The perfect mix of dumb luck and foolishness. Bet he had no idea of the business opportunity that was arising. And to think that many people spend their lives trying to find a small niche and build businesses and fail each time.
How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
71–80 of 227 posts
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it’s any comfort the alternative doesn’t turn out much better. Most of my life I looked down on prurient interests and instead chose to master my profession, convinced it had to be the smart choice. Now I find myself on the wrong side of 30 with a collection of useless money and assets slowly coming to accept that I’ll never have that ideal lifelong relationship with someone that matters. Soon I’ll have more years…
This attitude is not helping your cause at all. Do you have your health? Are you fit? Because if you've taken good care of yourself throughout all these years, you can definitely get yourself a great life partner. If not, then you might have to work on it. Either way, change your outlook if you want to attract quality. People with options won't want to voluntarily subject themselves to this persona, it's miserable, l…
No idea why this is getting downvoted. Pretty good advice imo.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#73Just 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.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#74Earlier 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.
It pisses me of that basically everyone who ended up with bad career prospects from their physics or similarly difficult degree switched to tech. It makes it look like there are 0 career prospects in other industries.
It's not that there are no career prospects in other industries. It's simply that certain careers can be bootstrapped on your own, and others you need to help/training/licensing/whatever to get into. You can't become a doctor or civil engineer by just hacking on your own & applying to jobs.
This comment sums it up => "I'd consider it if I didn't need a four-year degree.", (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20101794)
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#75Earlier 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.
It pisses me of that basically everyone who ended up with bad career prospects from their physics or similarly difficult degree switched to tech. It makes it look like there are 0 career prospects in other industries.
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 of my acquaintances from uni struggled to find good employment in various industries.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Some of the best coders I know are 9-5ers, with busy lives outside of anything to do with computers. I understand where you're coming from but this is also a harmful mindset for anyone coming into the profession - I have been careful to emphasise to the people I'm tutoring to not make my mistakes and sacrifice life outside of work in the pursuit of "better" coding skills.
Best coders I know became good at coding long before they started working.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#77How come a listing with full details available publically can never make it to top of Ycombinator but a medium article with gated content ranks on top?
What do you mean by "a listing with full details available publically"? Can you give examples of articles you feel should make it to the top to HN but haven't?
The answer to why this one is doing well is clear from the comments: a lot of readers found a lot to identify with in the article. That's the important thing, not what site it appears on.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#78Ah, its nice to reminicse! Back in my day, games weren't online, and I didn't really have the hardware to do them justice, nor the money to buy good hardware or games either. I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D from a cover-disk in a tiny postage-stamp sized window. At school we used to pass around cover-disks because we couldn't all afford to buy every mag. Anyway, I kind of started programming from the get-go, and fo…
> Wolfenstein 3D from a cover-disk in a tiny postage-stamp sized window
The only way to play on a 286 without game-breaking stuttering visuals. Oh how far we've come in such a (relatively) short time.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#79Games 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…
Hear hear. I got into coding as a young teen from running a counter-strike server and wanting to make my own adminmod plugins to do more cool stuff on the server, had to learn Small C. Then I wanted to go further than the restricted API adminmod had for plugins so I learned how to build and modify actual adminmod, then metamod, eventually was working in C++ building actual mods for half-life, was all fun and games at…
My start into real programming was through EventScripts for source servers. Used to love that stuff. Taught me Python too.
Re: How I Made $200k When I Was 16 Years Old Through Coding (2018)
#80Earlier 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.
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