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Comment by rewind | Hacker News Reader

I find that when it comes to these sorts of arguments that the people who spend their time telling you what they think are usually the people who care too much what other people think. Startup vs. Project? Computer Programmer vs. Software Engineer? CEO vs. Single Founder?

It's all so completely irrelevant to who you are or what you're doing. It's just noise.

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The #1 reason I have stopped actively coming to HN. Too many self-entitled opinionated "authors" telling people what they should or shouldn't be doing (especially when it's not even technically relevant).

Or should they be called "writers"?

Yes there are a lot of bold statements written as a blog posts going around, which are mostly for the purpose of ranting and self-promotion.

It's like a bolded tweet.

i feel the same way. like this place is a toxic pit of narcissism that leaves me feeling icky and uninspired.

You know what the difference between an author and a writer is? An author writes.

I thought the difference was "an author is published." That doesn't translate into the post-NYC-book-publishing-industry era, though, because "an author is read" doesn't convey the same idea—you can be read because of viral marketing effects, but usually you're only published because an editor thinks your content is an investment that will make their publisher money.

I just signed on to express your first sentence, but you beat me to it!

I've been lurking for a short while on here and found out about HN because I wanted to get into programming and the whole IT world. I find HN great for those things, but as soon as they start posting "creative writing" material, it's really only good for a chuckle. A lot of it competes with the self-absorbed, snobby (Liberal) Arts, so-called objective, essay writing that I had to put up with at university. They only base things on subjective meanderings.

Well, I disagree. But I totally see where you're coming from and respect your opinion. I find that by people continually to call projects startups, it's muddying the actual startup community and taking the standards of what people see as a startup down. But again, I'm hopeful that these projects become startups as the founders dedicate themselves to them.

CEO means "Chief Executive Officer" not rando dude with a pet project. It sounds self-involved, and doesn't impress anyone.

Until you own a building, it's a little presumptuous to call yourself CEO. Once you do own a building, It needs to have at least 3 floors.

mine one has 2 floors, one more to go.

To be fair, once you incorporate you need to name a CEO, no matter how small of a project is being created by the company.

I don't think there is an "actual startup community". There are just people that do things, some of which may become successful.

Google did not have much in common with Value America, which did not have much in common with LiveJournal. They were 3 projects, or startups, or businesses, or whatever. In the late 90s, Value America was by far the most successful, but look where they are now.

Similarly, I think it's a mistake to fetishize certain ventures as being "real" startups while the others are just "projects". Those Stanford grad students who are playing around on stuff after class may be the next billionaires. Similarly, that Sequoia-funded startup with revenue and an ex-Googler founder may just be dust in the wind in five years.

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