Hacker News Reader

Comment by liamilan | Hacker News Reader

Thanks a ton!

Tell your son that it took me a while, and a lot of work, but it feels great to finish something (there are a lot of projects that I don't finish...).

I began learning using Scratch a long time ago. They even featured me last year (the project was a solar system in which I used sine and cosine to calculate the rotation of the planets). I then used blocklike.js to move to JS.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. I like The Coding Train, Carykh, and Code Bullet, and I get a lot of my ideas from their projects.

View on HN

Startup Idea: Start a slack/discord group for aspiring students between the ages of [pick your age range, say (8-18)] and start a mentoring/support group with these like-minds...

You'll learn, build relationships and some of you will go off and found companies together.

Starting a Slack group for students is a good idea, but decidedly not a startup idea.

What about a saas to support the companies providing groups for slack.

I've considered building a "coding buddies" site. Something that's been lacking about the whole Codecademy/Hacker Rank/etc sites is the lack of intrinsic motivation. An actual person with whom you can work could potentially provide that.

Yeah thats what I was inferring... Basically - start a slack, find a bunch of people like him - pick a project to build together that suits their need (coding buddies) and build the tool.

Kind of like when I was trying blacksmithing, the teacher makes you make your tools first.

I'm 21 but I wish something like this existed when I was younger!

I'm 47. There were computer camps and clubs when I was a kid. They probably took a downturn, though, as computing went mainstream and turned into consumption of video games and, later, online socializing.

Maybe you were either too late, or too early, depending on perspective. :)

38 here. I was learning Turbo Pascal in around 96. I'm sure there was a lively community around it, but it would have been on IRC and usenet, which was still a little daunting to me. My primary resource was the SWAG archives, and I honestly can't remember if it was a bunch of floppy disks or a website. Either way, I remember many hours lost to running various random bits of Pascal and hacking them together to make what I wanted. Which is pretty much the same way I code today.

I wish I was 21. Or 31 for that matter.

I am 24, and was programming when I was 12. I remember spending days trying to get Visual Studio to download. I began working with Visual Basic Macros in Word. Although it wasn't very well understood in the schools around me, I found the comfort of those online willing to teach, and help others like it seems he is being shown here.

The mentality of those taking boot camps, and the mentality I had when I started coding are vastly different, but I can see the use.

> there are a lot of projects that I don't finish...

You and me both. :)

He's one of us :)

sine and cosine last year? Now I want to know what your parents are feeding you!!! ;)

I also picked up sine and cosine at around that age; it was thanks to programming.

Various example BASIC programs (e.g. Lissajous curve and circle plotters and such) used those functions and from their behavior I kind of picked up the relationship to both undulation and the circle. I found out about the arctangent function, and from that I realized that it could be used for 3D projection. I made a proof-of-concept program that mapped some connected points in 3D (boxes and whatnot) to 2D by calculating the visual angles using arctangents: i.e. I plotted the angle between the line of sight and each point, rather than a simple planar projection. It resulted in the objects appearing in a very nice "fish eye" perspective on the screen, which was very pleasing. From all that I learned about radians also and how there are "two pi" of them in a circle, since the functions accepted radians and not degrees.

You know how they say that necessity is the mother of invention; it's also the mother of learning trigonometric functions and whatever else.

Much better motivator than math classes in school too

Similar age for sin/cos. I wanted to move a game object in a circle that I used to develop amateur content for. I remember being wowed by light displays some scripters put together at the time (there was no particle system at the time).

By the time it came around, I was disappointed to learn about all the "triangle stuff". I want quite there enough to make the link between right angle triangles and a circle but it made that topic so much easier to connect.

Thanks to programming and the thought patterns it drums into you, I was able to do my maths course work in a few pages (far less than anyone else) but still achieve high marks. I remember one top performer in my class complained to my teacher because of how little I'd produced! The teacher said "doesn't matter - he used an approach that let him do that".

I learned how to use sine and cosine for drawing circles when I was probably 9 or 10. It was years before I found out what they actually mean and how they work. I didn't even know what the curves looked like.

I've got a 10 year old who's been making a lot of stuff in Scratch since he was 6. I've been trying to think of how to phase him over to less limited languages and wasn't aware of blocklike.js, so thank you for that idea.

Having a lot of projects that you don't finish is completely normal, so don't worry about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com