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

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

#191

Post by adrianhel »

Mvhsz wrote: post #156
cgriswald wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clas…

Some things I'd have loved to be told to build:

    Simple 2d game
    To do app
    Timesheet app
    Implement a clone of x with something extra of your choosing
    Top Twitter celebrity app using its API
    Building a search engine
    Creating a programming language
An issue with the programming courses at my uni was that none of them used a database. The programs were toy apps by design. Instruct students to use sqlite or MongoDB, and encourage them to use PostgreSQL/MySQL.

Our database class did use databases, but we had no integration of the two subjects.

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

#192

Post by tehbeard »

rococode wrote: post #14

Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) - making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half. Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much beyond running some basic programs. Making a…

Similar story on a smaller scale for me.

I wrote a plugin to fix an issue we had on our server, then got asked to do some work on the server's website to show news and in game stats.

Wound up on the admin team helping to run it. Built a number of plugins for it. Learnt a lot of Linux/ server ops through it, and the importance of backups.

And it helped me get a job. I showed off an Angular based editor I wrote for one an achievements plugin. The plugin exported data on available triggers and rewards ("is person in this area", "do they have this item equipped", "give them this item", "spawn this mob near them"), and the editor turned this into a GUI anyone could use to quickly make/edit achievements.

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

#193

Post by michannne »

teddyh wrote: post #111
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.

Yes. As criticizing and nitpicking which HN can be, it’s amazing how uncritical many people here are as long as something simply makes money . Doesn’t matter what it is – if it involves technology and makes money, then it gets nothing but heaps of praise from the HN crowd.

I see a lot of posts about people relating to the story and how they had a similar start in their engineering career.

I have not seen a single post praising the author's unabashed ruthlessness to make money illegally through the company's efforts.

All stories have multiple perspectives that everyone can relate to, agree with, and disagree with. In this case, many more people feel a relation to the story and want to voice it. If there is a large part of the community that disagrees with the author's way of going about it, either they are not as passionate about their disagreements, or did not wish to comment on the article, but these things are not mutually exclusive.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

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

#194

Post by okmokmz »

mdpopescu wrote: post #133
anextomp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person taking a job in teaching benefits society as a whole but disadvantages them individually. We should transfer some of that benefit to them to make it an attractive option by increasing taxes and salary.

Or, you know, you could send them some of your own money before you volunteer other people's.

What did he say that made you think he was volunteering other people's money rather than his own...? He would presumably also be paying the increased taxes he recommended. Also, why such an abrasive/defensive response when he simply recommended paying teachers a more attractive salary?

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

#195

Post by mv4 »

teddyh wrote: post #111
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.

Yes. As criticizing and nitpicking which HN can be, it’s amazing how uncritical many people here are as long as something simply makes money . Doesn’t matter what it is – if it involves technology and makes money, then it gets nothing but heaps of praise from the HN crowd.

I remember someone doing a Show HN and getting heavily criticized and downvoted for their spam practices (as I recall, their tool was designed to bypass Gmail's antispam measures for "marketers") - despite making a lot of money. So, not all is lost.

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

#196

Post by Bekwnn »

wayfarer2s wrote: post #171
rococode wrote: post #14

Games with strong user-hosted server ecosystems seem to be a great way for kids to start gaining serious coding experience. I went a similar path with Minecraft servers (and also first started with Runescape, both are in Java) - making a server in highschool and grossing ~$150k in a year and a half. Before making a server, I thought coding was cool, but had never done much beyond running some basic programs. Making a…

> I'm graduating with my master's in CS now and still haven't been taught in class many of the things I had to figure out to make what I wanted to make. Maybe the fact that you figured it out is an indication that it doesn't have to be taught in a CS curriculum. Most of the things that you mentioned have great documentation and tutorials outside of the classroom. The fact that so many people use them without them bei…

I often receive flak for expressing a similar opinion when people express disappointment at CS not teaching them "how to code". Your tuition is best spent on conceptually difficult material, not stuff you can easily pick up on your own.

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

#197

Post by tyrust »

Slartie wrote: post #69

Oh yeah, loved to read this! Gaming and especially moddable games are a great entry into programming. It wasn't exactly my entry, as I had programmed stuff before, but I learned a huge lot during my university time while writing a database site for World of Warcraft, which also had a distributed data collection mechanism by which hundreds of thousands of users could upload data gathered while playing the game to my s…

Hey I probably used this back in BC. Thanks!

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

#198

Post by smueller1234 »

grosswait wrote: post #182
antisemiotic wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't live in the US and I'm not up to date on the slang, but honestly a sentence like "some people work in technology while others design equipment for IC manufacturing" sounds quite silly to me. I'll try to remember now.

I don't think your interpretation is wrong, just the context of a HN thread makes it more likely "tech" is software related.

That's the gross oversimplification I went for, indeed!

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

#199

Post by smueller1234 »

antisemiotic wrote: post #83
smueller1234 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. My physicist friends from university ended up in various different places. Many of them with a technical or analytical twist, yes, but certainly not all in the 'tech industry': several data scientist, a quant, various opportunities at insurance companies, one who builds spy satellites, somebody who builds lensing systems for lithography, and of course a few who became software/system engineers. None…

I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, other than quants and insurance companies I'd consider all of these "tech jobs". Or does "tech" now mean "webdev"?

Building spy satellites could be argued to be electrical engineering, space/flight engineering, physics, data science, etc. In the interpretation of tech industry == software, these are career options that are open to physicists (and similar grads) that aren't in the-HN-type-of-tech.

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

#200

Post by ellius »

debaserab2 wrote: post #188
ellius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely anecdotal, but I was a tutor for two years out of college and planned to be a teacher (originally college, then high school). I went into a different field for 3 reasons: 1. Pay 2. Professionalism - all of the teachers I saw and talked to under 65 were treated like dirt, and were micromanaged instead of being treated like professionals 3. Barriers to entry. By the time I got my Master's and decided I'd rather…

I don't know where you're located, but in the U.S. if you already have a masters, you don't really need a teaching degree (a certificate is all that is needed in most states). My wife, an eighth grade science teacher, has a masters in neuroscience - no formal teaching degree - and is on the same payband as any other teacher with a masters.

Could be wrong but I believe it depends on the state.
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