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16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

namc.in

121–130 of 154 posts

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#121
post #46
post #14

Young women interested in programming rare enough, let her get some help, let her have all the praise, that's okay. In years to come she'll hopefully stick to the field and that's what is important. Not that she wrote 100% of her app. What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what…

So she can plagiarise an app, call her critic a jobless harasser and get away with it all just because she is a woman? If this is tolerated at large it will have a chilling effect on any young person (including young women) who looks and sees people like her because they will think they are too stupid for tech since they can't make an entire app in 2 months. It will also have a chilling effect on all men and women in…

Oh come on, call this plagiarism is over the top. She had help and didn't mention that everywhere. There's something on quora where she mentioned the guy she paid for some work. https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-it-cost-to-build-Crypto-P...

For me it's not about her being a woman, but about her being a young person. Give them a chance or have we (mid-thirties) already become so intolerant against teens?

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#122
Who cares? Even if she is a fraud, the result of pointing this out is only going to give her more support and attention.

The only reason young or female developers get weird media attention is because the same companies who abuse visas and get convicted of wage fixing are trying to get more cheap labor. They pour money and volunteers into charities and media; offers dwindle.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#123
post #14

Young women interested in programming rare enough, let her get some help, let her have all the praise, that's okay. In years to come she'll hopefully stick to the field and that's what is important. Not that she wrote 100% of her app. What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what…

"What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what the nit-pickers say" This is why we have shit software ecosystems - Take Microsoft as the biggest example of "its more important to sell stuff than get it right"

Not sure why you're talking to me about that. My last windows as the 98 one.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#124

> But after reading her blogpost, her stackoverflow/github history in an attempt to understand her struggles as a self-taught programmer; I figured that there was no struggle at all! Self taught programmers are full of numerous questions, but she didn’t seem to have any! Neither is there any progression of all the tasks she did. This is just one of possible approaches. For example, I actively ask very rarely, the mos…

Well, after a couple years of development, you have the vocabulary & terminology to search for & find your answers. Starting out, you wouldn't have that.

This is so true. I think my biggest achievement is that I evolved my ability to search. A few years ago it would take me days to find the solution to a problem, but now I find it much easier to formulate a question or Google query.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#125

"Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because sweetie, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry." It's quite ironic that in a sentence about sexism and a male-dominated industry, the author addresses the developer by 'sweetie'.

This isn't a hit piece by some bro-grammer who doesn't want to share space with a 16 year old girl, this is a woman who had to carve out space for herself in a male dominated industry. She's looking at the software equivalent of that kid who took a clock slightly apart and put it in a cardboard box and became an engineering prodigy because some idiot thought it looked like a cartoon bomb timer and saying that we need…

The author is a woman.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#126
post #85

I have a related question. Since when is a 16 year old who makes an app a prodigy? Even if she did write it all by herself? I was getting paid to make back office software for local businesses at 13 in 1998 with absolutely no help from anyone and no one called me a prodigy. I'm sure tons of NH people have similar stories. I seem to remember a survey at one point that the average person on HN who actually codes starte…

It's easy enough to write code when you're young, but to write something that is being actively used is impressive. With that being said, I do find the worship of young people in tech a bit worrying. Over the years I've worked with a handful of talented developers that have started from a very young age, and over the years they become very good at a relatively young age. By the time they reach 20, they're senior-leve…

There's nothing magic about writing software.

There's nothing magic about writing software people use.

The magic is in being in a position where your software is in a position to reach people who can use it. Traditionally, this was handled through pure nepotism, but these days it's possible for people to succeed without such connections.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe sweetie is a gendered word?

It seems to be one of those loaded words that's often used by a certain type of man to put women "in their place".

What you seem to think it is and what it actually is are two different things. "Sweetie" is a traditionally Deep South term of endearment or mock-endearment applicable to both genders and used almost exclusively by women. I can't remember the last time (if ever) I have seen it used by a man other than in imitation of women from the Deep South.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#129
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. "If you manage to get social media on your side by endearing them then you can lie and steal" is the better lesson to teach a 16 year old. A 16 year old can waste his or her life by this age if he or she does really badly in school or smokes weed and gets caught. I can forgive teens for a lot of silly things like lying, cheating, petty crime, etc. but not doubling down when caught and creating a social media hat…

>A 16 year old can waste his or her life by this age if he or she does really badly in school or smokes weed and gets caught. I agree with the vast majority of your post, but I would say this part isn't super fair. Maybe I'm reading too much into this part, but outside of exceptional cases, we do give minors the chance to recover. I know people who had high school GPAs in the low 2s, that went to community college fo…

I have a friend from college who had a 2.0 in high school and got rejected from the college of new jersey. He ended up getting into a much better school (possibly due to SAT scores) and graduated with a 4.0. He majored in math as well as physics and minored in CS. Worked for Google for two years after... smokes weed too.

Re: 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?

#130
post #20

"Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because sweetie, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry." It's quite ironic that in a sentence about sexism and a male-dominated industry, the author addresses the developer by 'sweetie'.

I see where you're coming from but I think the point still stands. Making a fraud the poster child for a cause is worse than having no poster child at all. In general I'm always very wary of "teenage prodigies" stories, they're very marketable but I think they're bad for everybody involved: on one hand the "prodigy" is on exhibit like some kind of circus freak and at this age is probably ill-prepared to deal with the…

there are very... very few prodigies in this world who could've done it without strong mentorship.

Mozart and Tiger Woods are both thought to be prodigies, but their parents were very involved in their developmental process.

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