How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#151

Post by ryanmercer » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 12:31 PM UTC

Crazyontap wrote: post #73

Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless if it happened years ago. Just a thought to put things into perspective.

And similarly if a piece written by Escobar that had never been seen before surfaced and was published I imagine it would upvoted to the moon with a title like "How I made 30 billion dollars capturing 80% of a U.S. market"

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#152

Post by Bakary » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

Moru wrote: post #80

sitkack wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people were transition _to_ math teachers. I understand things change, income is different between jobs. I am not passing judgement on the fact that you transitioned away. It would be awesome if teachers were paid as well as a web dev.

I think that is pretty common in the west. A social job does not pay as well, you should be doing it for the greater good. Today's society does not value the future

I think it's the other way around. People who gravitate towards these jobs are willing to put up with more, which while a useful skill in some contexts means that the entire profession has reduced bargaining power.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#153

Post by markus92 » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 12:47 PM UTC

jeremysalwen wrote: post #27

Wow, exactly how I got into programming too! although I made 40$ in the end instead of 200k :D The timing also matches up pretty well, I wonder if we bumped into each other on the forums. I was on the scar forums, then SRL, but the period I was most active was on villavu (iRobot), after Arga came out I started to become less active. I wasn't at all involved with the RSbot scene and knew almost nothing about it.

Hi there!

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#154

Post by indigodaddy » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

There are MacBook images strewn about the article, which definitely fits with hip coder culture, but I doubt he started coding in the Mac ecosystem, given how he started out in gaming? More likely he started coding in Windows....

if so, then all the MAC art in the article is slightly curious to me. Totally fine (I am currently a Mac user, and I’m sure the author is now as well) of course.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#155

Post by teddyh » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

Grangar wrote: post #121

teddyh wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s when people admit to doing things like this without any hint of remorse, and no-one calls them out on it , that it becomes evident that this is really “Y Combinator News”, and not really “Hacker News”.

What would they need to feel remorseful about? Automating a video game? It's not like they're breaking the law... I think bots are the least harmful type of cheats anyway. I remember my first intro to programming was modifying Action Replay codes for online NDS games, that was fun but I ruined many people's games doing so. I do kind of regret abusing it like that in hindsight but I would do it again given how formati…

I would prefer if someone from an online game company could give their viewpoint; I think they could give a more understandable explanation than I could.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#156

Post by Mvhsz » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

cgriswald wrote: post #84

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A Java course I took in school had us writing a 'database' command line app that held fake enrollment information. Had that kind of thing been the only exposure to programming that I was given, I almost certainly would not have entered the field. Me neither. That said, in retrospect, I believe university is more similar to real jobs that people give it credit for - the tedium only gets worse in a typical dayjob. As…

The thing that always bothered me is that the “fake enrollment DB” doesn’t solve a problem anyone has. It’s play-acting at solving a problem. So you get the tedium of work instead of the fun of play, but the productivity of play instead of work. Yeah, you can get there that way but it’s a slog, and the reward is a long way off. That’s not like work. At work you get a regular paycheck even if enrollment DB isn’t thril…

I'm a teaching assistant for an intro to programming class, and I do feel that solving an endless train of toy problems is problematic for students. From my experience, the best way to learn is to understand a real problem, determine it's requirements, then design a solution. However the professor and I struggle to find real problems that are approachable for novices with varied backgrounds.

I saw an open source class called nand to tetris where students had a semester to create a machine that could play tetris, starting with only nand gates. I thought that seemed like a much more fun progression for computer hardware than the undergrad courses I took. I would love to discover something similar for programming but so far I haven't found it.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#157

Post by Tepix » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

sean-duffy wrote: post #108

Crazyontap wrote: post #73

Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless if it happened years ago. Just a thought to put things into perspective.

Yeah, it's kind of concerning that an article about essentially black-hat behavior is earning so much praise in the comments. You have to remember that this kind of thing put a huge strain on Jagex when they had to (and still do) spend resources fighting against bots and gold sellers rather than development of the game. And in fact the difficulty of dealing with this problem led to the update which restricted free tr…

Aren't the MMORPGs also at fault? By requiring a long, boring "grind", they are encouraging players to automate their gaming hours. After all, we play games to be entertained, not to repeat boring tasks.

That's a good reason why this activity (writing bots) is not seen in a negative light even if it may cause problems for the company running the game and/or other players and the game economy.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#158

Post by vanterdon » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

UweSchmidt wrote: post #132

justsoamazing wrote: post #85

It's eerie how similar my own introduction to programming and business matches the author's. I started playing Runescape in elementary school (I logged many thousands of hours on the game) and eventually started programming because I desperately needed to automate some aspects of the game (my parents restricted video games to weekends only, which made it extremely difficult to meet my in-game goals). After teaching m…

The vast majority of people "lost in the gaming world" is not going into programming or learning anything useful. Socially, it's a lot of "GG" and insults to each others mothers. Connections in "clans" or "squads" are mostly incredibly shallow and abstract, compared to hiking or playing sports in a team or otherwise engaging in groups irl. Kids are physically underdeveloped [1], programming MMORPGs is mostly treated…

I mean that's the case for you, but not for everyone. I've made connections in games (friends, guildmates, clanmates), that have lasted for over a decade. I don't regret a moment of the thousands of hours I poured into online games.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#159

Post by Bakary » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

Crazyontap wrote: post #73

Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless if it happened years ago. Just a thought to put things into perspective.

This is a good example of an uncomfortable aspect of human nature. Deep down we don't really want to follow the social contract so we respect and sometimes glorify people who don't, at a conscious or unconscious level, and even if they turn out to be monsters.

It's only when the person is framed to be in opposition to us that we stop doing this and start complaining.

That's why you can have people loving Iron Man as a character when they would hate him in real life. In fact the character's creator explicitly wrote him as a personal challenge: someone who went against the morality grain but whom audiences would learn to identity with regardless.

Of course the kid was hardly a monster for making bots but he did play a part in hurting the game and players who didn't cheat, and is cheered for it.

Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)

#160

Post by Bakary » Wed, Jun 05, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

ryanmercer wrote: post #151

Crazyontap wrote: post #73

Just for arguments sake if this was titled "How I made $200,000 gaming Hacker news" where it's the exact same story but instead of writing for RSbots he was writing bots for a site to game HN submissions and comments and manipulating HN rankings instead we would have a completely different reaction, regardless if it happened years ago. Just a thought to put things into perspective.

And similarly if a piece written by Escobar that had never been seen before surfaced and was published I imagine it would upvoted to the moon with a title like "How I made 30 billion dollars capturing 80% of a U.S. market"

Well the show Narcos is exactly that, glorifying Escobar to some extent.