1. Teenagers can build cool things too! We need more kids interested in STEM and females are underrepresented, so these "puff" pieces are great inspiration for the next kid who happens to come across it.

2. All that was needed for her solution was a cheap FLIR camera connected to an iPhone 6, meaning you don't have to be rich/VC funded to experiment with hardware solutions.

This is Smithsonian Magazine, not the Wall Street Journal. I say bring on more stories like this!

There's not a hell of a lot of value in a constant barrage of hyperbolic articles telling us that the world has changed.

It's about as useful as parents telling their kids that they're the best and smartest that the world has ever seen, only to have reality tear the carpet from under their feet.

You can be encouraging and realistic at the same time.

However as opposed to most articles of this type, this one isn't as "THIS IS GONNA BE WORLD CHANGING!!!!!" and more "look at this cool thing this kid did" which is so much more acceptable, especially if it helps get more _people_ (no matter who they are) into STEM.

Yes of course but your well-meaning reply is missing the argument made by gp: for some topics, the readers don't have enough background knowledge to know that it's a mundane story because the journalists are (possibly inadvertently) inflating the significance.

E.g. compare 2 different examples:

- "Teenager builds ramp to help nursing home patients in wheelchairs." <-- Readers already have enough background to know that "ramps" are common solutions to "wheelchair mobility" so the significance can easily be categorized as "mundane feel-good story". We can easily discount the ramp in the title and therefore properly appreciate that it's actually a human-interest story of a teenager doing something nice.

- "Teenager invents tool to spot elephant poachers." <-- Most readers have no existing knowledge of what technology is already in use to judge the significance of that type of story.

> Eikelboom cautions that Puri’s model still needs to be tested on raw video footage to see how well it can detect poachers—the accuracy of Puri’s model was tested using figures already determined either human or elephant. He also says other barriers already exist to using drones in parks, such as the money and manpower to keep them flying.

They also explain the technology choices and some of the other challenges.

Your issue is with the headline.

If all you read is the headline, then fine, let's play that game.

> It can be about “mundane” stories of “this young person did something” too. "Yes of course"

Okay, that's it. You agree with the previous comment.

Why does it matter? The press does context-free puff-pieces all the time, even for professionals allegedly at the very top of their game (off the top of my head: Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes[1], Elon Musk, Jeff Dean, and Sanjay Ghemawat to a lesser extent). Typically the template is "Genius expert invents X all by himself" without providing additional context for people outside of tech.

Food for thought: do you suppose journalists are exclusively wrong in tech reporting only? Or is this an area you have enough context to understand the nuances?

1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just plain evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the hagiography can't tell the difference

Yes, I'm very aware of the meta-game around "puff pieces" which I've explained before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881420

It seems your "Why does it matter?" was just a rhetorical question as prelude to your comment about puff pieces already existing in abundance ... But I'll answer it as if you had asked that question earnestly: It matters because readers would like to know how to gauge the significance of unfamiliar tech mentioned in the article.

So we have 2 interpretations of this thread's article:

(a) this poacher detection tool is a true breakthrough -- and the inventor also happens to be a teenager; the tech itself is not hype. The idea is truly a game changer and while the inventor's age is very young, that's a footnote to the tech invention.

... or ...

(b) the tool's tech (machine learning) is not significant and may not even work in the real world -- but the teenager's attempt at problem solving is showing promise of future things to come; let us celebrate this young person's effort.

A previous example of the first (a) type of story is this one a teen discovering a new classical algorithm comparable to a quantum algorithm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654220

That wasn't some pure human-interest puff piece about teenager Ewin Tang. Instead, a respected computer scientist (Scott Aaronson) said it was legitimate new work that advanced our understanding of the field.

>1. Sometimes the "revolutionary tech" is not just plain evolutionary, but fake. But a layperson reading the hagiography can't tell the difference

Right ... and readers don't want to mistakenly interpret the story as type (a) when it was actually type (b). The gp (Avalaxy) of the subthread tried to give us some extra perspective about this story that the journalist did not.

I agree with you on principle: and it should happen across the board and not just reserved for science fair submissions, but the press seems incapable of that, for reasons good and bad. For one,evaluating new tech is subjective (and difficult), and for another, sone news puff pieces are mostly written by PR firms.

Good work, more than I achieve for the most part, and something to celebrate in someone so young.

The world needs more feel good stories. Also if she's doing AI on infrared images at 17 she's probably going to be really impressive work later on.

I mean it along the lines of "at 17, she is doing AI on IR images, at 30 she will be fixing bugs in traffic sign detection code for a big car company, with no mention of her name except in commit logs".

And it is not a bad thing! We need people to fix bugs in traffic sign detection code, and she may have a nice pay, in a reputable company, with a good work-life balance. It may not be impressive work, but it is work that needs to be done.

It may not be a feel good story for the press, but I believe living a mundane life certainly feels good to the one living it.

So then, are we celebrating the potential growth of a teenager more than that of the potential growth of a middle-aged person, on the grounds of potential, or are we celebrating that she managed to achieve this at 17?

I'm trying really hard to see beyond age. I don't care if someone is 16 or 36. Both can have the same years of experience (say 8-10 years of programming), and yet the former sounds more romantic and sellable to headliners because it's easier to dream big about achievements someone in their 25 will do than someone in their 45. Why?

Did you just describe the stock market?

It's rare for a previously unremarkable 36-year-old to suddenly turn in to Jeff Bezos (for a lot of reasons, not least that cognitive power peaks at age 25 so learning and adapting to novel situations gets harder with age).

I'm a thoroughly average 33-year-old, for what it's worth :) I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't continue strive for growth and development as we age, but I certainly am not as mentally quick or energetic as I was ten years ago. There is very little chance I will suddenly transform into jwz or John Carmack or <insert name of legendary hacker here>.

On the bright side, I am a better communicator and strategic decision-maker, and am more satisfied with my life as it is.

Sure, you'll be delivering slower than what you would if you were 25 but slower is better than not delivering whatever unique you have to offer at all.

The whole system needs a reboot. Without good journalism, democracies can’t survive

I think it's much more interesting than a guy in yesterdays HN home page making a lisp machine that almost nobody uses for RISC-V which is missing a lot of more important software that needs to be written by somebody.

It doesn't cost much and can be helpful for society in 10 years when she's going to be the next Elizabeth Holmes.

> If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it

> If you flag, please don't also comment that you did

Even this article was posted a day late for slow news day.

Handwave away that most of the cost in the drone is going to be in getting it decent range, not a decent FLIR camera. Add in a 5x bonus to media coverage because you're young, 5x bonus because you're a woman in STEM, say something about how important skin colour, demographics, and chromosomes are for doing some mediocre programming:

> “What I really realized from this is how important it is that women, people of color, all sorts of minorities in the field of technology are at the forefront of this kind of groundbreaking technology.”

And you've got some journalists writing about you and not something far more interesting and useful, because A. The journalists can somewhat understand it, B. You're under the age of 20, C. You're a girl in STEM, D. You're a minority, and E. It's about good animals being protected from evil poachers, giving it a nice simple narrative.

And I'm sure her winning that competition was totally about merit and not because they've got a mandated 50% women winning (and she's a minority, extra points!) and probably 5% of submissions are by women. Or maybe it's not? Maybe it was merit. Either way, implicit and explicit quotas mean that it's more likely than not, and my knee-jerk reaction to this is one of "she's there because she's a girl" and not "she's there because of merit". What fantastic efforts to get rid of stereotypes, right?

I'm around her age, I'm tempted to try to send something similarly useless to that competition and get $10 000. But why bother, when the first, second, and third place will inevitably be taken up by girls with useless projects going "It was so difficult to get here, all I had was exclusive help in the form of courses, programs, special treatment, and mentors all along the way and competing against 10% of the people for 50% of the spots"