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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

This sort of comment crops up every time an article like this comes on HN. No doubt often times parents bring their kids along for the ride but no one bats and eye when we talk about our youth and learning to program as a 14 year old or something, why be surprised an 18 year old has come up with such an idea based on basic chemistry?

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Because the issues kids in these articles claim to solve are usually large unsolved problems, that have been studied by subject matter experts for years. It's possible someone could dream up a silver bullet, but I believe the trope of an untrained outsider approaching a problem and easily solving something that has stumped "the experts" is nowhere near as common as we'd like to believe. The reality is these solutions take years of persistent hard work and background knowledge, and rarely materialise all at once. But that doesn't make a feel-good headline.

That's fine for the typical case, it's not like "teens with fresh ideas" solve all the problems, that's why this is news worthy because it is an exception. I'm not sure this story (the article in question seems like a blog of some sort so their writing might not be the best) is trying to pass off the idea that it's common at all.

I think the red flag is in the combination of "teen" and "<feel-good-subject>".

It's just a very typical clickbait pattern.

"Teen builds online brokerage platform" or "Teen builds bike that goes 100mph" does not cause the same negative anticipation.

Because when we were teens and younger programming, we were just covering well-known ground, learning to program and messing about. Some useful stuff maybe, but not furthering Computer Science with ground-breaking research. No different to playing an instrument as a child for example.

The doubt isn't over whether a teen can do 'basic chemistry', it's whether they've 'invented' something; whether they've done anything that someone who doesn't know them/their family/their school and isn't considering their application for something needs to care about. It's whether this is (or was a while before the media got it) news or exciting or a citation for an adult researcher working in the field.

>when we talk about our youth and learning to program as a 14 year old or something

what 14? That's late indeed. The story has to be preschool to be awe-worthy.

For instance: "12/13y old writes the shortest assembly routine to move the head of the floppy drive of Apple II", doesn't sound grounbreaking - even if the code was better/shorter than DOS, itself. Solving massive world problems is a totally different scale.

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