What are HN's guidlines on young people mentioning their age in a Show HN like this post here? Should we take it graciously, admit they are young and encourage them for what they did or should we point out not to mention their age?
IMO, if we take the age out, some of show HN's might not look very interesting. Same goes for a Show HN where someone mentions they are not a programmer and yet built a thing.
There's no official guideline (we try to keep that list minimal), but I think it's harmless and the main thing commenters should do is not complain about it. These complaints are always the same, always offtopic, and usually balloon in size to the point where the offtopicness drowns everything else. That's a terrible outcome for a thread like this.
Even if you dislike "I'm $X years old and I $Y" posts, it's not helpful to give a kid a grumpy patronizing response. We want HN to be a helpful community, not some weird age competition.
For whether age should be mentioned: Does there need to be a guideline? There are plenty of things that have no specific guideline, things which are fine to do or not do.
For whether there should be comments about age being mentioned: existing guidelines already denounce low value commenting especially at the root level.
I guess the point is that saying you are a teenager in the title can seem like an unfair way to game your post ranking by garnering awe/sympathy.
Lots of middle aged people build cool things too, but they can't pull the age card to boost their rank on the front page (at least, not until they are at the other extreme - like 80 or 90 years old)
These kinds of feats aren't more or less impressive with age. Maybe the opposite, teens have so much free time.
When I was 17 I was working on a programming language, and I promised myself I would find the time to finish it during college. But during college I didn't have the time.
I have two friends who founded a startup at 16, one of which was quite succesful. I can think of two seperate friends who started a Minecraft hostar at 16, both of which makes up the majority of minecraft servers hosted in the Netherlands currently and one of them is now a generic hostar with his own datacenter.
And this isn't a problem in and on itself, but phrasing it like this discourages older people to work on pet projects. I started working as a Cyber Security TA at a private IT school and older students keep telling me "I'll never be as good as you because I didn't start so young" and it's a harmful mindset. Because it only took me a few years to learn what I know. Stating your age everywhere as a young developer reinforces this mindset in people.
If you want to see a teen/student do cool stuff. I suggest checking Adam McDaniel on GitHub. That dude really is impressive.
Yes, the problem is there are a fresh supply of 17 (or whatever) year olds, who haven't seen the old-man-yelling-at-cloud messages like OPs that are posted when they do this.
