Though Its Network Of Mentors, HackHands Offers Live Help for New Programmers

Any idea why this is such a crowded space? Doesn't seem to be a huge market to me, but maybe I'm missing something?

To give you an idea of response times, here's a live AirPair going on now from someone that saw the hackhands post this morning and followed through to get Rails help with AirPair:

http://youtu.be/1Tp9_nFUhLQ

Let's hope they're less spammy than airplay :) hijacking news to blindly advertise your product on HN (and everywhere else, like the comments section on the article itself) is not the greatest tactics, IMHO.

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated to hackhands in any way, just met the founders in NY, at a coworking space, and found them pretty nice folks.

I belive it should be 'Through'

yes, it's a typo (on the original headline) - it was edited by HN after I submitted it, can't correct it anymore :-(

IRC is a different use case. There are no gaurantees that your needs will be addressed. Help through IM had less benefits for "learning". Also IRC particularly shines for niche frameworks where the knowledge is limited to a few that really want to share it into a support community. But for something like Rails, you're better off following tutorials and blogs. But then you can get overwhelmed and connect the dots wrong. So guidance through pairing can fast track learning on time and resource sensitive projects.

In my experience, IRC rooms tend to converge on a state where they are really useful to a largish coterie of experts that frequent them and know each other, and frightening, off-putting, or actively hostile to the newbies that this project is targeting.