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Five-year-old boy stopped on highway driving from Utah to California

295 points| samspenc | 5 years ago |nytimes.com | reply

208 comments

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[+] chrisco255|5 years ago|reply
While I think this is an interesting story, why are these sort of articles popping up on Hacker News? This is not the place for it.
[+] est31|5 years ago|reply
This site values driven young people taking risks and chasing goals that seem very far away but maybe achieving them one day. This kid has the same spirit as many startup founders have, and similarly has skills that others in his age group lack. Oh and he's after a lambo. It's a good symbol for the wealth that the young startup founders seek as well.
[+] dang|5 years ago|reply
It always fascinates me when a comment says "I find this interesting but it doesn't belong here". Finding this interesting is the definition of it belonging here (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Of course there are different kinds of interesting and HN is for some and not for others.

It's good for HN to defy expectations, because predictability and repetition are the worst things for curiosity. But it's good to defy expectations in an interesting way. The distribution of defied expectations is bimodal; when it's bad it's very bad.

On the third hand: it's also good if—more rarely—there is an occasional bit, just a wafer-thin bit, of "why is this on HN" agitation of the bad kind too. It gets the juices flowing. It means readers care. I think it bonds users more closely with the site in the end. But it should be rare. Since there's so much variance in what people like to see, and HN is a non-siloed site (i.e. we're all in the same theater), every user sees a lot of things they dislike, so we mostly have the opposite problem.

One other point. People sometimes react to these unpredictable submissions by saying "oh, so stories about little kids driving [or whatever $story was] are on topic now?" But of course that is exactly the wrong conclusion. Since this story made HN's front page, a follow-up about, say, a 7-year-old driving a tractor, would have power-law-dropoff levels of uninterestingness. And a 3-year-old driving a motorboat would be right out. Rather, there's some other unexpectedly interesting off-beat story waiting to play this role for next time, and the point is that you can't predict it from any sequence. Actually such submissions are surprisingly uncommon—I feel like they show up maybe 2 or 3 times a year, if that. That's why I'd be curious to see links.

Edit: just to be clear—I'm not criticizing your comment! I'm saying you're an ideal HN user.

[+] SilasX|5 years ago|reply
Geez. Your comment's killed already? I tend to agree with you FWIW. General-interest(ing) stuff is fine, esp for the "hacker spirit" angle, but I think there's such a thing as too much, and the whole site just degrades into quirky-insight porn -- I wish we'd see less of such stories, but not outright ban them. I also wish we could downvote submissions without outright flagging them (which is for spam/trolling).
[+] anonytrary|5 years ago|reply
I never understand this comment. If it made it to the front page of HackerNews, then yes, this is the place for it. There is no "should" or "shouldn't". Upvotes and downvotes already solved that problem.
[+] blunte|5 years ago|reply
It's pretty exceptional. And if it doesn't get enough upvotes, it will quickly fall away.

I'm thinking the kid must have played a fair amount of driving/racing games. And he said he was going to Cali to buy a Lambo...

[+] mabbo|5 years ago|reply
Look, we're living in some really weird, bad times. We need a story like this right now. It's cute, it's strange, it's audacious, nobody got hurt.

Just let us have this one, just for today.

[+] searchableguy|5 years ago|reply
One reason might be that there is an influx of new user as well as different set of regulars because of the pandemic?
[+] sbassi|5 years ago|reply
The car's GUI is so usable that a 5 y.o kid can use it. It is something worth studying.
[+] Stratoscope|5 years ago|reply
I admire the kid's hacker spirit!
[+] hindsightbias|5 years ago|reply
Not that we know he’s Mormon, but there is a segment of SV ex-Mormons who escaped to CA.

Kid is jumping the whole unicorn step to Lambo, maybe another example of how Knuth was wrong.

[+] bryanrasmussen|5 years ago|reply
I guess I wouldn't have posted it for this exact reason, although I have probably posted me share of things that you might find wrong for HN.

But someone did post it, and it seems to have done rather well, so I guess that makes us both wrong in this case.

[+] numpad0|5 years ago|reply
I just saw this story popping up in a completely different place.

Either this is a globally interesting story, or someone here and someone there happens to pull stories from the same source, or someone’s flexing propaganda muscle

[+] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
> While I think this is an interesting story, why are these sort of articles popping up on Hacker News?

Because people are submitting them.

> This is not the place for it.

“This is not the place for it” is what story flags are for.

[+] cambalache|5 years ago|reply
It is the Redditization of this site.
[+] p1mrx|5 years ago|reply
Given that the police tend to catch a relatively low fraction of traffic offenses, how many 5-year-olds are actually driving around on a given day?
[+] mcbuilder|5 years ago|reply
I think you may be underestimating just how bad a five year old may be at driving
[+] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
The proportion of traffic offenses that result in police stops is not consistent across all types, grades, and natures of offenses. I would guess that five year olds driving are vastly more likely to be stopped than the average (median or mean) traffic offender.
[+] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
When I was growing up, it wasn’t unheard of to hear about a 9 or 10 year old caught driving. 5 is pretty exceptional.
[+] WalterBright|5 years ago|reply
I bet zero if the car is a gearshift with a carburetor.
[+] IncRnd|5 years ago|reply
This is nothing. At the tender age of three years old, I had been driving cross-country for five years. After the first six years of that, my 10 year-old adopted daughter would switch off with me in the semi, so we could make deliveries around-the-clock.
[+] jbigelow76|5 years ago|reply
Uh yeah, the scent of some kind of bullshit is wafting pretty strongly off this story in at least some regard. 5 years old and cognizant of wanting to buy a lambo, where to go to get one, knowing why and the protocol for getting pulled over (didn't roll down the window until the cop sauntered up?), carrying around any amount of money in his pocket, and to top it off... that pic with the kid's face blurred out, that's pretty damn high in the seat for a 5 year old[1].

1. Point of reference, admittedly anecdotal, parent of a 5 year old boy.

[+] justsomedood|5 years ago|reply
Agreed. There is no way this kid is actually 5 years old. He's massive for a pre-school aged kid and our five year olds were I no way attentive or coordinated enough to have pulled something like this off. I don't get why they would like about this age. Maybe hoping for more sympathy?
[+] awillen|5 years ago|reply
Honestly, I respect any five-year-old with this much determination and drive (no pun intended). He's going places (okay that pun was intended)...
[+] fb03|5 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] ppierald|5 years ago|reply
I was fascinated when I crossed this story. The mechanics of driving a car aren't that hard once you've done it a couple of times, but to get the car started, into reverse, back up, into drive, navigate surface streets, accelerate onto the freeway (ok, he was going slow), change lanes into the "fast lane" etc... Pretty impressed. I was theorizing that maybe he had played car racing video games (hence the Lambo) and had enough of an understanding of distance perception and braking time not to kill himself. While this is a cute feel good story, that kid is really lucky not to be injured or worse.
[+] gerdesj|5 years ago|reply
You guys don't generally use a stick shift. A clutch would probably have caused a few teeth marks in the steering wheel rather than a car hurtling down a motorway.

I too am impressed that a child so young managed to get out so far but yes, he had a very long run of luck and so did a lot of other people.

[+] awwstn|5 years ago|reply
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage."
[+] 11thEarlOfMar|5 years ago|reply
Makes me wonder what the cutoff age would be between being impressed with the achievement (at age 5) vs. being 'in trouble' with the police.
[+] mindfulplay|5 years ago|reply
If Lamborghini wanted to boost their sales, there couldn't be a better product placement than this.

" Our cars are so amazing, even a five year old would drive by himself on a highway to buy it."

[+] dhosek|5 years ago|reply
Of course, Lamborghini is also the sort of brand that wouldn't stoop to such advertising.
[+] rootusrootus|5 years ago|reply
I am skeptical that the kid is only 5 years old. Certainly I've never seen a kindergartner anywhere near that large.
[+] satya71|5 years ago|reply
What is more impressive is that the kid actually pulled over!

From the NYT article: “He was all set to make the trip,” Trooper Morgan said at the news conference. “It amazed me that when he heard my siren that he did pull over and stop.”

[+] partiallypro|5 years ago|reply
We're just lucky he never played Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
[+] jhymn|5 years ago|reply
Since when did face-blockers look like a vortex into another dimension? Creepy.
[+] solarengineer|5 years ago|reply
I wonder if these various concerns would be relevant once self driving cars become common place.

A child could pretend to drive (or even be trained to drive!) by a self driving vehicle.

[+] nine_zeros|5 years ago|reply
Did the kid actually pull over to the shoulder?
[+] schoen|5 years ago|reply
Yes (the left shoulder), as seen in the police dashboard camera footage linked in the article.