Woah! Did not expect this to be here. I'm the 13-year-old who tweeted this out, and I really love programming. I like experimenting and creating open source projects. I'm interested in the web, servers, systems, and AI. Some of my most recent projects are:
Moon - UI library
Wing - CSS framework
Wade - 1kb JS Search Library
Slash - hash function in Assembly
You can find them on my Github[1]. I usually don't like stating my age as I love the feedback I get if you treat me as if I was an adult. People usually just compliment me after they see my age, but I'd honestly rather have some nice feedback and criticism.
Hey.. i'm 42 now, But I was also programming at 13 (at that time we were trying to convince people that computers could be useful, and teachers to allow us to be in the computer lab).
A few things I picked up over the years: Keep going, don't get too into any one technology / keep moving, expect to continue learning forever, keep your body healthy (it's not just there to carry around your brain), avoid bad habits that start to emerge early (100x red-bull ++ etc). The brain requires a LOT of energy, feed it with respect
Intelligence = Speed of the car | Smart = Good at driving it | Wisdom = Where to drive.
In a similar vein: If you need to use a tool (software or other wise), and you might use it more than once, take the time to learn it right. This will slow you down in the beginning, but it pays off in productivity later on.
Really impressive stuff, so here's some unsolicited career advice. You may get some internship offers if this post gets enough attention. They can teach you a lot, but since you seem to be able to learn on your own you should consider staying solo and continuing to market yourself with open-source projects. That said, if you get an invite from Google, that's a different story.
For me, and I suspect many (if not most) others, side projects have made all the difference. College was great, but the fact that being a student "gave me permission" to work on side projects really made me get my hands dirty. I only wish I'd started when I was 13. Keep on keepin' on!
Kabir, you've instilled some instincts about design in 13 years that some people never figure out. How did you do that? How old were you when you started programming, what did you do? Just fascinated in how you've done it.
Oh, and don't forget to enjoy being young. You only get to be a teenager once! You've got a long time to be able to wow people, don't owe anything to anyone.
Thank you so much! I started programming basic HTML when I was about 8 years old. After that, I pretty much just started making websites, and when I didn't know how to do something, I just looked it up or asked my parents to help me fix it. With that I've been able to learn a lot. Progressing from HTML to CSS, Javascript, Node, and now into Python and C.
I definitely will enjoy being young :)
I program in my free time, when I'm not playing soccer, doing homework, snowboarding, or playing guitar.
Nice array of hobbies there, and I hope you keep some of that up as well as programming.
I'd comment on your actual work, but I'm one of the non-tech folks that are sitting here reading HN. Reading this stuff helps my artwork's creativity, oddly enough, and I'm guessing for some it works the other way around as well.
In the Moon.js Repository [1], it said you've been developing Moon.js since late 2015. So that means you've been building it since 11 years old? That's really cool! I want to hear your stories sometimes. But more importantly, keep making awesome things!
I love the way you keep things really simple and to the point. It's actually great for marketing ( the hard part) and gaining attention for your projects ( eg. They'll read what you write).
I do have plans on finishing it, but I have a lot of projects right now. I'm trying to get Moon v1 out, working on my OS, Slash, and some other new projects. If you have any recommendations for what the code samples should be on, I'd be glad to try and write it based on that.
Haha if you look at my recent commits (maybe 1-2 a day), you'll see that I've been putting less effort into the amount of commits, and more effort into the quality of them. I think a year ago I was focused more on getting that graph to look good.
Back, when I was learning (I was 15 at the time) we didn't even have internet access at home, so you had to learn by downloading stuff in school, put it in a bunch of diskettes, pray none of them borked before getting home and then read for hours looking for what you needed to know. It was awesome, haha!
Now you kiddos have the internet and Github. Lucky whipper snappers! <screams at cloud>
Joking aside, great job! What other technologies outside of the JS stack are you looking into learning?
2. I started out with HTML, then slowly moved into CSS, Javascript, Python, C, and Assembly.
3. I am completely self-taught, a few people in my family program but are in different fields than what I am interested in.
4. I wouldn't say that it suffers, but it is definitely hard to keep up with both. I always keep school as my first priority when it comes to these types of things, and most of my projects are done over break or the weekend.
Awesome! The internet is extremely helpful and you can learn pretty much anything you put your mind to, and it's never too late to start :)
It's wise to appreciate those people in your family who program and give them credit, just for the fact that they exposed you to programming. I know many who grew up with parents which can't even read, let alone have more than one member in the family with a certain level of education. That said, keep up the good work!
Haha yeah, most of the credit goes to my dad. He's a Java programmer. On the other hand, I'm more interested in web development, web design, servers, and systems.
"Once you’ve followed your curiosity to several different tributaries, those tributaries will converge. Then, you’re completely, utterly, untouchable."
Thanks for releasing so many great open source projects!
On your website, you mention you use Crystal for programming on the server. What made you choose Crystal over other languages, and what do you like about it for server-side programming? Thanks :-)
I prefer Crystal because it's a really expressive language (similar to Ruby) but has the advantage of being compiled (like C). I prefer compiled languages for the server because they are usually faster, and can be deployed with a single binary.
This isn't just a "young maker". This is university-level stuff.
# Back Propagate into Dot Product
dY = np.multiply(dO, self.activationPrime(self.o))
The breadth of knowledge and demonstration this person has just seems out of the realm of a 13-year-old unless they are a legit genius. I'm skeptical, but they'll have to take it as a compliment.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who is skeptical, but the more I click around the more I can't find anything to actually criticize? I guess I'm just surprised at how someone so young can both be so smart and also have such a well crafted social media presence / personal brand or whatever you want to call it.
I'm not yet 30 and this might be the oldest I've felt in my entire life. I'm going to stop being skeptical and just remind myself that kids are smart and capable of incredible things and that adults constantly underestimate them. I'm going to choose to believe that they really are as "productive" as they seem to be.
Haha I actually learned most of my knowledge on AI and machine learning from Stanford lectures, so I'd agree when you say it's university-level stuff.
Nonetheless, it's incredibly helpful when you have a passion for this kind of stuff. There are tons of resources out there for learning this stuff, and it's really interesting :)
Hi there, I'm left wondering if you started this [1] from scratch or used a sample OS project? I don't understand why'd you initialize the GDT in the bootloader.
I started it from scratch. I mainly reference a book about the implementations of operating systems.
I initialize a basic GDT in the bootloader because it is essential. Without it, you cannot run the OS in long mode, which will unlock the capabilities of a 64 bit system.
As someone else who wrote an operating system, I initialized the GDT in the bootloader as well. The goal was to get into long mode ASAP, so I just did it in assembler.
Geniuses are made, not born. It is entirely within the realm to achieve something like this with the proper training. See "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise".
I think a lot of university level courses are actually significantly easier to understand than things aimed at 14-16 year olds (at least where I live, in the UK) If you care and you have enough time, you basically learn anything (in my opinion).
That's definitely true, but I meant actual university courses e.g. CLRS. Some University grade literature, mostly in CS, of STEM subjects is almost non-mathematical e.g. A. Tannenbaum's OS book/s and S. Muchnick's compiler are both mostly mathematics free.
Everybody here seems to want to dish out advice, but I'd like to turn the mic to you. I'm a new parent with two kids under 3. I also started my career my learning HTML/CSS on my own in the early 2000s. It was a different world back then. What are you most grateful for about how your parents raised you, and what constraints did they impose? I want to protect my kids from all the crap, but don't want to stifle their creativity and desire to learn freely.
I totally agree, growing up nowadays is extremely different then what it must've been like before. I'm grateful for my parents encouraging me to play outside and make friends, and once they found out that I was interested in programming, they encouraged that as well.
They always want me to try new things and see if I love it, and that's what I found with programming. They do have some rules about it, and can see what websites I visit, and generally what I do online.
I'd say to let them do what they find interesting, like my parents did with me and programming, but still encourage them to try new things. You never know, they might find more things that they love :)
Hey, I'm not Kabir but I also started coding as a kid.
My parents didn't let me drop out of Elementary school but I ended up dropping out of college to work as a game designer for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigWorld . I was fortunate enough to meet their CEO because my family supported me by traveling with me to a couple conferences where I got to meet the industry.
Things that would have gone better for me: parents working with me on my projects as project manager / guiding production schedules. I'm not saying tell your kids what to do, let me explain:
I spent a lot of time drawing games in notebooks & programming 10% finished projects in my teens. I wish I had produced finished games (/s/games/$project_type for your kids) earlier and gotten a serious head start on game development.
I also wish my parents had encouraged or forced me to exercise more. I do now, but only after health problems forced me to start paying attention to my body!
I wish they didn't let me drink so much soda and red bull too. Keep that crap away from your kids, no matter what the other's are doing.
You having experience with HTML/CSS + everything else you know could be great for teaching your kids programming. Even if they go into other disciplines, I think "learning how to think" from programming + problem solving is invaluable and can apply to every area.
"I also wish my parents had encouraged or forced me to exercise more. I do now, but only after health problems forced me to start paying attention to my body!"
For my part, I just wish I'd have read some good books on health and physical fitness. I think I would have gotten it, and been in to it, if only I understood how much health and physical fitness mattered -- not just to protect your body from disease and injury, but also to improve your mood, give you more energy, and help motivation.
Another thing to keep in mind that the easiest time in one's life to get stronger (something that will help protect you from injury later on in life) is when you're going through puberty, when your body is filled with natural growth hormones. People in their teens are able to very quickly achieve results that older people struggle for much longer to achieve (if they ever do).
Instead of exercising when I was young, though, I focused exclusively on intellectual pursuits... even kind of buying in to the whole "nerd vs jock" dichotomy, and proudly considering myself a nerd, and felt like any kind of physical pursuits were below me. In retrospect, that was a really narrow-minded, ignorant, and harmful point of view. There's no reason you can't pursue both the intellectual and the physical -- and you'll probably be a lot healthier that way, and suffer a lot less later in life.
Exercise also affects one's weight, body image, and self-esteem -- things that so many people suffer from (especially in fields like tech where most people sit in front of their computer all day). You could get a head start on avoiding all that if you start exercising young and turn it in to a habit that you maintain throughout your life.
Give your kids the right things to play with and they will follow (so to speak). Basically don't force them to do anything, just nudge them in the right direction.
Very impressive that they've made this at such a young age. I also hope they're developing strong friendships and doing "regular kid stuff" too, though. You'll never get that time back sadly.
All human knowledge is now free and accessible on the Internet.
Imagine how many potential genuises have been lost in the last centuries. Now that mainstream Internet is 20 years old, we can expect a generation of children like Kabir. I'm excited for this century.
I was introduced to the basics of programming at 15 but it only really clicked at late 16. Before that I was really interested in electronics and aeronautics/fluid dynamics/aircraft design, but those all went into the backburner when programming came along.
In particular, I got really into Robocode - see http://robowiki.net - the community is still active 10+ years later and the state of the art is still being pushed.
I've ended up working as a software engineer in a related field (computer vision) and the lessons I learned from my early programming experience have given me a massive headstart in design, readability, maintenance and breadth of knowledge. I'd totally do it again given the choice, probably starting even younger.
It's amazing how much I've changed in the past year. If you check out my latest commits (it's also part of the reason why almost all of the squares are light green), you'll see that they are pretty significant in size.
A while back, I thought commits were the best thing ever, and made it my goal to commit every single small change I made. Now I've learned not to :)
When I was 14 or 15 in the late 1990s I started my own "web community" for young (German) "web designers" (programming wasn't on my mind back then). It got me some little fame, I even won some prizes. Almost 20 years later that chapter of my life is closed, and many others which came after it are too.
Enjoy this moment, but set goals: finish school, go to University and get some degree, fulfill your dreams.
But always try to stay on the ground. Time goes by very fast, and your current achievements probably won't matter much ten years from now.
The first time I saw Wing, I thought it was a brilliant and simple idea. Since then, I have been using it both as a base CSS library and a general approach to the styling problem. When I saw Moon and noticed that it was from you, I felt proud for you; however, I have never thought you would be this young. Congrats Kabir, keep up the great work!
I started programming at an early age (41 now), but I did not create things at this scale (we didn't have HTML, Javascript or Python on the VIC20 but that is no excuse). To say I'm impressed is the understatement of the century. Keep it up and use your instincts and common sense. You'll get approached by many now I'm sure.
Hi Kabir, if you are real, and I believe you are, you seem to be an outlier among the outliers (HN commmunity is already very peculiar).
A question, out of genuine curiosity:
- How do you deal with loneliness? Do you manage to find people that can understand what you say, furthermore being able to answer you with relevance outside internet?
I hate to be "that guy", but is there any verification that Kabir is, in fact, 13? The project documentation alone is incredibly impressive - the breadth of knowledge is remarkable for anyone who hasn't even taken highschool level classes.
(coming from a highschooler, for whatever that's worth)
I don't have any proof, I guess you'll have to take my word for it :)
I can tell you my birthday, but will that really help? If you look at my comment above, you'll see that I don't really like giving my age out. I did it this one time just because I wanted some of my followers to know (I wasn't expecting it to be on Hacker News). There is no way for me to show you my age other than you meeting me in person, but hopefully you can judge by the way I talk.
Well, I am actually quite disappointed that everyone just believes this.
Sure, the projects are nice. But the reason the post is on the front page is because of his age (that no one seems to question). This is pretty different from other topics on HN.
Here's the best advice you'll ever hear. Money is the be-all and end-all of our existence. Make it, honestly, and be very careful who you trust with it. No money, no honey. Only listen to one who speaks with his money. A USD is not money.
Kabir, can you tell me more about family life. Do your parents encourage you to code or do they worry you spend too much time at the computer? Are there pressures to stop, or pressures to keep going, or you feel free to do as you please?
My parents definitely encourage me to program. Still, sometimes they tell me to go outside, or to try something new. It's like a mixture of encouragement while still trying to keep me from staying online 24/7.
Making a point of this kid's age for clickbait purposes, is probably going to leave them eventually wondering if their achievements would have received any recognition otherwise.
As someone who was a "child prodigy", people making a big deal of my age only made me feel good about myself and wanting to achieve more. Of course, this may not be a universal experience, but has certainly been common among the other child prodigies that I've since met.
Im prepared to take the hate if I'm wrong, but it seems like you've made over 170 sites, developed a lot of stuff and it just doesn't seem to add up...
Flag 1: After Googling your username, it led to your YouTube channel, with an adult male in the picture: https://www.youtube.com/user/kbrshh pretty odd...
If you've done all this by the age of 13, then damn, good luck in the future, but it just seems like you're trying to push the popularity of your side projects by leveraging your age... Just seems madly dodgy to me.
1. I recently changed my username and do not have a Youtube channel. That person doesn't even have the same name as me.
2. I was 12 then, and if you can't tell, I was pretty dumb at the time, and was pretty much looking for attention. Legally you weren't allowed to be signed up for Reddit, which is why I said I was 13 (which I am now).
3. I have worked on all of those npm modules, but most of them are forked improvements of existing modules (such as Jade).
If you read my comment above, you'll notice I don't like talking about my age (this is one of the few exceptions). In fact, I am even not the OP of this post.
It's interesting that the person who submitted this to HN has already submitted the same link exactly a year ago. In fact 3/5 his submission are about your site...
Edit: actually all of the OP submissions are about you.
Interesting. The thing is, I don't have control over what the OP can post. It's crazy how you guys are assuming that I don't know my own age after judging based on:
1. A search of my username (there are tons of people with a three letter username like my HN username)
2. An old post of mine on Reddit.
3. My NPM profile (which includes lots of forks)
4. The quality of my username.
5. The layout of my comments on Hacker News.
6. The posts of some stranger that has attempted to submit my website multiple times.
> The thing is, I don't have control over what the OP can post.
You see here is the part I don't believe. If you look at the submissions [1] that the OP has, all 5 of his submissions lead to either your github projects or your 13 y/o twitter page/website. I doubt that a person you don't know is so obsessed about only posting stuff about you, not commenting or anything, just submitting your projects and links. That account has no comments nor favorites.
Based on that - my assumption is you have multiple accounts here and now are lying about not having control of what the OP has, if you lie on that part - it makes your whole 13 y/o thing less beleivable to me.
Prepared to take the hate too. Answers seem fake under the question about relation with parents, and your voice does not strike me as a 13 year old, in particular seeming too controlling of situation. I don't buy it. I apologize in advance if I'm somehow proven wrong in some verifiable way.
So I'm still skeptical... because the branding, presence and everything is just way too professional to make me believe he's done this alone. I also believe that he's using multiple HN profiles to manipulate visibility (there are a number of profiles who's first comment is this on this post).
So while I'm still skeptical about his presence, I think it seems plausible that he is who he says he is, but that doesn't mean he's done it alone, etc, etc.
I did most of my branding by myself (using Sketch), but my family, and a community of students[1] always give me feedback on my projects. I do not have multiple HN profiles (although I have a throwaway account made a while back). However, I do have friends that usually are the first comments on my posts.
Also, while Moon was on Github in 2016, I started playing around with it locally in late 2015 before publishing anything online.
Haters are gonna hate, potatoes are gonna potate.
I've known Kabir for a while now and I can confirm that he's pretty much a really fun kid. Try me.
https://twitter.com/shnbhg
Flag 8: He is using Crystal based on his knowledge of ruby, there is no ruby code on his Github
Flag 9: He cranked out a multithreaded reverse proxy in C in four days, despite no other C code in his repo. https://github.com/kbrsh/coat
I learned C when I was just about his (alleged) age. I made some cool shit for an ANSI art group, but my code was a total goddamn mess full of newb mistakes (not DRY, bad naming, etc etc) and there's no way in hell I would be using advanced things like threads and mutexes in general, nevermind correctly.
Where's all the terrible C code? The terrible ruby code?
Where's the path and not just the destination? There's a lot of stuff in the github showing he just learned how to do web development. He was at "Hello World" a year and a half ago and definitely deserves props for getting as far as he has since then, regardless of age.
That said, wouldn't he want to put up all of his old work in ruby and C it took for him to get this good at C and Crystal since he already has all the other half-finished projects? Perhaps that work would be too far in the past for his story and would force us to have to believe he knew how to do pointer arithmetic in C at 8 years old?
There's no way coat was written by someone who hasn't been programming for a good while. It's not some phenomenal work of engineering but it's by someone who is fairly seasoned. The profile here looks like someone who was already pretty good and experienced at programming and picked up web programming about a year ago under a new online identity.
Alright I'm going to stop replying to these, I'm starting feel attacked.
8. All of my code is not on Github, and there is no reason for me to learn a language simply because I have previous knowledge in Ruby. I chose to learn Crystal because of it's elegance and speed.
9. I wrote that reverse proxy based on a variety of online tutorials[1], but used my knowledge of threads to make it multithreaded.
Fair enough -- I guess you must have learned how to write multithreaded C code with pthreads when you were 10 years old. Props if so. It just defies my comprehension given that I know what it is like to learn to code from a young age (I was writing my first programs at 8 years old on my Apple //c) and your velocity is absolutely insane.
Perhaps you are just 10x more capable at this than all other humans I've encountered in my entire life. If so good luck and godspeed and please try to avoid bringing about AI takeoff for the rest of us :)
You seem like a really nice person with similar interests as me, I'd love to actually get to know you :)
I started out with C, definitely didn't know how to write multithreaded code when I was 10 haha. I learned most of that after reading a great book on operating systems (Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) a couple months ago.
I'm trying to clean up my Github, you'll notice the "DayN" repositories are just edited versions of stuff I found online to learn from. These days I create my own projects, and am slowly deleting those "learning" repositories and making them private.
Flag 10: In his introduction to his 'Moon' library [1], he notes that in 'late 2015' he found he was having problems with Vue. If he's the oldest 13 year old he can be today, that makes him in 2015 toying with Vue enough to start looking under the hood at 11...
Plus looking at his old FreeCodeCamp username [2], I don't believe the programmer who was working through FCC tutorials (with very basic results) in 2016, is the same one who got tired of Vue in late 2015.
Please. The initial commits on Moon were in 2016, and I was playing around with a forked version of Vue locally in late 2015. I think it's extremely important to know what goes on under the hood of popular libraries.
And regarding the FreeCodeCamp profile--I made that account for my little brother (who was learning to program at the time). Along with that, I tried to help people out on the FCC Gitter[1] as much as I could, as teaching people is a good way to master something.
Moon - UI library
Wing - CSS framework
Wade - 1kb JS Search Library
Slash - hash function in Assembly
You can find them on my Github[1]. I usually don't like stating my age as I love the feedback I get if you treat me as if I was an adult. People usually just compliment me after they see my age, but I'd honestly rather have some nice feedback and criticism.
I'd be glad to answer any questions :)
[1] https://github.com/kbrsh