Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

diy.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–88 of 88 posts

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#81

Post by kephra »

remixz wrote: post #16

Hi all! Thanks for the great feedback. I did realize the title might have been controversial, but I have a small argument for it. A few weeks ago, there was the 14 year old who posted their rad iPhone game on HN. Their post did inspire me to post my own work. I have a tiny hope that someone else who's doing something like I am will see this and post their own work. I doubt it, but you never know! :D

Never mind the bollocks, who flamed you for the title.

You did it right, your posting got 85 points, so far. Its on HN about for 10 hours. So around 8500 people did read your page. This will likely triple by the long tail of twitter and facebook.

Well done. Tomorrow about 24000 people will know that you are a great coder. That all that counts.

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#82

Post by Jare »

GuiA wrote: post #78
Jare wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the age bit interesting because most young people are not interested in creating, and I enjoy celebrating those that do.

>because most young people are not interested in creating Clearly you need to work with young people more :) There is that misconception that all teenagers care about is watching TV or hanging out with their friends and doing nothing "creative" or "productive". How wrong! I've worked with hundreds of teenagers over the past few years, and I've never met one who wasn't interested in creating. By default, kids and teen…

I may have chosen my words incorrectly, since in many ways I agree with you about the teenager's (or young adult's) thirst to make an impression in the world.

That said, there's a huge difference between wanting to be a creator, and actually creating stuff. In my experience, most young people quickly settle down into caring less about the acts of creation and self-expression, and focus more on 'making an impression' in their immediate peers. This path leads to obvious, uninteresting, facile, lazy, short-term, me-too, style-over-substance, meaningless creations that I can barely label as such.

Is it down to proper encouragement and guidance? For sure that must help a lot, especially when dealing with setbacks and lack of validation. But I believe there needs to be a level of inner dialogue and disregard for what's popular around oneself, that is a) at odds with the desire for teens to 'fit', b) rarely encouraged in practice in our society, and c) hard to sustain against the amount of noise (media, fashion, etc) we surround ourselves with.

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#83

Post by GuiA »

Jare wrote: post #82
GuiA wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because most young people are not interested in creating Clearly you need to work with young people more :) There is that misconception that all teenagers care about is watching TV or hanging out with their friends and doing nothing "creative" or "productive". How wrong! I've worked with hundreds of teenagers over the past few years, and I've never met one who wasn't interested in creating. By default, kids and teen…

I may have chosen my words incorrectly, since in many ways I agree with you about the teenager's (or young adult's) thirst to make an impression in the world. That said, there's a huge difference between wanting to be a creator, and actually creating stuff. In my experience, most young people quickly settle down into caring less about the acts of creation and self-expression, and focus more on 'making an impression'…

>In my experience, most young people quickly settle down into caring less about the acts of creation and self-expression, and focus more on 'making an impression' in their immediate peers. This path leads to obvious, uninteresting, facile, lazy, short-term, me-too, style-over-substance, meaningless creations that I can barely label as such.

Of course- but one must give them time! They're barely starting to figure out how to interact with their peers and themselves, and you want them to create masterpieces on the side? "On n'est pas sérieux quand on a 17 ans!" ("We are not serious when we are 17" - Rimbaud had it right)

Everything in its moment; the important thing is that their creations should not be dismissed as "obvious, uninteresting, lazy [...]", because negativity is the mother of sterility.

> But I believe there needs to be a level of inner dialogue and disregard for what's popular around oneself, that is a) at odds with the desire for teens to 'fit', b) rarely encouraged in practice in our society, and c) hard to sustain against the amount of noise (media, fashion, etc) we surround ourselves with.

Some of them can figure that out on their own; some don't (and most are in between). That's where we come in as educators (which I believe every philosopher implicitly is [as in us, φιλόσοφος, lovers of wisdom- which is a description HNers rally under]) :)

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#85

Post by guiomie »

chris_p wrote: post #40
guiomie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His age is totally relevant. I wish that at 15 I could have known just to code, he actually published code! It's great that we see youth influenced and impacted by HN.

> It's great that we see youth influenced and impacted by HN. So this is the HN version of "We did it, reddit!".

I don't use reddit, nor do I understand your point.

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#86

Post by mememememememe »

rymith wrote: post #65
rymith wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I don't see why this comment is relevant.

Seriously, I'm down voted to obscurity because I don't see the relevance in some asshole picking a fight with a 15 year old kid? Releasing your own node module (or any code fo that matter) is something most developers never do, they are consumers of these packages, never contributors. You can look at the stats, it's pathetic. But a kid who can't legally dive a car releases a module. That's great, and whatever head up…

I upvoted you. HN has a lot of haters. I got downvoted too before.

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#87

Post by astrodust »

Jare wrote: post #82
GuiA wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>because most young people are not interested in creating Clearly you need to work with young people more :) There is that misconception that all teenagers care about is watching TV or hanging out with their friends and doing nothing "creative" or "productive". How wrong! I've worked with hundreds of teenagers over the past few years, and I've never met one who wasn't interested in creating. By default, kids and teen…

I may have chosen my words incorrectly, since in many ways I agree with you about the teenager's (or young adult's) thirst to make an impression in the world. That said, there's a huge difference between wanting to be a creator, and actually creating stuff. In my experience, most young people quickly settle down into caring less about the acts of creation and self-expression, and focus more on 'making an impression'…

The proportion of those under twenty that are interested in, to put it generally, 'creating things' has not significantly changed over the years. There will always be a large number that are passive, that simply want to be catered to.

The difference is that with the internet and social media we can actually see how large that proportion is. In the age of television, newspapers, and strictly controlled publishing you wouldn't hear from these people at all. They'd be invisible.

The ability of young people to interact directly with the creators they admire has never been greater and we're seeing a lot of achievement in that group that wasn't possible before. Instead of being shunned by publishers, these kids are just going it alone and self-publishing and in some cases, succeeding, something that would never have happened twenty years ago.

There always has been and always will be lazy people.

Re: Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry

#88

Post by mnicole »

This post is a few days old, but I think it would have really limited the amount of criticism if you'd also noted that you work at DIY (a company that is promoting kids and teens to make all sorts of things - programming or otherwise) in the post somewhere (even though technically people can see the name in the URL). It makes a lot more sense to note his age when the company he's working for is specifically trying to help younger generations.

Great work regardless, I love everything DIY is doing and it's fantastic they have their target audience in the office!

Post reply on HN