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I disagree - I starting learning C++ at 14, and I had shareware apps for Windows I was making a fair amount of money with by the time I was 17 back in the late

by berkut 14y ago

I disagree - I starting learning C++ at 14, and I had shareware apps for Windows I was making a fair amount of money with by the time I was 17 back in the late 90s... That included learning how the POP3 and SMTP protocols worked to write email clients and obviously socket programming.

just2n 14y ago
I started learning C at 11 and at 13-14 had software developed that assisted in reverse engineering and debugging of applications. These days that knowledge seems fairly trivial to me, and it isn't fundamentally complicated. Now with more understanding of theory and algorithms, it would be a lot easier to build much more useful tools like something that is as simple as dataflow analysis -- something I couldn't have fathomed at 14. Or binary instrumentation. Similarly, I had done socket work and reversing proprietary protocols, and I didn't consider any of that groundbreaking (nor was it substantially marketable). To walk into a field like AI and summarization which isn't infantile and outdo Ph.D. level experts at their own theory -- that's something you didn't do, nor did Nick, nor does anyone. It just doesn't happen, and hasn't in any subject with a similar depth of specialization as far as I'm aware. Not to say one can't make useful things and/or learn a lot very rapidly. I tend to understand the young, inexperienced people building games that sell well due to the frameworks available. And I understand how shareware could sell decently in a market that's widely open with lots of low-hanging fruit. But this situation is very different. That he built an application that grabbed parts of text and produced a shortened version by making some very rudimentary guesses about what's important perhaps. What's described -- not a chance.
kybernetyk 14y ago
Pretty much the same for me. +- a few years. 5 years is a lot of time. More so when you're going to high school and have a lot of free time. Yes, with 3 years of programming experience your code won't be too polished/elegant but it will be sufficient to make the application work. (Especially if you can use some 3rd party frameworks like the kid in this article possibly did.)

by berkut 14y ago

just2n 14y ago

I started learning C at 11 and at 13-14 had software developed that assisted in reverse engineering and debugging of applications. These days that knowledge seems fairly trivial to me, and it isn't fundamentally complicated. Now with more understanding of theory and algorithms, it would be a lot easier to build much more useful tools like something that is as simple as dataflow analysis -- something I couldn't have fathomed at 14. Or binary instrumentation. Similarly, I had done socket work and reversing proprietary protocols, and I didn't consider any of that groundbreaking (nor was it substantially marketable). To walk into a field like AI and summarization which isn't infantile and outdo Ph.D. level experts at their own theory -- that's something you didn't do, nor did Nick, nor does anyone. It just doesn't happen, and hasn't in any subject with a similar depth of specialization as far as I'm aware. Not to say one can't make useful things and/or learn a lot very rapidly. I tend to understand the young, inexperienced people building games that sell well due to the frameworks available. And I understand how shareware could sell decently in a market that's widely open with lots of low-hanging fruit. But this situation is very different. That he built an application that grabbed parts of text and produced a shortened version by making some very rudimentary guesses about what's important perhaps. What's described -- not a chance.

kybernetyk 14y ago

Pretty much the same for me. +- a few years. 5 years is a lot of time. More so when you're going to high school and have a lot of free time. Yes, with 3 years of programming experience your code won't be too polished/elegant but it will be sufficient to make the application work. (Especially if you can use some 3rd party frameworks like the kid in this article possibly did.)