Homeless man releases app after learning to code | Hacker News Reader

Homeless man releases app after learning to code

nypost.com

50 pointssethbannon31 comments

On one hand this is great, on the other, what does this guy do now? How does this help him? I imagine this helps his self esteem, which is a good thing and a meaningful non-tangible benefit. But it's not as though he can go get a job now. And he still doesn't have a place to live. And I'm not saying the dev who taught Leo to code is somehow in the wrong, I'm genuinely curious what the next step could be for this gentleman.

It costs 99 cents. That's 70 cents per install. A few days ago, this app was #10 on the App Store. I can imagine this will help him a lot.

This isn't actually as rare as is being made out, though good luck to him, once he has an online folio of work sorted he should be able to freelance off this. A lot of people have housing problems during their lives and there are a fair few coders, so it is no surprise that the two sets overlap, especially given the tendency to nomadism. It is amazing what you can do with a cheap laptop and free wifi.

>This isn't actually as rare as is being made out

Well, of all the app developers (there are now 1 million apps for iOS alone, so let's say all US developers are 100,000) how many are similar cases? 1? 2? 10?

1 such story in multiple thousands IS rate in my books.

3.5 million people in the US experience homelessness in any given year, I think you would be suprised how many professionals have gone through a period of homelessness. Most people who have gone through housing problems don't tend to advertise the fact in work situations.

Why do you say he couldn't get a job? I'd say this demonstrates pretty clearly that he's capable of applying himself and making things happen.

I watched the video of him describing the app, and it seems as though he'd have trouble with a job interview. Is that just my impression? Do you disagree?

Excellent. Instead of just taking other people's money and giving it to someone for no return, an individual actually chose charity, aided the willing without government interference, and "taught a man to fish." Bravo!

Or, you know, you could come to the exact inverse conclusion:

An sad isolated example where a man helps another man (arbitrarily him, and to the neglect of others in the same condition), instead of our society having standard procedures and programs to help everybody in the same situation.

Just because society is supposed to do something, does not mean that government is supposed to do that thing.

Likely the problem you are so quick to put government in charge of, wouldn't be a problem in the first place if we had a free economy.

>Just because society is supposed to do something, does not mean that government is supposed to do that thing.

Why not? Government is the set of people we, society, put in place to do some work for us in an organized fashion.

So if there's something society at large has to do and that is not about individual action, then the government better see to it pronto. That's what people pay taxes for -- so we can have things like roads, bridges, clean water, schools, armies and action to aid the more unfortunate.

>Likely the problem you are so quick to put government in charge of, wouldn't be a problem in the first place if we had a free economy.

Yes, but also if we had free ponies. I don't deal in "what if" scenarios alluding to some perfect state of being that nobody has seen. This is the kind of economy we have, it might get more or less free, but nobody has seen a "free economy" anywhere, and I don't see such a thing coming in any conceivable time frame.

I think you misunderstand what government actually is. Government is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

I have a right to use force in self-defense.

Therefore I have the right to hire a bodyguard to use force in my defense. (In fact it is the same right - delegated.)

Therefore we have the right to elect a sheriff to use force in our defense.

...But I do NOT have the right to beat and rob people.

Therefore, neither do I have any right to hire a bodyguard to beat and rob people.

Therefore, neither does our sheriff have any right to beat and rob people -- even if we voted for him to do so! Because you cannot delegate powers you never had.

Therefore the question isn't whether society should provide social welfare for the needy. Rather, the question is whether we have a moral right to use VIOLENCE to FORCE people to provide social welfare for the needy. (We don't.)

The only time we have a right to use violence is in defense against murderers and thieves. Once we start trying to use it to solve social problems, we end up making those problems worse, not better.

The reason you see poverty in various nations is because they do not have economic freedom and secure property rights. The nations with the worst poverty are the ones with the worst protections of rights. The nations with the lowest poverty are the nations with the best protections of rights. And note: those are also the nations who donate the most money to charity.

Government can never fix poverty by using violence to forcefully redistribute wealth. All that will do is cause worse poverty.

The best a government can do is strongly protect rights and economic freedoms -- then you will have a rich nation, which will not have poverty problems in the first place, and which will easily be able to cover the rest through private charity.

Unfortunately we do not see any governments today that respect rights and freedoms in this way, although some are better than others. But proposed solutions based on "social welfare" will only make those problems worse, not better.

You say that you do not deal in "what if" scenarios -- you say that there is no "perfect state." I agree with this. But behaving more and more like North Korea is not some magical solution either. It just makes things worse.

It's not quite that easy. I can tell you haven't "lived" enough to know just how simplistic you comment appears. Let me quess--twenties, a lot of support, and really never experienced anything horrific?

How about 45, support a family, very independent, and faced death four times over? Thanks for the ad-hominem attack.

And yet, you clearly still think like a child.

So how exactly is this sort of charity supposed to solve homelessness and poverty? What about all the mentally ill out on the streets, do we teach them to code and maybe to manufacture their own medications as well? Have libertarians found the solution-for-all-time to mental illness and they just aren't telling anyone?

Is this man even out of poverty at this point? There are hundreds of thousands (millions, maybe, I'm not up on the latest Apple marketing) of apps in the app store and most of them make very little money. This isn't sustainable, this is a puff piece about someone who did something nice for someone else.

Grow the hell up.

Wow! I've got no excuse!

Good for him. Now, why should we give a shit? since when should we care about who does what? sorry but for what I remember, this must be the third attempt to go viral with this crap. TLDR: another carpooling app.

Who asked you to 'give a shit'? Who even asked you to weigh in on this? TLDR: Nobody.

Everyone upvoting it on the discussion site news.ycombinator.com

I think the intended intent behind an upvote on these news aggregation sites is that the actor oneself "gives a shit" about the article -- rather than "wants others to 'give a shit'" about the article. Of course, in practice, it's the latter, especially for one's own submissions.

Being homeless and finding a way to release an app is a good example of resourcefulness.

>‘Homeless coder’ saga shows connections matter more than coding skills (washingtonpost.com) 2 points by Libertatea 2 days ago | 0 comments | cached > https://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filt...

Leo The Homeless Coder (media-results) (imgur.com) 1 point by Empathenosis 3 days ago | 1 comments | cached > https://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filt...

> The Real Story of the Homeless Coder (youtube.com) 4 points by danboarder 5 hours ago | 0 comments | cached

those are just the first two pages. Now, My point is : "bravo leo. but enough with this Oprah shit."

IMHO this story is borderline spam.

I find your comment pretty harsh, and I think you have a narrow view of the story: it's not about how amazingly innovative this app is, it's about how a man who has nothing but a laptop could learn how to program and release something that is useful for many people.

My question to you is why shouldn't we care about another human being?

imo the problem is that you're so submerged in the industry-driven world that your mind believes the value of a person is based on their capacity to create the next Big Product... it's sad.

No one succeeds with their first app. Failure leads to success. We should applaud him for actually releasing an app. That's a feat in itself.

Yeah. I'm gonna have to agree with you here. I'm all for charity, but in the end, an app is an app. If we want to be truly unbiased, why should we care that the guy who wrote it was homeless? Shouldn't we focus on the quality of the app? And after enough homeless people "learn to code" at what point does this story cease to be newsworthy?

The biggest problem for apps right now is discovery and this is a smart way to get discovered.

Ladies and gentlemen... HACKER NEWS! Tada!

Not everyone can think of the next genius app on their first try. Unlike you, apparently.

Every time...

Conspiracy theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6441795

Potential examples:

  1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6885123
  2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6365495
  3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6448409
  4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857739
  5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6035263 - This is the most obvious one.
  6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6902563 - Cover up.

I'm going to just keep on collecting these links and post it on every instance I see. This will be added as the 7th.

The pattern is obvious, but I don't know why you think there's a conspiracy behind it. People don't need conspiracies to act like that.

This is why I don't lurk HN much anymore. Great story, terrible discussion.

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