I'm from the same part of India that this girl is. This kind of crap is very common there. The kids who do this are not necessarily intelligent, they usually just crammed for years. Nor do they have a say in the matter. Everything is orchestrated by the parents. It's like a dog show -- the parents compete using their kids. Needless to say, the kid's childhood and normal development are completely derailed (I've seen it in person). The parents aren't evil; it's just a facet of the hyper-competitive society. The best way to describe it is that it's India's version of the contest in Little Miss Sunshine.

The negative comments here don't come close to capturing how messed up this is.

Litanies about the people Zed Shaw doesn't get along with don't qualify as Hacker News.

Jeeblus, what's wrong with you people? If she'd gotten a high score on the SAT, would you be telling her how boring and useless the SAT is? High scores on adult tests at a young age, almost no matter the test, are something to congratulate her for.

But instead you're dumping on her because of "Microsoft" in the title? If you're going to dump on someone, dump on Microsoft! And even that is a backhanded insult to her. There are just some very bright 9-year-olds out there.

The perfect index symbol for them would be NSFW.

What's remarkable is that grown adults become MCPs.

Especially wrong litanies. He likes to imply that the only people who call him on his attitude are biz people, as a kind of dismissive jedi mind trick. That's complete hogwash, a lot of engineering types and rubyists don't like Zed and have been fairly vocal about their disapproval for some time now.

Zed loves to be a complete jerk and then when people use the same strong language back at him suddenly write a blog post about how mean people are. At first I thought he was being deliciously ironic, but now I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

I would gladly be the guy who "created the popular iPhone fart app" if it netted me $10,000/day for even a week. That'd be plenty to live off of for several months while I built something better.

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to blogging.

We also wouldn't have scoffed as much if she were merely three years older, and a boy, and working in PHP and Javascript instead of Microsoft technologies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=156863

Can't we just congratulate the kid and move on? I mean, vital as it is to teach her that credentials are bullshit, can't we let her turn ten before breaking the bad news? She's already much closer to figuring it out for herself than I was at that age.

Thomas Friedman was able to get steady wi-fi on a bullet train running through the wealthiest outpost of a country of 1.3 billion people, 3/4 of which are rural poor living at or near the $1/day poverty level. Therefore, America needs a reboot.

The key point is not how many poor people China has and hence we should reboot; but that the rest of the world is sprinting towards new opportunities in spite of their handicaps. 60 years ago (after WW2), there was no real competition to America - we built cars, planes, trains, and the world ate it all up. About 40 years ago, the Japanese started giving us a run for the money in some sectors. Today the competitors are increasing in quantity if not in quality - there is Japan, Europe, China, etc. Friedman uses generic examples such as bullet trains and broadband access. But these are valid nonetheless. The larger point remains - we need a massive reboot.

Most of Zed's rants don't have much to do with technical insight, and a lot more about silly personality issues and bickering.

But they won't approve an app that lets you receive podcasts via RSS.

Its funny I like Zed. I think its healthy to have someone with his technical insight standing on the outside screaming "You're fucking DOING IT WRONG!".

Most won't pay him heed, but in some way the message gets through. (at least it gets decent distribution)

I just realized that Zed could be _why's evil twin. They're both talented, well-known rubyists, and they're both fascinating to read, even if you don't really have any idea what they're talking about, but they seem diametrically opposed in personality.

That's just how corporate culture works. I am more disturbed by sitting in meetings where every 10 seconds I hear "that is great" or "good job" while in reality the product sucks, schedule is unrealistic, salespeople are poorly educated on what we actually do here and half of the engineering team are incompetent idiots and sluggish sales are clearly suggesting that's not my imagination.

I wish I had the luxury of hiring a contractor with nothing to lose, someone like Zed, to just bitch-slap these fake-smile wearing, strictly polite and always politically correct morons who are so full of this mandatory "positive attitude" that saying obvious things out loud had turned into a tabu. They use words like "good", "great" and "outstanding" so often that they lost any useful meaning. This is why you need to be Zed to be heard.

Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap" are essential to every healthy business meeting because the world is full of these objects and ignoring them or using some kind of cryptic doublespeak isn't helping anyone.