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Comment by coryl | Hacker News Reader

He's 17, hasn't finished high school, and you want to know if he can build the next Facebook? Why isn't it enough to just let him grow and be whatever is he was meant to be.

Why does it matter if he was lucky, if he has hacker skills, can be a "social theorist"? You write as if you believe he's this millenia's greatest young thinker.

Or will he be a has-been by 2011? What does that even mean? Are you buying into media hype that badly?

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He's growing now. That's exactly what's happening. High School has nothing to do with it and appears to be a waste of his time.

What do you want him to do, drop everything he's developed and go study for pulse checks on whether or not he did the reading?

Don't get me wrong, I'm an academic and have great respect for the value of education, but the traditional system doesn't seem to have been much use for this guy and at this point the training wheels fell off a long time ago. You can't just expect him to go put them back on.

He can always go back to high school in 2011. But if he lost this opportunity to get funding and iterate fast to turn his product into a next-facebook, the opportunity is lost forever.

In 2011 he will be drafted into the army.

WTF? Visa is not equal to citizenship.

Yes exactly, he will be drafted into the Russian army because he will still be a Russian citizen. (Not sure what you're WTFing. Did you think he meant drafted into the US army?)

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