Fifteen-year-old Nigerian builds small scale construction machines [video]
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
But he has commitment and looks like at least average intelligence.
He'll do fine compared to everyone else around him. He'll work hard and send his kids to school.
Worry about the kids who are really bright and who should go to uni who the world misses out on. Then worry about hard workers like this kid.
Wish the video included some way to donate materials.
Kids ...
Btw, it reminds me of the Joule Thief circuit (often used in solar outdoor lights), that can recover and fully-discharge a battery over a much larger range than most consumer devices.
What this kid is doing is pretty impressive especially when you consider the dismal state of public school education in Nigeria (private school isn't so bad)
On the other hand in the age of "auto-play-with-mute" videos on social media, a lot of people just add subtitles to every type of online video. And as a sibling comment points out, there are hearing impaired people out there.
Hearing impaired people, non-English speakers, content indexing, machine learning, etc. There are many good reasons, don't make victims where there are none.
HN is one of those places where I have seen the concept of "violent agreement" at work. "Wait wait! You still need to consider ... this thing you thought you already said."
As a non native, but still fluent English speaker I always use subtitles when I can. It just helps to fill in the odd word I miss due to local noise or unexpected pronunciation (English has a lot of dialects!).
FWIW, I tend to do this for content in my native language as well. Turns out ~ten million people is enough to produce a lot of incomprehensible dialects as well...
The thing is, two statements can be seemingly at odds in sentiment and also simultaneously true. The "aggressive subtitles for foreign accent" phenomenon is real. I wanted to acknowledge I had seen the same in other places. It is irritating when it happens. It is disrespectful where it occurs. But the second paragraph establishes that it is not always the reason. I did not think it was here.
“What did they about X, I couldn’t understand the accent?”
I have also seen native English speakers, turn on subs on English movies, with the volume at a perfectly normal level to understand things.
The only thing going on is that people really like their subtitles.
It's the broadcast equivalent of your first scenario.
I find it helps me to focus on the video rather than spend effort parsing somebody's speech (reading is fast).
The way he speaks is not "100% understandable" at all. Watch it with your eyes closed, or with the subtitles hidden, it's actually quite difficult to understand in many parts.
So we enforce intellectual property law here which prevents lower cost clones from being made and also prevents industry from investing more in reverse engineering. The monopoly on ideas raises costs compared to a market with clones, and poorer communities and countries suffer with IP versus an alternative world with more abundant cheap clones. Some would say the innovation would not have occurred without IP law in the first place, which obviously in some cases is true (certain business models require the monopoly on ideas to exist). However I think it’s absurd to suggest that there would be no incentive to innovate in a world with no IP law, and the damage done by IP law is too great to ignore. As someone who believes we have a moral responsibility to help people less privileged than us, I see it as grotesque that we lock up information that could help feed hungry people all over the world.
Go to Nigeria. The place is full of construction, engineers, inventors, mechanics, etc. This video -- to a Nigerian -- would receive this response: "Big fucking deal... if the kid was really smart he'd be using motors and gears by now." The response of a white liberal, on the other hand: "Oh how precious... I didn't know that those people even knew how to write! Someone should give him a scholarship!"
I am not sure why you assumed this is a post by a "white liberal" that automatically assumes a low opinion of Nigerians.
To me, this is a post about something interesting that someone has done, and is made more interesting by the fact that they live in an impoverished part of the world (I watched a video on them, it's pretty clear they aren't rich).
The environment the boy was filmed in suggests that he doesn't have a lot to work with. Maybe that's BBC going for the sensationalist angle, but I doubt it given that the article was originally produced for BBC News Pidgin:
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-48130271
The initiative to actually implement his designs with limited resources is the hallmark of a hacker, and he belongs on the front page of this site.
His young age makes it that much more interesting. I have worked with 15 year-olds before and let me tell you that there's a wide spectrum of abilities. In particular, the ability to reduce plans into an implementable format quantitatively (i.e., measuring and cutting accurately) is extremely rare even in the US.
Very few wealthy US students could do what this boy has done.
Go to youtube and search for 'syringe hydraulic.'
I'm not knocking the kid, but the adulation over his accomplishment -- copying a DIY project off YouTube most likely -- is absurd.
If this kid figured it all out from YouTube, he's still way ahead of the rest of his peers around the world.
The point for me isn't the syringes. It's the initiative and determination it takes to start with the idea and actually finish it, particularly among this age group.
I would have just as enjoyed reading about a white kid in the UK who made the same sort of scale bulldozers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardwa...
Could you imagine a future where these massive machines are controlled by remote operators running green, all electric energy sources?
This is a 14yo which was gratuitously accused of being a terrorist by his teachers - the very people that we as a society tell kids to trust and look up to.
He was handcuffed and arrested, he went through a detention intake process, mugshot and all.
The word exploit really does not sound right.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Ahmed_Mohamed...
he literally said something like 'that's nice but it looks like a bomb. don't show anyone else.' -- it doesn't seem to me to be unsupportive, just worried. I don't think a teacher would say something like that in confidence with a student unless that student had a certain rapport with the teacher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba
Here's to Hope's similar advancement as he grows, studies, and learns.