Hacker News Reader

Comment by th0th | Hacker News Reader

I really wonder what that dude was doing when he was 15 years old, should have been a difficult childhood...

When I was 15 I thought I was hot shit even though I wasn’t doing anything interesting. It would have been good if someone had told me that, so I had pushed harder and not been satisfied with what I was doing.

I get what he’s going for I guess but “this isn’t much of an achievement” is sociopathic

What’s your honest appraisal of this code? Would you ever under any circumstances use it? If not, then be honest and tell them to keep pushing. The quote is that it is not much “yet”. It’s a good first step, but having too high of a self-appraisal is just as bad as having too low. As an elementary school kid I worked for several years on a BASIC game where you could fly an ASCII art ship around the screen. It was not good, and I would have been better off if some adult had been honest and told me that I was doing it wrong and sent me down a better path. Instead I thought I was hot shit because I was the best programmer at my school. It wasn’t until years after college that I really even began to understand programming, and having too high a self-conception hurt me for a long time.

You don't know anything about this kid. You definitely don't know that what they need in their life is discouragement. Don't conflate their childhood with yours.

If a 15 year old wanted to show me a project, and I wanted to help them understand what would improve it, I'd ask them questions and engage them in a Socratic process to lead them that direction.

I wouldn't tell them that their work was trash. That would either discourage them from doing more projects, showing their projects to me, or both.

Who said it was trash? I said there are no new ideas, and it’s not ready for other people to use. Why would you conflate that with “trash”? That’s a perfectly normal, honest assessment.

I think you guys are expecting a 15 year old to be treated like a 5 year old. 15 is old enough to make real contributions to open source. Aaron Swartz is the obvious example, but lots of other young people make big contributions. It’s honest to say “good for you and keep working but this isn’t ready for the front page of Hacker News and if you think it is you will hold yourself back.”

If you weren't hypercritical, why do you think everyone is reacting as if you were? Either you communicated poorly and came off way differently than your intended, or you aren't being honest with yourself about what you said and what it meant.

You are heavily projecting onto him. You don’t know anything about him and even if you did unless he’s being openly belligerent it’s not your place to fix him

Just let people build things. There’s no need to aggressively tear them down. Programming for fun is not serious

You are projecting that people need unconditional affirmation. Why? Normal people can handle mild criticism.

Just because you dislike unconditional affirmation doesn't mean you need to delude yourself into thinking that being a total asshole without provocation is "mild criticism"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com