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Comment by smith7018 | Hacker News Reader

Totally unrelated to the content of your post but labeling posts with "I'm [a teenager] and X" has always irked me. It either serves to undermine the content (older people immediately questioning the authority of a teenager) or people respond with meaningless praise ("Wow, great job! I was playing video games when I was your age!"). It also harkens back to the 2000s and 2010s when the industry was obsessed with "teenage savants" for some reason. So much money was wasted by being thrown at teens due to tech's obsession with youth and the errant belief in its ability to drive innovation.

Your post could have been titled "Show HN: I wrote a guide to help teens learn how to build their own programming language." I dunno, maybe I just need my coffee and I'm being grouchy

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This comes up every time someone posts like this, and it's not really very helpful.

What are HN's guidlines on young people mentioning their age in a Show HN like this post here? Should we take it graciously, admit they are young and encourage them for what they did or should we point out not to mention their age?

IMO, if we take the age out, some of show HN's might not look very interesting. Same goes for a Show HN where someone mentions they are not a programmer and yet built a thing.

There's no official guideline (we try to keep that list minimal), but I think it's harmless and the main thing commenters should do is not complain about it. These complaints are always the same, always offtopic, and usually balloon in size to the point where the offtopicness drowns everything else. That's a terrible outcome for a thread like this.

Even if you dislike "I'm $X years old and I $Y" posts, it's not helpful to give a kid a grumpy patronizing response. We want HN to be a helpful community, not some weird age competition.

For whether age should be mentioned: Does there need to be a guideline? There are plenty of things that have no specific guideline, things which are fine to do or not do.

For whether there should be comments about age being mentioned: existing guidelines already denounce low value commenting especially at the root level.

I guess the point is that saying you are a teenager in the title can seem like an unfair way to game your post ranking by garnering awe/sympathy.

Lots of middle aged people build cool things too, but they can't pull the age card to boost their rank on the front page (at least, not until they are at the other extreme - like 80 or 90 years old)

Not just that; plenty of teenagers build their stuff without announcing that they're teenagers too.

Is it truly an unfair ranking boost if it's highlighting a substantially rare circumstance? I think many people prefer to discover rare things.

These kinds of feats aren't more or less impressive with age. Maybe the opposite, teens have so much free time.

When I was 17 I was working on a programming language, and I promised myself I would find the time to finish it during college. But during college I didn't have the time.

I have two friends who founded a startup at 16, one of which was quite succesful. I can think of two seperate friends who started a Minecraft hostar at 16, both of which makes up the majority of minecraft servers hosted in the Netherlands currently and one of them is now a generic hostar with his own datacenter.

And this isn't a problem in and on itself, but phrasing it like this discourages older people to work on pet projects. I started working as a Cyber Security TA at a private IT school and older students keep telling me "I'll never be as good as you because I didn't start so young" and it's a harmful mindset. Because it only took me a few years to learn what I know. Stating your age everywhere as a young developer reinforces this mindset in people.

If you want to see a teen/student do cool stuff. I suggest checking Adam McDaniel on GitHub. That dude really is impressive.

Yes, the problem is there are a fresh supply of 17 (or whatever) year olds, who haven't seen the old-man-yelling-at-cloud messages like OPs that are posted when they do this.

I think it guides responses to it. If a teenager writes a guide that says O(n) algorithms are always faster than O(n^2), I'm likely to tell them that I see what their thinking is, but here are some counterexamples that make it more nuanced than that. If a friend with a PhD in compsci said that, I might tease them more... assertively.

In this conversation I see people discussing the requirements for being Turing complete. Because OP is a teen, everyone so far seems pretty nice about gently pointing out inaccuracies. I doubt they would be, or should be, as easy on me if I made similar misstatements.

And that's the value I see in "as a teenager..." here. It's not so much about their age as that they don't have decades of education and experience under their belts. Another person posting "as a professional dog groomer..." might get similar responses: hey, that's pretty neat coming from someone who hasn't been doing this for a living for many years!

Totally agree on every point and I'm not being negative, the thing is that stating the age is something most people wouldn't even think (I like to believe we all still see ourselves as kids in our minds), so if someone puts it there themselves (as opposed to being a news article written by someone else) then they are doing it for marketing purposes.

I did lots of cool stuff "for being made by a 17yo" but in retrospect it was not objectively great.

I don't think there's an issue. Discourse on HN can be daunting for anyone. Sometimes it helps to know there are people your own age doing cool things. It makes it more accessible, which is a good thing.

There’s been a concerning trend of less and less young, successful founders. Where is the modern Zuck, Gates or Patrick Collison?

I say good on OP for putting themselves out there and keep pushing. We need young people to come up with great ideas and if that comes with them pointing out how young they are, I’m totally fine with it.

I think there have been fewer young technology founders because I think technology has become less and less accessible. There is so much more to sift through to get from an idea to a project or product than there was 10-20 years ago.

I'm saying this as someone who is relatively young, so keep that in mind.

For some parts of the landscape like mobile app development, yes. Its hard to say if they are doing it with hidden intention, or if they sincerely believe enforcing their "best practices" on everyone yields greater good. Probably a bit of both.

The part where you build a demo/prototype showcasing if an idea works, I believe it should be much easier than before as long as you postpone understanding/deciphering the implementation. In those major ecosystems there are huge collections of single-purpose libraries doing a subset of what you want to do, all you need might just be a reasonable amount of python to string them together.

However, ensuring the correctness and actually deploying them for planet-scale mandates following a reasonable subset of "best practices" which is very overwhelming, but doable. People doesn't usually build planet-scale product 10-20 years ago.

> However, ensuring the correctness and actually deploying them for planet-scale [...]

I think this is specifically a big part of the problem. Not everything needs to be planet scale to be good. People didn't focus on being planet scale 10 years ago. 20 or so years Mark was worried about getting The Facebook available at one or two schools.

Worrying about getting things working for the world has made it way harder for us to get things working for indoviduals or small groups.

Kids and especially teens seem to do this implicitly whenever they are doing things that they feel is advanced for their age

That's survivor bias.

No it isn't

Of course it is. If a project doesn't state that it was made by a teenager you wouldn't know.

I never stated my age on my projects when I was younger. Neither did any of my developer friends.

The observation was on kids declaring their ages around projects that they feel are advanced for them. It is not survivorship bias and has nothing to do with that term. The term doesn't even apply to your own example anyways

While I want to agree, your comment just sounds salty

Thanks for absorbing the downvotes. Helpful or not, I mostly agree with your reaction. Let the work stand on its own without injecting identity into it.

Andy Rooney, is that you?

Definitely just grouchy.

HN is so full of negative comments like these. OP I’m very impressed you learned all of this at 17! I started coding when I was a teenager but still haven’t released something like this 10 years later.

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