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Comment by dickeytk | Hacker News Reader

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

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 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.

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.

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’.

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".

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.

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