Item — HN Reader

This is amazing—made even more impressive by the fact that the author is just 15 years old!

Also, it's nice to see this mentioned:

> For this 10k-word write-up, I spent around a month finishing up the main parts, and refining/editing it took an extra while. Writing this is indeed a painful process. I spent the entire day on the weekend and 4-5 hours during the rest of the week working on it for around two weeks.

It's the kind of behind-the-scenes effort that often goes unspoken.

2 comments

10k words was the word count for my 3rd year undergraduate dissertation in the UK. Typically, this is tirelessly worked on over months. The quality of this far exceeds anything I produced during that time and anything I saw from my peers.

I'm also detecting hints of non-native English in his writing which may make it even more effort. Though his Twitter account says he's based in Connecticut.

Edit: Wow, shocked that I'm being received so negatively about this, non native English is not "bad". It isn't meant as judgement but praise for what he's accomplished.

He's 15. Many adults whose native language is English can't write it correctly, or what are you referring to if not grammar errors? Can you give me examples?

The way grammar works is that it is hard to describe the rules of your native language. I am parsing this as non native. My older kid is a few years younger than this guy, and her text messages to me sound more native than this corpus. No I can't describe it concretely. It's just how I parse word choice and sentence structure.

I read it again. I can see where you are coming from though. I didn't downvote you.

Yeah, I removed the first part and made it into an edit of the original comment, since it wasn't directed at you.

I know, thank you.