For those that missed it, this Engineer is in _high school_.
Byran, I have been a professional engineer longer than you have been alive, I can tell you right now that I have met very, very few people that would have the motivation, skill and sticktoitivness to pull this off.
Don't underestimate the amount of knowledge you don't have to perfect things. I remember building scheduling software in PHP in high school, because I just fixed problem after problem, and I was not limited by any form of knowledge. If I'd have to do it again, I'd be perfecting the architecture, refactoring everything every other week...
There’s a real double-edged sword to this whole “becoming a ‘better’ software engineer” thing. I remember just hacking stuff together when I was younger with not a care for whether I was doing it right or not. I just wanted to make it work.
I miss that feeling. It doesn’t come around as often now, but I still feel like I move fastest when I can shut off the part of my brain that’s been trained on years of online discourse about right and wrong ways to do things, and just… do them.
> I move fastest when I can shut off the part of my brain that’s been trained on
While at it: the fastest way to move is free fall. If you fall at will and from a reasonable height, it's called a jump, and indeed gets you there fast. Otherwise it's called a crash, and it usually results in your limping the rest of the way.
So the approach of just hacking things together works great for small things, and the worse, the larger the scale grows.
The laptop in question, for instance, was definitely not just hacked together without any planning, even though the project seems to have fortunately escaped analysis paralysis.
tbqh, I vividly remember rolling my eyes in high school when older people would say: "don't squander the free time you have; you'll wish you had it back someday..." and while I don't outright regret doing kid stuff and squandering the free time in high school as kids do, some days those sentiments ring out more true than others; today being one of them after seeing this video.
Yeah I mean I wasn't doing things like this. I was constantly frustrated because I didn't have any resources to achieve the things I wanted. Didn't even have a half decent computer. I had some janky celeron thing that barely functioned and I couldn't even buy books about subjects I wanted to learn. To think the things I could have done if I was a well off kid.
Yeah, but TBF.. in my early teens, my "internet" consisted of a 300 baud modem hooked up to an Atari 800xl (my 2nd computer - the TI 99-4/A was "obsolete"), my "manual" was a 6502 assembly book I borrowed and typed out and a binder full of photocopied notes called "De Re Atari" that I picked up at a garage sale or something. My later teens, some of my time in was spent debugging early Watcom SQL software and working on an educational software app in FoxPro, as well as studying computer engineering (and still working on the side in FoxPro).
Yeah, that's a given. Everyone has only 24h of time per day. And everyone has different struggles.
This is an incredible achievement. And i really don't like, that your comment invited other people to jump onboard & comment in a way belittling the achievements– even if just implicitly, to make themselves feel better why a high-schooler is doing things like that.
If all that was really the main driver, HN frontpage should be flooded with projects made by high-schoolers. But it is not. It might be contributing factor.
Btw: Funnily enough, i would expect these type of excuses & self-comforting negativity from high-schoolers.
I'm not saying this in a negative way - but priorities shift in life (unfortunately).
I wish I had the time that I had back when I was in high school.
The time part doesn't have anything to do with the skills though. At that age I would have never been able to do a similar thing - at my age I would probably struggle, but with enough time at hand I might achieve half of the project.
This is what makes this whole thing exceptional: this person is very talented and is using his free time to do great things - I appreciate that.
If my initial comment sounded like I was bragging I would do it too if I had more free time, it wasn't my intention. I actually am jealous that I get to spend less time on my side projects and I envy those who can build such cool stuff.
It really depends on the person and the school they go to. I've had wayyyyy more free time in my 20s than I did in high school. With kids its a different story, but having a job and no kids is peak freedom. 8 hours of work, then I'm free. Meanwhile in high school I'd wake up at 6:30, school starts 8am and ends at 4pm, sports practice until 6pm, start homework at 7:30pm and hopefully finish by 11:30pm, then rinse and repeat. Weekends just meant more homework and very long sports events (swim meets, XC races for me). Summers were more chill but I was working full time starting from 15.
Highschool was genuinely awful. So so sleep deprived and stressed. I went to a prep school so for those who didn't, your experience may have been different.
I sometimes wonder how many talented engineers top colleges are rejecting because they were busy working on real engineering projects like this than academics and test scores.
Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.
I almost failed the high school entry exams because I dedicated more time to soldering electronic devices and programming computers rather than writing essays about Polish literature or memorizing dates of historical battles. Same thing with the final high school exams - it was a really close call. I felt like they gave me good scores on non-STEM subjects just because I already won some prizes in electronics / physics olympiads and brought some fame to the school, so kida got away with that but... it was stressful anyways.
Man, you just triggered me. This was also me in school.
I even have a huge interest in history, but I remember my first history exam on World War 1. I was ready to answer questions on its causes, the people, how industrial war changed the nature of fighting, the new countries that formed after the war... First Question: What was the date the Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Second Question: What was the dates each country declared war...
It also took me years to actually sit down and read JRR Tolkien as we read the Hobbit as a class book in grade 8. First question for the test: List the names of the 13 dwarves that attended the party at Bilbo's house (1 point each for a test out of 30 IIRC).
Holy crap - I have read the Hobbit many times (and LoTR a few less) and I would never have taken the time to commit 13-character names to memory - most of them simply were not that memorable.
The rhyming sets are a bit of a crutch, at least (Fili + Kili, Óin + Glóin, Bifur + Bofur + Bombur, etc). But you're right - most of the dwarves are individually forgettable. Only two are substantially characterized - Thorin the leader, and Bombur the comically fat.
Heh - exactly - the only truly easy character name that has always stuck in my mind was from "Snow Crash", I mean - who can forget "Hiro Protagonist"...?
But doesn't your global liberal democratic society want you to be trained and proficient in productive tasks which might only appear boring through a superficial lens or perspective? Or is this world's education entirely motivated by the selfish desire for pleasure and leisure? Rather than being founded to serve hard work ethic principles and effective programs that maybe can help build decent societies?
It's true, and okay, that the academia grind is only for a subset of us. It is not the only meaningful path! I went on to gradschool by rote, and I do not push it on my high-school students or anyone else. It took me about 40 years to find a sense of purpose (having a child was the catalyst).
Sadly, the push for STEM seems motivated by capitalists wanting further control of valuable labor, so I'm really chuffed by Bryan's Show HN post- even though open-source can be leveraged by capital, it doesn't have to be. It is a non-walled-garden model, and an example of what we can do collectively. Even if the Linux kernel is largely funded by corporations, it doesn't have to be.
A concern is that a laptop is still not something my community can make with the local resources, and thus the exploitation of land, labor, and money continues.
> Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.
This really resonates with me. I love math now, but absolutely loathed it in high school. The curriculum lacked any sort of way to apply math to real problems. I simply cannot learn things in the abstract like that. It's like learning a programming language without ever building a program.
Same. I stopped "caring" about math when we started to learn polynomials. Binomials..ok. Trinomials...ok. But then it just became repetitive when the class was just adding more terms to the functions that over the semester I ended up spending most of the class daydreaming.
I disagree; I did similar projects like this in high school (not exactly like this; his is a true achievement). I did very well grade-wise and had a high GPA but I bombed the SAT because I didn’t understand that you didn’t lose the same number of points for questions you skipped. So the ones I didn’t have time to answer I just randomly selected, which resulted in a poor score.
I found out later:
1. How SAT scoring works
2. That you shouldn’t take the last SAT of the year since then you cannot retake it
3. I probably should’ve taken the ACT instead
I wish they’d prepared us in school for this, but they were too busy training us for standardized state testing since that determined their own budget.
Could I have gotten into MIT? Unsure; back at 18 I didn’t know MIT existed and this was early Internet times. It would have been nice if my high school mentioned it as an option.
In my case at least, doing projects like this and getting good grades didn’t automatically turn into attending any college I wanted. Either way, I ended up with a great career.
Anyways, kudos to the person who made this project!
Thankfully, the SAT no longer deducts points for wrong answers. But I agree, there's a big difference between testing and doing really great work.
I'm somewhat on the other end of this, where I excelled in school, graduated valedictorian, but didn't gain any meaningful experience with projects and such and had poor leadership skills all around.
I’ve known few exemplars like this one. But at least 2. One made a flight simulator for 737 in the backyard that was used regularly by airline pilots to train. The other made a complete discrete FM stereo transmitter, mounted his own radio later. He was 16, and it was the early 90. So all from books.
Both guys brutally failed in the first year in the University. They dis not like theory, they wanted to make.
Unless you aren't fit for traditional academic learning models.
I spent most of my young adulthood working on projects (not nearly as insanely technical as this! but) similar to this. But I dropped out of high school, didn't go to college, because none of them would teach me in a way, or a pace, that fit my learning disability or mental models. Luckily I had the drive to teach myself, and built a successful two-decade career, despite my parents and teachers telling me I'd fail and become homeless.
High school kids have insane potential, and can achieve truly amazing things. But often people disregard them and don't set them up for success. So many companies could hire really great engineers, even from high school, if they could just find the motivated ones and put them in a mentorship/apprenticeship program that aligned with their interests and ways of learning.
You really don’t want to see my pre-university grades.
I was on a mission, and I can’t do two things at once. So school was about efficiency. I got great grades wherever that took low effort. That only went so far.
After graduation, nowhere I wanted to be would have looked at me.
It took me a couple years after high school to find the right university, but my personal projects paid off.
Looking back, it was a gamble. But you don’t really choose those kinds of paths.
I dunno. I only succeeded as a kid academically because of literally my IQ not because I had grit learnt from my projects. I pathologically hated being told what to do so the determination to do my own projects did not translate into anything assigned to me.
Going from how many gifted children end up underperforming because they are made to do stupid things & then getting labeled as difficult or slow: a lot more then you'd think.
Being talented and gifted is generally not appreciated, not even in academia. Many of the most talented people never finish their education because academia is more about playing the game & having the grit (or lack of backbone?) to deal with the bullshit and do what you are told.
And tbf, the best engineers I know are not necessarily the most talented ones, but those that developed the grit to push through the bs.
Would you please stop taking threads on flamewar tangents? Your comments in this thread have been inflammatory and offtopic. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Well, sincerely, my objective here is to spark thought provoking discussion, which should lead to personal cognitive improvements. But I must admit that it's kinda not my fault that the format I chose is really provocative.
edit: And doesn't that defeat the purpose of a nerd-rich forum like Hacker News? The stifling of creativity and abstract thoughts? I came here to socialize and find bright minds, no offense.
I'm not worried about whose fault it is, I just need you to stop posting like this to Hacker News. As I said, it's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. And it's particularly dismaying to see in a thread such as this one.
This is an incredible achievement! I've been working in hardware design for 10 years. I've touched on most of what was covered here across various projects in my career, but never all at once. To have the discipline and motivation to carry a project like this through to completion is seriously impressive.
Bear in mind he's "CEO" of the underwater MATE ROV team at Phillips Exeter Academy, and if you scroll down a bit, it says that Phillips Exeter Academy is giving him a high school diploma.
Hilarious that there’s a separate sub-$1000 line item for books and supplies. If it’s that expensive, you can’t just throw in some pens and pencils with the tuition?
...back in the day we had this partner who emigrated from undisclosed_balkan_country to the USA in the 90s. 20 years later his daugther in her teens gets $20k funding from the school principal, for her pet fashion project (not even STEM!). Her school is not even a top one, just a private school somewhere in major USA city.
On the contrary, even though we've had top marks in the top math school in the same country, we'd never ever hoped to get even $200 for a project. Were we good enough to build a computer - of course, it's not that hard once you get the basics, and once you've done x86 assembly in your early teens. But it was just impossible to even think about spending the money, or loosing them per se.
Exeter Philips school has quote "700 acres, 147 buildings, the world's largest high school library". And I'm sure also lots of engineering development facilities where you can actually get your hands dirty. I can imagine the progress had I found myself there by some miracle. This kid is absolute winner to be in it, but I bet his parents must have also won the lottery ticket, one way or another, cause UK education is crazy expensive.
Now, in order to not make this story super sad, let's admit that, even though we as schoolkids didn't have access to such campus and funding, by last year in school I could track music with FT2; build Linux kernel and write ASM/C/C++/Perl; operated a BBS; debugged the IE9 source with VXDs and all; took part in writing two demoscene productions, that we still proud of; and finally, but not lest being a bunch of smart kinds in their 20s we started a hosting company in 1998(or '99) which soon handled the amount of traffic which equaled that of the whole country. This all with no GPTs, no Google searches, not even forums that much back then. So of course, it matters, that you are not a dumbass, after all.
But nobody ever gave us the security to pursue dreams the way this kid does. And I'm absolutely convinced we could've put together a laptop or something along the line. I say put together, because a lot of these parts are easily available now, one click away, nothing like what it was back in the day. He's not producing the chips, neither the screen, neither putting elements together, but the chassis and kbd, and does some wiring. Of course - fascinating for a teenager to do, but you see, teenagers are not so stupid, and never were. And those in top schools are particularly bright and outpace many adults in many areas. From the images I can tell this is a school projects, so perhaps it took also a little mentoring to do it.
This always make me think about two things - it absolutely matters which school you are lucky to have gone to; and very likely all talent is lost soon after high-school, because... reasons.
yeah, it's a little bittersweet to see the adulation this is getting; I hope he has success in his academics and career, I got my first computer by dumpster diving parts.
Hits close to home. Apart from what was a family PC (terribly cheap), my main rig for a time was assembled via old junk the computer lab at school was done with but wasn't valuable enough (or fully functional) to say no when I asked if I could have it.
Byran, I have been a professional engineer longer than you have been alive, I can tell you right now that I have met very, very few people that would have the motivation, skill and sticktoitivness to pull this off.