It's quite ironic that in a sentence about sexism and a male-dominated industry, the author addresses the developer by 'sweetie'.
In general I'm always very wary of "teenage prodigies" stories, they're very marketable but I think they're bad for everybody involved: on one hand the "prodigy" is on exhibit like some kind of circus freak and at this age is probably ill-prepared to deal with the attention, on the other the people he's supposed to inspire (kids his own age) just see a bar that's impossible to reach. You can't expect your average 16yo to write a high quality crypto tracker app regardless of gender. It's not inspiring, it's discouraging.
Mozart and Tiger Woods are both thought to be prodigies, but their parents were very involved in their developmental process.
Don't know enough about Mozart to know if his father actually wrote and played 90% of his works.
Unless by "mentor" (as seen on the dialogue-screesnhot) means "X and Y designed this and that for me so all I did was put my name in the front page).
We have hundreds of people doing this in https://hackclub.com, many of whom are 16 or younger.
Interestingly, at least in my area, it's generally only used by women and effeminate gay men. As a result, actually using the term does imply effeminacy, so a straight man using it to insult a woman may be unknowingly implying something about himself which he'd find embarrassing.
That being said, I believe this particular use was intended to be ironic/sarcastic. Though it ends up being just a distraction.
However, the author may genuinely not have noticed the sexist connotation until it was pointed out.
Either that or she is being deliberately patronising towards perceived innocence, also for comedic effect.
I'm sure the author had a point they were trying to make, but it was completely lost on me with the condescending turn to 'sweetie'.
This is just one of possible approaches. For example, I actively ask very rarely, the most you could find on SO would be upvotes to answers.
With this approach, the author would probably conclude I didn't write my weather watchfaces myself, as there are almost no public traces of me doing so. And yet.
https://apps.garmin.com/en-US/apps/2de2ee03-0f81-4668-b885-1... https://apps.getpebble.com/en_US/application/56aeaa675fc3f1c...
I would also keep stuff on my own disk until I thought it is progressed enough etc. I was too insecure to show progress, because progress contains more mistakes and I dont like looking dumb. It also makes it easier to tear you down if someone decides to.
I mean, I have no idea what the conditions of that competition were and how much alone you was supposed to do it. I have no idea how much mentoring counts as too much and how much is fine. Nor whether this crosses the line. Just that, the above suspicion is dumb.
The idea that every beginner programers must leave public track of beginners questions is fairly ridiculous.
but on the topic.. she's busted. there's good evidence now beyond signs like those SO/github thoughts.
Starting out, you wouldn't have that.
and lots of people don't use github.
they're just a couple of the signs.
i could even let go that she didn't know how to express what the expression was and even not knowing how to make a string uppercase.
they're little signs but they aren't where she was eventually busted.
I'm withholding judgment on if she did or did not code most of the app herself.
There's no reason the person discussed in this story couldn't be in the same situation.
I was getting paid to make back office software for local businesses at 13 in 1998 with absolutely no help from anyone and no one called me a prodigy. I'm sure tons of NH people have similar stories.
I seem to remember a survey at one point that the average person on HN who actually codes started coding at around 12.
Perhaps we should be teaching young people that coding is an obtainable goal that if you put your mind to it and work hard you can do? Not something you need to be a "prodigy" to do.
With that being said, I do find the worship of young people in tech a bit worrying. Over the years I've worked with a handful of talented developers that have started from a very young age, and over the years they become very good at a relatively young age. By the time they reach 20, they're senior-level developers.
That's all well and good, but these youngsters have been praised for years. Once they reach their twenties, they go from being young to being an adult, like everyone else. All of a sudden, the slack they were given to build their career up is gone, and many of them struggle from here onwards. It can be a mixture of being treated differently, or from essentially being jaded about dedicating that many years of their youth to a skill to be building the same old CRUD shit year after year.
He's still successfully protecting servers from getting hacked today, when pretty much every other server is getting hacked nowadays.
There's nothing magic about writing software people use.
The magic is in being in a position where your software is in a position to reach people who can use it. Traditionally, this was handled through pure nepotism, but these days it's possible for people to succeed without such connections.
Programming isn't magic, it's a skill one can learn, and at this moment of history it's easier than ever to get the information and tools required to do so. Teenagers (and younger kids) can learn incredibly quickly - if they decide to do so.
I sometimes find the fact that women are successfully being high profile scam artists (Elizabeth Holmes etc) encouraging in a twisted way. Plenty of men have made a bunch of money by cheating and lying in the business world, women are now making their mark too (and likely always have of course)! why not? =)
If anything it is a little sexist (not you, the "prodigy" idea). That if a 16 boy makes an app it's just normal but if a girl does it, she is a prodigy.
We need to be teaching people that men and women are equal and that girls can do this stuff just the same as boys. Saying it takes a prodigy to do it discourages people from even trying because it comes with the implication that person is capable of something the average girl isn't.
Look at the golden age of games over here in the UK if you need proof of that. You've got many stories of famous game designers and developers starting as kids with a ZX Spectrum or Amiga and learning to code extremely impressive games in the teens or younger (and sometimes ending up employed in the field before they've even left school).
There's also the fan game, ROM hack and game mod fields, where quite a few notable users are between 12 and 15 years old, yet have learnt enough about the hobby to learn how to write assembly code and build tools to help reverse engineer a game made by a team of hundreds.
Add to this the no doubt thousands of great website and app developers in the same age range as the subject of the article, and well, while writing an app at 16 is impressive, it's certainly not some impossible task that couldn't have been done without outside help.
I was also making websites for business at the beginning of the Internet when I was a teen. But back then anybody who could understand HTML was seen as a freaking wizard :) But I also recognize that the complexity of what I was building was nowhere near what I do today for example.
But yeah, let's all waste our time holding 16 old kids "accountable" for their "unethical" behaviour, like big boy adults do, that'll teach them how to grow up!
A 16 year old can waste his or her life by this age if he or she does really badly in school or smokes weed and gets caught. I can forgive teens for a lot of silly things like lying, cheating, petty crime, etc. but not doubling down when caught and creating a social media hatemob for someone questioning her.
Also - she is not a kid. There are at least few countries in which a 16 year old can have sex, drive, drink alcohol, join military academy, etc. and at 17 or 18 the list of countries grows to hundreds of entries.
And she is a "prodigy", not any ordinary kid and she defended herself very well (and evidently successfully considering the thread calling her out on reddit got outright removed, not just downvoted) on social media and even called the person claiming she is lying a "jobless disturbed harasser and bully".
She has attended MIT Launch, was intern at Sales force. Along with writing that app she also localized this app to 10 languages (I'm not sure if she did it herself via Google Translate, the way she writes about it is not clear), optimized it for iPhone X, prepared a full release, all within these 2 months while coming across new techniques and concepts and learning them on the fly.
This is all in her medium.com post and if she can do all of that she can get held to the same standard as an adult. And if it's someone just using her persona and doing all this then there is even a bigger problem, bordering on personality theft and fraud.
Who knows, maybe her parents are pushing her a lot and she doesn't know how to react.
We should give people the benefit of the doubt when we don't know the full story. She'll be forgiven in 2 months anyways..
It actually is boolean for many laws but that's beside the point. Whatever a threshold is a person who makes apps so quickly, calls herself an entrepreneur and a programmer, all while highlighting her young age (ostensibly to show that she is more mature or skilled than others that age) has crossed it.
> Who knows, maybe her parents are pushing her a lot and she doesn't know how to react.
Then just like with "a team" it's a big issue if her parents pushed her to do it all or did it for her and should not be swept under the rug because it's a woman in tech or a teen.
> We should give people the benefit of the doubt when we don't know the full story.
Too bad the author of this post doesn't get that. Instead they got called names, accused of bullying and harassment of a teen, accused of driving women out of tech, flagged (here too for a while apparently), and pretty much told to fuck off and die. It's only more ironic that the author is a woman too (which in an ideal world should not matter in the dispute but in USA/tech industry it seems to, although I've seen plenty of woman vs. woman disputes online where one woman will claim the other who criticizes her has "internalized sexism").
> She'll be forgiven in 2 months anyways..
Well yes. No one is going to crucify her for this but plagiarism and being put on a pedestal for things you didn't do are (in theory, apparently it is if you are a woman judging by some of the comments here[0]) not acceptable and can't be revealed and then just defended (not even disputed) by tons of people because the perpetrator is a woman or teen and thus beyond criticism or fair attribution of work.
I agree with the vast majority of your post, but I would say this part isn't super fair. Maybe I'm reading too much into this part, but outside of exceptional cases, we do give minors the chance to recover. I know people who had high school GPAs in the low 2s, that went to community college for 2 years, transferred to a solid university, and have a good career.
At least where I live, your records are sealed at 18 unless you have been tried as an adult (which is exceedingly rare). You can definitely recover from an offense, but it is going to make things harder.
Yes, a 16 year old doing some (alleged) unethical behavior should face some consequences, but no 16 year old should have their life ruined. Intelligence and maturity are not coupled.
What a prodigy!
What we must never forget, writing the code is just the small part, marketing and selling software is the bigger challenge. She's obviously good at that and will prevail no matter what the nit-pickers say.
If this is tolerated at large it will have a chilling effect on any young person (including young women) who looks and sees people like her because they will think they are too stupid for tech since they can't make an entire app in 2 months. It will also have a chilling effect on all men and women in tech. Men will be afraid of criticizing women and secretly doubting their competence and women will be coddled, depraved of criticism and doubted as being there for reason other than their own skill.
IMO it has already happened to a degree in USA. In Poland no one sane would doubt a woman in tech or be afraid of criticizing her but in USA it's getting very murky, especially after stuff like [0].
For me it's not about her being a woman, but about her being a young person. Give them a chance or have we (mid-thirties) already become so intolerant against teens?
This is why we have shit software ecosystems - Take Microsoft as the biggest example of "its more important to sell stuff than get it right"
The reality of a lot of app development now is that you can go a long way by not doing very much. Ok, so the git graph shows another developer committed many more lines: since when have we, as an industry, taken KLOC as a serious measure of anything?? Those lines of code could well be XML UI structures or a bunch of config spat out from an IDE.
Is she an amazing developer? No, she admits as much - she claims 10k lines of code, a bunch of which may have been StackOverflow'd, and she doesn't claim experience. She says she has trouble with Python.
Such a big deal over such a minor thing.
But she gave it to me of her own free will, and if you think 10000 lines can be SO'd then you live in a bubble
The code is too complicated for a beginner to have written. There are generator expressions, lambdas and what not in there.
I could go ahead and post the previous conversations where I was struggling to get basic programming concepts into her head, but shes already gone rabid in trying to discredit me. More material from my side will make her react even more extremely.
My biggest question and open challenge to her is this:
If she wrote all of it -
1) Show us the git log
2) If she insists aviral corrected and merged the code himself, show us the original fragments of code she sent, or show us the mails containing fragments of code if she emailed it to him.
If aviral was really a mentor, why would he use this crude method of collaboration, he'd explain how to use git and github to her to raise pull requests, commit code and so on.
Even the most pleb developer uses github and manages to commit code and so forth to it in a few days. Just look at the number of git repos with hello world like code in them.
I'm sure she'll come up with some excuse why the above is impossible like "we deleted intermediate stuff and mails", or "I dont know how to use git", or whatever hamstering.
I saw bullshit I called it. The burden of proof is on her. I have much more to lose by lying than she does. I have a life, a career and people will surely take the word of a teenage girl over a man in his 30s. She could instantly destroy all my credibility and reputation by showing proof.
In the unlikely event that she can provide proof that can convince without doubt, then I'll eat my words. If she can't then its her word against mine - I have nothing to lose or gain by her rise or fall, I don't even own Macs, iPhones or do mobile development.
I have no motivation to lie. I've built apps all my life. She has every motivation to - this is her ticket to getting into the USA.
Also what about the guy who was told directly by aviral that aviral developed the app for a small sum of money under an NDA?
Aviral has even tweeted something to the effect of "I lost respect for this guy who made a private conversation public". That's damning evidence.
Is it all about censorship of harsh truths?
If you have enough karma, you can vouch for flagged items. You can also email the mods if you think it merits mod intervention. I have done so a few times to say stuff like "It is a good article with a bad title. I think users are flagging in reaction to the title without reading it." In such cases, they sometimes turn off flags and retitle the piece.
Large group dynamics are inevitably messy and complicated. It doesn't really help to get up in arms about that fact.
There's a "vouch" button once you have enough karma.
The problem is sinking and killing discussions that already got going. A minority of selfish users gets to demolish collaborative work that other users already invested in.
The incentives are for lower effort from commenters. A downward spiral.
Feels like something fishy is going on, given all the author’s prior references of being flagged on other platforms.
The author of this post seem to have it out for the girl personally, which is unnecessary.
She also called the person disputing that a jobless disturbed bully, harasser and troll and due to internet "siding with her" the author was met with abuse for "harassing a kid" and insults despite the proof they provided about app possibly being a team work or work of someone else.
And if all her social media posts are "a team" then this is even more unethical.
The other developers seem happy for her to take the credit, presumably as its good for marketing. Who is this really hurting?
Instead of the talented and hard-working individual she expected, the author found someone who'd take credit for the work of others to gain internet fame. I don't think this article is the best reaction to that (hurling insults usually doesn't help anyone), but I can understand how she'd get pissed about that kind of behavior.
I guess she's worried that she'll get exposed further down the line and it would be bad for women who code in general
Well that reaction seems to have come after they were harrassed, called a dumb kid, and a lying piece of shit[1]. This is a 16 year old, they're going to make mistakes. This level of hate for something very minor is really out of proportion.
They did after all contribute at least partly towards the app, so it's more of an exaggeration than an all out lie.
It also reminds me of the Naomi Wu fiasco, where people thought that a woman couldn't possibly be doing all the things she said she did. And ultimately apologised.
The author tries with all effort to proof that this kid can’t Code by saying how experienced he is and that he was also smart when he was her age. For me this sounds like being very jealous and frustrated.
People have been doing it forever but with help of social media they can generate lot of support and sympathy also if they fit in right slot of identity politics.
> I’m not sure who is the “someone else” here. The app is published from Ravinder Singh Arora’s (my Dad) account. I can’t sign up for an Apple Developer account because I’m <18. And I created the app on my own :)
https://medium.com/@harshitaisanerd/im-not-sure-who-is-the-s...
When i was 17, for the 2nd iOS app i launched on the app store, i made the GUI programatically. It was a simple app and trying to combine story boards with code just confused me.
I haven't investigated this app at all, but seriously? I stopped reading after that gross speculation.
Is this the actual quote? It sounds as though we're meant to read more into it. The real author could well be a parent, but I guess we're meant to read that it's a suitor.
> I used a spare iPhone to get the app, and then used https://github.com/BishopFox/bfdecrypt and https://github.com/BishopFox/bfinject to decrypt the app .
>Here are a few things I found :
>No, she did not code the app as she claims. In her defense, she has help from a few people, but I would call that bluff, given that help construed of over ~~50%~~ 90% of git commits.
What? You can't get the git history by decrypting an app binary.
The post shows a screenshot of a private git repo's commit history but no explanation of how it was obtained.
The 16-year old girl claims (https://i.imgur.com/TQzc6TW.png) that the other author has a high number of commits because he was committing code on her behalf because she didn't have a Github subscription for private repos. Fishy because that's a weird workflow, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.
>There is no storyboard, lol. For any iOS dev who is just starting out, making an application without storyboards is just unbelievable.
Maybe this is lost on me because I'm not an iOS developer, but is the author just accusing the girl of poor technique? That seems to support the case that she's an amateur developer.
>So we did a grep for `com` on strings in the decrypted app, you will notice that on line 929 there is a mention of library which does not exist, and so I’m inclined to believe, this is who probably the author of original code is.
A non-existent library created the app? What is this evidence of?
>Upon reaching out to the the dev in question, he went to the extent of saying that he “allowed her” to call the app hers, given certain “circumstances”. Fair enough, we don’t see him bagging MIT scholarships, or all the accolades the girl is receiving for her app. Let’s pass on some appreciation to the so-called-mentor?
Why are we not seeing proof that this conversation occurred?
>Such kind of people give Women in Code a really, really bad name, because ~~sweetie~~, it takes tonnes of hardwork, cutting through competition, persistent dealing with sexism and lot of patience to make place for yourself in this male-dominant coveted industry.
Addressing another developer as "sweetie" is deeply unprofessional. This whole sentence was dripping with obnoxious arrogance. This is the "investigator" we're taking at their word?
In case the author changes the post, this is the version that I'm commenting on: https://archive.fo/9Jw4R
Maybe they mean a fake domain for the name of your libs: com.monkeybuttskunkworks.libs.cryptopricer
If you think it's the fact that she's young that made the app famous, then create a false young persona and the same with your own app instead. Only stupid people would care about who built it instead of the actual quality of the app.
I've lost time even reading even the title of this post.
#firstworldproblems
Reading through the comments "However her aptitude was pretty poor... I've mentored many kids in my life.
At some point she was unable to even reason out how to convert a string to upper case.
She said... What does this have to do with programming.... I want to build apps.
After that she didn't talk to me much and I didn't bother either."
These aren't really the people we should be lauding or giving a free ticket to MIT. From what I'm reading, she's probably a future successful corporate bullshit artist, but this is not a role model for anyone or a future visionary.
I think it is good things like this get attention - young people should know they're not going to get ahead by stealing credit from others or falsifying their talents.
I think what's upsetting to me is not really this case in particular, but that I couldn't imagine any reputable tech journalism organization being able or willing to publish an expose like this. So cheers to all you HN citizen journalist digging into the commits and asset names to give us an idea what's behind the Press Release.
That's a pretty funny typo from someone defending themselves against accusations of not knowing how to program.
This girl is using her age as a marketing tactic, and I understand the point of the author, but this post goes too far. Instead of pointing out her faults by making a big deal on his blog, the author should reach out to her and explain his opinion in a mature manner. I don't think it is right to expose someone publicly just for making a mistake.
The only reason young or female developers get weird media attention is because the same companies who abuse visas and get convicted of wage fixing are trying to get more cheap labor. They pour money and volunteers into charities and media; offers dwindle.
There seems to be the tendency to think "If I did it in the harsh world, why should anyone have it easier than me?"
Are you a “prodigy” for building an app? No. But you don’t deserve accusations backed by opinion and no evidence either.
Good post though, I love people who exposes frauds.
So the app developer had some mentorship, and probably copied and pasted a handful of code snippets she didn't have a deep understanding of. So what? That doesn't justify this completely over the top reaction.
