Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluetomcat | Hacker News Reader

Looks especially clean, consistent and well-modularised, tackling a problem that requires non-trivial knowledge about binary formats and kernel APIs. Many "senior" programmers would struggle to build something like this even at a conceptual level. The antithesis of "kids these days" :-)

Out of curiosity, how does a 17-year-old attain that level of knowledge? Books, peers, programming clubs, parents who are programmers probably?

View on HN

I can reply because I was in the same situation at a younger age, at a time with no internet then limited internet.

Raw curiosity & having "just access to the required hardware" (a huge "just") and a bit of books & magazines can take you a long way.

My parents were not programmers but my father bought computers early on (1984), and later brought compilers at home (via his work), e.g. TurboPascal, C++, and let me experiment.

I learned mostly via magazines & books, and later a bit of exchanges with peers (demomaking), and also via buying disks (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/DP_Tool_Club) that contained documentation (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralf_Brown%27s_Interrupt_List) and arrived via snail mail.

I "just" gradually iterated and coded small stuff, then gradually more complicated stuff (Windowing toolkit in CGA, a Tetris clone, a Bomberman clone, FFT software, and ultimately 3D realtime rendering without any FPU, only in software, with Phong rendering and such https://github.com/thbar/demomaking#obez-1995).

I was not an isolated case in the sense I ended up stumbling on other teenagers (via the demomaking world) who did exactly the same thing.

Today a curious kid can go probably much further, as long as curiosity is encouraged :-)

Sorry but 1980 does not compare to 2020 I levels of distraction kids nowadays have that divert their attention into consuming rather than creating.

I would really be interested in the author's take on it.

There are definitely many people who almost exclusively spend their time consuming stuff at a young age. I cannot tell however, if that has ever been different, or if it's just perceived differently now. For many people continue consuming a lot their entire lives. The quality of the content one can consume has likely gone up though, or at least it has become addictive.

The idea of only watching saddens me. Doing any creative work is incredibly satisfying, and I think has positive effects on long-term happiness and self-worth.

It's not the same for sure. But I see my 15-yo doing mostly the same today!

You are right that the attention-eating stuff is a huge difference.

Happy to also read the author :-)

But you aren't op.

So you can but shouldn't reply.

It's mostly books and blogs: I like to read a lot. Also, your guess is correct, my dad is a computer scientist.

Reading books to increase your understanding puts you ahead of 90% of people who graduated from a CS program in the last 5-10 years from what I've seen. Several of my coworkers admitted to having never read a book on anything related to software engineering before and it shows.

Having parents who expose you to these things and instill curiosity and passion puts you ahead of 99.9% of people who graduated from a CS program if you decide to go through that yourself. Direct early-life hands-on experience is a huge privilege and it is important to remember that.

We just had a thread about programming books where plenty of people admitted to never reading them.

To be honest these days articles on the web seem to be more efficient means to attain knowledge than a book, with less condensed words

If you can find good articles. The reality is with the ad economy, 99% of articles are plain wrong and copypasta.

Todays internet is a cat litter spilled all over the floor.

And youtube/twitch. I think in the last couple of years a lot of new content creators with very high and maybe more niche topics started producing videos or streaming, and for me at least it is quite entertaining and educational. It doesn't replace books, I don't think short-form, more or less spontaneous content ever could, but given how low-effort text production these days is, it filters out some of the noise.

Some recommendations:

https://www.youtube.com/@CodeAesthetic/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@ThePrimeTimeagen/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@LowLevelLearning/videos

https://www.youtube.com/@strager_/videos

Don't think so.

If articles are more efficient, then it means there are plenty of nonsense in books. I don't think good books are filled with a lot of nonsense, if they are, then they are not good.

However, it's a fact that there are a lot of books which are collections of many trivial topics, collections of unrelated articles.

These people don't read anything that they aren't assigned in school or by their manager at work.

I'm impressed. What did your dad do to help you get interested in coding?

>how does a 17-year-old attain that level of knowledge?

There's an excellent blog series linked at repo that guides you step-by-step.

Yes. Anyone who is interested in this topic should read it.

Thanks for sharing your learning resources! I had a phase where I was really into computers so I’ll definitely be taking a look at the links you have in that file

Because there is no software engineering manager who likely does not write any useful code for a long time and is telling engineers what to do.

Reminds me of that 15 year old who revolutionized modding for Half-Life games by creating Metamod. Some kids are crazy. I cried from frustration trying to learn C++ at that age.

Wow this is amazing. My question on top of yours is beyond just knowledge (which yes yes I know I am underrating) how does a 17 year old get this kind of passion. (Not to brag) I was very fortunate to have this kind of passion in my early teens (also I did not have many friends) but I am really struggling to get my kids and their friends this kind of passion!

Well, part of it includes actually wanting to do this stuff. Some people don’t, and that’s fine.

Tangential: my gut feeling is that this is a very good use case for GPTs; I’m an experienced application developer and sysadmin, but wouldn’t even know where to start if I’d want to tackle this sort of topic. I’m pretty sure ChatGPT would point me in the right direction and allow me to tackle the first important steps.

ChatGPT might be able to point you at some stuff but you might run into trouble if it tells you something and you have no easy way of verifying whether it’s right or not, since you won’t be in a position to check.

Yeah this is the dream for ChatGPT. Someone with enthusiasm, some knowledge, and tons of free time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com