I think it's great to encourage students like Samarth and I by sharing and talking about what we're building. You can offer specific and helpful feedback which I would really appreciate. But I don't appreciate your calling my work bullshit. And I think this attitude chases away less privileged students from pursuing things like software further. There's value in making something that people get joy from, even if it's not the cutting edge shit that OpenAI blogs about. And I'm confident in what I made here.
OP was actually wrong with their hueristic in this case - the article doesn't really go into your age beyond a passing mention, but that doesn't change the fact that OPs critique was with article writers, not programmers-who-have-their-work-written about.
Still feels like HN generally has a counterproductive attitude to stories of this type.
Personally, I think your project is getting coverage not at all because of your age, but because it produces interesting results that people want to see, regardless of whether the algorithm used is considered cutting edge or not.
This isn't to denigrate the work of either of the two kids involved: the program produced is interesting and fun, the encouragement is awesome, and they've lucked out with this publicity and should milk it for all it's worth.
I would bet that OP was once themselves the recipient of similar "breathless gushing" when they were young, and lost a lot of the wind in their sails when formerly impressive achievements became simply expected. Better not to depend on that kind of validation, it stops early and never comes back.
And worse, someday you might read articles like this and feel discouraged, because it seems nobody will care that you just discovered how much fun you can have with Markov chains in your 30s.