A "teenager does X" post that is actually worth reading.
Including or excluding the 40% fluff that was added seemingly because the author wanted to tell a good story more than anything? :P
How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
101–110 of 227 posts
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to try and remember this tip for when my kid gets older!
I have three stepkids ages 12 to 15 who are all interested in STEM, and we've been looking for a summer coding/compsci project for them. They're into games like Minecraft and Roblox. This might be a good avenue to take. Back in the day, I actually talked to somebody in one of my C++ classes who made (IIRC) around $50k in a year running some kind of gaming server. I looked into it at the time, but it didn't seem like…
50k/yr is a low dollar figure for popular gameservers, not really an outlier.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#103What I find the most impressive is that someone was able to get a serious career start from one of the "Teach Yourself X in 21 days" books. I'd always dismissed these as proto-clickbait without any meaningful content. Shows what I know
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The funny thing is that someone very close to me knew how to program, and never once did they think it would be cool to show me how. I didn't write my first line of code until I was 26 or so. Maybe even later. To be honest, I think that's how you become good - by working on your own stuff. I feel like my skills are rotting at work. I work with "cool tech," but I basically "learn it" for long enough to implement it an…
You become good by spending long amounts of time on your computer, sometimes for 12 hours a day. It is a lonely and solitary activity.
To be fair, long amounts of time practicing is how you get to be a really good musician, or basketball player, or skateboarder, or anything.
But that doesn't preclude practicing in the same general area as other people with similar interests. And even if you end up practicing for 4 hours a day entirely by yourself, there are still 12 other waking hours you can spend doing things with other people.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#105The Runescape "blackmarket" was a fun world to play in! Like the author, I got into creating Runescape bots for a bit - but never works to sell them, just made my own for fun and (in-game) profit. As I dove deeper into the world, I came across people who would purchase a monthly VPS and install botting software on it. There were plenty of guides on how to go through - but no easy solutions for those who weren't techn…
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”.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
reverse engineering is your friend. i've modded all sorts of stuff that never intended it... Full Tilt Poker back in the day, MechWarrior Online, Ultima Online, etc. Learning how to hook into a program's functions and extract real-time data without destroying the stack, properly calling game functions with your own arguments, and translating your patches to new client versions is all pretty interesting and gratifying…
If you do this in any recent game you'll get banned. If you do this in any Valve game you'll get VAC banned.
Bots get you banned in Runescape too, which is what the OP article is about. What's your point?
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#107It'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…
I have nothing to add, just pleasantly surprised to see RuneScape mentioned on here! I can credit RS for inspiring me to learn programming after I got involved with several private servers. Android development was also a natural progression for me.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#108Just 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 trade and did a great deal of damage to the game and the people who played it.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#109It'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…
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Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hosting a long term game of freeciv was essentially the catalyst for me transitioning from math teacher/trade union official to web developer, via making some web apps For the players involved.
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.
You might get a different perspective if this were a discussion board for maths teachers.