Byran, I have been a professional engineer longer than you have been alive, I can tell you right now that I have met very, very few people that would have the motivation, skill and sticktoitivness to pull this off.
Having said that, even with unlimited time this is such an awesome achievement and really shows the dedication. Well done!
I miss that feeling. It doesn’t come around as often now, but I still feel like I move fastest when I can shut off the part of my brain that’s been trained on years of online discourse about right and wrong ways to do things, and just… do them.
While at it: the fastest way to move is free fall. If you fall at will and from a reasonable height, it's called a jump, and indeed gets you there fast. Otherwise it's called a crash, and it usually results in your limping the rest of the way.
So the approach of just hacking things together works great for small things, and the worse, the larger the scale grows.
The laptop in question, for instance, was definitely not just hacked together without any planning, even though the project seems to have fortunately escaped analysis paralysis.
Good job, kid
This is an incredible achievement. And i really don't like, that your comment invited other people to jump onboard & comment in a way belittling the achievements– even if just implicitly, to make themselves feel better why a high-schooler is doing things like that.
If all that was really the main driver, HN frontpage should be flooded with projects made by high-schoolers. But it is not. It might be contributing factor.
Btw: Funnily enough, i would expect these type of excuses & self-comforting negativity from high-schoolers.
I wish I had the time that I had back when I was in high school. The time part doesn't have anything to do with the skills though. At that age I would have never been able to do a similar thing - at my age I would probably struggle, but with enough time at hand I might achieve half of the project.
This is what makes this whole thing exceptional: this person is very talented and is using his free time to do great things - I appreciate that.
If my initial comment sounded like I was bragging I would do it too if I had more free time, it wasn't my intention. I actually am jealous that I get to spend less time on my side projects and I envy those who can build such cool stuff.
Highschool was genuinely awful. So so sleep deprived and stressed. I went to a prep school so for those who didn't, your experience may have been different.
I even have a huge interest in history, but I remember my first history exam on World War 1. I was ready to answer questions on its causes, the people, how industrial war changed the nature of fighting, the new countries that formed after the war... First Question: What was the date the Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Second Question: What was the dates each country declared war...
It also took me years to actually sit down and read JRR Tolkien as we read the Hobbit as a class book in grade 8. First question for the test: List the names of the 13 dwarves that attended the party at Bilbo's house (1 point each for a test out of 30 IIRC).
Even at my own university, I struggle to maintain a 3.0 GPA while at the same time actively tutoring students for the very courses I'm failing.
The issue isn't knowledge or competency, it's a mix of work ethic and tolerance for menial busywork.
I think some of us just aren't made for the academia grind...
A concern is that a laptop is still not something my community can make with the local resources, and thus the exploitation of land, labor, and money continues.
What would a fair-trade laptop cost?
This really resonates with me. I love math now, but absolutely loathed it in high school. The curriculum lacked any sort of way to apply math to real problems. I simply cannot learn things in the abstract like that. It's like learning a programming language without ever building a program.
I found out later:
1. How SAT scoring works 2. That you shouldn’t take the last SAT of the year since then you cannot retake it 3. I probably should’ve taken the ACT instead
I wish they’d prepared us in school for this, but they were too busy training us for standardized state testing since that determined their own budget.
Could I have gotten into MIT? Unsure; back at 18 I didn’t know MIT existed and this was early Internet times. It would have been nice if my high school mentioned it as an option.
In my case at least, doing projects like this and getting good grades didn’t automatically turn into attending any college I wanted. Either way, I ended up with a great career.
Anyways, kudos to the person who made this project!
I'm somewhat on the other end of this, where I excelled in school, graduated valedictorian, but didn't gain any meaningful experience with projects and such and had poor leadership skills all around.
Both guys brutally failed in the first year in the University. They dis not like theory, they wanted to make.
So… i dunno. 2 reference points there.
I spent most of my young adulthood working on projects (not nearly as insanely technical as this! but) similar to this. But I dropped out of high school, didn't go to college, because none of them would teach me in a way, or a pace, that fit my learning disability or mental models. Luckily I had the drive to teach myself, and built a successful two-decade career, despite my parents and teachers telling me I'd fail and become homeless.
High school kids have insane potential, and can achieve truly amazing things. But often people disregard them and don't set them up for success. So many companies could hire really great engineers, even from high school, if they could just find the motivated ones and put them in a mentorship/apprenticeship program that aligned with their interests and ways of learning.
I was on a mission, and I can’t do two things at once. So school was about efficiency. I got great grades wherever that took low effort. That only went so far.
After graduation, nowhere I wanted to be would have looked at me.
It took me a couple years after high school to find the right university, but my personal projects paid off.
Looking back, it was a gamble. But you don’t really choose those kinds of paths.
Being talented and gifted is generally not appreciated, not even in academia. Many of the most talented people never finish their education because academia is more about playing the game & having the grit (or lack of backbone?) to deal with the bullshit and do what you are told.
And tbf, the best engineers I know are not necessarily the most talented ones, but those that developed the grit to push through the bs.
What makes you think he is in high school
Also I must say, if I had that much money to spend in my future children education I totally would.
On the contrary, even though we've had top marks in the top math school in the same country, we'd never ever hoped to get even $200 for a project. Were we good enough to build a computer - of course, it's not that hard once you get the basics, and once you've done x86 assembly in your early teens. But it was just impossible to even think about spending the money, or loosing them per se.
Exeter Philips school has quote "700 acres, 147 buildings, the world's largest high school library". And I'm sure also lots of engineering development facilities where you can actually get your hands dirty. I can imagine the progress had I found myself there by some miracle. This kid is absolute winner to be in it, but I bet his parents must have also won the lottery ticket, one way or another, cause UK education is crazy expensive.
Now, in order to not make this story super sad, let's admit that, even though we as schoolkids didn't have access to such campus and funding, by last year in school I could track music with FT2; build Linux kernel and write ASM/C/C++/Perl; operated a BBS; debugged the IE9 source with VXDs and all; took part in writing two demoscene productions, that we still proud of; and finally, but not lest being a bunch of smart kinds in their 20s we started a hosting company in 1998(or '99) which soon handled the amount of traffic which equaled that of the whole country. This all with no GPTs, no Google searches, not even forums that much back then. So of course, it matters, that you are not a dumbass, after all.
But nobody ever gave us the security to pursue dreams the way this kid does. And I'm absolutely convinced we could've put together a laptop or something along the line. I say put together, because a lot of these parts are easily available now, one click away, nothing like what it was back in the day. He's not producing the chips, neither the screen, neither putting elements together, but the chassis and kbd, and does some wiring. Of course - fascinating for a teenager to do, but you see, teenagers are not so stupid, and never were. And those in top schools are particularly bright and outpace many adults in many areas. From the images I can tell this is a school projects, so perhaps it took also a little mentoring to do it.
This always make me think about two things - it absolutely matters which school you are lucky to have gone to; and very likely all talent is lost soon after high-school, because... reasons.