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I think kids tend to do it in traditionally adult spaces just as a buffer from the extreme criticism that can exist online. Saying, "someone wrote a cpu guide" has a lot less impact than saying "a teenage girl wrote a cpu guide". I don't think the individual behind the content is all that important and we have to recognize that we only ever see the kids that tell us they're kids, i could be an 8 year old prodigy for all anyone knows.

Praise is nice, especially when you're young. Stating your young has to dramatically increase praise to criticism ratio in adult spaces like this. No one would care on reddit but we're all old men here lol so the kids stand out. It can be overdone if the person makes the content about themselves instead of the content, or intentionally starts controversy. But this is fine.

Since she states she won a hackathon she's probably a very gifted and motivated young person who is still surrounded with adults telling her she's great, that doesn't mean they're wrong. And sooner or later the adults begin drastically raising the bar for praising you so it's cool for her to get her last couple years out of it.

I think this approach is pretty alien to me. When I was a kid, I hid the fact I was young on the internet because I wanted to be taken seriously and not be dismissed or treated with kids gloves due to my age. I didn't like that I could show a website I built to someone in life and have them say 'oh wow good job kid'. Internet is brutal but usually pretty honest.

Encouraging youth is a good thing. But I suspect that the youth most in need of encouragement are the sort of kids who wouldn't even have the courage to post something to HN. Maybe I'm wrong. But I think that's why these things rub me the wrong way.

These things always strike me as merely fishing for praise, while trying to stifle legitimate criticism, which is unfair to everyone else, old and young alike.

Agreed. Honestly, I thought it was always about humble brag. For example: Look at me I'm a 5 yr old cat living in a $2M loft in Soho while I go to school in MIT riding my private helicopter. I'm such a success at cat.

Kind of a tangent off your point but you’re referencing the "girls do not exist on the internet" phrase like it was used by people to say don’t bring your identity onto an anonymous forum.

Was that how it was used? Back in my forum and chan days when that phrase was common I only saw it used to explicitly try to force women off the internet. It was usually quickly followed up with “tits or gtfo” for instance and I never saw an equivalent push on anyone mentioning they were a man

I've always understood "tits or gtfo" to suggest that if you are mentioning you are a girl then do something related to it (show breasts) or else shut up about being a girl when its not relevant.

That's on the charitable side. It reads to me more like "a woman's acceptance in this community is predicated on her providing sexual favours". But your interpretation still reveals an issue: men are allowed to express themselves in small (and often large) ways that are "not relevant", so why this (pervasive) attitude when women do it?

I cant recall a single instance where the woman in question delivered and then wasn't met with immediate derision and misogny. It was a pretty explicit anti woman statement

I agree with your take. It also reminds me of those comments on youtube videos of classic rock songs (or any music older than 5 years at this point) that go along the lines of "I'm X years old, and I like this REAL music".

It always seems like the intent is for internet strangers to pat you on the back and tell you how special/precocious you are.

I know what you mean, but I see it a little differently.

1. I was a precocious kid, and as much as it might rub people the wrong way, there’s nothing wrong with being proud of yourself for that and bringing attention to it. The downside is that you can (at least some of us) have one hell of a shock once you’re out of the wunderkind age range and you’ve made that a core part of your identity.

2. Different standards are warranted with youth. That was a big reason why I prefaced everything with my age growing up. Programmers are notoriously nitpicky and curmudgeonly, but they do tend to have a special place in their heart for youthful curiosity and enthusiasm, and are more willing to give constructive feedback to someone in that phase than a mature adult who won’t just RTFM. I know I feel that way.

Mixed feelings, but overall, I think it does two things:

- promotes more civil discussion. Commentors are less mean, less dismissive, and when posting criticism it's usually more constructive

- gets the article more attention/traction than normal as a subset of the audience is impressed by the accomplishment/effort given the backstory

Which both benefit the author, and that's fine. We talk about hooks and marketing all the time here; this is harmless but effective, which IMO is the best kind.

Can't wait for people to start abusing this strat by lying about their age.

Yeah, for me the breakout interesting thing about this post was that it was written by a 17 year old.

Gently: Could we please not? :)

This is a young person who’s new to the community. That’s where communities come from!

Without other comment, this meta thread is pushing the author’s personal statement below the fold. As the grown-ass adults in the room, we can have our judgments, but we should try to make a little space, too.

I disagree with your premise of censoring as a "way to be welcoming".

There's a valid discussion to be had about the title and the need to preface things with age.

As a a grown ass adult you're not making space, you're demanding ranking that favours your ideas and even more, the silence of some you disagree with.

The funniest thing is that you didn't even address the guide itself. The style or the content, you just came to do "justice" or something.

Content is good enough. Style is a bit "full of wonder and amazement" and has its own particular flair but that's just personal style, regardless of age. You could even argue that age is necessary to account for "the audience are other high schoolers, but that's if you have the discussion you're asking people not to have (and whoever agrees with your censoring mindset and downvoted OP to now effectively hiding it from. View).

Thanks for your feedback! I’m not sure I’m following, but it’s always interesting to hear perspectives from people with different life experiences. Take care :)

Fully agree with this, I have a very similar response when I see these.

That said, the tone of my reply to OP would have been different if hadn't known their age. Or more likely I would have thought to myself "so you understand CPUs, cool" and moved on.

Doesn't the idiom "girls do not exist on the internet" itself point to the "standard" that, in this circles, men think of the people are interacting with as men, as "default", and the not-default is women. And we come back to the invisibilization of people who are not a white young guy in tech.

I'd wish to get as far away as possible from such an attitude, and thus really enjoy when I see people outside of this "norm" to make themselves known and attract more heterogenous people that can enrich the community.

I don’t think it’s intended as such, but the particular phrasing as expressed could be misinterpreted as such. Therefore it should be expressed differently; don’t choose to differentiate based on attributes that shouldn’t make a difference for your message.

I don't think it's any worse that appealing to authority ("patio11 said that ....") or referencing that you were in YC. In those cases as well, quality should stand on its own. Even so, I think context helps, and it's not always the same as having lower standards.

Not commenting on whether it's good/bad, but I think it's completely different to your examples. Both of those say "here is context of my past achievements; this is an indication that what follows may be of high absolute quality"

As opposed to the "I am N years old", which is saying "here is context, which doesn't by itself indicate achievement, which may be an indication that what follows is of high relative quality"

I don't mind. I will form some opinion after I see the work, and yes, my standards will be different depending on the life circumstances of the OP, especially when it comes to some disability which makes the work more difficult, like being blind. In such a case, mentioning it could be encouraging to other people facing similar hurdles.

I just wanted to give another interpretation of the phasing used in the post. I took it more like this should be considered more impressive because it is well written AND written by someone so young. And i suppose it's fair to feel like that as the author cause its a pretty good post

> other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards.

I have to admit, a fault of mine is that I sometimes do the opposite. When I read stories about someone younger than me achieving stuff, it's easy to look for faults to diminish the accomplishment.

"High school student made X? Pft, I found a small flaw when skimming the story therefore the whole thing is probably bad and I don't have to feel bad about not achieving the same at that age."

> other than to prime people to look upon your writing with lower standards

Yes, that's the point. They're 17, so my expectations are lower.

I am impressed a 17 year old wrote this website.

It's always great when I see someone's work and it's interesting so I look the person up and it turns out that is not the stereotypical demographic (eg. 20 to 40 yo dude), but if I see demographic factor paraded upfront I feel like it is meant to compensate for lacking work (if not then what is the purpose?) and I automatically counter compensate so it tends to lower my first impression

This is very impressive at 17, and her Github activity. So age definitely qualifies. We were fascinated with Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates at their ages, so this isn't anything new. Doing anything remarkable at a young age is impressive and worthy to be noted.

This is a young person making strides in a hard field, and quite different from majority of peers at their age, but especially today with short attention spans, and TikTok, gaming, other distractions.

Another point is many high schools tend to coddle their students even for very little accomplishments. I was surprised by the attention one 16 yr old student got for making an interesting yet simple science explainer about the sleep cycle. She won the award in the Breakthrough challenge competition, got a 250K scholarship, and given feedback to the tune that she would cure cancer.

There's also a huge competitive gap between US High schools today on average, than many other countries. It would be great for the US system to challenge HS students again and reward real accomplishment.

If you want people judging you, mention that, if the goal is for others to judge the work, don't.

On the other hand it is very positive because it inspires others in whatever “I am X” situation to get involved. It’s not uncommon for other fields like sports etc to have similar influence: “someone else like me is doing this so I can do it too!”

Everything is marketing.

The age thing is a bit of a red flag now given that too many parents in this industry try to give their kid an advantage by presenting their work as the work of their child. Seed the internet with all of the amazing accomplishments your kid "achieved" at a young age. I now look on the "I'm NN years old and I..." claims with skepticism, to the point where it's a net negative. It makes the project look worse.

Not in this case. It probably a nice guide. Already know how CPUs work so didn't read it, but it's entirely reasonable that a teen could do the work and assemble the details of how a CPU works.

If the HN community was kinder, this kind of caveat would not be necessary

Also, 17? At that point young adults have reached cognitive maturity[1], so perhaps that's a good time to drop the qualifiers.

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30762417/

Internet is a different place now. People bring their personalities and identities in. Don't think there is anything wrong with it. Also nothing wrong with being more patient with very young people and more impressed with their achievements IMO.

I think some of the negativity towards identity is that it’s usually not something that can be merited as your doing and not usually relevant.

I understand this criticism, but think it’s a lost cause to point it out.

Maybe in this case it’s a way to avoid too harsh criticism. It’s like, “hey, if I’m missing something I don’t have a degree so don’t take this as an authoritative piece”.

If it serves like a content warning then sure but it's dubious, a lot of outright junk appears here without anything like that-- that's what discussion threads are for:)

and about avoiding negative feedback, well I'm 36 and I don't have a degree... What can I do to avoid harsh criticism? I clearly can't use my age right? (right now I try to ignore it if it's not constructive or try to not become depressed and use it if it is, but overall I don't think this industry is so harsh criticism wise)

A lovely piece of advice I came across from Larry King in his book How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere:

If you're about to give a public speech and you don't have much experience (and are thus anxious), come out and state as the first thing (something like) "Hey, I don't talk publicly and this is scary, but I'll try my best".

This immediately can make you less anxious as any mistakes you make can be understood (rather than criticized) by the audience.

When commenting outside my area of expertise I often mention my lack of qualifications so as to invite gentle corrections to my mistakes (and to make others not assume I speak from great knowledge).

I don't support racism, sexism, ageism etc. Therefore I would prefer it if people didn't try to use those attributes to draw attention.

What do you mean "rule of thumb"? That's just an old meme making fun of how most Internet users were male. It's not about how you shouldn't mention gender.

If gender is never mentioned, maleness is assumed all the time, and then male users will not realize the abilities of their female peers.

I think something valuable is lost if everyone must present irrelevant identity information to combat false assumptions some may hold. At least for the crowd who want to primarily be associated with attributes that can be merited to their choosing.

Rule of Thumb comes from ancient measure systems (its basically an inch)