My main concern with these types of programmes is that highly technical yet difficult to demonstrate projects (think programming languages, distributed systems, OSs, CLI tools etc) tend to get disproportionately bad results in voting. People new to programmes like this could be strongly put off by their perceived bad results, and people with knowledge of how the game works will just take their projects to other Hack Club programmes. If I were running this it would have 2 separate groups of prizes: larger ones based on number of hours spent (tracked with Lapse or Hack Hour, because I strongly dislike Hackatime), and smaller ones based on number of votes. However the big flashy prizes (in this case, the Framework laptops) really do attract people – recall that Siege <https://siege.hackclub.com/> was one of Hack Club's best performing efforts despite how easy it was to sink dozens of hours into it and win nothing.

Nonetheless I see the potential and I do hope for a lot of submissions – the programme clearly distances itself from the usual Hack Club status quo ;). Good luck with it!

Is there some weird SEO superstition that being a child prodigy helps HN posts

Lots of other "I'm 15" (or 16, 17, 18) HN posts are pretty obviously spam or AI slop. Im' 65, and I'm immediately suspicious and biased against such titles.