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Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

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Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#281

Post by swat535 »

This is really amazing, reminds me of my childhood days..

I showed this to my girlfriend's sister whom has shown interest in programming, today I learned that she decided to drop her art classes in favour of some programming courses!

Well done!

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#282

Post by jwdunne »

kazinator wrote: post #150
sramam wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sine and cosine last year? Now I want to know what your parents are feeding you!!! ;)

I also picked up sine and cosine at around that age; it was thanks to programming. Various example BASIC programs (e.g. Lissajous curve and circle plotters and such) used those functions and from their behavior I kind of picked up the relationship to both undulation and the circle. I found out about the arctangent function, and from that I realized that it could be used for 3D projection. I made a proof-of-concept pr…

Similar age for sin/cos. I wanted to move a game object in a circle that I used to develop amateur content for. I remember being wowed by light displays some scripters put together at the time (there was no particle system at the time).

By the time it came around, I was disappointed to learn about all the "triangle stuff". I want quite there enough to make the link between right angle triangles and a circle but it made that topic so much easier to connect.

Thanks to programming and the thought patterns it drums into you, I was able to do my maths course work in a few pages (far less than anyone else) but still achieve high marks. I remember one top performer in my class complained to my teacher because of how little I'd produced! The teacher said "doesn't matter - he used an approach that let him do that".

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#283

Post by Jach »

hashbig wrote: post #176
sgk284 wrote: post #167

Liam, this is incredible ! I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here's a little code review via video: https://youtu.be/UkVOrcS--04 We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: https://gist.github.com/stevekrenzel/b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8... Hope you find it helpful!

If you would start a channel where you review code of random public repos I would definitely subscribe. Well done.

Drive-by code reviews (and maybe other types of annotated "audits", like for security bugs) would be a nice feature source repo sites might consider adding one day. It seems like a missing practice in open source development, code reviews (if any) are done by active developers once on check-in/merge acceptance. But as we see here code reviews can be a useful way to pay it forward too, not just new code / issue fixes, and done out-of-band there's no pressure to bow to the reviewer just to get something in; you can just have conversations and learn things.

The video format is a nice twist, in my distributed teams sometimes we've done "code review meetings" for some changes that are rather involved to capture some of the benefits of in-person / video code reviews.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#284

Post by otakucode »

jcrza wrote: post #110

I guess I'm the only one here doubting that the combination of both this project and the language used in the comment replies is coming from a 12 year old. Take it as a compliment if it's legitimate.

Probably not the only one, it's very common for people to be extremely prejudiced against the young. As with other prejudices, of course, it's wrong and only scores accurate evaluations by chance. The only thing which prevents any person, of any flavor or age or background or whatever, from producing such work and comporting themselves in such a manner is not having learned it or not practicing it themselves. Anything blamed on 'age' is normally just an indictment of the society that hasn't provided appropriate education or incentives.

I was a precoscious kid myself, and took to online communities with vigor specifically because it permitted me to interact with adults as equals without them constantly dismissing me without basis apart from my age. I've not forgotten that, and if anything society now is even more egregiously bigoted towards the young than ever. Next time you read an article about "kids" or "teenagers" or "adolescents", try mentally substituting in "women" or "African Americans" for the group identity they're talking about. You might be surprised how identical the claims made, and the weak support given for them, are.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#285

Post by otakucode »

mayneack wrote: post #160

IANAL and all that and it doesn't bother me, but the first thing I thought of was the age related ToS restrictions from the HBO Silicon Valley show. From the HN "legal" page: > If you are under 13 years of age, you are not authorized to register to use the Site. https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ I assume no 12 year olds actually try to follow this boilerplate on the internet. Do sites that require a DOB to sign up r…

The legal restrictions are not actually on Liam, or any user. They are on the site itself. The law in the US prevents the collection of any personal information from anyone under 13 years of age. Once you are 13 years old, you are a trackable, surveillable, profilable, saleable commodity. Prior to that, though, your personal info is protected from collection.

But... HN doesn't actually collect any personal info. So, that's likely either a reflex inclusion of such a clause or just an abundance of caution.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#287

Post by otakucode »

ateesdalejr wrote: post #82
jVinc wrote: post #39

It's amazing that at the same age Steven Wolfram himself had written his first 100 page book "concise directory of physics) and at just one year older wrote his first book on quantum physics.

From all the amazing things Mr. Wolfram has done at such a young age almost makes him the Chuck Norris of science.

It's really not all that unusual. History is littered with amazing minds that accomplished tremendous things well before adulthood. The modern fiction that humans are useless until adulthood is one we have to construct by force, through active neglect of education, denigration of intellectual pursuits ('Go outside! Get a life! Do anything else but read or sit and think!'), and adamant insistence that it is normal to be ignorant and incapable until adulthood. Pascal recognized his triangle as a youth, Gauss was similarly known for early feats, etc. Those are just accidents of history, mostly, that they are remembered. The actual number of fertile and productive minds is doubtlessly orders of magnitude higher. It's only through diligent refusal to believe, or to tolerate the notion that maybe we should have expected a bit more of ourselves in our own youth, that we can keep up seeing intellectual achievements of the young as an unusual occurrence.

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#288

Post by otakucode »

da_murvel wrote: post #205

Excuse my portion of scepticism, it's not the fact that a "12 year old" built this, sure anyone can learn how to code and we can't know how much help this person got along the way. But it's rather the person's language when writing plain text, here in the comments for example. It doesn't feel adolescent but more grownup to me ... But maybe it's just me realising my own shortcommings as a 12 year old, as I only was pl…

I was extremely lucky and got Internet access in 1990 (pre-web) when I was myself 12 years old. I was entirely conscious of the fact that if the adults figured out that I was 12, I was dead meat. They wouldn't listen to a thing I had to say, and wouldn't feel the need to defend their claims against any argument from me. So, I spoke well. It's not all that hard to do. As such, I can't recall a single time I was ever called out. When I did on occasion choose to reveal my age, I often encountered disbelief, but by then it was usually after I'd already won them over so they could overcome their bigotry. And that's really what it is, I've realized in the years since. It's just simple 'they're not like me, any difference must be negative, it must be rooted in what they are and insurmountable, I will always be above them' bigotry. Despite the clear fact that if a 12 year old is taught to install a kitchen sink, something I'm sure anyone could see as possible, then clearly they'd be superior to most adults who don't know how to install kitchen sinks. So why is anything else different?

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#289

Post by Jach »

godelmachine wrote: post #45
gilesvangruisen wrote: post #14

This is awesome! Keep up the good work. As a fellow developer who began writing software around your age, I have some advice that is definitely subjective and biased, but which you may indeed find helpful. 1. Keep practicing. Practice makes perfect. Explore different languages, frameworks, and problem spaces (interfaces, servers, distributed systems, statistics, etc.) to see what you find most interesting. You will m…

Would you please provide an example on how one proceed with T shaped learning and expertise?

A phrase I came up with that I like more than "T-shaped" is "molecular skillset". A chemist would probably laugh at me but I think of it as developing seemingly independent skills (molecules skills, experience, knowledge...) that end up forming bonds with other skills, sometimes in surprising ways, that together prove really powerful and can bond up even further. "T" and other tree/tendril-ish shapes are then just special cases of different bond arrangements. You can acquire skills haphazardly (though as a serial dabbler I'd caution against actively pursuing the dabbler's path without a ton of introspection), you can also take the efficient road like a university sequence where most skills are visible and have unsurprising connections to the next skills. You might have to take some seemingly unrelated course too, but you can look at those optimistically as another potential source of surprising bonds. Duds are of course possible -- I have some useless things in my brain that I don't think will ever connect with anything useful, at best they might aid in social signaling one day. (A lot of education is just signaling to show you can talk about a lot of stuff...)

Trivial example: at some point around age 17 I installed Gentoo successfully and learned a lot about gnu/linux (and some bsd) in the process. Lots of little skills formed and connected, and they continue connecting with other things to this day. Got my initial hook on vim then. Saw how nicely colorized my terminal prompt was and that opened the door to many bash customizations. One of the skills I had to learn was to understand how hard drives worked (at least to the ability to successfully partition, format, and boot them -- I did accidentally wipe a windows xp partition the first time). Some years later (age 20?) I had accidentally rm'd a couple weeks of java work without having committed it yet. But prior knowledge of the system let me know the data was still there, and I was able to recover it by scanning the disk device partition directly for the bytes. (Ended up using "grope.tcl" referenced here http://wiki.yak.net/592 which was a lot more efficient than what I was making.)

Re: Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node

#290

Post by sgk284 »

earthscienceman wrote: post #228
sgk284 wrote: post #167

Liam, this is incredible ! I thought it might be useful for you to incrementally see how someone in industry would review or change this code, so here's a little code review via video: https://youtu.be/UkVOrcS--04 We very incrementally build up to the final code, which can be found here: https://gist.github.com/stevekrenzel/b490564bf1c7f98e232a6c8... Hope you find it helpful!

I'm a long time coder and still liked watching your video just for watching someone else work in emacs. How do you get emacs to highlight all occurrences of map? Was it a keybinding for "highlight-phrase"?

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! And like another person already responded, this is vim with a split pane where the right pane is a `:terminal` (a relatively new feature of vim... though prior to that I would have just used tmux).

Highlighting searches is enabled with `:set hlsearch`, and you can search for whatever word is under the cursor with ``. So I just type and it highlights all of the matching words. Nothing too magical!

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