British teenage designer of Summly app hits jackpot

"D'Aloisio is by no means a typical teenager - he is polite, highly motivated and enthusiastic."<p>Wow, wonder how many other groups they'd be able to get away with stereotyping like that.<p>"D'Aloisio is by no means a typical (woman|Mexican|black person|obese person) - he is polite, highly motivated and enthusiastic."<p>Ouch.<p>Makes the BBC sound out of touch, considering that most teenagers are under a historically unprecedented amount of pressure to succeed (eg: <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6221872" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6221872</a>).

I understand the writer needs an introduction to the article, but F everything about starting with this:<p>"Most teenagers will find any reason under the sun not to do their homework."<p>No most won't and stop repeating it.

Heh. They should have asked him what "ontological detection" means.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+-summly" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ontological+detection%22+...</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_(information_science)</a><p>There's <i>no way</i> he fit a useful semantic network in an iPhone app, and I doubt he interfaces with an external one such as OpenCyc, or in fact uses any kind of automated reasoning that can sort of be classified as "ontological".<p>It's VERY impressive for his age (even if it doesn't actually work that well outside the demo/testcases, according to a commenter below), but more general terms such as "it uses Computational Linguistics" would sound just as impressive and are actually descriptive instead of meaningless buzzwords.

I feel I have to say something positive in light of the other comments; this is great to see from a 16 year old.

Isn't it redundant to summarize BBC articles? A bit off topic, but I do think it's a horrible way to demo your app considering that the BBC's online news outlet has been publishing articles that feature "paragraphs" which are rarely longer than a single sentence for years. In other words, summarized news. Still an interesting concept. Quite interesting that this idea has already been pointed out well over a year ago out by one HNer, Geee, via Open Text Summarizer. Makes you wonder what he's actually using to summarize the content.

Interesting that I suggested this idea for someone asking for app ideas on HN almost 2 years ago.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1450570" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1450570</a>

Regarding the hype of this app -- this is a response from a friend who is a journalist and has covered this kid's app :<p>"unfortunately the kid is pretty good at marketing himself, and a 16 year old app developer makes a good story"

I don't think a $250,000 <i>investment</i> is considered a "jackpot".

A MacBook when he was 9 ? Damn, I'm 32 and still cannot really justify one. And I'm sure his parents had nothing to do with his funding arrangements, of course.<p>I hate to talk about privilege, and this kid is clearly smart, but the smell of upper class is hardly bearable, sorry.

App aside, this kid has a fantastic camera presence, although some of his words made no sense ("quickly and instantaneously") I would guess a large part of his success is down to his ability to talk so well.

Any insight into the tech this is using?

"I find the product and the design of the product much more interesting than the programming"<p>Of course. Programming is hard work.

Good job kid. Keep it going