can be taken on. For example, I notice one thing with many of the people I talk to, to this regard: high school is where the transition from "YEAH MAN, I'm going to be a pro athlete when I grow up dude" to "I thought physiology was pretty cool in bio class, so I'm going to go and do premed." But of course, this doesn't work for a lot of people. It doesn't work with me, because I've personally already have found my passion (and it has been for three years.) It also didn't work for Richard Branson. Everyone complains about high school. And there's definitely a lot of rote memorization. But for some people, they might not gain this important "oh, this is actually pretty cool" moment.
  - jacoblyles 17y ago
    Those of us who went to school in old North Carolina tobacco towns did not learn how to learn in High School.
  - absconditus 17y ago
    If I believed that most high schools taught people how to learn I'd be very satisfied. There are many options that we could explore if our political system allowed it. The one that makes the most sense to me is to provide two paths for students: one which leads to a university and one which is vocational. The university path could begin at 16 with the curriculum that would typically be taught to a college freshman.
    - warwick 17y ago
      You might want to have a look at CEGEPs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP
      - psawaya 17y ago
        I think this is a pretty good idea! A lot of students at the colleges I went to spent their first year taking core classes or classes in a major they ended up switching out of. Might as well let students take care of that first year somewhere more affordable/accessible to everyone, and then move on to college.
  - mattmcknight 17y ago
    But if you already know most of what they are teaching you, it doesn't teach learning. School needs to use a pre-test, post-test methodology. Pass the pre-test and you can skip a topic, fail the post-test and you have to study it longer.
  - puffythefish 17y ago
    Oh, bullshit. It teaches "95% of kids" to hate learning because it turns it into a job.
    - _pi 17y ago
      Learning is a job, if it wasn't so damn hard and stressful everyone would be a quantum physicist. Teenage kids need to accept the realities of life.
      - andreshb 17y ago
        Realities of life are not taught in high school. Regular High School is a joke, however, specialized optional programs like International Baccaularate or AP, I found more challenging than most college classes. Unfortunately, these are optional, IB/AP should be the norm.
      - puffythefish 17y ago
        Sorry, maybe I used the wrong word; learning certainly requires work, but it shouldn't be treated as a chore.
  - andreshb 17y ago
    "We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world" So sure, content-wise it was useless, but now I see that I can pick up any project or subject learn it and apply it really quickly. But I am still not ok that they were not capable of providing valuable content and practical knowledge in class. Neither in college nor in high school did I learn anything from class or teachers (except for a handful), my education was mostly Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, not textbooks or teachers. (I stopped buying books my last semesters in College after I realized I never opened them when I did)
    - _pi 17y ago
      "We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world" That's a horrible argument that defines your disdain for learning.
      - andreshb 17y ago
        It is an argument that defines my methods for learning, which is that I learn on my own. Not a disdain for learning. I strongly believe in learning by doing.
antonovka 17y ago
I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false. I was a teenager -- I dropped out of school, moved out of my parents home, and took a full time technology job at 16, and began working my way up. This meant that by the time my peers graduated from college, I had 6 years of experience under my belt. I wasn't special, I was simply motivated. If my home and school life had been satisfactory, I probably would have been content to sit out my future high school and college years with very little responsibility, and I imagine this is the situation that most teenagers find themselves in. High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%. 95% of teenagers don't accept real responsibility and behave like capable adults because there is no external motivation or encouragement to do so. Is this beneficial to their well-being? Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.) That depends on what you would like to do with your life. Returning to college later in life is surprisingly easy.
- Retric 17y ago
  If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition. Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level. http://books.google.com/books?id=2xpvp4ie_8MC&dq=hippocampus+development+teenagers&source=gbs_navlinks_s http://books.google.com/books?id=2xpvp4ie_8MC&dq=hippoca...
  - antonovka 17y ago
    If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition. My circumstances were special, not me. Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level. Cognitive differences do not preclude all responsibility. As it currently stands, most teenagers are provided with none at all, despite their historically demonstrated ability to shoulder considerably more than our institutions provide. I was not special -- I did quite a few phenomenally stupid things as a teenager -- but I also learned how to be an adult sooner. [Edit] One of the dangers of expressing this opinion is that it triggers cognitive dissonance amongst those who did follow the standard protocol. So, allow me to reiterate -- given the proper circumstances, I believe all teenagers are well capable of accepting quite a bit more responsibility than they are currently allowed, but most never have the external encouragement or motivation to do so.
electronslave 17y ago
Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.) I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset. By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear! I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half. Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- smanek 17y ago
  given me infallible icebreakers Care to share? I've never had much luck on developing those ...
  - jibiki 17y ago
    "Have you ever throttled a mountain lion with your bare hands?" I think you need to actually experience a story to use it as an icebreaker. Nobody likes a liar.
    - electronslave 17y ago
      Exactly. It's not that there are 39 Awesome Icebreakers For Hackers, but rather that I have stories and experiences that (more or less) relate to almost anyone I'm likely to meet. And yes, the stories are often more fun in the telling than in the living.
hedgehog 17y ago
The data doesn't support high school working out for 95% of students. Fewer than 70% of US high school students graduate with their class. Few districts do better than 80%. About 3% or so homeschool, so that leaves you with about 67% who graduate in the system. The 2005 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that 34% of 12th graders rated "proficient" reading abilities. Not exactly a glowing success. There are good options if you're looking for alternatives. I know a bit about the situation in Seattle because I opted out of high school there. The school district there has a "school" set up where home schoolers can register, do some non-home friendly classes (science & theater mostly IIRC), and benefit from government education funding. Many cities have programs that let high schoolers get credit for taking college classes and some universities are set up to do early admission (I did the UW program). Before all that I did an apprenticeship at a small electronics company (age 13). Pretty much you need to do the legwork though, you may find that the school district isn't interested in helping students leave the system (taking their funding with them).
- fburnaby 17y ago
  Couldn't a fail be an indicator that schools still are serving kids? "Oh, Johnny didn't really get it the first time around, let's get him to try again"? I'm not necessarily advocating this point of view, but stating the statistic isn't enough to get your point across. You need to propose a proper way of interpreting those results as well.
bokonist 17y ago
High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%. Funny. If you listen to the political-sphere, the argument is that high school sucks for most people, but works brilliantly for the well-off. But if you actually ask the well-off and the people at the top of the class, they almost unanimously decry it as an awful waste of time. High school does not really work for anyone. The vast majority of people end up learning their trade on the job. Why delay that process 4 (or 8) years?
- Zev 17y ago
  Why do you assume that people know what they want to do when they're 13-14 years old? If you were to ask me what I wanted to do back then, I'd look at you funny and say "computers". Come to think of it, If you were to ask me what I want to do now (I'm 19, a junior in college), I'd probably give you the exact same answer. Even though one of my majors has nothing to do with computers at all (other one does), nor did my internship this summer.
  - bokonist 17y ago
    I don't. But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process. I'm three years out of college. Most of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do in graduation. They picked a job, didn't like it, and now are switching. Except now the biological clocks are ticking, and it's becoming more important to pick the right path, because there is a major costs in switching careers. If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family.
    - Zev 17y ago
      But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process. I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?). Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge. //edit (to reply to this bit): If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".
fallentimes 17y ago
9 startups or 9 websites?
- markbao 17y ago
  I've had my fair share of websites. I don't consider, for example, http://speakhq.com http://speakhq.com a startup. At all. Whereas I do consider http://ramamia.com http://ramamia.com a startup, and http://tickrtalk.com http://tickrtalk.com a startup (funded and in dev), and http://classleaf.com http://classleaf.com a startup. I can change that to 8 if Avecora (which did previous web stuff, but now is developing a mobile dev) doesn't count as one, since it's in development. In fact. I'll list them and try to qualify them, chronologically sorted. DebateWare - sold enterprise event mgmt software. sponsoring debate event in bos in oct Avecora - doing a mobile device in dev Avecora OnDemand - CRM/Project Management app. only connected to Avecora by name. market sucked. Cadmium - social advertising network. used facebook data to target ads. decent revenue, closed down later b/c market was :/. Student Concourse - was at WebInno 22. Lots of users but bad retention rate. Closed down. FB Idol: >15,000 Facebook users and very active. monetized via ads, with good money. said screw it and sold it. Ramamia: with hnuser:jasonlbaptiste. few thousand users, in public beta. tons of gigs of photos. launching next month. TickrTalk: in dev. funded by UPenn Weiss Tech Fund. Classleaf: sales force started making calls last week. software. it's selling. Adaptance: in dev: advanced ad network built on a complex algorithm combining behavioral + contextual + 3 other targeting metrics. Actually, that's 10, but remove Avecora OnDemand and there's the nine.
  - fallentimes 17y ago
    Yeah I was more curious than anything. I don't really know what the definition of a startup is, but I know it's certainly different than a website. HN in general tends to have a very liberal definition of the word. Side projects that never made a dime or had more than a few hundreds visitors are rightly or wrongly considered startups rather frequently. The word "startup" is so overused that like the terms "breaking news" and "celebrity" it doesn't really mean much anymore. Website -> Startup News -> Breaking News Reality TV Appearance -> Celebrity

by markbao 17y ago

absconditus 17y ago

"High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%." Toward what end? Babysitting teenagers? Forcing people to memorize information that they forget a day after the final exam?

markbao 17y ago
The way I see it, high school doesn't really teach content, it teaches learning, which we've been learning (cout << recursive_meta_joke) for about eight years now. The second thing that high school gives is a one-year introduction to the various careers that can be taken on. For example, I notice one thing with many of the people I talk to, to this regard: high school is where the transition from "YEAH MAN, I'm going to be a pro athlete when I grow up dude" to "I thought physiology was pretty cool in bio class, so I'm going to go and do premed." But of course, this doesn't work for a lot of people. It doesn't work with me, because I've personally already have found my passion (and it has been for three years.) It also didn't work for Richard Branson. Everyone complains about high school. And there's definitely a lot of rote memorization. But for some people, they might not gain this important "oh, this is actually pretty cool" moment.
- jacoblyles 17y ago
  Those of us who went to school in old North Carolina tobacco towns did not learn how to learn in High School.
- absconditus 17y ago
  If I believed that most high schools taught people how to learn I'd be very satisfied. There are many options that we could explore if our political system allowed it. The one that makes the most sense to me is to provide two paths for students: one which leads to a university and one which is vocational. The university path could begin at 16 with the curriculum that would typically be taught to a college freshman.
  - warwick 17y ago
    You might want to have a look at CEGEPs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CEGEP
    - psawaya 17y ago
      I think this is a pretty good idea! A lot of students at the colleges I went to spent their first year taking core classes or classes in a major they ended up switching out of. Might as well let students take care of that first year somewhere more affordable/accessible to everyone, and then move on to college.
- mattmcknight 17y ago
  But if you already know most of what they are teaching you, it doesn't teach learning. School needs to use a pre-test, post-test methodology. Pass the pre-test and you can skip a topic, fail the post-test and you have to study it longer.
- puffythefish 17y ago
  Oh, bullshit. It teaches "95% of kids" to hate learning because it turns it into a job.
  - _pi 17y ago
    Learning is a job, if it wasn't so damn hard and stressful everyone would be a quantum physicist. Teenage kids need to accept the realities of life.
    - andreshb 17y ago
      Realities of life are not taught in high school. Regular High School is a joke, however, specialized optional programs like International Baccaularate or AP, I found more challenging than most college classes. Unfortunately, these are optional, IB/AP should be the norm.
    - puffythefish 17y ago
      Sorry, maybe I used the wrong word; learning certainly requires work, but it shouldn't be treated as a chore.
- andreshb 17y ago
  "We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world" So sure, content-wise it was useless, but now I see that I can pick up any project or subject learn it and apply it really quickly. But I am still not ok that they were not capable of providing valuable content and practical knowledge in class. Neither in college nor in high school did I learn anything from class or teachers (except for a handful), my education was mostly Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, not textbooks or teachers. (I stopped buying books my last semesters in College after I realized I never opened them when I did)
  - _pi 17y ago
    "We teach you how to learn" was repeated over and over again in my engineering department at my university. I always thought it was an excuse and justification that allowed them to save face and make it ok that what was being taught was going to be useless in the "real world" That's a horrible argument that defines your disdain for learning.
    - andreshb 17y ago
      It is an argument that defines my methods for learning, which is that I learn on my own. Not a disdain for learning. I strongly believe in learning by doing.

antonovka 17y ago

I'm currently a teenager. This is mostly false. I was a teenager -- I dropped out of school, moved out of my parents home, and took a full time technology job at 16, and began working my way up. This meant that by the time my peers graduated from college, I had 6 years of experience under my belt. I wasn't special, I was simply motivated. If my home and school life had been satisfactory, I probably would have been content to sit out my future high school and college years with very little responsibility, and I imagine this is the situation that most teenagers find themselves in. High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%. 95% of teenagers don't accept real responsibility and behave like capable adults because there is no external motivation or encouragement to do so. Is this beneficial to their well-being? Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.) That depends on what you would like to do with your life. Returning to college later in life is surprisingly easy.

Retric 17y ago
If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition. Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level. http://books.google.com/books?id=2xpvp4ie_8MC&dq=hippocampus+development+teenagers&source=gbs_navlinks_s http://books.google.com/books?id=2xpvp4ie_8MC&dq=hippoca...
- antonovka 17y ago
  If you did something that 99.9999% of the population did not do then you are special by definition. My circumstances were special, not me. Teenager's have significantly different levels of cognitive ability compared to adults. There is a reason most people look back on their teenage years and say "why was I so stupid" and honestly it's because your brain was less developed on a biological level. Cognitive differences do not preclude all responsibility. As it currently stands, most teenagers are provided with none at all, despite their historically demonstrated ability to shoulder considerably more than our institutions provide. I was not special -- I did quite a few phenomenally stupid things as a teenager -- but I also learned how to be an adult sooner. [Edit] One of the dangers of expressing this opinion is that it triggers cognitive dissonance amongst those who did follow the standard protocol. So, allow me to reiterate -- given the proper circumstances, I believe all teenagers are well capable of accepting quite a bit more responsibility than they are currently allowed, but most never have the external encouragement or motivation to do so.

electronslave 17y ago

Dropping out is not an option. You 100% will have a much harder time with acceptance with most colleges (and asian parents.) I enjoyed turning on, tuning in and dropping out, fwiw. It's not for everyone, but life experience has fine-tuned my BS filter, given me infallible icebreakers and generally purged that poisonous Life-As-A-Race mindset. By my experience getting into university after doing the dot-com years and a few years of domesticated life, colleges only care about their straight-out-of-secondary rates (given, I went to a state school, not an Ivy League, but I feel that the end effect would be similar.) Asian/1st generation immigrant parents, on the other hand, are a terrible burden to bear! I would encourage the younger HN demographic to manage their expectations. Spending 3 decades in school doesn't give you a whole lot of common ground with a VC panel, other people in your chosen field or (really) anyone outside of a similarly-academic background. While that may be who you're working with or hiring, 8/10 times that's not who you're ultimately selling to. Freight-train academia can, however, set up a crushingly intense fear of failure that can break a young hacker's willpower in half. Short story: never be afraid to walk away from a raw deal, especially if there's an implication that it's "mandatory." Life doesn't have to be a Dostoyevsky novel.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
smanek 17y ago
given me infallible icebreakers Care to share? I've never had much luck on developing those ...
- jibiki 17y ago
  "Have you ever throttled a mountain lion with your bare hands?" I think you need to actually experience a story to use it as an icebreaker. Nobody likes a liar.
  - electronslave 17y ago
    Exactly. It's not that there are 39 Awesome Icebreakers For Hackers, but rather that I have stories and experiences that (more or less) relate to almost anyone I'm likely to meet. And yes, the stories are often more fun in the telling than in the living.

hedgehog 17y ago

The data doesn't support high school working out for 95% of students. Fewer than 70% of US high school students graduate with their class. Few districts do better than 80%. About 3% or so homeschool, so that leaves you with about 67% who graduate in the system. The 2005 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that 34% of 12th graders rated "proficient" reading abilities. Not exactly a glowing success. There are good options if you're looking for alternatives. I know a bit about the situation in Seattle because I opted out of high school there. The school district there has a "school" set up where home schoolers can register, do some non-home friendly classes (science & theater mostly IIRC), and benefit from government education funding. Many cities have programs that let high schoolers get credit for taking college classes and some universities are set up to do early admission (I did the UW program). Before all that I did an apprenticeship at a small electronics company (age 13). Pretty much you need to do the legwork though, you may find that the school district isn't interested in helping students leave the system (taking their funding with them).

fburnaby 17y ago
Couldn't a fail be an indicator that schools still are serving kids? "Oh, Johnny didn't really get it the first time around, let's get him to try again"? I'm not necessarily advocating this point of view, but stating the statistic isn't enough to get your point across. You need to propose a proper way of interpreting those results as well.

bokonist 17y ago

High school works decently enough for the rest of the 95%. Funny. If you listen to the political-sphere, the argument is that high school sucks for most people, but works brilliantly for the well-off. But if you actually ask the well-off and the people at the top of the class, they almost unanimously decry it as an awful waste of time. High school does not really work for anyone. The vast majority of people end up learning their trade on the job. Why delay that process 4 (or 8) years?

Zev 17y ago
Why do you assume that people know what they want to do when they're 13-14 years old? If you were to ask me what I wanted to do back then, I'd look at you funny and say "computers". Come to think of it, If you were to ask me what I want to do now (I'm 19, a junior in college), I'd probably give you the exact same answer. Even though one of my majors has nothing to do with computers at all (other one does), nor did my internship this summer.
- bokonist 17y ago
  I don't. But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process. I'm three years out of college. Most of my friends had no idea what they wanted to do in graduation. They picked a job, didn't like it, and now are switching. Except now the biological clocks are ticking, and it's becoming more important to pick the right path, because there is a major costs in switching careers. If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family.
  - Zev 17y ago
    But the best way to figure out what you want to do is to actually do it. School does not help in this process. I would say that school does help. It exposes people to different ideas and topics (Wait, I can get paid to do something with math besides run a business? You mean I can spend my entire life researching something?). Personally, my opinion is that its absolutely great to know a lot about your specific field that you (want to) work in. But I would never want to limit myself to only knowing about one particular topic of knowledge. //edit (to reply to this bit): If people started working at 14, or even 18, people would have a lot more time to discover the career they loved, before they had to assume the burden of earning enough to support a family There's a lot of careers that require years of training to go through before you can begin working. Lawyers, Doctors, etc. We on HN might like to think that anyone can pick up a profession and just hack away and be able to make a living at it on whim. But it doesn't work like that. Its not as simple as deciding "I don't like being a lawyer, but I think I'd like being a farmer. I'm going to buy some land, plant seeds and call it a day".

fallentimes 17y ago

9 startups or 9 websites?

markbao 17y ago
I've had my fair share of websites. I don't consider, for example, http://speakhq.com http://speakhq.com a startup. At all. Whereas I do consider http://ramamia.com http://ramamia.com a startup, and http://tickrtalk.com http://tickrtalk.com a startup (funded and in dev), and http://classleaf.com http://classleaf.com a startup. I can change that to 8 if Avecora (which did previous web stuff, but now is developing a mobile dev) doesn't count as one, since it's in development. In fact. I'll list them and try to qualify them, chronologically sorted. DebateWare - sold enterprise event mgmt software. sponsoring debate event in bos in oct Avecora - doing a mobile device in dev Avecora OnDemand - CRM/Project Management app. only connected to Avecora by name. market sucked. Cadmium - social advertising network. used facebook data to target ads. decent revenue, closed down later b/c market was :/. Student Concourse - was at WebInno 22. Lots of users but bad retention rate. Closed down. FB Idol: >15,000 Facebook users and very active. monetized via ads, with good money. said screw it and sold it. Ramamia: with hnuser:jasonlbaptiste. few thousand users, in public beta. tons of gigs of photos. launching next month. TickrTalk: in dev. funded by UPenn Weiss Tech Fund. Classleaf: sales force started making calls last week. software. it's selling. Adaptance: in dev: advanced ad network built on a complex algorithm combining behavioral + contextual + 3 other targeting metrics. Actually, that's 10, but remove Avecora OnDemand and there's the nine.
- fallentimes 17y ago
  Yeah I was more curious than anything. I don't really know what the definition of a startup is, but I know it's certainly different than a website. HN in general tends to have a very liberal definition of the word. Side projects that never made a dime or had more than a few hundreds visitors are rightly or wrongly considered startups rather frequently. The word "startup" is so overused that like the terms "breaking news" and "celebrity" it doesn't really mean much anymore. Website -> Startup News -> Breaking News Reality TV Appearance -> Celebrity