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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

This is a child being disrespectful on a monumental level, not outsmarting anyone. It also sounds like her parents are paying a great deal of attention.

She may also be a classic psychopath.

http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/sociopath-psyc...

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Any internet comment that ends in "psychopath" is probably a bad one—this pattern is a Godwin mini-me—and to get there from one colorful anecdote of adolescent cleverness is a particular stretch.

Please don't practice unsolicited psychiatry on HN.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032277 and marked it off-topic.

Whoa. Agree to disagree, big guy. Not only are the majority of HN commenters practicing amateur everything (especially with politics) but that's not what I was doing.

And further disagreeing, any 12 year old that shows such blatant disrespect - and makes friends with a porn star in the process - is in no way a cute story of "adolescent cleverness." It's something that should get protective services involved.

You don't have nearly enough information to make such personal judgments—that's an understatement by orders of magnitude—which makes your comments here unduly personal and therefore uncivil. Please stop.

Again, and as a parent of a daughter, we'll just have to continue to agree to disagree.

That comment seems excessive. She may be very normal, creative and competitive girl. Even if she really wanted to be a porn star. In such free schools, gaining respect from students without the use of punishments is something the teacher needs to learn himself.

I wouldn't go that far. Little girls can be very manipulative and yet perfectly normal. Psycopathy requires things beyond playing games with adults. This particular girl just doesn't respond well to artificially-imposed authority figures. Her form of lashing out is simply more aggressive than standard coping mechanisms which, with girls, often internalizes things (shyness, self-destruction etc). Frankly, I give her points for demonstrating the absurdity of the assignment while at the same time operating within the rule. I fault the teachers for not anticipating this.

(In my day, the popular option for such assignments was "starship captain".)

That's an odd conclusion, especially with so littke information. Her reply re the soldier signals she's capable of sensuble social criticism, and the rest of the story, if somewhat alarming, points to her being extremely resourceful.

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