A Kid Spent 9 Years Building a Detailed Paper Model of a Boeing Jet (2017) | Hacker News Reader

A Kid Spent 9 Years Building a Detailed Paper Model of a Boeing Jet (2017)

ge.com

329 pointsycombonator72 comments

This “kid” is 25 years old, studied architecture and works as an artist. The work is amazing on its own, no need for clickbait.

Kinda right, it sounds like most of the work has been after his "kid" years but if he's been working on it for 9 years then he was 16 when he started.

I can never figure out why people care more that a kid made something.

Really?

"Group of children place toddler on the moon" wouldn't be more surprising than "Thousands of highly trained grown-ass engineers put man on the moon"?

We care more because we EXPECT impressive things to be accomplished by adults. We expect kids to be morons, because when we were kids, we were morons.

What slightly irks me is when some "kid" makes the news about something they did, but in reality it was basically their parents guiding them the entire time. Pretty much how some kid shows up to a science fare and wins despite their parents doing most of the work.

Not the case here, but that is usually what I expect when I see a kid making something news worthy.

I tend to care more about what is being accomplished and could give a rip who is accomplishing it.

Do you have kids? I can't get mine to sit still and focus long enough to learn the basics of playing the piano. The basics. And this is something they pester me to teach them on a weekly basis!

Anyone who has a normal kid would understand why people care more that a kid made something - especially something of such amazing detail.

My kids are happy, that's really everything that I hope for, but someone who puts this level of focus and effort into their work is not what very many people with kids would consider normal.

That’s the difference between “some kid” and “your kid”. Find a kid that likes playing the piano and it’s no longer an issue.

It might be unusual for kids to make something that would still be interesting if an adult had made it. But, their are millions of kids out there.

Of course, left to their own devices and granted the opportunity, kids will naturally do the thing they most want to do and it never appears to be anything of consequence until you look back on it many years from now.

I'm sure my Mum thought I was just wasting time on the computer at 8, but I'm where I am today because of it. But this is equivalent to me having reverse engineered and coded a commercial piece of software that I began in high school... that never happened, and I loved programming.

Not quite, this is not an actual functioning aircraft. On the other hand many kids have written programs that where actually useful. Recorded music people actually paid for etc etc.

it said he started in high school, studied architecture in high school and not college, and has no formal training in this. you seem to be massaging the facts.

Fair point, but I think the headline is more effective this way and, unlike most things I'd label as clickbait, the payoff in the article is satisfying enough that I don't feel tricked.

The way I think of clickbait is this: You should always write the most effective headline you can, which I'd measure in terms of the click-thru rate. But if the content doesn't pay off, I'll stop trusting you.

For example, I'll gladly click any clickbait from Cracked because their articles almost always pay off. If they say they have 23 surprising things, you can bet there will be 23 things that surprise me. By contrast, I'd never click a BuzzFeed link because they spent years proving their headlines never pay off.

Update: You know, it's cool if you need to downvote things, but it'd be helpful if you had the courage to comment on why you're downvoting. I don't care about the points (it's just gamification folks), but my obsessive brain is now wondering who I offended and how. Is it for disliking BuzzFeed? For liking Cracked? For suggesting clickbait-style headlines can be justified? For thinking this particular headline was justified? It reminds me of an old job I had where everyone in the company did an annual evaluation of everyone else in the company, anonymously. We just rated people, with no ability to explain why we gave them that rating. It ended up serving no instructive purpose and was just a way of finding out how many people hated you.

Totally agree. The title should be more along the line "An Artist Spent 9 Years Building a Detailed Paper Model of a Boeing Jet which he started as a kid"

If he spent nine years building it, he started at sixteen: hence as a kid.

Don’t miss his Flickr, particularly the landing gear. https://www.flickr.com/photos/lucaiaconistewart/albums/72157...

That degree of focus is extraordinary. I think of myself as meticulous and detailed but this is several levels beyond.

In those landing gear photos you can also see a bunch of insulin vials lined up in the background. So he did all of this while managing T1 diabetes as a kid / teenager. Very impressive.

I like his encouraging statement in the video. Often when we see amazing things we don't think we can accomplish something similar.

"I was not born with these skills, I developed them over time. And the original model was actually pretty crude. And I've really learned a lot over the past number of years, and that's how I've gotten to where I am at now."

A similar quote I heard "You can do anything, you just can't do everything".

I could have built that model plane for sure. The amazing part that's worth giving credit for is that someone did sit down and dedicate all that time to actually doing it

Related ("You can do anything"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlD9JYP8u5E

In some ways this is the most difficult thing. By doing X you're inevitably giving up doing all the possible not-X things you could have been doing. The Internet makes this worse by showing you more choices which you're giving up.

Opportunity cost is huge... and the internet definitely compounds the feelings about that.

I think the key is to find things that cause you not to care about the opportunity cost of everything you're missing because you're doing the thing you most want to do.

Right now I'm at a point in my life where I'm seriously considering shunning all media, not just social media, but media altogether.

The constant nagging reminder of the opportunity cost of things I'm missing because the choices I make pander to responsibility instead of fun and happiness while all those around me sink themselves into debt having fun is depressing. I have nobody to blame but myself of course, but the media constantly showing you what you're missing out on definitely doesn't help.

Boeing should give this guy a ride on a 777 - or a job! They need all the good publicity they can get right now.

I'm sure he's flown on a plane before - he's a fully grown man.

Parent didn't mean any plane - the 777 as he clearly loves that specific model from how he describes it.

He actually got to fly on the plane he is modeling.

Wired has a good video of him on YouTube.

It is remarkable work, regardless of how you define "kid" or "adult".

What I find interesting is that it really is made entirely of file folder cardstock.

Most model makers would have chosen foamcore or sculptable foam. But here, even the hinged parts and wheels are made of paper.

If he wanted to cash in on this, I wonder how much he'd get for it? To my eyes at least it's worth far more than any of the modern art "installations" that sometimes sell for millions.

Things are worth millions when there's an actual buyer who'll pay millions, and that has a lot to do with things other than than the artwork per se.

I could see it ending up in a museum collection, but probably not MoMA e.g., unless he gets famous. Art collectors won't buy it unless he has a body of work that other people can buy, too. Until then he's looking at aviation/industrial model collectors and those values are way lower.

EDIT: which is perverse, yes, and I agree with the sentiments in your comment!

GE is hosting the article so maybe they bought it off him

With art, everything is a crapshoot. The famous artists of the 20th century? Creativity and work meant less than who was in one's network. It is basically the same today.

This man is lucky enough to have some press, so if he ever decides to sell it he could probably get a decent price. It probably won't sell for more than art installations without him having displayed it unless he has contacts in industry.

He might find himself a niche buyer, though: Boeing, for example, or a number of aircraft hobbyists. Obviously, the company will probably pay more. Hobbyists aren't as likely to have "big money", like so many ordinary art buyers. This may very well limit his income from such things.

I found it interesting that this was hosted on a GE web site. Obviously they were impressed with the detail he put into the engines.

That he has any press whatsoever is a grand thing. I honestly know folks that spend as much time promoting themselves as they do working on artwork. I in no way thing that is what this man has done.

Now, more specifically, GE or any company as such: Considering the scope of this man's research and skills, they may or may not be interested in the artistic side of his skills. This is a man who has studied engineering, has spent numerous years looking at the details of airplane design, and has constructed delicate, movable parts alongside support bearing parts for that airplane ... out of freaking paper. This project could be the antithesis of art. It could be the most hideous thing you or I have laid eyes on. But nevertheless, it took serious dedication and attention to detail. The man worked with a material to the full potential that he has been able to do and designed parts. I can seriously see why this man would wind up working for GE. The artwork is a secondary but very complimentary skill.

Personally, I would absolutely love this man to get that and use it to, in part, fund his artistic career. Imagine if he took his skills and was more free with them. He could make impressive futuristic and surrealistic scenes with these skills. Miniature worlds, movie models, and so on.

(Full disclosure: I'm an artist, of the sort that doesn't make much money from my work. If I were rich, I'd fund my own art fun to a larger degree.)

This is so random!

I can't imagine the amount of patience and focus this guy has.

Or maybe Boeing reputation management op

No one ever checks those stories

i saw this video a couple years ago which shows it still in-progress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg_jpZsLf4s (2014)

I wasn't expecting much when I first clicked until I saw the landing gear and the engine part moving. Seriously impressive how there are joints and hinges in his design!

This is pretty cool. Wonder what his techniques are: How does he get the paper fitted and molded the way he wants?

I'd be especially impressed if it exhibited anti-stall+trim related nose dive. :-)

This is a 777, not a 737-MAX. You want burning batteries I believe. Or a disappearance. Or a SAM.

The batteries thing was the 787, wasn’t it? At least I recall the ANA 787 fleet was grounded for a battery issue shortly after revenue service began.

I wonder how he got access to the plans that have this level of detail?

Since when is a 25-year-old a "kid"?

He's been working on it for 9 years. Do you consider a 16 year old a kid?

No. A 16 year old is at best, a teenager. Sometimes they can be viewed as young adults.

A kid is, generally, younger than 13, though a 13 year old can sometimes be called a "kid". An 8-10 year old fits squarely in the "kid" bracket.

Where are you getting your definition? Merriam-Webster defines it as "a young person" and even gives "kids in high school" as an example usage. Wikipedia includes "young adult" in its definition which includes people from late teens through their twenties (again, according to Wikipedia).

Calling teens "kids" is part of the cultural problem in modern society. We expect too little of teens, and infantilize and demean them, instead respecting their talent and accountability.

He was 16 years old 9 years ago when he started, so I'd say it counts.

I've been working on my piano technique continuously since I was 6. Can I still be considered a kid three decades later?

Clearly not. What a weird question.

I think it really works like, a kid spent 2-3 years assembling a model. Then he turned into an adult who attended Vassar and worked on it for another 6 years.

Yeah, the idiom “this kid” got mistranslated into “a kid” on the link headline.

That's not an idiom, that's a clickbait trick. Our software catches that one and rewrites it sometimes. In this case it got it right.

Here's the artist 6 years ago [1]. The Flickr has tons more photos from the same year (2013).

Assuming the article got his current age right, he was 16 when he started the model, and 19 when he started posting to Flickr (and amazing progress by then; most of the model was ready).

So I think it does qualify as a "kid". Maybe a more precise title would be "Artist started building a paper model of a Boeing jet when he was a teenager; took 9 years to finish", but I didn't feel deceived by the current title.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/lucaiaconistewart/11782600196/...

How is 'this kid' more clickbait than 'a kid'?

It's the 'this' that does it.

'Kid' is baity too, but there are degrees.

What’s the psychology of that, though? How does ‘this’ attract more clicks than ‘a’?

Your just-so story is as good as mine, but FWIW my theory is that "this" is the verbal equivalent of physically pointing at something. So its role in a headline is analogous to those people who stand at a busy intersection shaking a gigantic cardboard pointer to some nearby store.

"this" is zero value clickbait and easy to catch. "kid" is a lie in this case, but it's hard for software to detect that automatically.

That's wonderful news. I've been begging for this for years.

You'll be happy to hear that we invested a lot of software effort into this recently, and are catching a ton of cases. Unfortunately, it's hard to do well and impossible to do precisely, so we have to be more modest than we'd like. Still, if you post "These secrets of the story behind exactly these things", the title will convert to "Things".

If were to ask a woman they would tell you that your still a kid till your mid 40's

Someone with wisdom or experience :)

Whether you're a kid or not depends on whether you have a stable income and take responsibility for yourself and others. I know 40-year-old kids and 17-year-old men.

Edit: Since I've been called out as sexist, I should note that I apply this equally to women. I've likewise met 40-year-old girls and 17-year-old women, and the difference between them is the same: The capability to earn a stable income and take responsibility for themselves and others.

Sometimes being part of a partnership means you focus on internal rather than external roles: Supporting the family instead of earning an income. Who does what is then negotiable within the family, and that's OK.

That’s sexist and poses a gender-role sterotype on men that they should be providable in order to get respect.

We call women, with no stable income but devotes her life to her household, women. We don’t call them girls because ‘they don’t have a stable income’.

Oddly enough, my brain associated "Kid" and "9 Years" from the title and I assumed a young child built a detailed Boeing paper plane. A "9 year old kid" makes perfect sense to me.

I was slightly confused when the video began. (Both by the level of detail a 9 year old kid could achieve and then the age of the "kid"!)

I hope that it's not Boeing 737 Max..

I dont understand the praise for someone building model airplanes, is there some secret moral superiority about kids who build model planes from scratch versus kids building lego boats from kits or.

Usually ‘building model airplanes’ involves buying ready-made, moulded plastic parts and kits, mounting and painting. This guy studied the plane and designed the whole thing from the ground up using paper only, made the mechanical parts functional and accurate. Entirely different story.

Yes, and for what reason, and what result? Perplexed why someone would spend this amount of time on such a thing. To each their own I suppose.

> for what reason

the pleasure

> what result?

a wonderful piece of work, self accomplishment, vast sum of knowledge in both airplanes and "sculpture", find any job in modeling with a snap and headline on HN :)

Don’t you think it would also amaze people that some well paid software developers would spend their free time working on open source software that is given away free?

This guy put in an insane amount of research and work to do this. I don't think there is a "secret moral superiority", but this takes a lot of dedication and focus which few people on this planet could achieve. I find this to be a very interesting project. Anyone can build lego bosts from kits and it only takes about an hour, so no one cares when you do it.

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