Moon - UI library
Wing - CSS framework
Wade - 1kb JS Search Library
Slash - hash function in Assembly
You can find them on my Github[1]. I usually don't like stating my age as I love the feedback I get if you treat me as if I was an adult. People usually just compliment me after they see my age, but I'd honestly rather have some nice feedback and criticism.
I'd be glad to answer any questions :)
A few things I picked up over the years: Keep going, don't get too into any one technology / keep moving, expect to continue learning forever, keep your body healthy (it's not just there to carry around your brain), avoid bad habits that start to emerge early (100x red-bull ++ etc). The brain requires a LOT of energy, feed it with respect
Intelligence = Speed of the car | Smart = Good at driving it | Wisdom = Where to drive.
Bye! Good luck!
> Intelligence = Speed of the car | Smart = Good at driving it | Wisdom = Where to drive.
For me, and I suspect many (if not most) others, side projects have made all the difference. College was great, but the fact that being a student "gave me permission" to work on side projects really made me get my hands dirty. I only wish I'd started when I was 13. Keep on keepin' on!
Oh, and don't forget to enjoy being young. You only get to be a teenager once! You've got a long time to be able to wow people, don't owe anything to anyone.
I definitely will enjoy being young :)
I program in my free time, when I'm not playing soccer, doing homework, snowboarding, or playing guitar.
I'd comment on your actual work, but I'm one of the non-tech folks that are sitting here reading HN. Reading this stuff helps my artwork's creativity, oddly enough, and I'm guessing for some it works the other way around as well.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/6xi2jj/whats_your_dr...
I do have plans on finishing it, but I have a lot of projects right now. I'm trying to get Moon v1 out, working on my OS, Slash, and some other new projects. If you have any recommendations for what the code samples should be on, I'd be glad to try and write it based on that.
Whoops lol. That's what I get for not double-checking that I pasted correctly hehe.
You don't have to look like a super programmer to convince everyone that you're smart, you are smart as hell already.
Now you kiddos have the internet and Github. Lucky whipper snappers! <screams at cloud>
Joking aside, great job! What other technologies outside of the JS stack are you looking into learning?
Other than JS, I love Python for AI, and C/Assembly for systems (I'm writing an OS). Check out my Github! It has most of my projects.
How long have you been programming?
What was your early exposure like? Which language tools, legos, games, etc?
Did you have a mentor or self learning? Anyone else in your family programs?
Does academia suffer as a consequence? (It did for me)
I was self taught at 13 (GWBasic on a Commodore PC10) but had very little mentoring and no internet access which limited my trajectory.
1. I've been programming since I was 8.
2. I started out with HTML, then slowly moved into CSS, Javascript, Python, C, and Assembly.
3. I am completely self-taught, a few people in my family program but are in different fields than what I am interested in.
4. I wouldn't say that it suffers, but it is definitely hard to keep up with both. I always keep school as my first priority when it comes to these types of things, and most of my projects are done over break or the weekend.
Awesome! The internet is extremely helpful and you can learn pretty much anything you put your mind to, and it's never too late to start :)
Don't worry too much about what to do next. Just let your curiosity guide you. You've got a bright future ahead.
From a good read on how curiosity may guide you: https://medium.com/the-mission/make-the-pursuit-of-curiosity...
Keep being motivated, curious about all kinds of problems, learn the past of computing and above all, do it for fun!
On your website, you mention you use Crystal for programming on the server. What made you choose Crystal over other languages, and what do you like about it for server-side programming? Thanks :-)
I prefer Crystal because it's a really expressive language (similar to Ruby) but has the advantage of being compiled (like C). I prefer compiled languages for the server because they are usually faster, and can be deployed with a single binary.
I really wish fast, compiled, low-memory languages were more widely used on the server. Crystal sounds very promising in this regard :-)
So why did you tweet it then?
This isn't just a "young maker". This is university-level stuff.
# Back Propagate into Dot Product
dY = np.multiply(dO, self.activationPrime(self.o))
I'm not yet 30 and this might be the oldest I've felt in my entire life. I'm going to stop being skeptical and just remind myself that kids are smart and capable of incredible things and that adults constantly underestimate them. I'm going to choose to believe that they really are as "productive" as they seem to be.
Nonetheless, it's incredibly helpful when you have a passion for this kind of stuff. There are tons of resources out there for learning this stuff, and it's really interesting :)
I initialize a basic GDT in the bootloader because it is essential. Without it, you cannot run the OS in long mode, which will unlock the capabilities of a 64 bit system.
Don't just take my word for it. Grub does it too. Example: https://github.com/coreos/grub/blob/40e2f6fd353061fdb3ec4dd6...
One can find very nice, textbook quality, lecture notes for free all of the web too (http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/yang_mills.pdf for example).
Everybody here seems to want to dish out advice, but I'd like to turn the mic to you. I'm a new parent with two kids under 3. I also started my career my learning HTML/CSS on my own in the early 2000s. It was a different world back then. What are you most grateful for about how your parents raised you, and what constraints did they impose? I want to protect my kids from all the crap, but don't want to stifle their creativity and desire to learn freely.
I totally agree, growing up nowadays is extremely different then what it must've been like before. I'm grateful for my parents encouraging me to play outside and make friends, and once they found out that I was interested in programming, they encouraged that as well.
They always want me to try new things and see if I love it, and that's what I found with programming. They do have some rules about it, and can see what websites I visit, and generally what I do online.
I'd say to let them do what they find interesting, like my parents did with me and programming, but still encourage them to try new things. You never know, they might find more things that they love :)
My parents didn't let me drop out of Elementary school but I ended up dropping out of college to work as a game designer for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigWorld . I was fortunate enough to meet their CEO because my family supported me by traveling with me to a couple conferences where I got to meet the industry.
Things that would have gone better for me: parents working with me on my projects as project manager / guiding production schedules. I'm not saying tell your kids what to do, let me explain:
I spent a lot of time drawing games in notebooks & programming 10% finished projects in my teens. I wish I had produced finished games (/s/games/$project_type for your kids) earlier and gotten a serious head start on game development.
I also wish my parents had encouraged or forced me to exercise more. I do now, but only after health problems forced me to start paying attention to my body!
I wish they didn't let me drink so much soda and red bull too. Keep that crap away from your kids, no matter what the other's are doing.
You having experience with HTML/CSS + everything else you know could be great for teaching your kids programming. Even if they go into other disciplines, I think "learning how to think" from programming + problem solving is invaluable and can apply to every area.
Congrats on your new family!
For my part, I just wish I'd have read some good books on health and physical fitness. I think I would have gotten it, and been in to it, if only I understood how much health and physical fitness mattered -- not just to protect your body from disease and injury, but also to improve your mood, give you more energy, and help motivation.
Another thing to keep in mind that the easiest time in one's life to get stronger (something that will help protect you from injury later on in life) is when you're going through puberty, when your body is filled with natural growth hormones. People in their teens are able to very quickly achieve results that older people struggle for much longer to achieve (if they ever do).
Instead of exercising when I was young, though, I focused exclusively on intellectual pursuits... even kind of buying in to the whole "nerd vs jock" dichotomy, and proudly considering myself a nerd, and felt like any kind of physical pursuits were below me. In retrospect, that was a really narrow-minded, ignorant, and harmful point of view. There's no reason you can't pursue both the intellectual and the physical -- and you'll probably be a lot healthier that way, and suffer a lot less later in life.
Exercise also affects one's weight, body image, and self-esteem -- things that so many people suffer from (especially in fields like tech where most people sit in front of their computer all day). You could get a head start on avoiding all that if you start exercising young and turn it in to a habit that you maintain throughout your life.
Can you expand this? What is that crap that kids need to be protected from?
Find friends who are also into computers and kill two birds with one stone.
In particular, I got really into Robocode - see http://robowiki.net - the community is still active 10+ years later and the state of the art is still being pushed.
I've ended up working as a software engineer in a related field (computer vision) and the lessons I learned from my early programming experience have given me a massive headstart in design, readability, maintenance and breadth of knowledge. I'd totally do it again given the choice, probably starting even younger.
A while back, I thought commits were the best thing ever, and made it my goal to commit every single small change I made. Now I've learned not to :)
When I was 14 or 15 in the late 1990s I started my own "web community" for young (German) "web designers" (programming wasn't on my mind back then). It got me some little fame, I even won some prizes. Almost 20 years later that chapter of my life is closed, and many others which came after it are too.
Enjoy this moment, but set goals: finish school, go to University and get some degree, fulfill your dreams.
But always try to stay on the ground. Time goes by very fast, and your current achievements probably won't matter much ten years from now.
Keep learning and have fun.
A question, out of genuine curiosity:
- How do you deal with loneliness? Do you manage to find people that can understand what you say, furthermore being able to answer you with relevance outside internet?
(coming from a highschooler, for whatever that's worth)
I can tell you my birthday, but will that really help? If you look at my comment above, you'll see that I don't really like giving my age out. I did it this one time just because I wanted some of my followers to know (I wasn't expecting it to be on Hacker News). There is no way for me to show you my age other than you meeting me in person, but hopefully you can judge by the way I talk.
Except for the part about being careful who you trust it with, that's legit.
Don't forget to be a kid some days (you have multiple github commits EVERY day), you have the rest of your life to write code.
I need to find a way of converting somewhat obscure knowledge about into money :)
Flag 1: After Googling your username, it led to your YouTube channel, with an adult male in the picture: https://www.youtube.com/user/kbrshh pretty odd...
Flag 2: You seem to not have aged in a year? What. https://www.reddit.com/r/freelance/comments/4w7thd/can_a_13_... the post date is the 5th of August so unless you were lying then, then you're lying now.
Flag 3: This led to finding https://npm.taobao.org/~kingkabir which shows everything you've worked on.
If you've done all this by the age of 13, then damn, good luck in the future, but it just seems like you're trying to push the popularity of your side projects by leveraging your age... Just seems madly dodgy to me.
1. I recently changed my username and do not have a Youtube channel. That person doesn't even have the same name as me.
2. I was 12 then, and if you can't tell, I was pretty dumb at the time, and was pretty much looking for attention. Legally you weren't allowed to be signed up for Reddit, which is why I said I was 13 (which I am now).
3. I have worked on all of those npm modules, but most of them are forked improvements of existing modules (such as Jade).
If you read my comment above, you'll notice I don't like talking about my age (this is one of the few exceptions). In fact, I am even not the OP of this post.
It's interesting that the person who submitted this to HN has already submitted the same link exactly a year ago. In fact 3/5 his submission are about your site...
Edit: actually all of the OP submissions are about you.
1. A search of my username (there are tons of people with a three letter username like my HN username)
2. An old post of mine on Reddit.
3. My NPM profile (which includes lots of forks)
4. The quality of my username.
5. The layout of my comments on Hacker News.
6. The posts of some stranger that has attempted to submit my website multiple times.
You see here is the part I don't believe. If you look at the submissions [1] that the OP has, all 5 of his submissions lead to either your github projects or your 13 y/o twitter page/website. I doubt that a person you don't know is so obsessed about only posting stuff about you, not commenting or anything, just submitting your projects and links. That account has no comments nor favorites.
Based on that - my assumption is you have multiple accounts here and now are lying about not having control of what the OP has, if you lie on that part - it makes your whole 13 y/o thing less beleivable to me.
Prepared to take the hate too. Answers seem fake under the question about relation with parents, and your voice does not strike me as a 13 year old, in particular seeming too controlling of situation. I don't buy it. I apologize in advance if I'm somehow proven wrong in some verifiable way.
However, I do believe he is legit about his age.
Searching for his name, I found this old CodePen account: https://codepen.io/KingKabir/
There's a link in there to: http://www.main180.tk
That link is expired, but it showed up in this Quora from 2015: https://www.quora.com/Should-an-11-year-old-know-full-stack-...
Looking in the wayback machine, you can see what content his site used to have: https://web.archive.org/web/20151231214946/http://www.main18...
This lead me to this blog: https://180projectblog.wordpress.com/
It looks like he accomplished most of them? I didn't count, but the last entry on that site was in March 2016 (https://180projectblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/bubble/)
Moon was started in July 2016 (https://github.com/kbrsh/moon/commit/2e38db7571adf64c9192cfe...).
So while I'm still skeptical about his presence, I think it seems plausible that he is who he says he is, but that doesn't mean he's done it alone, etc, etc.
Also, while Moon was on Github in 2016, I started playing around with it locally in late 2015 before publishing anything online.
Flag 5: He had the good sense of using a throwaway email at 13, associated with nothing but his projects and no photos.
Flag 6: That same good sense to get into every self-promotion channel, like Twitter would even cross a child's mind in 2017.
Flag 7: Some of his projects seem copy pasted from school/books/online examples, without attribution.
My guess is that he has a really intense family on him being an overachiever, they are probably aiming at some internships, which is only fair.
[1] https://hackernoon.com/42-startups-changing-the-world-4f3d1a...
Flag 9: He cranked out a multithreaded reverse proxy in C in four days, despite no other C code in his repo. https://github.com/kbrsh/coat
I learned C when I was just about his (alleged) age. I made some cool shit for an ANSI art group, but my code was a total goddamn mess full of newb mistakes (not DRY, bad naming, etc etc) and there's no way in hell I would be using advanced things like threads and mutexes in general, nevermind correctly.
Where's all the terrible C code? The terrible ruby code? Where's the path and not just the destination? There's a lot of stuff in the github showing he just learned how to do web development. He was at "Hello World" a year and a half ago and definitely deserves props for getting as far as he has since then, regardless of age.
That said, wouldn't he want to put up all of his old work in ruby and C it took for him to get this good at C and Crystal since he already has all the other half-finished projects? Perhaps that work would be too far in the past for his story and would force us to have to believe he knew how to do pointer arithmetic in C at 8 years old?
There's no way coat was written by someone who hasn't been programming for a good while. It's not some phenomenal work of engineering but it's by someone who is fairly seasoned. The profile here looks like someone who was already pretty good and experienced at programming and picked up web programming about a year ago under a new online identity.
8. All of my code is not on Github, and there is no reason for me to learn a language simply because I have previous knowledge in Ruby. I chose to learn Crystal because of it's elegance and speed.
9. I wrote that reverse proxy based on a variety of online tutorials[1], but used my knowledge of threads to make it multithreaded.
[1] http://www.gilesthomas.com/2013/08/writing-a-reverse-proxylo...
Perhaps you are just 10x more capable at this than all other humans I've encountered in my entire life. If so good luck and godspeed and please try to avoid bringing about AI takeoff for the rest of us :)
I started out with C, definitely didn't know how to write multithreaded code when I was 10 haha. I learned most of that after reading a great book on operating systems (Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) a couple months ago.
I'm trying to clean up my Github, you'll notice the "DayN" repositories are just edited versions of stuff I found online to learn from. These days I create my own projects, and am slowly deleting those "learning" repositories and making them private.
Plus looking at his old FreeCodeCamp username [2], I don't believe the programmer who was working through FCC tutorials (with very basic results) in 2016, is the same one who got tired of Vue in late 2015.
[1] https://hackernoon.com/introducing-moon-1d44a99635f0 [2] https://www.freecodecamp.com/KingPixil
And regarding the FreeCodeCamp profile--I made that account for my little brother (who was learning to program at the time). Along with that, I tried to help people out on the FCC Gitter[1] as much as I could, as teaching people is a good way to master something.