
Show HN: I'm 15 years old, and I released my first NPM module: Wizardry - remixz
http://diy.github.com/wizardry/
======
orangethirty
On behalf of all the idiots that decided to rain on your parade, I would like
to apologize. All of you should be ashamed. How dare you insult this young
person whose only wish is to share his work with us?

In terms of the module, can't really comment much on your code. It looks clean
and well written. I'll try and run it during my free time to get a good feel
for it. Well done. Now go back and build something bigger.

PS. Shoot me an email (in profile). You might enjoy hanging out with the
Nuuton team.

~~~
chris_p
Who is insulting him? People are just saying that his age is not relavent to
what he did, and I agree. His post should describe the project. It should be
about how awesome his project is, not about how awesome he is.

~~~
astrodust
It looks like a good module that stands on its own merits. Adding irrelevant
demographic information weakens that.

If this headline was "I'm black, and I released my first NPM module" or "I'm a
Republican, and I released my first NPM module" would it be appropriate?

It's as if anyone who's not 20-40, white and male needs to somehow draw
attention to that fact. Shouldn't this be an inclusive community rather than
one that needs to tag its members?

~~~
Jare
I find the age bit interesting because most young people are not interested in
creating, and I enjoy celebrating those that do.

~~~
GuiA
>because most young people are not interested in creating

Clearly you need to work with young people more :)

There is that misconception that all teenagers care about is watching TV or
hanging out with their friends and doing nothing "creative" or "productive".
How wrong! I've worked with hundreds of teenagers over the past few years, and
I've never met one who wasn't interested in creating.

By default, kids and teenagers have a thirst to create, to see how they can
imprint the world they live in.

Sure, for a lot of them, what they wish to create is what HN would (sadly)
scoff at (those dreaming of becoming athletes, singers, actors, writers,
etc.). But the intent to create is there.

What makes the difference ultimately is how seriously they're taken. In our
current society, they're just dismissed as ignorant teenagers, and that's what
they become in a sad self-fulfilling prophecy. But when they're given the
proper encouragement and tools to act upon their creative impulses, that's
where the magic happens.

~~~
Jare
I may have chosen my words incorrectly, since in many ways I agree with you
about the teenager's (or young adult's) thirst to make an impression in the
world.

That said, there's a huge difference between wanting to be a creator, and
actually creating stuff. In my experience, most young people quickly settle
down into caring less about the acts of creation and self-expression, and
focus more on 'making an impression' in their immediate peers. This path leads
to obvious, uninteresting, facile, lazy, short-term, me-too, style-over-
substance, meaningless creations that I can barely label as such.

Is it down to proper encouragement and guidance? For sure that must help a
lot, especially when dealing with setbacks and lack of validation. But I
believe there needs to be a level of inner dialogue and disregard for what's
popular around oneself, that is a) at odds with the desire for teens to 'fit',
b) rarely encouraged in practice in our society, and c) hard to sustain
against the amount of noise (media, fashion, etc) we surround ourselves with.

~~~
GuiA
>In my experience, most young people quickly settle down into caring less
about the acts of creation and self-expression, and focus more on 'making an
impression' in their immediate peers. This path leads to obvious,
uninteresting, facile, lazy, short-term, me-too, style-over-substance,
meaningless creations that I can barely label as such.

Of course- but one must give them time! They're barely starting to figure out
how to interact with their peers and themselves, and you want them to create
masterpieces on the side? "On n'est pas sérieux quand on a 17 ans!" ("We are
not serious when we are 17" - Rimbaud had it right)

Everything in its moment; the important thing is that their creations should
not be dismissed as "obvious, uninteresting, lazy [...]", because negativity
is the mother of sterility.

> But I believe there needs to be a level of inner dialogue and disregard for
> what's popular around oneself, that is a) at odds with the desire for teens
> to 'fit', b) rarely encouraged in practice in our society, and c) hard to
> sustain against the amount of noise (media, fashion, etc) we surround
> ourselves with.

Some of them can figure that out on their own; some don't (and most are in
between). That's where we come in as educators (which I believe every
philosopher implicitly is [as in us, φιλόσοφος, lovers of wisdom- which is a
description HNers rally under]) :)

------
remixz
Hi all! Thanks for the great feedback. I did realize the title might have been
controversial, but I have a small argument for it.

A few weeks ago, there was the 14 year old who posted their rad iPhone game on
HN. Their post did inspire me to post my own work. I have a tiny hope that
someone else who's doing something like I am will see this and post their own
work. I doubt it, but you never know! :D

~~~
tylermauthe
I'm currently in University studying Comp Sci; I can say with confidence that
the level of competence demonstrated by you doing this surpasses the majority
of my peers and your work-ethic is certainly much higher than those of us who
have skills.

Good show dude! Keep up the awesome stuff and you'll have money & praise
showered on you.

~~~
bashzor
It's commonly known, especially on HN, that self education works much better
than any school. I too surpass pretty much everyone at school because I
started programming much earlier.

------
SoftwareMaven
Well done. One question, though: Shouldn't the commands be a list instead of
an object? I would think you would want to be sure to keep order for image
processing. For instance, I don't want my image down-sized for the web until
after all the processing is done to it.

The Ecmascript spec leaves the object attribute iteration order undefined
(though it appears most implementations iterate in the order attributes are
added).

------
ComputerGuru
Sorry, I don't see that your age is relevant.

~~~
bdcravens
The "HN" ethos tends to reward those who go against the odds: founders who
jumped off a cliff financially, teams working crazy hours with too few
employees, working a full time job while bootstrapping, trying to have a
family life, etc. In the end, none of that matters: you either ship good
stuff, or you don't. However, whether you have a full-time job or are dealing
with the time-suck that is high school, we're here to support, sympathize, and
empathize, so it's all relevant.

~~~
saebekassebil
I think this is very suitable description of today's HN - I'd just love this
to emphasized more clearly, since it seems like a common mistake to believe
that HN is about actual ground-breaking stuff. It's not even if it were ment
to be just that.

I must say that I agree with people stating that people should present their
creative works here, with the intention of getting feedback _of the product_
\- How is it any relevant for any other HN reader (than OP), that we praise
him/her as a person, rather than the product? The FAQ states, that relevant
information is "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" - Of
course that's a quite vague definition, but still this is hardly
intellectually stimulating.

------
bdcravens
Many didn't like posting the age in the title. Yeah, no one ever words their
HN submissions to be inflammatory and get to front page, right?

I'll take a million hackers showing their projects and trying to win brownie
points with their age than a single freakin smart phone troll blog post any
day of the week.

~~~
ianstallings
Yeah no doubt. And this kid is miles ahead of the SEO goons as far as I'm
concerned. Besides I always assume that means "I don't have experience so I'm
just putting that out there before you stone me for something I did wrong".
And as harsh as some of these comments are you can see why. I guess we all
have to be tempered by the flames.

------
chill1
"Wizardry is a task-based library for GraphicsMagick / ImageMagick that
focuses on simplicity and getting one thing done right: processing images."

Why I like these words: It's not enough to be able to write code, or even to
package up a module for a framework. Knowing that you can't do everything, and
that you should not try to do everything, with a single module, is a promising
sign in and of itself. Having a clear goal to reach makes getting there all
the more possible.

~~~
remixz
Thank you! This is something my bosses really helped me out with. I've been
pretty lucky to have them mentor me. :)

~~~
kellishaver
That's great. Surround yourself with as many good mentors as you can and take
full advantage of their experience. I've probably learned more over the years
from great bosses than I did in school.

Congrats on publishing the module. :)

------
smoyer
Hmmm ... when I was 15, I spent all my time playing ultimate frisbee and
riding my bicycle. Except when I was poring over the schematics and ROM code
for the 1802-based COSMAC Elf.

------
lewisflude
Here we go with another one of these "I'm (under 18) and I did x" posts and an
equal amount of people complaining why that isn't relevant.

But yeah, this is a really cool little module, congrats.

~~~
thejosh
You see the same thing everywhere in regards to tech. I am X years old, please
show me validation that I am doing good.

~~~
mkr-hn
Seeking validation isn't a bad thing, and it's not unique to young people.
Older people are more subtle about it.

------
nkohari
Already at 15 you've done more than (I would wager) most of the people on this
site -- you've shipped open source.

Congratulations, and ignore the haters. Remember that it doesn't matter what
you think or say, it matters what you do. Creating software is more important
than talking about it.

~~~
bdcravens
Maybe a good rule of thumb: When someone complains about a Show HN that links
to Github, post their own Github profile, or STFU? :-)

------
josephagoss
Whoa quite a few comments here seem a bit negative, remixz you shipped
something, that is good, power on! :)

~~~
remixz
Thanks! I don't mind the negative comments either, I always love to know what
I can do better.

~~~
bdcravens
Glad you don't let it get to you. Keep it up: I suspect you've contributed
more to the hacker world at your age than the haters twice your age.

------
geuis
Guess I'll leave one of the few comments about the project itself.

I'm going to evaluate this when I get home. If it works as described, I think
I'll be integrating this into an imaging service we're building. The interface
looks great.

Keep coding man. This looks really good.

~~~
remixz
Wow, that's really cool! Thanks! :D

------
gtmtg
Looks great - nice job!

I'm 13 and I've created a node.js command line app
(<http://gtmtg.github.com/view-test>) and an iOS control
(<http://gtmtg.github.com/MGDrawingSlate>) among other things, but none of
them are nearly this advanced...

Again - looks really cool...

------
Skywing
One thing to notice about this module is that it's spawning a sub-process out
to imagemagic itself. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just pointing it
out. There are also other modules that wrap the imagemagic libraries
themselves and do not spawn sub-processes. Just be mindful about the different
implementations.

------
mnicole
This post is a few days old, but I think it would have really limited the
amount of criticism if you'd also noted that you work at DIY (a company that
is promoting kids and teens to make all sorts of things - programming or
otherwise) in the post somewhere (even though technically people can see the
name in the URL). It makes a lot more sense to note his age when the company
he's working for is specifically trying to help younger generations.

Great work regardless, I love everything DIY is doing and it's fantastic they
have their target audience in the office!

------
mkr-hn
This thread is an early lesson in how age often makes people focus too much on
little things and miss what's important.

------
homakov
I am 19 years old and I don't give a fuck

~~~
taras_v
I am 25. Same shit.

~~~
loceng
I'm 29, and I care, though this particular topic is not important to me - and
I think this is a good reason for categories to exist.

~~~
homakov
it's again me, i meant "and i dont give a f about anybody's age"

if he would be 10 years old or 90 it WOULD be relevant. In 15 I was makin good
money selling porn online, but this is the thing nobody gives a f about xD

------
kmfrk
The font-weight on your link is _very_ close to being too small to be legible
- in Opera on Windows - hello to edge case asshats like me!)

And my vision is pretty decent.

I know you're probably using a default or something, but it's really
bothersome to someone like me to read it.

Great job on the project itself, though.

------
vaidik
Good one! Seriously! For the work you have done according to your age is
tremendous. I certainly was not able to do anything even close to it when I
was 15. So I'd say, hats off!!

------
shaunxcode
This is rad, keep it up! Seriously when others detract remember minor threat:
"what the fuck have you done?"

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Why this instead of gm?

<https://github.com/aheckmann/gm>

~~~
tferris
I used this one few times and though it's good it doesn't offer the full API
to the underlying libraries.

So, I appreciate any new NPM and if it's just for the sake of competition
pushing the boundaries of the entire Node ecosystem.

------
tonywok
That's rad man. Haters gonna hate. Keep shippin'

------
tacoboye
Hey dumbasses, look how smart I already am! I think I'll just go fuck someone
my own age, don't you wish you could??? HAHAHAHAHA

GET FUCKED!

------
joshbrody
You've got one hell of a future.

------
measure2xcut1x
ImageMagick FTW Go buddy go!

------
robertli
I'm 12 and what is this

------
bashzor
Oh a 15 year old, how cute. So, what about that module? Why is it special
enough to be posted to HN?

The age is not relevant. Imagine someone of 36 made this module and included
his age. If he had gotten into programming at 35 and this was some kick-ass
thing, then yeah that would be kinda neat. Now you could have been programming
for five years or so, which gives you a big advantage.

If you had been twelve or so, then I'd say it rocks. But fifteen is a fine age
to develop something.

I don't mean to discourage you at all, just let the product speak and not your
age.

~~~
danilocampos
We're top-voting this comment, folks?

Really? That's how we want to encourage the next generation?

Age is entirely relevant. In having youth, OP is sitting on a one-shot mass of
potential energy that can be channeled in a multitude of ways. Among other
things, by including age, OP is perhaps asking to be encouraged that yes, this
is a valid and worthy combination of talents and ambitions. That this work
shows potential and can lead somewhere.

The prosperity of my country, and of the human race altogether, absolutely
depends upon swelling the ranks of STEM professionals. Our future requires we
encourage our youth down the very challenging road of developing their minds.

 _So when one of those indescribably valuable minds comes to town seeking the
support of the elders_ , we say fuck yeah, good job. You're doing it right.
How can I be helpful on your journey?

OP, I know nothing about Node, but I nonetheless encourage you to continue
your quest. We need you to keep loving this, even though it's hard. Keep it
up. You'll get to help define the future.

~~~
dchichkov
Shouldn't a threshold for "good job, you're doing it right" be a bit higher,
than an iPhone game or an image processing module?

Like launching your code into space? Or solving a major machine learning
challenge?

~~~
siglesias
Why?

~~~
dchichkov
Very simple. A threshold for an _outstanding_ achievement by a school kid is a
solid, noteworthy, postgraduate level work.

------
wilfra
You didn't need to give your age, it was obvious from the name you chose for
the module ;)

------
webmech
Kids these days lol

------
ryanbraganza
You know how I know you're 15? Light grey text on a white background.

I remember when I was younger and discovering ImageMagick - a perennial
favourite for building little tools on top of.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
It's a standard Github Pages template.

