
Gaming pays off for two teenagers - tpatke
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34476287
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igvadaimon
I thought this article would be about people streaming on twitch and receiving
donates.

Because let's be honest, it wasn't really gaming that paid off in this case,
but programming and hard work.

~~~
baby
yup. The title is irrelevant. And the story is... well another teenager
success stories that people adore.

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ponyous
> Pedro wanted to use Apple's new personal assistant, Siri, but she only spoke
> English. By the age of 15, he had managed to make Siri speak Portuguese.

How could one teach Siri to speak new language? Sorry but I am clueless...

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Translation services and hooking input to Siri.

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lifeisstillgood
Impressive - getting Siri to learn Portuguese, coding gaming servers, creating
a PayPal like payment system ... All as teenagers.

Nothing to do with "lucky and gamers" but interesting nonetheless.

Kudos to them.

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fixxer
So they have a profitable biz... Why bother with college? What are they going
to learn there that they haven't already demonstrated enough savvy to acquire
on their own? Seems like a waste of scholarship.

~~~
breitling
If not knowledge, perhaps it's worth it for the people one would meet at
Stanford?

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Kiro
I don't understand this headline.

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ckozlowski
I think the intent of this article was to show that PC gaming can sometimes
introduce young kids to the world of IT. In trying to figure out how to make
their games work, they learn concepts along the way.

I agree, the headline was really misleading. But the title was something that
I've heard my own parents tell me, looking in retrospect at the hours I spent
on Descent or X-Wing, figuring it was all for naught then, and seeing how it
lead to a job later on.

Flying an X-Wing of course, didn't teach me anything. But it was at an age
when I had to get my father (not-computer savvy) to install my games. After he
couldn't, the game sat, for most of a year, until one day I opened it up once
more to read the manual, and noticed that there were instructions I
understood: DOS memory needed to be configured to allocate more to EMS (or
something along those lines) and I successfully made the configuration change.
I was 10.

It was all in the name of being able to play a game, sure. But it was a good
motivator to developing a set of skills. If you're lucky enough to love
computers, getting games to work is a good place to start when you're little.
=)

