We produced some pretty awesome wire cars back in the day, but they tended not to be powered. Mind you, I suppose getting the bits and pieces for that is easier these days.
The kid's machines are indeed impressive. We also used to spend hours building wire cars. We had a whole factory line. The younger lads did the straightening of the wires, some were good at using the smaller wire (often coloured wire or copper) to tie the pieces together. There were the designers who could bend the big piece of wire into the frame of the car you wanted. We then used empty polish tins for the wheels. Some of the cars had gears (none functional). It was pretty labour intensive but loads of fun. I realize now that this is why most of us had no low muscle tone or issues with our coordination. Your fingers needed to be nifty to make wire cars.
Didn't come up with the ideas, here's an example from 5 years ago in asia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfhki3RkJv0
First time I saw this was about 30+ years ago in Nigeria, and have seen plenty variations.
In other news, the cargo cult has now spawned the infrastructure cult. Build models of construction machines, and maybe someone will start developing real actual infrastructure within the country...
I really get irritated with this pattern: a lot of times, people will add subtitles due to a 100% understandable foreign accent. It feels like it's being disrespectful to the speakers.
On the other hand in the age of "auto-play-with-mute" videos on social media, a lot of people just add subtitles to every type of online video. And as a sibling comment points out, there are hearing impaired people out there.
> I really get irritated with this pattern: a lot of times, people will add subtitles due to a 100% understandable foreign accent. It feels like it's being disrespectful to the speakers.
Hearing impaired people, non-English speakers, content indexing, machine learning, etc. There are many good reasons, don't make victims where there are none.
By the same token, don't assume I am victimizing! At least read the 2nd paragraph where I am saying a similar thing to your rebuttal.
HN is one of those places where I have seen the concept of "violent agreement" at work. "Wait wait! You still need to consider ... this thing you thought you already said."
Pro tip: If you don't want to come off as negative, don't start your post with the words "I get really irritated" ;) I'm still confused about what you really meant, since your first and second paragraphs really were at odds with each other.
As a non native, but still fluent English speaker I always use subtitles when I can. It just helps to fill in the odd word I miss due to local noise or unexpected pronunciation (English has a lot of dialects!).
FWIW, I tend to do this for content in my native language as well. Turns out ~ten million people is enough to produce a lot of incomprehensible dialects as well...
Maybe next time I will say I get "positively irritated".
The thing is, two statements can be seemingly at odds in sentiment and also simultaneously true. The "aggressive subtitles for foreign accent" phenomenon is real. I wanted to acknowledge I had seen the same in other places. It is irritating when it happens. It is disrespectful where it occurs. But the second paragraph establishes that it is not always the reason. I did not think it was here.
I have been in the same room with other people, listening to a person speak in English with a heavy accent from wherever, and I will be the only person who understood what was said.
“What did they about X, I couldn’t understand the accent?”
I have also seen native English speakers, turn on subs on English movies, with the volume at a perfectly normal level to understand things.
The only thing going on is that people really like their subtitles.
Sometimes there will be a movie or TV program where nobody is subbed, except the one person with a completely understandable foreign accent. That is a phenomenon I have seen. Usually in media for an American audience, from what I've seen. (A lot of Americans have trouble even with native speakers from the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, etc. We as a nation seem to have very little patience or habituation for accents.)
It's the broadcast equivalent of your first scenario.
> ...people will add subtitles due to a 100% understandable foreign accent.
The way he speaks is not "100% understandable" at all. Watch it with your eyes closed, or with the subtitles hidden, it's actually quite difficult to understand in many parts.
This appears to be the norm for the BBC videos based on the ones linked on that page, not just from the Africa series. It would be a little odd if it were used because his English was unclear, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
They don't. They take offence with subtitles under English speech by a foreigner but no subtitles under English speech by English native speaker. The pattern is the issue, not the existence of subtitles.
If the machines came as kits sold in stores with prefabricated parts most kids his age either wouldn't be interested or wouldn't be able to build them.
Even if they are not his original creation he has talent and he deserves to be in an environment where he can be nurtured and grow. Sadly I fear that won’t happen for him but I wish him the best.
Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment, but I really dislike the implication of the words "exploits his popularity".
This is a 14yo which was gratuitously accused of being a terrorist by his teachers - the very people that we as a society tell kids to trust and look up to.
He was handcuffed and arrested, he went through a detention intake process, mugshot and all.
the kid assembled a "suitcase bomb" prop and kept showing it off to his friends during class. His teacher told him to stop, he didn't and kept being disruptive. Obviously calling the cops on his bad behaviour is overkill, but the he is no wunderkind as portrayed by the media (and even the WH).
he literally said something like 'that's nice but it looks like a bomb. don't show anyone else.' -- it doesn't seem to me to be unsupportive, just worried. I don't think a teacher would say something like that in confidence with a student unless that student had a certain rapport with the teacher.
The kid is good at constructing mechanical toys. But let's be clear, this is hands-on mechanics of very simple mechanisms. He is also, as far as the video shows, imitating mechanisms that he has already seen in full scale machinery. It's a feel good story, but do not nominate this guy as a future game-changer just yet. Precociousness is not an indicator of future potential.
I feel like this is exactly the kind of person our intellectual property system keeps intellectually impoverished. Does anyone else feel like intellectual property is digital imperialism? I wish people all over the world could share in the knowledge we keep locked up in most of the business world.
Especially since a lot of early industrial nations basically gave no fucks about intellectual property rights enforcement but are now making developing countries play by a stricter set of rules.
You’re asking how intellectual property law keeps information from spreading? I feel like that is self evident. But also I forget if it was the world bank or the IMF but the US and other wealthy nations have made it a requirement that countries adopt our intellectual property laws if they want to receive benefits from the (IMF or World Bank, I forget).
So we enforce intellectual property law here which prevents lower cost clones from being made and also prevents industry from investing more in reverse engineering. The monopoly on ideas raises costs compared to a market with clones, and poorer communities and countries suffer with IP versus an alternative world with more abundant cheap clones. Some would say the innovation would not have occurred without IP law in the first place, which obviously in some cases is true (certain business models require the monopoly on ideas to exist). However I think it’s absurd to suggest that there would be no incentive to innovate in a world with no IP law, and the damage done by IP law is too great to ignore. As someone who believes we have a moral responsibility to help people less privileged than us, I see it as grotesque that we lock up information that could help feed hungry people all over the world.
A 15-year old makes model trucks.
Neither shocking nor surprising... unless white audiences have a low opinion of the intellect of Africans/Blacks.
Go to Nigeria. The place is full of construction, engineers, inventors, mechanics, etc. This video -- to a Nigerian -- would receive this response: "Big fucking deal... if the kid was really smart he'd be using motors and gears by now."
The response of a white liberal, on the other hand: "Oh how precious... I didn't know that those people even knew how to write! Someone should give him a scholarship!"
i love when whitey tells me about my own culture/community and then I (a poc) somehow get excluded from the conversation because the worst thing you can tell a white person is their opinion doesn't matter
The kid uses "wood and condemned laptop batteries to construct a moving excavator and a dump truck." That's pretty impressive to me, and something worth talking about.
I am not sure why you assumed this is a post by a "white liberal" that automatically assumes a low opinion of Nigerians.
To me, this is a post about something interesting that someone has done, and is made more interesting by the fact that they live in an impoverished part of the world (I watched a video on them, it's pretty clear they aren't rich).
I wouldn't have predjudices about the intellect of an African kid, but I would assume that a random kid might not have as much access to resources as e.g. an American kid might have. Looking at the video, it looks quite as if fancy technology is replaced with a lot of practical creativity, like building a hydrolics system based on syringes.
The boy himself says: "When people see me on the street operating my excavator and tipper, they are usually surprised." I don't imagine he's flying to Beverly Hills to demo his projects and then flying back to Nigeria, but I guess that's a possibility.
The environment the boy was filmed in suggests that he doesn't have a lot to work with. Maybe that's BBC going for the sensationalist angle, but I doubt it given that the article was originally produced for BBC News Pidgin:
The initiative to actually implement his designs with limited resources is the hallmark of a hacker, and he belongs on the front page of this site.
His young age makes it that much more interesting. I have worked with 15 year-olds before and let me tell you that there's a wide spectrum of abilities. In particular, the ability to reduce plans into an implementable format quantitatively (i.e., measuring and cutting accurately) is extremely rare even in the US.
Very few wealthy US students could do what this boy has done.
Using syringes for hydraulics has been around forever. I remember instructions for making a 'hydraulic' backhoe in a Cub Scout booklet nearly 40 years ago.
Go to youtube and search for 'syringe hydraulic.'
I'm not knocking the kid, but the adulation over his accomplishment -- copying a DIY project off YouTube most likely -- is absurd.
And I have patiently explained to multiple teens in great detail how to turn a simple design into a drawing and that into a 3D artifact. 95% of them can't do it.
If this kid figured it all out from YouTube, he's still way ahead of the rest of his peers around the world.
The point for me isn't the syringes. It's the initiative and determination it takes to start with the idea and actually finish it, particularly among this age group.
Someone posted an article on HN recently partly about a woman in Germany who makes fabric pillows shaped like cuts of meat and whose shop looks like a butchery. It's not hard to make pillows shaped like meat, but it's a fun quirky business and I enjoyed reading it.
I would have just as enjoyed reading about a white kid in the UK who made the same sort of scale bulldozers.
Like Cubans under sanctions... the poorest people are the most inventive by necessity, while the richest tend to be the most wasteful and unimaginative. Mother of invention and all that.
What this kid is doing is pretty impressive especially when you consider the dismal state of public school education in Nigeria (private school isn't so bad)
Used laptop batteries deemed "dead" are usually only bad in one or two cells. A SoCal guy named Jehu Garcia went through charging and discharging thousands of used laptop battery cells individually to recover 18650's to build custom packs for a DIY EV VW bus.
Btw, it reminds me of the Joule Thief circuit (often used in solar outdoor lights), that can recover and fully-discharge a battery over a much larger range than most consumer devices.
67 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadWish the video included some way to donate materials.
Kids ...
On the other hand in the age of "auto-play-with-mute" videos on social media, a lot of people just add subtitles to every type of online video. And as a sibling comment points out, there are hearing impaired people out there.
Hearing impaired people, non-English speakers, content indexing, machine learning, etc. There are many good reasons, don't make victims where there are none.
HN is one of those places where I have seen the concept of "violent agreement" at work. "Wait wait! You still need to consider ... this thing you thought you already said."
As a non native, but still fluent English speaker I always use subtitles when I can. It just helps to fill in the odd word I miss due to local noise or unexpected pronunciation (English has a lot of dialects!).
FWIW, I tend to do this for content in my native language as well. Turns out ~ten million people is enough to produce a lot of incomprehensible dialects as well...
The thing is, two statements can be seemingly at odds in sentiment and also simultaneously true. The "aggressive subtitles for foreign accent" phenomenon is real. I wanted to acknowledge I had seen the same in other places. It is irritating when it happens. It is disrespectful where it occurs. But the second paragraph establishes that it is not always the reason. I did not think it was here.
“What did they about X, I couldn’t understand the accent?”
I have also seen native English speakers, turn on subs on English movies, with the volume at a perfectly normal level to understand things.
The only thing going on is that people really like their subtitles.
It's the broadcast equivalent of your first scenario.
I find it helps me to focus on the video rather than spend effort parsing somebody's speech (reading is fast).
The way he speaks is not "100% understandable" at all. Watch it with your eyes closed, or with the subtitles hidden, it's actually quite difficult to understand in many parts.
But he has commitment and looks like at least average intelligence.
He'll do fine compared to everyone else around him. He'll work hard and send his kids to school.
Worry about the kids who are really bright and who should go to uni who the world misses out on. Then worry about hard workers like this kid.
Could you imagine a future where these massive machines are controlled by remote operators running green, all electric energy sources?
This is a 14yo which was gratuitously accused of being a terrorist by his teachers - the very people that we as a society tell kids to trust and look up to.
He was handcuffed and arrested, he went through a detention intake process, mugshot and all.
The word exploit really does not sound right.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5e/Ahmed_Mohamed...
he literally said something like 'that's nice but it looks like a bomb. don't show anyone else.' -- it doesn't seem to me to be unsupportive, just worried. I don't think a teacher would say something like that in confidence with a student unless that student had a certain rapport with the teacher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba
Here's to Hope's similar advancement as he grows, studies, and learns.
So we enforce intellectual property law here which prevents lower cost clones from being made and also prevents industry from investing more in reverse engineering. The monopoly on ideas raises costs compared to a market with clones, and poorer communities and countries suffer with IP versus an alternative world with more abundant cheap clones. Some would say the innovation would not have occurred without IP law in the first place, which obviously in some cases is true (certain business models require the monopoly on ideas to exist). However I think it’s absurd to suggest that there would be no incentive to innovate in a world with no IP law, and the damage done by IP law is too great to ignore. As someone who believes we have a moral responsibility to help people less privileged than us, I see it as grotesque that we lock up information that could help feed hungry people all over the world.
Go to Nigeria. The place is full of construction, engineers, inventors, mechanics, etc. This video -- to a Nigerian -- would receive this response: "Big fucking deal... if the kid was really smart he'd be using motors and gears by now." The response of a white liberal, on the other hand: "Oh how precious... I didn't know that those people even knew how to write! Someone should give him a scholarship!"
I am not sure why you assumed this is a post by a "white liberal" that automatically assumes a low opinion of Nigerians.
To me, this is a post about something interesting that someone has done, and is made more interesting by the fact that they live in an impoverished part of the world (I watched a video on them, it's pretty clear they aren't rich).
The environment the boy was filmed in suggests that he doesn't have a lot to work with. Maybe that's BBC going for the sensationalist angle, but I doubt it given that the article was originally produced for BBC News Pidgin:
https://www.bbc.com/pidgin/tori-48130271
The initiative to actually implement his designs with limited resources is the hallmark of a hacker, and he belongs on the front page of this site.
His young age makes it that much more interesting. I have worked with 15 year-olds before and let me tell you that there's a wide spectrum of abilities. In particular, the ability to reduce plans into an implementable format quantitatively (i.e., measuring and cutting accurately) is extremely rare even in the US.
Very few wealthy US students could do what this boy has done.
Go to youtube and search for 'syringe hydraulic.'
I'm not knocking the kid, but the adulation over his accomplishment -- copying a DIY project off YouTube most likely -- is absurd.
If this kid figured it all out from YouTube, he's still way ahead of the rest of his peers around the world.
The point for me isn't the syringes. It's the initiative and determination it takes to start with the idea and actually finish it, particularly among this age group.
I would have just as enjoyed reading about a white kid in the UK who made the same sort of scale bulldozers.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardwa...
What this kid is doing is pretty impressive especially when you consider the dismal state of public school education in Nigeria (private school isn't so bad)
Btw, it reminds me of the Joule Thief circuit (often used in solar outdoor lights), that can recover and fully-discharge a battery over a much larger range than most consumer devices.