Homeless man releases app after learning to code

http://nypost.com/2013/12/11/homeless-man-learns-to-code-releases-app/

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

50 31 13 years ago

bigd2• 13 years ago

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.

Axsuul• 13 years ago

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.

mburney• 13 years ago

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

bigd2• 13 years ago

‘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.

agorabinary• 13 years ago

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

drvdevd• 13 years ago

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?

tarr11• 13 years ago

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

uptown• 13 years ago

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

Dylan16807• 13 years ago

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

newobj• 13 years ago

Ladies and gentlemen... HACKER NEWS! Tada!

pera• 13 years ago

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.

smtddr• 13 years ago

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.

aptwebapps• 13 years ago

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.

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

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!

coldtea3• 13 years ago

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.

FellowTraveler2• 13 years ago

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.

marincounty• 13 years ago

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?

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

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

zacinbusiness• 13 years ago

Wow! I've got no excuse!

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

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.

moocowduckquack2• 13 years ago

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.

coldtea3• 13 years ago

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.

iancarroll• 13 years ago

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.

myk7• 13 years ago

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.

ritchiea2• 13 years ago

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?

johngrefe• 13 years ago

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

Homeless man releases app after learning to code

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