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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Are any other young tech nerds (I'm the same age as the person in the article) a bit annoyed when people mention age?

I mean...half of the news I hear about greplin is about the founder being 19 years old. Who cares? Greplin is a cool service, it's not relevant that the founder is 19 and, honestly, if it were me I would be a little offended.

Same thing with this. Who cares that the person who donated money is 23? Why not just: "Kik founder donates $1 Million to support Waterloo student entrepreneurs"?

/pet peeve

This does sound like an awesome project though :). A bit like the "hacker hostel" I think ever geek dreams about at some point.

Good on Ted Livingston for supporting it.

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In general, I'm with you, but in this case, it's significant in my opinion. There's very few people who at 23 could even think of donating $1M, especially money they've earned on their own. Meanwhile it's fairly common to hear about some founder/CEO in general donate $1M. I think mentioning the age is just to highlight how great this guy is. Just saying "Kik founder" might take away from it.

I guess. It just kindof sucks when you're younger, sometimes it feels like people are saying "Yeah, that's really cool...for a kid".

I really don't care that much, I was just curious if other people my age felt the same way.

I'm with you and do feel the same way for the most part. Just think that in this article specifically, it's in a good way.

I read it as "That's really cool ... and especially cool at such a young age". I'd say the age makes it a rarer and hence more newsworthy event.

It is annoying, only because it is obvious tabloid-level gossip and has nothing to do with the events involved. We should be talking about the Canadian start up scene, Waterloo in particular, not this guy's age. But something tells me something about his age is the reason this got upvoted so much.

Age is no different then skin color, marital status, or any other attribute you could assign to a person. I always (try to) by default ignore it from headlines and articles.

I'm not a fan of trying to put spin on anything - when I submitted the story, the only edits I made to the original title were to satisfy HN's 80 character limit.

I understand, the spin came directly from Velocity.

So you ignore age/skin color/marital status/etc? So it is not more impressive if a single mother with 3 kids starts a startup than a 45 year-old rich serial-entrepreneur. It is not more impressive if a 16 year old solves one of the millennium problems (as opposed to a 65 year old career academic)?

Of course it is more impressive and I wouldn't ignore these factors...

I always feel a twinge of sadness knowing that I can never be a 19 year old who invented something again.

Yeah, but you can be a person that gives 19 year olds the tools that they need to invent things, which in my opinion is even cooler.

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