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Show HN: Teach Yourself To Code

teachyourselftocode.com

102 pointskateray40 comments

Well done. A couple of observations though...

RailsCasts: "Early screencasts are free to watch, more recent ones require a $9/month subscription."

Not correct, Ryan still produces weekly free RailsCasts. Advanced topics and refreshed content require a subscription.

"all in the most soothing, wonderful voice to be heard on the Internet"

Steady there! And to my ear, it's a bit nasal (not intended as an insult, just an observation in light of the gushing comment quoted.)

that's what the comment section is for! http://teachyourselftocode.com/links/1

I clicked on the "0 comments" link, but all I get is the RailsCasts description in isolation, with no obvious way to submit a comment.

Hmmmm...are you logged in?

Logged in? I don't even have an account. Consider making the comment form available, with a request to log-in / sign-up on form submission. (Also, do you really want comments to be used for feedback as you've suggested here, rather than for comments on the value (or otherwise) of the educational resource?)

Yeah, making the comment form available would be a good idea. And I didn't mean that people should use them as feedback to me, but to the author of the link description. Need to add a way for people to edit the descriptions.

What I meant was, do you intend comments to be used for feedback on the educational resource for the benefit of your site users, or for feedback to the author of the link description? If I use comments to contact the link author, and they update the link or description, then my comment will be out-of-date. (Which is not to say that users observations on linked sites won't go stale, but less so.)

I, too, see no way to submit a comment when logged out. I think the interface is the problem here - when you are logged out, it should say "[Sign up] or [log in] to leave a comment.". That would guide the user on how to create a comment. It's not obvious that you have to sign up first, because some site allow users to leave anonymous comments.

Shameless plug, but here is something I'm currently working on: http://www.coursebacon.com/

I really like the "upvote" system you have. Let me know if you want access to all of the URLs on coursebacon (I can send you a copy of everything that's already on there).

Edit: My email is username @ gggmail.com

Just a heads up - the site doesn't look to good in 2560x1440.

http://i.imgur.com/wyGLl.png

Many of the descriptions aren't nearly as good as they could be. I think if they were made to be editable like wiki pages they would be much better.

I have another idea: what if the link data were stored in the git repo, with pull requests to merge them, and only the votes and comments were added with the website?

Why not have downvotes too?

If you ask me, upvotes-only (as here on HN) works great if post get hidden when x time goes by. But AFAIK links "value" will not devalue over time on TYTC and therefore the early submissions will get ahead by far, even if they are of lower quality than the links posted later on.

Downvoting does not mean bullying, and I cant imagine people will be afraid to publish links with the risk of getting a downvote or two.

But I may be wrong, and please point that out, HN!

EDIT: Also, I wouldnt mind if there was an adsense ad on the left side of the list. A small tower one that would not be in the users face. I'd turn off adblock for you!

Or have "value" exponentially decay over time (e.g. continuously & adding up to 50% decay per year. Which is equivalent to the value of a vote being 2^(year the vote is cast).)

But that would need a constant growing userbase, otherwise new (and not neccesary better) would get a favor. In the system that 1 upvote === 1 point old links get a favor.

If upvote===1 point and downvote===-1 point old posts would get a head start (from being in the top lists) but it wouldnt be that hard for a competing link. Bad links would quite quickly get low rankings though.

An important thing to note is that this isn't a social news site (as reddit or HN) but a social link sharing site, and thusly doesnt need to have fresh link at the top, but only best links.

We just launched (in preview mode)..

http://CodePupil.com

We have games where code flies around & u click in proper order http://codepupil.com/game5 -

Also, visual exercises that teach you how to build webpages in a crazy simple/fast sense http://codepupil.com/ex (that's the aim).

Focused on HTML/CSS for now but creating games & exercises for other languages too.

You could say our focus is towards pupils - though you don't have to be young to be a pupil.

Getting a browser warning and am unable to use/view your product using firefox 12.0

Hi thank you for the feedback. There is a small issue with Firefox MAC users we are working on fixing.

It works on chrome and safari as of now. In a week or two that will be fixed.

Sorry about that, but thanks again for comment!

Thanks, guys! This was actually just a couple-of-weekends project - my main thing is http://scrollkit.com. It's a lot cooler than this.

sorry all, 'Memory Quota Exceeded.' On a bus, will have to fix this when I've got real Internet.

Great job for launching something! Not only did you accomplish that, but you're also making a noble attempt at sharing educational resources. Great work, and best of luck!

It's my first open source project too. https://github.com/kateray/tytc

Really nice work. I will add to my favs to see how it grows. I am working in a voting system similar to this, but about books. The way that you handle the "language" on the right sidebar is simple and effective.

I don't get what the "<-- Back to Index " means. Maybe something on the views / links / index.html.haml

Looks promising. However I selected C++ and the first result was railscast? 2nd results also rails.

Seems like you are just pushing matched results to the top instead of removing unmatched results? Anyways with some work this could go in my bookmark bar.

Congrats on launching something cool. I think your server might have just gotten slashdotted, or something odd happened, as I'm getting an Application Error.

If you need any help debugging, shoot me a quick email (this username @ gmail.com)

Thanks, just emailed. Maybe the problem has to do with this line in links#index

tags = Tag.find(params[:tags]) @links = Link.order("votes_count DESC").includes(:tags).select{|link| (tags - link.tags).empty?}

Awesome stuff, blows my 'learning to code' tumblr out of the water. I'll definitely use in the future. Any background on how you put this together? I've got a vertical I think this would work really well in.

The code is open sourced: https://github.com/kateray/tytc

These seems to be really ruby and python centric.

Is there anybody who knows any good ones for IOS development?

Treehouse[1] has some iOS dev lessons and CodeLesson[2] has one intro course so far.

[1] http://teamtreehouse.com

[2] http://codelesson.com/courses/tag/Mobile

Other good sources for learning iOS are HackRocket.com[1], Stanford CS193P[2], Lynda.com [3] and Raywenderlich.com [4]

[1] http://www.hackrocket.com

[2] http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application-dev...

[3] http://www.lynda.com/iOS-tutorials/iOS-SDK-Essential-Trainin...

[4] http://www.raywenderlich.com/

This is phenomenal work KateRay. DL sourcecode and would love to help!

I see you have Scheme, you have Clojure but no Common Lisp?!

I just disabled sorting for the moment until I figure it out

May I suggest adding a favicon? A red triangle maybe? :)

You have Code School in there twice. Awesome site, btw!

Great, bookmarked.

This is AWESOME!

Kateray, this is awesome. I'm probably at the same place as you learning how to code and loving every minute of it. I couldn't agree more, everyone should know how to code - at least enough to be dangerous and prototype something up.

Great work!

You should add a link to yourself somewhere on the site so people can email you, follow you on Twitter, etc.

Again, great work!

You can do that on Github :)

https://github.com/kateray

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