Palm Beach Gardens teen launches Jurassic app | Hacker News Reader

Palm Beach Gardens teen launches Jurassic app

m.palmbeachpost.com

26 pointsmangoleaf30 comments

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The angel offer came from a retired CEO of a public company that saw the article.

The subject of the article is a product of HN:

HN introduced us to Khan Academy many years ago, and it his math and [one of the] CS sources.

HN introduced us to many learning sources for Java [Programr, Think Like a CS, etc].

HN introduced us to Pygame.

HN introduced us to ocw.mit.edu.

HN introduced us to Minecraft when it was in early beta.

etc.....

Nice, great job! Very, very impressive!

"As of last week, about 30 people had downloaded Frost’s application"

"angel $ offer"

Uh oh.. are we in another bubble? I hope not...

Oh, come on! How old are you (pun intended). I know I'd have been deliriously happy if any of my apps had gotten a write up like this when I had been 13. Even in a local newspaper.

Not that I managed to publish any marketable apps at that age.

Not that there was an app store to market them on when most of us were that age.

You may do have a point there. :)

"I know I'd have been deliriously happy if any of my apps had gotten a write up like this when I had been 13"

Actually I can assure you that there is a inverse relationship between age and the chance of getting a newspaper to write an article about something you have done. "17 year old gets into medical school" is barely interesting. "13 year old gets into medical school" is definitely interesting. Same with business, computers, or just about anything.

I'm confused - the article doesn't mention an angel investment at all.

The person that submitted this (mangoleaf) is the father of the boy in the story so I assume he knows more than the article mentions.

The angel offer came from a retired CEO of a public company that saw the article. I posted that as the first comment, but there is no way to make that comment sticky to the top. I see it below.

Right sorry - missed that.

Did you accept the offer and what was the amount of the offer?

I had a talk with my son. He said he wasn't ready. I agreed. The angel said that whenever he feels he is ready, offer stands. Enough to put a structure around him and allow him to focus on products. One manager, one sales/bizdev...enough to cover their salaries for a year or two.

What he REALLY wants to do is work for Notch, or some company that is doing a fun and interesting games or educational stuff. He likes team projects. Anyone need a 13yo beta tester that is into the digital game/educational world?

what references/skills does he have?

Very cool--I'm jealous of what a great environment teenagers have for programming today. When I was 13 I was hacking up QBasic games I downloaded from local bulletin boards. A teenager today can publish Android apps to impress their friends and make some spending money!

It's a soundboard. Plenty of young teenagers have made much better and more useful things.

I'm surprised no one's asked yet -- how did he obtain the samples of dinosaur sounds?

IPhone's voice recorder. grin

There was an old dinosaur pc game from the '90s that has since open sourced. He started from there, but opened each audio file in some application that allowed him to modify each. Some needed truncating, others attenuation, increased amplitude, etc. It was fun watching him mess with the analog signals. There was also a hard limit of media total filesize.

Obviously the time machine was the easy part. Not worth documenting.

Left as an exercise to the reader.

Exactly. Like every proof ever: "It is easy to show that..."

So whats so special about this?

Link to the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=appinventor.ai...

Go homeschoolers! I love it (coming from someone who was homeschooled for most of K-12.)

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