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Comment by wesselbindt | Hacker News Reader

My personal favorite is that he was part of authoring the RSS spec at age 14. But you're more than welcome to Google for other pieces of evidence yourself if you're genuinely interested and not just being argumentative.

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>authoring the RSS spec at age 14

No sources on this, though, only a couple articles from around the time of his death stating it as it was a fact already.

In all this time, and with all this fuzz, none of the actual authors of RSS, which are still alive, have come clear about this.

Disclaimer for immature people: This is not meant to disrespect Aaron's memory and/or legacy.

Time-sorted xml of hyperlinks? That was obvious at those early blog and wiki times, and we didn't care much about it. Esp. adding XML parsing, where a simply text format would have been much better.

Not that I disagree that with the idea that he was brilliant but the RSS spec isn't what I would consider a complex piece of documentation. Even for a 14 year old.

What were you doing at 14?

Not the person you asked, but I (in 2004) was part of sysadmin team at the school. I helped developing tools for automating many tasks around teacher and student performance measurement and tracking.

I also wrote a piece of software that went super viral among sysadmins all over the city and I was getting "thank you" emails for years after.

Had anyone been developing RSS spec next to me I'd definitely jump on it. As any 14 y/o would.

I don't think I'm particularly brilliant or even smart. Your circle defines you.

Surround any healthy teenager with interest in tech with the right people and they'll have a lot to show in no time

Being well-educated and well-connected doesn't necessarily mean you aren't great. The Sutherland boys were famously hanging out with Edmund Berkeley at his computer lab while they were still children, thanks to their mum knowing Berkeley through the General Semantics scene https://spectrum.ieee.org/sketchpad https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... . It was also luck, as well as skill, that got Ivan enjoying sole use of the gigantic, cutting-edge TX-2 for hours every week in the early '60s. You nevertheless still have to hand it to him for creating flipping Sketchpad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad in 1963 at the age of 24. On the other hand, Ivan Sutherland had created Sketchpad before he turned 25.

I agree. My point goes rather in the direction that just because one doesn't have much to show by 14 y/o, doesn't mean they're less of a human than someone who does. Merit isn't a predictor of success, perhaps a requirement, but even that is dubious.

I know what I was doing at 14, and it landed me in the NET.LEGENDS FAQ.

He was certainly precocious! A gifted kid, absolutely. But 'genius' is a lofty title. You'd usually need to be doing things differently and better, certainly by the time you're in your 20s. Maybe Infogami can make that case for him?

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