16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy? | Hacker News Reader

16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

namc.in

243 pointsDawny33148 comments

I have a related question. Since when is a 16 year old who makes an app a prodigy? Even if she did write it all by herself?

I was getting paid to make back office software for local businesses at 13 in 1998 with absolutely no help from anyone and no one called me a prodigy. I'm sure tons of NH people have similar stories.

I seem to remember a survey at one point that the average person on HN who actually codes started coding at around 12.

Perhaps we should be teaching young people that coding is an obtainable goal that if you put your mind to it and work hard you can do? Not something you need to be a "prodigy" to do.

It's easy enough to write code when you're young, but to write something that is being actively used is impressive.

With that being said, I do find the worship of young people in tech a bit worrying. Over the years I've worked with a handful of talented developers that have started from a very young age, and over the years they become very good at a relatively young age. By the time they reach 20, they're senior-level developers.

That's all well and good, but these youngsters have been praised for years. Once they reach their twenties, they go from being young to being an adult, like everyone else. All of a sudden, the slack they were given to build their career up is gone, and many of them struggle from here onwards. It can be a mixture of being treated differently, or from essentially being jaded about dedicating that many years of their youth to a skill to be building the same old CRUD shit year after year.

My brother was a security consultant for a few major websites that you've most likely used yourself at the age of 16, many years ago. He knew more about security at 16 than most developers I work with today. Don't discount someone's knowledge or abilities because of an arbitrary age.

He's still successfully protecting servers from getting hacked today, when pretty much every other server is getting hacked nowadays.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? They didn't say anything dismissive, and even expressed the impressiveness of someone writing a usable app at 16.

There's nothing magic about writing software.

There's nothing magic about writing software people use.

The magic is in being in a position where your software is in a position to reach people who can use it. Traditionally, this was handled through pure nepotism, but these days it's possible for people to succeed without such connections.

It's unfortunate that this seems to be the case of fraud, but I hope people don't take the wrong lesson from it. "Kids" can be far more intelligent, persistent, and effective than many adults seem to be willing to believe. I don't think there's anything inherently implausible about the general story "16 year old creates usable and useful app," even if that's not what happened in this case.

Programming isn't magic, it's a skill one can learn, and at this moment of history it's easier than ever to get the information and tools required to do so. Teenagers (and younger kids) can learn incredibly quickly - if they decide to do so.

Obviously the fact that she was a woman made the story more appealing, which would be fine if it was a true story, it is nice for people to have role models they can identify with and be inspired by. Everyone loves an underdog story...well I do.

I sometimes find the fact that women are successfully being high profile scam artists (Elizabeth Holmes etc) encouraging in a twisted way. Plenty of men have made a bunch of money by cheating and lying in the business world, women are now making their mark too (and likely always have of course)! why not? =)

My point is if she did make the app herself it makes sense to hold her up as a role model but holding her up as a "prodigy" is counter productive.

If anything it is a little sexist (not you, the "prodigy" idea). That if a 16 boy makes an app it's just normal but if a girl does it, she is a prodigy.

We need to be teaching people that men and women are equal and that girls can do this stuff just the same as boys. Saying it takes a prodigy to do it discourages people from even trying because it comes with the implication that person is capable of something the average girl isn't.

IMHO, we shouldn't even use the word prodigy. It is a heavy weight for those who are labeled as such, and in most cases it is just a happy combination of passion, intelligence and hard work well directed.

Yeah, if a 16 year old makes an app like this it's certainly a good thing, but I'd be hesitant to say it makes them a prodigy. Kids are not stupid, and a smart, determined kid or teen can often outdo an adult or team of adults when it comes to programming, especially if it's something they're personally interested.

Look at the golden age of games over here in the UK if you need proof of that. You've got many stories of famous game designers and developers starting as kids with a ZX Spectrum or Amiga and learning to code extremely impressive games in the teens or younger (and sometimes ending up employed in the field before they've even left school).

There's also the fan game, ROM hack and game mod fields, where quite a few notable users are between 12 and 15 years old, yet have learnt enough about the hobby to learn how to write assembly code and build tools to help reverse engineer a game made by a team of hundreds.

Add to this the no doubt thousands of great website and app developers in the same age range as the subject of the article, and well, while writing an app at 16 is impressive, it's certainly not some impossible task that couldn't have been done without outside help.

I would say that it depends on the maturity of the app. If it's 2 or 3 screens with a couple buttons yeah, nothing extraordinary. If it can handle a massive load and do actual complicated calculation then it's more impressive.

I was also making websites for business at the beginning of the Internet when I was a teen. But back then anybody who could understand HTML was seen as a freaking wizard :) But I also recognize that the complexity of what I was building was nowhere near what I do today for example.

"Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because sweetie, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry."

It's quite ironic that in a sentence about sexism and a male-dominated industry, the author addresses the developer by 'sweetie'.

I see where you're coming from but I think the point still stands. Making a fraud the poster child for a cause is worse than having no poster child at all.

In general I'm always very wary of "teenage prodigies" stories, they're very marketable but I think they're bad for everybody involved: on one hand the "prodigy" is on exhibit like some kind of circus freak and at this age is probably ill-prepared to deal with the attention, on the other the people he's supposed to inspire (kids his own age) just see a bar that's impossible to reach. You can't expect your average 16yo to write a high quality crypto tracker app regardless of gender. It's not inspiring, it's discouraging.

there are very... very few prodigies in this world who could've done it without strong mentorship.

Mozart and Tiger Woods are both thought to be prodigies, but their parents were very involved in their developmental process.

Earl Woods wasn't swinging the club for Tiger.

Don't know enough about Mozart to know if his father actually wrote and played 90% of his works.

>Earl Woods wasn't swinging the club for Tiger.

you're completely missing my point. Your logic is incredibly infantile.

Strong mentorship is important. It's like the difference between a good and bad coach on a sports team. If a sports team wins a champion, its unlikely they could've done it with a coach who doesn't know what they're doing.

if Earl Woods or Mozart's father had ZERO background in music and golfing, could Tiger Woods and Mozart be known for their talents? Maybe, but they would be far less dominant. Just another golfer and musician, the average person has never heard of

Lying is lying irrespective of gender. No way a 16yo kid can design start-to-end an app, learn how to code, learn how to build the UI, etc.

Unless by "mentor" (as seen on the dialogue-screesnhot) means "X and Y designed this and that for me so all I did was put my name in the front page).

I see no reason why a 16 year old shouldn't be able to do that, and it's not that uncommon, especially these days with all the great resources available online.

A 16yo kid who's had multiple years of learning how to program, and a good work ethic, could very well do that - I had published applications at around that age that had users. I don't think a young age is in itself a reason to be suspicious of plagiarism.

Don't underestimate young people.

We have hundreds of people doing this in https://hackclub.com, many of whom are 16 or younger.

A decade is more than enough time to become extremely competent. I've know 16 year olds who started learning to code when they were 6. Plenty of developers teach their kids from very young ages. Of course a 16 year old could write a great app.

They could, they just probably wouldn't be 16 by the time they finished learning how to do it.

I’d love to hear your reasoning for why a 16 year old person couldn’t do those things.

This isn't a hit piece by some bro-grammer who doesn't want to share space with a 16 year old girl, this is a woman who had to carve out space for herself in a male dominated industry. She's looking at the software equivalent of that kid who took a clock slightly apart and put it in a cardboard box and became an engineering prodigy because some idiot thought it looked like a cartoon bomb timer and saying that we need to back up and look at actual female programming icons, like Margaret Hamilton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)).

The author is a woman.

that's exactly what the person you're responding is saying

In my experience, "sweetie" is a word older women use condescendingly towards younger men or women.

It fits in the same category as “aren’t you special”. It is pretty good way to find out you are not acting properly in an elder’s eyes.

Sexism is not limited to men on the side of who does it (nor on women on the side that is the target).

The point is that, in the South, sweetie isn't a gendered term. I'm a man and get called sweetie every day in a non-demeaning sense. When used pejoratively, it's essentially "bless your heart" condensed into a noun.

Interestingly, at least in my area, it's generally only used by women and effeminate gay men. As a result, actually using the term does imply effeminacy, so a straight man using it to insult a woman may be unknowingly implying something about himself which he'd find embarrassing.

I use "sweetie" all the time because I live in a house with 3 girls and no guys. It's a tough habit to break when I go to work.

My experience is different, the only people I've ever heard use "Sweetie," besides towards children, is older men being condescending towards younger women, making sure they know their place, and older men who use it towards younger women as a term of endearment unaware that it's usually used in a condescending manner. I've literally never heard an woman say it outside of speaking to children, however, I think it might be acceptable to use in the American South, at least stereotypically, I've only spent a few days in the South myself.

That being said, I believe this particular use was intended to be ironic/sarcastic. Though it ends up being just a distraction.

I've literally never heard a man use it. Or a woman. On the other hand many anecdotes does not equal data...

It definitely has firm roots female geek culture, and signals extreme condescension.

I think it's one of those words that's usage depends on your culture, it can be either relativity benign or inflammatory.

Given the author appears to be female, I suspect the irony is entirely on purpose.

I'm not sure it is. I suspect it's intended as a genuine term of endearment and the author is oblivious to the negative connotation. Still unfortunate.

I find it odd that someone who was writing a paragraph about sexism in tech (or any industry) wouldn’t be aware of the negative connotation - but your explanation could be right.

I find it odd too.

It's pretty clearly being used condescendingly in this case.

However, the author may genuinely not have noticed the sexist connotation until it was pointed out.

Specifically, I think she is using it in much the same manner as in Chris Rock used the "n" word in his "Black People vs. Niggaz" stand-up skit.

Either that or she is being deliberately patronising towards perceived innocence, also for comedic effect.

The author is a woman though. Is a woman calling a girl "sweetie" sexism?

Do you believe sweetie is a gendered word?

It seems to be one of those loaded words that's often used by a certain type of man to put women "in their place".

I hear sweetie or sweetheart a lot more from older women talking to younger adults/teenagers or kids. Maybe it’s the South.

You just cant handle the fact that a genuine really professional girl who is a coder cant be snarky when calling out a pleb of a teenaged liar?

If anything its very civil language towards a spoilt brat whose parents should be ashamed to have raised a liar.

So could be the word 'Geek', only to put smart people in their place, that didn't stop you from using it as a badge of honor in your nickname. So maybe you shouldn't blanket-accuse everyone of being a misogynist based on some hypothetical male character that you made up to fit some preconceived narrative of sexism, because that is in fact the true sexism here. There are plenty of people who use the word 'sweetie' endearingly, there is nothing wrong with that.

I've also seen it used in Tumblr posts which were written with absolutely no harmful intent. It's imaginable that the author of that page had used the word in a not-mean way before in their lives, and especially likely that dripping sarcasm doesn't come through in text.

As for the actual article, I guess it goes to show that this "kid genius" media stuff is always self-interested on the part of the institutions and rarely if ever benefits any kids.

What you seem to think it is and what it actually is are two different things. "Sweetie" is a traditionally Deep South term of endearment or mock-endearment applicable to both genders and used almost exclusively by women. I can't remember the last time (if ever) I have seen it used by a man other than in imitation of women from the Deep South.

I don't know any man who would use this word except towards his daughter (when she's quite small). It's unthinkable any man would use this word in such a way - in a public post, patronizing towards a young girl. It would be an PR suicide, and the result would be contrary to his expectations.

i believe today "sweetie" is mostly used by women

I was reading right along happily through the article, then I hit 'sweetie'. That came out of nowhere.

I'm sure the author had a point they were trying to make, but it was completely lost on me with the condescending turn to 'sweetie'.

Completely lost? Stealing someone's work and pretending to be 16 years old programming prodigy is lesser issue than calling someone sweetie?

it might have been knowingly condescending, which would be reasonable since we are talking about plagiarism

Isn't 'sweetie' something you just call young girls?

I'm getting the vibe this person is a complete fraud. It seems likely that somebody is steering her on what to say, how to manage the project, and market herself as the visionary behind it.

Reading through the comments "However her aptitude was pretty poor... I've mentored many kids in my life.

At some point she was unable to even reason out how to convert a string to upper case.

She said... What does this have to do with programming.... I want to build apps.

After that she didn't talk to me much and I didn't bother either."

These aren't really the people we should be lauding or giving a free ticket to MIT. From what I'm reading, she's probably a future successful corporate bullshit artist, but this is not a role model for anyone or a future visionary.

I think it is good things like this get attention - young people should know they're not going to get ahead by stealing credit from others or falsifying their talents.

This is advertisement. They use her story to promote the app. Of course she didn't write the thing, no "child prodigy" that "released an app that will change the world" in the last 10 years of apps, did. It's either a political diversity narrative or emotional advertisement for a product.

But yeah, let's all waste our time holding 16 old kids "accountable" for their "unethical" behaviour, like big boy adults do, that'll teach them how to grow up!

Yes. "If you manage to get social media on your side by endearing them then you can lie and steal" is the better lesson to teach a 16 year old.

A 16 year old can waste his or her life by this age if he or she does really badly in school or smokes weed and gets caught. I can forgive teens for a lot of silly things like lying, cheating, petty crime, etc. but not doubling down when caught and creating a social media hatemob for someone questioning her.

Also - she is not a kid. There are at least few countries in which a 16 year old can have sex, drive, drink alcohol, join military academy, etc. and at 17 or 18 the list of countries grows to hundreds of entries.

And she is a "prodigy", not any ordinary kid and she defended herself very well (and evidently successfully considering the thread calling her out on reddit got outright removed, not just downvoted) on social media and even called the person claiming she is lying a "jobless disturbed harasser and bully".

She has attended MIT Launch, was intern at Sales force. Along with writing that app she also localized this app to 10 languages (I'm not sure if she did it herself via Google Translate, the way she writes about it is not clear), optimized it for iPhone X, prepared a full release, all within these 2 months while coming across new techniques and concepts and learning them on the fly.

This is all in her medium.com post and if she can do all of that she can get held to the same standard as an adult. And if it's someone just using her persona and doing all this then there is even a bigger problem, bordering on personality theft and fraud.

Being a kid is not a boolean value. You don't go from "being a kid" to "not being a kid". It's gradual. Some people are still kids at 19, others are quite mature at 17.

Who knows, maybe her parents are pushing her a lot and she doesn't know how to react.

We should give people the benefit of the doubt when we don't know the full story. She'll be forgiven in 2 months anyways..

> Being a kid is not a boolean value. You don't go from "being a kid" to "not being a kid". It's gradual. Some people are still kids at 19, others are quite mature at 17.

It actually is boolean for many laws but that's beside the point. Whatever a threshold is a person who makes apps so quickly, calls herself an entrepreneur and a programmer, all while highlighting her young age (ostensibly to show that she is more mature or skilled than others that age) has crossed it.

> Who knows, maybe her parents are pushing her a lot and she doesn't know how to react.

Then just like with "a team" it's a big issue if her parents pushed her to do it all or did it for her and should not be swept under the rug because it's a woman in tech or a teen.

> We should give people the benefit of the doubt when we don't know the full story.

Too bad the author of this post doesn't get that. Instead they got called names, accused of bullying and harassment of a teen, accused of driving women out of tech, flagged (here too for a while apparently), and pretty much told to fuck off and die. It's only more ironic that the author is a woman too (which in an ideal world should not matter in the dispute but in USA/tech industry it seems to, although I've seen plenty of woman vs. woman disputes online where one woman will claim the other who criticizes her has "internalized sexism").

> She'll be forgiven in 2 months anyways..

Well yes. No one is going to crucify her for this but plagiarism and being put on a pedestal for things you didn't do are (in theory, apparently it is if you are a woman judging by some of the comments here[0]) not acceptable and can't be revealed and then just defended (not even disputed) by tons of people because the perpetrator is a woman or teen and thus beyond criticism or fair attribution of work.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16307994

>A 16 year old can waste his or her life by this age if he or she does really badly in school or smokes weed and gets caught.

I agree with the vast majority of your post, but I would say this part isn't super fair. Maybe I'm reading too much into this part, but outside of exceptional cases, we do give minors the chance to recover. I know people who had high school GPAs in the low 2s, that went to community college for 2 years, transferred to a solid university, and have a good career.

At least where I live, your records are sealed at 18 unless you have been tried as an adult (which is exceedingly rare). You can definitely recover from an offense, but it is going to make things harder.

Yes, a 16 year old doing some (alleged) unethical behavior should face some consequences, but no 16 year old should have their life ruined. Intelligence and maturity are not coupled.

I have a friend from college who had a 2.0 in high school and got rejected from the college of new jersey. He ended up getting into a much better school (possibly due to SAT scores) and graduated with a 4.0. He majored in math as well as physics and minored in CS. Worked for Google for two years after... smokes weed too.

She was an intern? Attended a conference? Used Google Translate to change strings?

What a prodigy!

So you're ok with they getting away with the all lies, but if someone writes something debunking them, you criticize the guy?

Right, let's not hold accountable 16 y old kids that do school shootings, those were only hormones.

> But after reading her blogpost, her stackoverflow/github history in an attempt to understand her struggles as a self-taught programmer; I figured that there was no struggle at all! Self taught programmers are full of numerous questions, but she didn’t seem to have any! Neither is there any progression of all the tasks she did.

This is just one of possible approaches. For example, I actively ask very rarely, the most you could find on SO would be upvotes to answers.

With this approach, the author would probably conclude I didn't write my weather watchfaces myself, as there are almost no public traces of me doing so. And yet.

https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/2de2ee03-0f81-4668-b885-1... https://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/56aeaa675fc3f1c...

This one jumped on me too. My history would quite the same and especially when I was younger. I would never ask under anything traceable back to me publicly. And I was always searching much more then actively asking, I asked online twice my whole life and got maybe one answer total.

I would also keep stuff on my own disk until I thought it is progressed enough etc. I was too insecure to show progress, because progress contains more mistakes and I dont like looking dumb. It also makes it easier to tear you down if someone decides to.

I mean, I have no idea what the conditions of that competition were and how much alone you was supposed to do it. I have no idea how much mentoring counts as too much and how much is fine. Nor whether this crosses the line. Just that, the above suspicion is dumb.

"when I was younger" is a risky point of view: i.e. when I was younger I wrote a cycling manager game that was really a very very modded gorilla.bas, and there was no internet to use, only the inline help and that was it. that mindset of figuring things out by incremental change and debugging thoroughly sticks, and even if now I can say I'm used to stack overflow and the like I do see programmer that grew up in a fully connected social world do rely a lot more on the network to find answers than me.

Searching for answers does not leave trace. Only posting under own name does. And there are so many answers to beginners questions out there, that you rarely need to ask new one (and it is likely to be closed as duplicate or obvious homework).

The idea that every beginner programers must leave public track of beginners questions is fairly ridiculous.

i asked one question on SO a long time ago that i'm embarrassed about. i don't blame anyone for not asking with a handle that links to them. i think that just about all questions have been asked really and you can just find them with search.

but on the topic.. she's busted. there's good evidence now beyond signs like those SO/github thoughts.

Well, after a couple years of development, you have the vocabulary & terminology to search for & find your answers.

Starting out, you wouldn't have that.

This is so true. I think my biggest achievement is that I evolved my ability to search. A few years ago it would take me days to find the solution to a problem, but now I find it much easier to formulate a question or Google query.

You might have a mentor (eg a parent) to ask instead though. Having no SO profile is not a sign you don't ask questions.

this is true of course.

and lots of people don't use github.

they're just a couple of the signs.

i could even let go that she didn't know how to express what the expression was and even not knowing how to make a string uppercase.

they're little signs but they aren't where she was eventually busted.

That doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have a digital footprint of all your activity online.

I'm withholding judgment on if she did or did not code most of the app herself.

site's been updated. she's busted.

Yeah, the lack of a Stackoverflow or Github history doesn't mean someone didn't struggle as a programmer or is lying about their abilities. Maybe they just don't use the sites on a regular basis. Maybe they don't use them as a logged in member and actually get their answers as a guest based on what they typed in Google search. Or perhaps they found some other way to learn that didn't involve open source coding or asking questions online. Heck, I know I'm in that basket; the last time I asked a question on Stackoverflow was probably about two years ago, and even then that was probably the first one. And even to this day, I basically don't use Github at all, so anyone looking for my profile would also find no evidence of a 'struggle'.

There's no reason the person discussed in this story couldn't be in the same situation.

Why do people always try to inconspicuously promote their products on hacker news by posting links to them in the comments... I find this rather annoying.

If you're not shilling, you're not selling.

She may not be good at developing apps but she is good a lying...

> I’m not sure who is the “someone else” here. The app is published from Ravinder Singh Arora’s (my Dad) account. I can’t sign up for an Apple Developer account because I’m <18. And I created the app on my own :)

https://medium.com/@harshitaisanerd/im-not-sure-who-is-the-s...

This seems to be the part that upset a lot of people including the OP.

It's not plagiarism, it's a team putting the 16-year-old in front for the media attention. The crypto currency space is full of dodgy stuff, so not surprising.

The author of this post seem to have it out for the girl personally, which is unnecessary.

She personally claims to have written it all on her own, in the press release she also says she was intern at Sales force in Bangalore, attended MIT Launch and her profile says she is a "16 year old programmer and entrepreneur" along with a link to "my app".

She also called the person disputing that a jobless disturbed bully, harasser and troll and due to internet "siding with her" the author was met with abuse for "harassing a kid" and insults despite the proof they provided about app possibly being a team work or work of someone else.

And if all her social media posts are "a team" then this is even more unethical.

Yes, that's what the current social media climate is like unfortunately. An internet mob harassing someone seems to be the default answer to everything, and each person participating thinks they are fighting for justice or something. I just don't think HN piling on is going to help.

So you're saying that we should just let people lie and get away with it? Because right now she's getting away with it.

It looks you're right. She was writing something, then the other guy was reviewing and correcting it, at least this is what she claims:

https://imgur.com/0ihzIzy

I have to say, I found the "story" very leading. A lot of inconclusive evidence labelled a lot stronger than it deserves, especially the "confession".

The reality of a lot of app development now is that you can go a long way by not doing very much. Ok, so the git graph shows another developer committed many more lines: since when have we, as an industry, taken KLOC as a serious measure of anything?? Those lines of code could well be XML UI structures or a bunch of config spat out from an IDE.

Is she an amazing developer? No, she admits as much - she claims 10k lines of code, a bunch of which may have been StackOverflow'd, and she doesn't claim experience. She says she has trouble with Python.

Such a big deal over such a minor thing.

If she has trouble with Python she's miles away from a competent Swift or Objective C developer.

I actually have the entire source code so I have enough evidence. Obviously I can't reveal it since it would be illegal.

But she gave it to me of her own free will, and if you think 10000 lines can be SO'd then you live in a bubble

If you want us to believe you without giving any proof you'll have to give us more evidence. Why did she give you the (incriminating) source? Why can't you reveal it? What in said source code convinces you she didn't write it?

You can see in the conversation screenshot that she uploaded code on Google drive at my request - my only intention was to review the code. Yes she trusted me that much - in fact there are a lot of peoples code I have reviewed and fixed.

The code is too complicated for a beginner to have written. There are generator expressions, lambdas and what not in there.

I could go ahead and post the previous conversations where I was struggling to get basic programming concepts into her head, but shes already gone rabid in trying to discredit me. More material from my side will make her react even more extremely.

My biggest question and open challenge to her is this:

If she wrote all of it -

1) Show us the git log

2) If she insists aviral corrected and merged the code himself, show us the original fragments of code she sent, or show us the mails containing fragments of code if she emailed it to him.

If aviral was really a mentor, why would he use this crude method of collaboration, he'd explain how to use git and github to her to raise pull requests, commit code and so on.

Even the most pleb developer uses github and manages to commit code and so forth to it in a few days. Just look at the number of git repos with hello world like code in them.

I'm sure she'll come up with some excuse why the above is impossible like "we deleted intermediate stuff and mails", or "I dont know how to use git", or whatever hamstering.

I saw bullshit I called it. The burden of proof is on her. I have much more to lose by lying than she does. I have a life, a career and people will surely take the word of a teenage girl over a man in his 30s. She could instantly destroy all my credibility and reputation by showing proof.

In the unlikely event that she can provide proof that can convince without doubt, then I'll eat my words. If she can't then its her word against mine - I have nothing to lose or gain by her rise or fall, I don't even own Macs, iPhones or do mobile development.

I have no motivation to lie. I've built apps all my life. She has every motivation to - this is her ticket to getting into the USA.

Also what about the guy who was told directly by aviral that aviral developed the app for a small sum of money under an NDA?

Aviral has even tweeted something to the effect of "I lost respect for this guy who made a private conversation public". That's damning evidence.

> The burden of proof is on her.

The burden of proof is normally on the person making the accusation. All you’ve offered is your opinion: “there’s no way she could have written it” and some hearsay.

If I accuse you of being a fraud should you have to prove that you’re not?

Presumably, you could perform many of the decompiling steps that the author performed. A great deal of the parent article seems reproduceable.

Wow, I was always a bit skeptic about this from the beginning. Already after reading her medium article I was convinced there is something fishy going on. Here I was putting together a simple web app after months of cramming textbooks & video tutorial series (as a 19 years old) & there she was winning acclaim for her fake commitment.

I would like thank this 'namc' for putting in the journalistic-legwork to get us all closer to the truth. And also letting us draw our own conclusions.

I think what's upsetting to me is not really this case in particular, but that I couldn't imagine any reputable tech journalism organization being able or willing to publish an expose like this. So cheers to all you HN citizen journalist digging into the commits and asset names to give us an idea what's behind the Press Release.

> but coding =! app development

That's a pretty funny typo from someone defending themselves against accusations of not knowing how to program.

This reads a lot like an attack. Yes its clear they did not program their app 100% themselves. I fail to see how it's such a big deal. Especially one that requires posts on multiple platforms targeting her.

The other developers seem happy for her to take the credit, presumably as its good for marketing. Who is this really hurting?

It appears that the author originally reached out to her because she wanted to offer mentorship. Then she realized that the code wasn't the work of someone who'd need a mentor, but an experienced developer who'd done the actual coding. And the girl had the gall to downplay the level of "help" she received.

Instead of the talented and hard-working individual she expected, the author found someone who'd take credit for the work of others to gain internet fame. I don't think this article is the best reaction to that (hurling insults usually doesn't help anyone), but I can understand how she'd get pissed about that kind of behavior.

> we don’t see him bagging MIT scholarships, or all the accolades the girl is receiving for her app

I guess she's worried that she'll get exposed further down the line and it would be bad for women who code in general

When someone very prominently says they made an app, someone else says they didn't and the first person responds with calling them jobless, disturbed and a harasser then the gloves are off. And it hardly reads like an attack to me anyway, there are no insults, no ill wishes to her career or life, it's just very firm.

> the first person responds with calling them jobless, disturbed and a harasser then the gloves are off

Well that reaction seems to have come after they were harrassed, called a dumb kid, and a lying piece of shit[1]. This is a 16 year old, they're going to make mistakes. This level of hate for something very minor is really out of proportion.

They did after all contribute at least partly towards the app, so it's more of an exaggeration than an all out lie.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/jFbQR

I'd like to weigh in on this as a 16 year old. By no means am I an experienced programmer [1], but I feel as if I am learning all that I can. Sure, stackoverflow and Google are there to help, but I make sure that I understand whatever I write.

This girl is using her age as a marketing tactic, and I understand the point of the author, but this post goes too far. Instead of pointing out her faults by making a big deal on his blog, the author should reach out to her and explain his opinion in a mature manner. I don't think it is right to expose someone publicly just for making a mistake.

[1]: https://shamdasani.org

Who cares? Even if she is a fraud, the result of pointing this out is only going to give her more support and attention.

The only reason young or female developers get weird media attention is because the same companies who abuse visas and get convicted of wage fixing are trying to get more cheap labor. They pour money and volunteers into charities and media; offers dwindle.

This happens a lot in India. There's a fraud by the name Ankit Fadia, who still sells plagiarised material and holds hands on 'ethical hacking' conferences.

Well, at least Wikipedia is up to date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankit_Fadia

She may be a plagiarist, but that doesn't mean the author of this post isn't also a bully who should be likewise questioned. There are extremists on both sides, the truth is in the middle, etc.

Why is this story flagged? It somehow proves the author's point.

It's difficult-to-verify flamebait, and if it's not true then it's harassing a kid.

It also reminds me of the Naomi Wu fiasco, where people thought that a woman couldn't possibly be doing all the things she said she did. And ultimately apologised.

It feels a bit like witch hunting and it is probably the reason it got removed from reddit. Anyway "X got removed so X is true" is a slippery slope if not outright false.

It was enough to answer just like she did here: https://imgur.com/0ihzIzy Personally I believe her explanations, but then it doesn't look like she was really writing everything on her own.

I once read that a big problem in the industry are already established women.

There seems to be the tendency to think "If I did it in the harsh world, why should anyone have it easier than me?"

"There is no storyboard, lol. For any iOS dev who is just starting out, making an application without storyboards is just unbelievable."

When i was 17, for the 2nd iOS app i launched on the app store, i made the GUI programatically. It was a simple app and trying to combine story boards with code just confused me.

I haven't investigated this app at all, but seriously? I stopped reading after that gross speculation.

Me too. I don't and never have used a storyboard.

I'm concerned with the parenting thats at play here! "Giving credit where due" is something so simple yet hugely absent in this incident!

I could understand if the App did something amazing, but it's just a basic Crypto tracking app - there are thousands of these already on the App Store. I'm sure she did work on it to some extent, it's nothing spectacular. Looks like a fairly basic 'follow the tutorial' first App, but maybe that's just me.

It's not about the complexity of the app that bothers me, it's the praise she is getting from people for falsely claiming that she solely developed the app with negligible help from other devs which turns out to be completely untrue.

Wow, this article is reminiscent of that other one a few months ago about that Chinese lady who made maker videos of herself doing 3D printing and soldering, and getting accused of fraud because she was a woman.

Are you a “prodigy” for building an app? No. But you don’t deserve accusations backed by opinion and no evidence either.

>> he “allowed her” to call the app hers, given certain “circumstances”.

Is this the actual quote? It sounds as though we're meant to read more into it. The real author could well be a parent, but I guess we're meant to read that it's a suitor.

The "real" author was a contractor--it's common to see app development contracted out on UpWork. I wouldn't read much into the wording since he's not a native English speaker.

It's a 16 year old girl that programmed an app, of course you're going to have a shitstorm when you deconstruct the truth of the matter.

Good post though, I love people who exposes frauds.

Cut the witch-hunt

So what? Apple is selling other people's work as their own since decades.

Whatever the truth is, this is a terrible write-up. I'm surprised it's getting such traction because the "evidence" against her is pretty flimsy or non-existent.

> I used a spare iPhone to get the app, and then used https://github.com/BishopFox/bfdecrypt and https://github.com/BishopFox/bfinject to decrypt the app .

>Here are a few things I found :

>No, she did not code the app as she claims. In her defense, she has help from a few people, but I would call that bluff, given that help construed of over ~~50%~~ 90% of git commits.

What? You can't get the git history by decrypting an app binary.

The post shows a screenshot of a private git repo's commit history but no explanation of how it was obtained.

The 16-year old girl claims (https://i.imgur.com/TQzc6TW.png) that the other author has a high number of commits because he was committing code on her behalf because she didn't have a Github subscription for private repos. Fishy because that's a weird workflow, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.

>There is no storyboard, lol. For any iOS dev who is just starting out, making an application without storyboards is just unbelievable.

Maybe this is lost on me because I'm not an iOS developer, but is the author just accusing the girl of poor technique? That seems to support the case that she's an amateur developer.

>So we did a grep for `com` on strings in the decrypted app, you will notice that on line 929 there is a mention of library which does not exist, and so I’m inclined to believe, this is who probably the author of original code is.

A non-existent library created the app? What is this evidence of?

>Upon reaching out to the the dev in question, he went to the extent of saying that he “allowed her” to call the app hers, given certain “circumstances”. Fair enough, we don’t see him bagging MIT scholarships, or all the accolades the girl is receiving for her app. Let’s pass on some appreciation to the so-called-mentor?

Why are we not seeing proof that this conversation occurred?

>Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because ~~sweetie~~, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry.

Addressing another developer as "sweetie" is deeply unprofessional. This whole sentence was dripping with obnoxious arrogance. This is the "investigator" we're taking at their word?

In case the author changes the post, this is the version that I'm commenting on: https://archive.fo/9Jw4R

Apple's IDE has a visual way to generate UI related code, but you can do it manually. Beginners tend to use the UI WYSIWYG tools to build apps - AFAIK.

Maybe they mean a fake domain for the name of your libs: com.monkeybuttskunkworks.libs.cryptopricer

Why is this flagged?

Is flagging on HN distinguishable from overpowered downvote?

Why is this flagged? How can we request unflagging?

Is it all about censorship of harsh truths?

Flagging is something users do on HN, not mods.

If you have enough karma, you can vouch for flagged items. You can also email the mods if you think it merits mod intervention. I have done so a few times to say stuff like "It is a good article with a bad title. I think users are flagging in reaction to the title without reading it." In such cases, they sometimes turn off flags and retitle the piece.

Large group dynamics are inevitably messy and complicated. It doesn't really help to get up in arms about that fact.

> How can we request unflagging?

There's a "vouch" button once you have enough karma.

Members may flag submissions due to the resulting discussion on HN as much as the submission itself: the sets of topics that are interesting and topics that can be constructively discusses on HN are not identical. Both are important to keep HN interesting. FWIW, it's not flagged at the time I'm writing this comment.

Quality of HN commentary is down and the flagging epidemic is part of it.

The problem is sinking and killing discussions that already got going. A minority of selfish users gets to demolish collaborative work that other users already invested in.

The incentives are for lower effort from commenters. A downward spiral.

I second this.

Feels like something fishy is going on, given all the author’s prior references of being flagged on other platforms.

That post looks so immature.. who the f* cares who created an app at the end of the day ?

If you think it's the fact that she's young that made the app famous, then create a false young persona and the same with your own app instead. Only stupid people would care about who built it instead of the actual quality of the app.

I've lost time even reading even the title of this post.

#firstworldproblems

You've been posting a lot of uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments, which violates the guidelines. Could you please (re-)read them and stop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The author of the article comes across poorly here - this is nothing more than bullying and harassment of the app developer, just because they didn't meet the exacting standards of this critic.

So the app developer had some mentorship, and probably copied and pasted a handful of code snippets she didn't have a deep understanding of. So what? That doesn't justify this completely over the top reaction.

Young women interested in programming rare enough, let her get some help, let her have all the praise, that's okay. In years to come she'll hopefully stick to the field and that's what is important. Not that she wrote 100% of her app.

What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what the nit-pickers say.

No, it's not ok, because as the original author highlights, such frauds diminish genuinely working women in tech (as is the author). For the same reason we don't give medals to the sportsmen that are caught cheating.

Yes, it is okay.

So she can plagiarise an app, call her critic a jobless harasser and get away with it all just because she is a woman?

If this is tolerated at large it will have a chilling effect on any young person (including young women) who looks and sees people like her because they will think they are too stupid for tech since they can't make an entire app in 2 months. It will also have a chilling effect on all men and women in tech. Men will be afraid of criticizing women and secretly doubting their competence and women will be coddled, depraved of criticism and doubted as being there for reason other than their own skill.

IMO it has already happened to a degree in USA. In Poland no one sane would doubt a woman in tech or be afraid of criticizing her but in USA it's getting very murky, especially after stuff like [0].

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868

Oh come on, call this plagiarism is over the top. She had help and didn't mention that everywhere. There's something on quora where she mentioned the guy she paid for some work. https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-to-build-Crypto-P...

For me it's not about her being a woman, but about her being a young person. Give them a chance or have we (mid-thirties) already become so intolerant against teens?

"What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what the nit-pickers say"

This is why we have shit software ecosystems - Take Microsoft as the biggest example of "its more important to sell stuff than get it right"

Not sure why you're talking to me about that. My last windows as the 98 one.

How do we help those that doesn't do frauds then?

Offer to review their code. Talented beginners tend to be unaware of the best/standard way to do things and are likely to produce code that works but is somehow strange. Point out how to do it differently when that happens, and make sure to explain the reasoning so they can avoid similar mistakes in the future. But don't give just negative feedback; also tell them when they have done particularly well, so they don't get discouraged. And sometimes just showing interest in what they are doing can be enough.

As a 16 year old male who has spent years and years hard at work, learning JavaScript and Rust, it really saddens me that people like this get the praise. There are lots of us working hard and putting in the hours, because we are intelligent enough to know that apps are a moonshot and not a key to success. I am all for gender equality, but it's blatant that the fact that the "developer" here is female has blown the actual achievement out of proportion. Maybe I should just get 'the change'. Maybe that's the key to success.

I‘m sorry but the author is indeed a bully. I get the point why it may be unethical to copy and claim it’s someone’s own work but afaik the “real” coders were alright with this.

The author tries with all effort to proof that this kid can’t Code by saying how experienced he is and that he was also smart when he was her age. For me this sounds like being very jealous and frustrated.

The author is women. And this just seems to be case where family 'helps' kid to chart their independent path. It is pretty common and I have known many people who would hire some contractors to write some mobile apps that can be used to garnish resume for college admissions etc.

People have been doing it forever but with help of social media they can generate lot of support and sympathy also if they fit in right slot of identity politics.

So what the author is a woman?

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