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Comment by wand3r | Hacker News Reader

I first thought, oh cool project; an autonomous drone boat must be pretty hard to build and manage. Probably a final for school or a robotics group.

...Nope. The kid is actually trying to pilot it himself. 48" boat. Honestly, wonder which challenge is harder. I know which one I'd prefer.

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He's 33, hardly a "kid"

Isn't that all the more impressive in a 42 inch boat?

My pet peeve. In graduate school we had professors, lecturers, working professionals etc constantly calling us students "kids" even though we were all 25+ yrs old. I believe this is a pretty American thing to always be infantilizing people.

I never understood it, 25+ year old "kids" going to "school"

In all American TV shows set in high school, the actors/actresses are all in their mid-20s. Ralph Macchio was in his 30s when he played the Karate Kid. It's altered people's expectations of how people look at certain ages.

Macchio was 23 in the first film, and 28 in Karate Kid 3. This information is at your fingertips.

Nah I was meaning the word choice, to me it's weird to call people that age "kids" and t say there at "school" not university/college

Yes, like calling grown women "girl", or calling partners "babe"/"bae". In German this would sound very, very off.

Not really. Calling your girlfriend 'Baby' or refering to a girls-night-out as 'Mädelsabend' are perfectly common for example.

I agree though that I never heard a professor refer to his students in this way and would definitively find it strange if that happened.

"Baby" does not count because it's not German, and it can be traced back directly to imported pop culture (Movies). You are right about "Mädels", it's not exactly the same as "girl" though (rather girly) - you would never say "Mädchenabend", that's cringy.

Same thought here! I thought "4 foot robotic boat, I guess you need to be long enough for stability". I really enjoyed the read in any case.

Scout[1] is an autonomous craft currently building their second attempt to cross the Atlantic. Their 2013 try made it a quarter of the way before (presumably) loosing the rudder and then lost tracking a few months later. There's a yearly competition[2] as well.

[1]: http://gotransat.com

[2]: http://Microtransat.org

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