[Inetenbr]

Im prepared to take the hate if I'm wrong, but it seems like you've made over 170 sites, developed a lot of stuff and it just doesn't seem to add up...

Flag 1: After Googling your username, it led to your YouTube channel, with an adult male in the picture: https://www.youtube.com/user/kbrshh pretty odd...

Flag 2: You seem to not have aged in a year? What. https://www.reddit.com/r/freelance/comments/4w7thd/can_a_13_... the post date is the 5th of August so unless you were lying then, then you're lying now.

Flag 3: This led to finding https://npm.taobao.org/~kingkabir which shows everything you've worked on.

If you've done all this by the age of 13, then damn, good luck in the future, but it just seems like you're trying to push the popularity of your side projects by leveraging your age... Just seems madly dodgy to me.

[kbr]

I feel like I've responded to this before.

1. I recently changed my username and do not have a Youtube channel. That person doesn't even have the same name as me.

2. I was 12 then, and if you can't tell, I was pretty dumb at the time, and was pretty much looking for attention. Legally you weren't allowed to be signed up for Reddit, which is why I said I was 13 (which I am now).

3. I have worked on all of those npm modules, but most of them are forked improvements of existing modules (such as Jade).

If you read my comment above, you'll notice I don't like talking about my age (this is one of the few exceptions). In fact, I am even not the OP of this post.

[usaphp]

> In fact, I am even not the OP of this post.

It's interesting that the person who submitted this to HN has already submitted the same link exactly a year ago. In fact 3/5 his submission are about your site...

Edit: actually all of the OP submissions are about you.

[kbr]

Interesting. The thing is, I don't have control over what the OP can post. It's crazy how you guys are assuming that I don't know my own age after judging based on:

1. A search of my username (there are tons of people with a three letter username like my HN username)

2. An old post of mine on Reddit.

3. My NPM profile (which includes lots of forks)

4. The quality of my username.

5. The layout of my comments on Hacker News.

6. The posts of some stranger that has attempted to submit my website multiple times.

[usaphp]

> The thing is, I don't have control over what the OP can post.

You see here is the part I don't believe. If you look at the submissions [1] that the OP has, all 5 of his submissions lead to either your github projects or your 13 y/o twitter page/website. I doubt that a person you don't know is so obsessed about only posting stuff about you, not commenting or anything, just submitting your projects and links. That account has no comments nor favorites.

Based on that - my assumption is you have multiple accounts here and now are lying about not having control of what the OP has, if you lie on that part - it makes your whole 13 y/o thing less beleivable to me.

[1] - http://i.imgur.com/3TzGnr4.png

[orthoganol]

TL;DR "No, trust me."

Prepared to take the hate too. Answers seem fake under the question about relation with parents, and your voice does not strike me as a 13 year old, in particular seeming too controlling of situation. I don't buy it. I apologize in advance if I'm somehow proven wrong in some verifiable way.

[beckler]

So I'm still skeptical... because the branding, presence and everything is just way too professional to make me believe he's done this alone. I also believe that he's using multiple HN profiles to manipulate visibility (there are a number of profiles who's first comment is this on this post).

However, I do believe he is legit about his age.

Searching for his name, I found this old CodePen account: https://codepen.io/KingKabir/

There's a link in there to: http://www.main180.tk

That link is expired, but it showed up in this Quora from 2015: https://www.quora.com/Should-an-11-year-old-know-full-stack-...

Looking in the wayback machine, you can see what content his site used to have: https://web.archive.org/web/20151231214946/http://www.main18...

This lead me to this blog: https://180projectblog.wordpress.com/

It looks like he accomplished most of them? I didn't count, but the last entry on that site was in March 2016 (https://180projectblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/bubble/)

Moon was started in July 2016 (https://github.com/kbrsh/moon/commit/2e38db7571adf64c9192cfe...).

So while I'm still skeptical about his presence, I think it seems plausible that he is who he says he is, but that doesn't mean he's done it alone, etc, etc.

[kbr]

I did most of my branding by myself (using Sketch), but my family, and a community of students[1] always give me feedback on my projects. I do not have multiple HN profiles (although I have a throwaway account made a while back). However, I do have friends that usually are the first comments on my posts.

Also, while Moon was on Github in 2016, I started playing around with it locally in late 2015 before publishing anything online.

[1] https://feathrd.co

[5_minutes]

Right, and the way his HN comments are written and layouted? Even the username is too pro. It certainly smells fishy.

[q1t]

hm.. related? https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/6sesm7/portfolio_fe...

[shanbhag]

Haters are gonna hate, potatoes are gonna potate. I've known Kabir for a while now and I can confirm that he's pretty much a really fun kid. Try me. https://twitter.com/shnbhg

[gonmf]

Flag 4: Supposedly he published articles at 12 about how "every year there are a lot of new startups" [1].

Flag 5: He had the good sense of using a throwaway email at 13, associated with nothing but his projects and no photos.

Flag 6: That same good sense to get into every self-promotion channel, like Twitter would even cross a child's mind in 2017.

Flag 7: Some of his projects seem copy pasted from school/books/online examples, without attribution.

My guess is that he has a really intense family on him being an overachiever, they are probably aiming at some internships, which is only fair.

[1] https://hackernoon.com/42-startups-changing-the-world-4f3d1a...

[gfodor]

Flag 8: He is using Crystal based on his knowledge of ruby, there is no ruby code on his Github

Flag 9: He cranked out a multithreaded reverse proxy in C in four days, despite no other C code in his repo. https://github.com/kbrsh/coat

I learned C when I was just about his (alleged) age. I made some cool shit for an ANSI art group, but my code was a total goddamn mess full of newb mistakes (not DRY, bad naming, etc etc) and there's no way in hell I would be using advanced things like threads and mutexes in general, nevermind correctly.

Where's all the terrible C code? The terrible ruby code? Where's the path and not just the destination? There's a lot of stuff in the github showing he just learned how to do web development. He was at "Hello World" a year and a half ago and definitely deserves props for getting as far as he has since then, regardless of age.

That said, wouldn't he want to put up all of his old work in ruby and C it took for him to get this good at C and Crystal since he already has all the other half-finished projects? Perhaps that work would be too far in the past for his story and would force us to have to believe he knew how to do pointer arithmetic in C at 8 years old?

There's no way coat was written by someone who hasn't been programming for a good while. It's not some phenomenal work of engineering but it's by someone who is fairly seasoned. The profile here looks like someone who was already pretty good and experienced at programming and picked up web programming about a year ago under a new online identity.

[kbr]

Alright I'm going to stop replying to these, I'm starting feel attacked.

8. All of my code is not on Github, and there is no reason for me to learn a language simply because I have previous knowledge in Ruby. I chose to learn Crystal because of it's elegance and speed.

9. I wrote that reverse proxy based on a variety of online tutorials[1], but used my knowledge of threads to make it multithreaded.

[1] http://www.gilesthomas.com/2013/08/writing-a-reverse-proxylo...

[gfodor]

Fair enough -- I guess you must have learned how to write multithreaded C code with pthreads when you were 10 years old. Props if so. It just defies my comprehension given that I know what it is like to learn to code from a young age (I was writing my first programs at 8 years old on my Apple //c) and your velocity is absolutely insane.

Perhaps you are just 10x more capable at this than all other humans I've encountered in my entire life. If so good luck and godspeed and please try to avoid bringing about AI takeoff for the rest of us :)

[kbr]

You seem like a really nice person with similar interests as me, I'd love to actually get to know you :)

I started out with C, definitely didn't know how to write multithreaded code when I was 10 haha. I learned most of that after reading a great book on operating systems (Modern Operating Systems by Andrew S. Tanenbaum) a couple months ago.

I'm trying to clean up my Github, you'll notice the "DayN" repositories are just edited versions of stuff I found online to learn from. These days I create my own projects, and am slowly deleting those "learning" repositories and making them private.

[MattieTK]

Flag 10: In his introduction to his 'Moon' library [1], he notes that in 'late 2015' he found he was having problems with Vue. If he's the oldest 13 year old he can be today, that makes him in 2015 toying with Vue enough to start looking under the hood at 11...

Plus looking at his old FreeCodeCamp username [2], I don't believe the programmer who was working through FCC tutorials (with very basic results) in 2016, is the same one who got tired of Vue in late 2015.

[1] https://hackernoon.com/introducing-moon-1d44a99635f0 [2] https://www.freecodecamp.com/KingPixil

[kbr]

Please. The initial commits on Moon were in 2016, and I was playing around with a forked version of Vue locally in late 2015. I think it's extremely important to know what goes on under the hood of popular libraries.

And regarding the FreeCodeCamp profile--I made that account for my little brother (who was learning to program at the time). Along with that, I tried to help people out on the FCC Gitter[1] as much as I could, as teaching people is a good way to master something.

[1] https://gitter.im/FreeCodeCamp/FreeCodeCamp