Plus I imagine putting that on your resume/CV will be a big help. An amazing talking point for interviews. Projects a strong sense of integrity. It would help them get a remote job or visa.

I remember crying/laughing/screaming when I won three GameBoy Advance games from some kids magazine. I would say he's pretty happy with himself.

That's a lot of money, even in a first world country. That could get you a new car, or a deposit on a house (depending on where you are), or pay off a substantial chunk of your student loan (or all of it, if you're not in the USA).

OT: Luckily for him, he studies at a public university so much likely he doesn't even need a student loan.

Students shouldn't need loans. It's an aberration.

I'm on the fence about student loans, obviously American student loans are obscene, but smaller ones seem reasonable to me.

It's not fair on those who went directly into the workforce or became an apprentice that the university students get free money for living costs for 3 or 4 years.

The current system in New Zealand (simplified slightly) is that university is free, there are no fees, and you can get up to $180 per week for living costs as an interest free loan. I think it's a perfectly reasonable system. That amount isn't really enough to cover all your expenses unless you are especially frugal, so students still need to go out and get a job (or work in the summer), which I think is perfectly fair.

Every year spent studying you miss out on working at some entry level job for ~25k/y. After 5 years of study, you (in Europe) have accumulated a debt of ~$25k-$50k depending on whether you've had a side job or help from your parents. That means you've lived for ~$10k/y for 5 years, where someone in the workforce lives on significantly more, and at the end you're in debt as well.

Obviously the upside is that you get a job where it is reasonable to expect that you'll be able to repay the loan in about 10 years, but that's something you worked for, and something an ambitious person in the workforce might achieve as well.

Anyway, I don't think you can simply say it's unfair to aid students in their living expenses while they're studying. Obviously they're usually having a great time studying, but they also don't own a car, or a house and instead live in tiny apartments sharing privacy with other students. They usually delay their family building for the entire span of their studies, and often even until they've paid of (most of) their debt. But yeah, have them work some extra in the summer while the workforce is driving their caravans to southern France...

That's pretty advanced stuff for an 18y/o, even for most senior developers. No doubt Google will try to recruit him after he finishes university.

(Edit: I appear to be a broken record) I spent a spell on a bug bounty program. There are some beasts out there in the 16-20yo age range, it's pretty crazy.

Their minds probably haven't been numbed by years of fixing shoddy code and writing CRUD apps yet.

What I appreciated most about it (or maybe this is just his writeup skills), but how not advanced each of the things were. It was just mostly him Googling things and making random guesses at the rabbit hole until he found something.

The skill, I guess, comes in piecing it all together and consistently making good guesses.

The tenacity is as important as the skill. He knew there was a way, he just had to find it.

Selling and getting paid in the black market is probably not very easy unless you already have quite a lot of contacts.

That's not necessarily true, there are brokers that are relatively easy to find. It's more risky at a personal level to go into crime though.

Uruguay is not third world country.

According to Wikipedia, it is a developing country, which is basically the modern way of saying third world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country#Country_lis...

Yes it is. I do not want to be that stickler but this is the charts for that term:

1st world: US, UK, West Germany, essentially western countries

2nd world: Soviets, East Germany, communist countries

3rd world: everyone who doesn’t fit the Cold War theater.

Either way, a GDP per capita of $15k isn’t considered “first” at whatever category you want to assign it by. Unfortunately there are no “1st world” countries in Latin America.

Come on you guys. There's no need to descend into one of these circles of hell.

> I do not want to be that stickler

Really?! You do but you don't but you do want to be a stickler? ....

PS West Germany and East Germany are not separate countries. :)

They were 30 years ago. The term “1st world” and “2nd world” came to existence in the second half of the 20th century.

I’m only mentioning this as people usually attribute it to only economic power.

"X World" has gone he way of "begs the question", "Literally vs. Figuratively", "One bad apple..", etc. Popular usage has destroyed the original meaning, and it's no use trying to get people on board with what those phrases actually mean.

this isn’t the way the OP used the term. they used it to make a statement about a lack of resources.

“studying CS in 3rd world country 35k is a lot of money”

Soviets, East Germany... in 2018?

The terms first, second and third world were coined during the cold war, during which those countries did exist.

First world were countries allied with the US. Second world were countries allied with the USSR. Third world were neutral countries.

So Switzerland, Ireland, and Sweden are third world countries.

While the terms may have been originally coined during the Cold War, the meaning and common usage has clearly changed. If you use 'third world countries' in a conversation hardly anyone will assume that you're including Switzerland in that. When enough people use a word "wrong" for a long enough time, they kinda stop being wrong.

You're getting downvoted, but you're right.

A "third-world country" was a country that wasn't aligned to either the Western countries (first world) or the Communist Bloc (second world).

These terms have become outdated, and "developing" countries is more commonly used now by, e.g., the press.

You really should read a couple of newspapers every now and then, East Germany no longer exists and most communist countries don't either.

This could be related to the fact that while you still hear a lot about "first-world" and "third-world" countries, you don't ever hear anyone use the term "second-world".