Brilliant. I've just come from the linkbait thread where a 14 year old who's never been part of the HN community and is still only posting in that thread is playing the just a kid card pretty hard.
Brilliant. I've just come from the linkbait thread where a 14 year old who's never been part of the HN community and is still only posting in that thread is playing the just a kid card pretty hard.
Examples of Apophasis: "It would be superfluous in me to point out to your lordship that this is war."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophasis
I'm trying not to be harsh with this, because I think the blog post was quite nice, but the only reason to say, "I am never going to play the 'I'm-a-kid' card" is to project a sense of superiority in comparison to kids who "played the card."
I think it's fine if you want your work to be judged on "adult" standards -- it's quite admirable. But if I was 14 and wanted advice on how a 14 year old should proceed, the advice could be very different from the advice you would give to someone you presume to be an adult. This is not an ideal situation, but it's a simple fact that being 14 puts you in a very different position than someone who is 24 -- it's impossible to show up at a bar to attend a meetup, it's harder to find other hackers (depending on location), and there are also a completely different set of life-related priorities that may factor in.
To put it simply: it's not the kid's fault for saying that he or she is 14. It's the community's fault for voting it up just because of the kid's age (if that's what's happening -- in many cases, the upvotes can also be well-earned).
Clearly he knows about HN. Possibly he was lurking. Maybe he's not sure or is not confident enough to comment often. What he has done is created an app and a few interesting blog posts. As far as I'm concerned, that is what HN is all about!
I've been lurking on HN for 4+ years, and I rarely ever contributed comments, mostly just read articles and read the comments to see others opinions.
Don't think this is true? Take a look at how many comments are left on articles on the front page, then if you were lucky enough to reach the front page of HN, take a look at your analytics software. You'll see something like 20k visits in a short period of time, there's no where near that number of comments. Most people passively participate in this community.