Ask HN: What's a young hacker to do?

I'm in High School right now (the Irish equivielent anyway).

Last year, I entered a Twitter-related project into a Science competition and I won my category. I've created software ranging from Copyright-protection to http://spreadapp.co.

My point is, there is no limitation to what you can do, the sky is the limit. Think of a cool project you'd like to work on, and make it to the best of your ability, and don't let anybody hold you back. You'll find at the end that you have a great piece of software (or a product) that you can have to show for your work, or sell!

Good luck in the future!

Build something that makes money from other businesses to get filthy rich.

I think its important focus on the development of your soft/social skills in addition to your technical skills. The combination of both will help you get far in interviews. Otherwise, if you go the entrepreneurial route, they will help you understand your customer. At the end of the day, we all need to communicate, and ideas tend to be only as valuable as we can communicate them. (this isn't a criticism, you seem to write well!)

Also, have fun with your programming and experiment. Getting experience in fields and languages that you enjoy will enhance your likelihood of finding a job in those areas. The sooner you find your passion, the more experience you can build up before you look for full-time income.

I didn't particulary get into any of the two, but if you like algorithmics you should check out Topcoder and http://ioinformatics.org.

Topcoder is full of highschoolers or young undergraduates. IOI is specially targeted towards them, though I think you need sponsorship from your educational institution to participate.

Faring well in any of the two is something cool to add to your CV, and is highly valued by many firms in Silicon Valley.

As long as you work on things that interests you, then just keep working at it.

When I was in middle/high school, building forum communities from PHP and MySQL were all the rage. So I attempted to create my own community by buying a Linux server, installing PHP and MySQL, and installing the appropriate forum software. Then I proceeded to add mods to it and write my own mods. It was a fun project to learn Linux and PHP on. The best part was that most mods were 'modular' which made them easy to install and dissect the code of.

Consider applying for an internship with the government? http://www.nsa.gov/careers/opportunities_4_u/students/index....

Hey Guys, this thread is amazing. I'm also a high-school student, I currently reside in Illinois.

Please feel free to email me, and we can arrange a meeting.

Email: shahedkhan30@gmail.com

I'm a sophomore in high school and I completely understand your dilema. I would say just _do_ it. Build the app (or other type of project) you've always wanted to, and complete every part of it. You'll need to hire a designer if you want people to use it, but many professional designers are willing to trade services, so you don't need to spend anything there. What you do after you release your product depends on what it is. If it's a web app, then launch it on a good server, but something that doesn't cost too much. I'd recommend an EC2 server which is relatively low cost and gives you a free trial long enough to see what users will think of it before you make too big of an investment. If it looks like it's going to be successful, then you just succeeded in your goal. If not, you only made a small investment and try not to get discouraged; build something else.

Apart from that, I would recommend you join forrst if you haven't already. If you haven't and need an invite, I can giv you one. Forrst really helped my programming skills go from just a hobby to something that people ask to hire me for without me ever having to search for clients.

Forrst also helped me get my name out there. It's made my posts visible to enough developers that I've had my stuff tweeted about by people with over 20,000 followers.

But above all I'd recommend to just learn as much as you can and get as much experience as possible. If you want to make a career out of it (which seems like a good fit for you), there's no such thing as too much knowledge or experience, it's what can separate you from the crowd. If you can finish college with a degree in another science field _and_ 6 or so years of real life programming experience, you'll be leagues ahead of the competition.

Best of luck!