Tech my dad banned in our house when I was a kid | Hacker News Reader

Tech my dad banned in our house when I was a kid

gizmodo.com

144 pointsBerislavLopac261 comments

In the late 90s, my dad was really mad about me experimenting with Linux on my personal computer which I built from parts bought with money earned at a summer job. It was kinda hilarious. He has zero involvement with microsoft, very little knowledge of computers, and tended to be mildly anti-establishment... and since it was 100% my computer, it had zero impact on his life. It really felt like a "my role is to crack down on my rebellious teenager no matter the cause" situation. Of course, he shut right up when I lined up a sysadmin job starting immediately after graduation.

> when I lined up a sysadmin job starting immediately after graduation.

If you don't mind me asking, how were you able to do this? I would like to do this kind of work, but am unsure of how to get into it. I'm perfectly comfortable with Linux, and can hack together tools when needed but haven't had any luck.

Such jobs are not as numerous as they used to be. But, basically you chat up owners/managers of local businesses with computers.

When you go off defined path, everything becomes highly context dependent. Know people or interview well, preferably both. Apply anywhere & everywhere. View your first few years as a paid internship, ie don't care too much about pay

For what it's worth, here's what happened for me: During Summer at Ohio State, I worked as a "consultant" in the computer lab. The job involved opening/closing the lab, managing the printers, and providing basic assistance to students (we had to know how the subject matter of an intro sequence).

During Summer, it was so dead, I somehow found my way to contributing to Bugzilla. Those contributions, plus hanging out in IRC, caused me to be noticed by someone who was looking to hire a Bugzilla person. That eventually led to sysadmin, and later more.

Sorry, my experience won't help you much. In the late 90s, I took a programming class at a community college. A classmate noticed that I was a keener; she first approached me for tutoring and later introduced me to her boyfriend who needed somebody to help make a website. I did everything from server admin, maintaining desktops at the office, to writing cgi scripts, html etc., and doing random stuff the company needed like optimizing processes in their warehouse. Our endeavors on the web never went much of anywhere, but it was fun for a few years.

What hasn't changed is the value of networking. My boss's girlfriend noticed me because I was a keener. Rare to make that kinda connection, though.

My parents were always very concerned about whether I was “hacking anything”

Yeah, I blame the movie "War Games". I didn't get a modem until I was 12.

He might have just been sad that you weren't living your life how he would have - ie you spent a lot of time in front of the computer instead of out socializing, chasing girls, playing sports, etc?

He was pretty supportive of my computer hobby... him and my mom both were. But like he was also super big on ford trucks, fuck Chevy, I think there was some brand loyalty tribalism in play around microsoft? There was a ton of FUD about oss back then, so maybe he probably absorbed that? Shame he's dead, these "wtf were you thinking" conversations were always fun.

Ha, kinda the same here.

I'm literally living off the stuff I've learnt by scavenging hardware off the local computer store's trash can and building PCs to run GNU/Linux on them.

Rules for my kids:

If you're over 10 years of age you should know what your limits are. I'm always going to be here for advice and help to get yourself back up from an accident or something that went wrong. I won't block content. I won't demand access to their phones. I won't shame them in any way.

I'm also planning on being sex and body positive. Nudity isn't inherently sexual and shame is a social construct. Nothing should be forced on my kids and unless they actually agree with me on plans I won't force them to do anything.

That's putting your children in grave danger from all manner of criminals online.

Grave danger? Of what? I suspect most of HN had free rein of the internet in their formative years. I’m sure I did a lot of stuff my parents wouldn’t have been thrilled about but I was never in grave danger (or any danger really) and I learned a ton. I’d be far more concerned with the potential lasting damage from a kid’s dumb social media posts than crime.

You can’t seriously compare the internet of even 10 years ago to the internet of today.

You can go to reddit right now and find a video of some right wing whacko shooting someone to death on the front page.

That content was available then, sure. It wasn’t blasted right at you though.

When I was growing up, I had to walk uphill both going to and coming from school.

Luxury! When I was a boy we had to crawl for two hours each way through burning hot gravel to get to school, and if you were late they'd whip you with an old electrical cord.

Errr, i mean, that's basically what shock sites/links were.

It was basically literally blasted right at you and people trolled by getting them to click on it/expose people to it involuntarily whether you were looking for it or not.

I'd name several of with their 'canonical names' off the top of my head if i didn't want to get banned...

I tried to explain this in another comment; you don’t have to go to shock sites to see this anymore.

In a main feed on Twitter Instagram or reddit you might see someone getting the pulp beaten out of them.

We had Columbine in our era. Maybe it took a bit more effort but newsground.com was an easy site to play some screwed up games. It existed and could easily be found.

>You can go to reddit right now and find a video of some right wing whacko shooting someone to death on the front page.

when I was growing up it wasn't just right-wing whackos glorying violence, it was Bill Gates himself dressed up in a trench coat advocating to 'clean up the neighbourhood'

https://youtu.be/KN0K58EfJSg?t=120

You may be underestimating the weirdness of the internet and the culture around it in the 90s, reddit looks harmless compared to what I saw when I was young when kids on the schoolyard were talking about rotten com

You can’t seriously compare that video to a video of an actual person beating up another person?

Rotten.com? Ogrish?

I was around ten when I saw these and the first thing I encountered was a video of a man's head exploding on contact with a helicopter blade, and then I scrolled down and saw a prostitute that had been chopped up and placed in a suitcase. The world is a remarkably vile place and the internet is just a reflection of it.

Even now I remember something I saw on ogrish a long long time ago and only when I think about it I feel the trauma comeing back. I wish I never had the curiosity in the first place.

My point is that you actively had to seek that stuff out. Now you find it on all of the normalized channels; twitter, reddit, facebook, etc.

When my kid started playing Minecraft, he told a lot of funny stories about the chat and joking about how people asking for personal details were pedophiles.

Ten years old kids are not stupid.

Well, many 30 year old adults are stupid, so it stands to reason that at least some percentage of 10 year old kids are, too.

I’m glad your child is bright and perceptive.

Good point. You're right that we trusted him more when we saw that the trust was used wisely.

Good job for teaching your kid to keep themselves safe!

We taught him the basics. He learnt the details from other kids.

Only if GP doesn't teach their child about the dangers of strangers online.

hmmm not my 10yr old. not my 12 yr old at 10.

I think 12/13 is about the time they start understanding that some limits exist, not just because mom and dad put them in place.

I do think you should tighten up a bit before teens depending on your kids.

For others, I would really advise you all to not rely on content blocking too much. Content blocking is one of the tools and you need more than one to fight off erroneous side of the internet. Be proactively involved in online activities of your kids.

See: https://www.fastcompany.com/90539906/sex-lies-and-video-game...

Side note: Limiting freedom of your kids is not bad. It's better to shape how they live so they continue with it later. Usually, the problematic parts are where people don't adequately explain or misunderstand the problem.

When you were young, did your parents successfully employ content blocking on your (computer) activities?

Nope.

I was just able to navigate through life with them and felt like I can ask them anything.

See bio and nope. Although I employ content blocking myself for trackers, ads, dumb stuff and mainstream media.

Due to censorship in India, you would probably know about vpn apps by teens.

I would have preferred if my dad blocked what I block today. Point towards the toxic wasteland and block it with an adequate explanation.

FYI, this very same approach worked nicely for my kid, that just turned 18.

Good that it has worked well so far, but I think it's a bit too early to tell. A lot of choices parents make for their kids echo in the 20s of the kid as well. After that it tends to be more about their choices as they've had enough time without parental influence.

After all, one of the arguments for giving your kids more freedom as they're growing up is that it will better prepare them for when they're on their own. You probably won't see that effect by 18 yet.

That's too true. So far he seems much more responsible than I was, let's see what happens in college.

This is the approach my parents took with me. Worked well :)

Just keep them off reddit 50/50. Kids don't know their limits to being exposed to images of violence. It's no immediately obvious that consuming those kind of images can have long term effects. Kids don't know how to contextualize sexualised representations. It' not immediately obvious that those images are produced to show things in a certain way to fit into a certain market, and don't represent life as it really is. I agree that it's impossible to try and just shield them from everything, it's better to give them the tools to process it themselves. But with the internet being weaponized by anti-social zealots trying to bring on ww3, who purposefully publish in channels used by young people... I wonder what is the value of letting young people lose in all of it..

I was exposed to the unfiltered internet starting at around puberty, and, despite being a huge programmer nerd, I turned out mostly okay.

I don’t think ten year olds gibbing opponents with rocket launchers in Quake is quite as harmful as you seem to think.

50/50 is not at all like Quake.

We still had rotten.com and The Stile Project, which were equal/worse to anything on 50/50, WatchPeopleDie, or Motherless.

Turns out, gross stuff isn’t actually harmful, despite being repulsive.

Based on the other replies to this perfectly reasonable post, I’d say HN is filled with helicopter parents.

I think it's more of an indication that even a place like HN is split on the issue of how much you should restrict your kids. From a societal perspective this seems good, because both strategies get employed.

Yeah honestly I'm a little judgemental towards how much these parents think little of their kids.

Your kid isn't an idiot. They probably have a much more interesting understanding of the world than you do and you won't always be there to keep them safe.

You need to give them the tools to keep themselves safe.

Children at any age, from baby through adolescence, have developing brains, and obeying rules, testing rules, struggling against rules, and accomodating rules, both from society and your parents, is a critical part of development.

Don't try to short circuit it, the implied "wrong way to do it" that you are trying to short cut is how the world works and has worked from hunter gatherer days.

I have a lot of experience with this type of stuff from my own upbringing with a number of siblings (very liberal as in too liberal) and to give an example from the real world, I suspect (not claiming I know) that Aaron Swartz was given lots of freedom, and not a lot of stricture, and he wound up an admirable kid but RIP. Again, I don't know that for a fact, but you don't know my siblings so you can't see what happened to them.

I was raised with a computer in my bedroom and no limits on anything since I can remember. I started watching porn at around 8-9 years old, for example, and far worse stuff within a year or two. I also was allowed a lot of physical freedom which unfortunately led to a felony arrest when I was in my early teens.

To be honest I'm not sure what effect this all had on me. What happened to your siblings? After all that and living in ghettos and third-world countries, I do feel maladjusted at this point in my life, but it's the sort of negative emotion that feels righteous -- as in the feeling that society is warped, not me, and I don't want to change even if it destroys me.

The question should not be framed as how many people (or children) come out ok after exposure to various forms of pollution, but how many are harmed and can that harm be avoided. Speaking hypothetically to illustrate, if only 5% of children are harmed by porn, that's still balanced against how many that are helped? none? That's a lot of net harm.

> If you're over 10 years of age you should know what your limits are.

Propositionally knowing things is very different than being able to make the right decisions when the moment comes. A 10 year old neither has the fully developed prefrontal cortex of a 25 old nor the required self knowledge. They are not even in puberty and half of their emotions, desires, drives wouldn't have come online yet. They will depend an active presence of your adult perspective to make sense of themselves and the world. Don't worry, they will still make their own mind anyway.

> I won't shame them in any way.

I know you mean well, but there are legitimate instances where shame is deserved, and regardless of that, society won't pull punches on using the shame lever legitimately or not.

> Nudity isn't inherently sexual and shame is a social construct.

You are right, these are called the purity codes of a society, and like you say, they are very context dependent. But social construct or not, falling out of those contexts will have social consequences, e.g. leave your kids prone to rejection, with lessened social agency and more isolation.

> there are legitimate instances where shame is deserved

Can you elaborate?

Legitimate shame is a pro-social emotion against breaking purity codes. For a child this could be around cleanliness (“don’t defecate on anywhere other than allowed places”, “don’t fart while eating”), boundaries (“don’t show your genitals to others”, “don’t touch other people’s genitals”, “don’t spit on other people”) but also more complex social interactions (“don’t steal other people’s stuff”, “don’t punch your friends”, “don’t dominate the playground, let others play”). Note that although shame circuitry is involved in all, it is not in the form we are most familiar with, which is heavy handed ostracism and total abandonment, but as minimal as necessary, because shame is a very powerful emotion as is.

Hmm. So, on the opposite end from the extremities of ostracism and abandonment, what are some ways that shame can be legitimately utilized in more minimal manner, in your view?

I’ve just enumerated the use cases. For them, a simple “That is not appropriate” or “Imagine what would others think of you” would be examples to shame based instruction. It is perfectly OK to invoke the fear of a loss in social connection if certain rules are broken, that is one of the ways we maintain social cohesion as desiring, driven, id-possesing beings. In contrast, toxic shame is using this machinery willy nilly anytime we demand cooperation as parents or peers.

Oh, interesting!

We certainly see eye to eye far more than I'd initially thought, regarding actual methods in practice.

I generally like to label such actions as something more like "providing immediate/direct feedback" over light shame and, re: "what would others think of you," I might rather try to frame as something like serving to one's convenience in future interactions.

Thanks.

Thanks for your kindly inquiry to clarify it. Indeed shame been excessively associated with its shadow side because that is how we have been using it, while even those light versions could feel distressing enough for particularly sensitive kids.

I really like this anecdote about shame: “In the 1990s I led a workshop in South Africa, soon after the Truth and Reconciliation Comission had started. After the workshop someone ... opened up about their experience working with one of the country’s tribes and how the tribe dealt with shame. When someone did something wrong the entire tribe would all gather, circling around this person ... telling them over and over again all the things they’ve done right, all the wonderful qualities about them, all the good things that they are. The tribe would provide a counter-point to the inner shame of doing something wrong, by holding up a mirror of who that person “really” is. Not implying that they hadn’t done wrong, but rather mirroring back their true nature”. From Attachment-Based Yoga & Meditation for Trauma Recovery, D. Fey, pg. 57.

For something to develop it needs to be used. There is no magic switch in your brain that goes from "not mature" to "mature" at the age X. Also, the less responsibilities you give to your kid, the less skill of being responsible they will have.

A 10 year old isn't even nearly old enough to be able to make accurate judgments about their own limits, or more broadly, their inner selves. There certainly are some 10 years olds who can, and maybe you were one such 10 year old, but it's a terrible recipe in the general case.

Most adults can't either and yes there are some who can....

Yeah honestly you're wrong about this and seeing kids as stupid little humans that constantly need protection isn't helpful.

You're not always going to be there to keep them safe. Give them the tools and the training to understand dangers on their own.

There's a Pacific Ocean between "they're stupid little humans" and "they can have free roam of the Internet and make their own decisions about content." Look how effectively antivaxxers, flat-earthers, and QAnon have infected the minds of adults, and now imagine the effects on a mind 5x as blank-slate/open to suggestion.

Have you thought that maybe if those people were given the tools to distinguish right from wrong they wouldn't have ended up believing that crap?

You have really no proof about the relationship of parenting style to conspiracy theory believers.

I mean it's obvious that I can't convince you that a generic 10 year old shouldn't be left to roam the Internet freely, so I'll refrain from trying further.

This is a thing you need to be doing since the start.

You can't just pick any 10 year old and give them this level of freedom..

I'm with the dad. Not necessarily for the specific choices but for making a choice. Author should have waited another 10 years because this is a shallow and still-immature perspective that underappreciates her dad's principle and integrity. Why should a company that demonstrably sucks for you, continue to get your money? (So your teenage daughter can be like the cool kids?) It's called voting with your wallet, and a lot of problems would just vanish if more people did it. If you keep rewarding a company, they assume they're doing it right. And you have this entity in your life that is bullshit, and if you accumulate enough of those, YOU become bullshit.

Edits/Addenda:

Live your truth. (Once you have your own money that is, because beggars can't be choosers.)

"Hmm I can't help but notice that the people this company hired specifically to talk to me are rude AF and my very first contact with them included statements that were verifiably lies." [0]

"Hmm this company takes advantage of me by collecting & selling my personal data, some of which I consider private and might not have consented to if I had read the privacy policy." [1]

"Hmm this company does provide the service I want from them, but I've heard they treat their female & ethnic-minority employees like shit, don't consider a lot of their workers employees at all, and they seem to break local laws a lot." [2]

"Hmm this registrar uses deceptive phraseology in its communications, e.g. referring to an expired domain that I intentionally didn't renew and on which I owe nothing, as an 'overdue invoice.'" [3]

[0] Comcast

[1] Facebook

[2] Uber

[3] Namecheap

A person for whom principles aren't important, lives with and financially supports things like this. It's not necessarily weak, but it doesn't take any particular strength of character either. Only a tolerance for cognitive dissonance. Someone for whom principles are more important, gets out of that relationship and finds another. Someone for whom principles are paramount, might just do without that product or service entirely, if unable to find a satisfactory provider of it.

agree 100% and made roughly the same point in a reply to someone else.

The father was accused of fanboyism, but my takeaway from the article is just that the father had high expectations and when those expectations weren't met they refused to continue giving them money.

If more people were like this, these companies would be better.

100 % with you. I mean why would you give money to companies that treat you like a dummy, won't allow you to tinker with your computer, ask for double the money compared to build it yourself, etc.

It might be just me getting old but I don't understand the current consumers who don't really demand anything for their money. Is nothing important to you? Do you just buy what they tell you to in marketing and PR?

They just value different things to you. It doesn't mean they are a gullible idiot. I don't understand why that is so difficult for people to recognise.

What are those things?

I care about price, reliability, ease of maintenance, freedom to modify, etc.

What do you/they care about?

I didn't see the article nearly as negative as you did. The last paragraph actually sounded extremely positive:

> Even though he was a pain in the butt about his preferences [...], my dad did right by me by. Instead of just putting me in front of a computer as a kid, he showed me how to make it my own.

Now that my kids are officially "grown" (18+), here were/are my tech rules for the house:

1) We (my wife and I) do not want to know any of your passwords.

2) No content filters on any device or router level.

3) Mixed OSes (we had Linux, MacOS and Windows in the house).

4) NEVER share your passwords with friends.

5) Anything you email, txt or post to anyone... consider it public. Nothing online is private.

6) No consoles.

Why no consoles?

Apparently the GP is part of the "PC Master Race" and will not tolerate "console peasants" in the house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Master_Race

I don't know all about this PC Master Race stuff. Basically, I wanted my kids to have to maintain, build a system to play games.

When my kids were young Minecraft JUST came out. They both learned A LOT about modding early. If they were stuck on consoles they probably would have missed out on all that.

And?

"Modding" is like, whatever.

I grew up programming PCs in the 80s and 90s but when I look back on it, I didn't really tinker much inside the boxes even though I have mistakenly thought that I did.

Dad installed a Sound Blaster Pro I purchased in like 5th grade after I went to bed so that I wouldn't screw up his work PC.

Past that, I don't think I even upgraded RAM or a hard drive until I was in my 20s, mostly because they were just too expensive.

Had an NES, though. I turned out fine.

But I would have hated my dad if he was like, "no NES for you!" while shoving a screwdriver at me.

Consoles are consumption devices. PCs are creation devices.

Sometimes when you want to play a game you don't want to sit in an office chair at the same desk workstation that you use for your home office.

You can connect a PC to a television (or get a device to stream the game from a PC to a television) connect a controller, and crash on a couch.

It's not for everyone, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive and some games are simply better with the third-party mods.

> You can connect a PC to a television (or get a device to stream the game from a PC to a television) connect a controller, and crash on a couch.

> It's not for everyone, but it can be a heck of a lot less expensive and some games are simply better with the third-party mods.

This is what I do 90% of my time, I often make my gaming choices based on which games have good controller support

Yep, which is why I was disappointed Steam Link never really gain traction.

Since I grew up on FPS with kbm, I hate using a controller for them, so I'll happily sit at my desktop.

But Steam Link lets me play controller based games on the couch in front of the TV. At least until my wife comes home :)

Nintendo games with 4+ player multiplayer is actually a great time with family and friends. In general I think Nintendo makes social games that are intended for the living room, which is harder to find on the other consoles, and almost impossible on PC. I say this as someone who mainly plays on PC and has LAN parties at home.

Consoles can be social devices. PCs can be isolating devices.

There are social games on PCs, meant to be played by a bunch of people with controllers, available on e.g. Steam. The ones I know of tend to be more teen-and-older oriented in their themes and levels of violence though.

They do exist but are they the best single screen multiplayer experiences? Even indie developers of the genre target Nintendo platforms because they know Nintendo draws that audience. They are the only local-multiplayer-first AAA developer.

maybe it's because I never had a console as a kid, but I just don't really see the appeal of multiplayer splitscreen games. if I'm going to budget a block of time and travel to be in the same physical location with people, I mostly just want to talk with them. if we're mostly going to be playing video games, I could just stay home and have the full screen area. overall, it strikes me as a relic of the times when internet multiplayer was much less reliable.

PCs also make fantastic consumption devices! The games are usually cheaper, there's a much bigger variety, you can get all kinds of stuff from all sorts of countries, and even 30 year old stuff still runs on Windows lol.

> I don't know all about this PC Master Race stuff.

It comes from a 10-second throwaway line in a gaming review from 2008 that's actually taking a dig at PC gamers liking overly-complicated RPGs [0], at about 0:53 to 1:03 [1]:

> While quickly it becomes obvious is that Witcher is very much a PC-exclusive game which are typically designed to be as complex and unintuitive as possible so that those dirty console-playing peasants don't ruin it for the glorious PC-gaming master race.

Then there's about 20 seconds more of him listing out the ways this game is overly complicated.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-glorious-pc-gaming-master...

[1] https://youtu.be/P0dXtOVi2yo?t=52

Funny how this is downvoted, since when translated into "reddit-speak" GP's "clarification" gives exactly that.

He doesn't want his kids exposed to zsh.

Fair.

The list was going very well until the last bit about “No Consoles”. Now the rest of its credibility is shot.

See this reply by the GP. I have to agree with him.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324462

Its a dumb reason applied to an adult.

> applied to an adult.

I agree. But this was for his kids when they were kids living at his house. If he want's to maintain the no consoles rule at his house later on, meh whatever. That's his business.

Edit: Also, what makes it reasonable to enforce this while his kids were young was that he actively encouraged learning about PC's, not just consumption through a different "Magic Box".

My children also learned to type very well at a young age because we did not have consoles.

AIM did more for my typing skills than any of my middle school “keyboarding” classes.

    a s d f j k l ;

Who decided typing that on loop is how you learn to touch type?

In my case, gaming taught me to type quickly, and keyboarding class taught me to type well.

That being said, my keyboarding class included copying out bodies of text as well, not just patterns on loop (There certainly was that though).

Mario Teaches Typing on win 3.11 or DOS (can't recall which). It looked like a Mario game but progress was controlled by typing correctly.

At least they didn't say no games at all. What's so different with "having" to game on a computer vs a console? Consoles don't come with a learning opportunity, are vendor locked devices and they're just more expensive for their value compared to a PC.

There's a small number of games that are exclusive but you'd have to buy 2-3 different consoles just to get access to them all anyways, which is not a realistic choice.

And yeah, some online multi-player games are console-only but as a parent I wouldn't want to be "forced" to buy a certain console make just because other kids might or might not have it. My friends had Xbox 360, I had PS3 and we're still buddies and we mostly played together on PCs anyways.

How many Xbox One / PS4 / Switch games can you get for free? A small handful if any. On PC, thousands literally. If you're not too picky, one could just play free games and never have to even pay for them.

I totally understand the no consoles rule. The last console I owned was a PS2 and think of those few years as the least productive of my life.

6) no consoles

I have a hundred times more confidence that microsoft and sony will keep the xbox one and PS4 operating systems up to date, patched and reasonably secure than I do that random cloud-based internet-of-shit consumer electronics vendors will maintain product security.

I would love to have a discussion with the person(s) who think that having an autoplay video pop up and cover 40% of the article I’m trying to read is a good idea.

They'll just show you the chart that shows the resulting increase to ad revenue and then put their fingers in their ears.

https://www.greathillpartners.com/ceos/jim-spanfeller/

Shoot him an email. Maybe ask him why he's such an herb.

"An herb", good god.

But completely agree. For anyone who hasn't followed what's happening to Gawker's corpse, this is worth a read:

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-adults-in-the-room-183...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/herb

Note the pronunciation given for US and Canadian English, with the optional /h/: /(h)ɝb/

If your dialect pronounces it as /ɝb/ it is perfectly natural to say "an herb" (/æn ɝb/) and saying "a herb" (/eɪ ɝb/ or /ə ɝb/) with that pronunciation is incorrect.

I repeat, good god.

I am familiar with the linguistic norms at play here, and if I come across an herb in a grassy meadow, I’ll happily say so. It’s specifically the collision of the dialectal “an” and a slang expression strictly pronounced with a “hard” h that got me. A person is never called an ‘erb, unless the individual speaking is themselves a total herb.

In any case, no offense intended to OP! It genuinely made me laugh. And none intended to you either, this exchange has been very HN in the best way.

It doesn't have a close button, either.

Not to mention the number of advertisements that take up the whole screen in the middle of the text. That plus the video killed my motivation to continue reading the story.

With NoScript (https://noscript.net/) blocking all of the javascript by default, I got no autoplay video and no article coverup at all.

I simply got a blog post that I read through from start to finish without anything else getting in the way.

uBlock Origin worked great too!

Firefox Developer Edition, with uBlock origin installed. I don't see anything you said.

Be sure to tell them that is why people like myself don't even bother visiting such sites.

I would love to have a discussion with the person who doesn't browse the web with uBlock Origin (or similar).

Talk to an iPhone user?

iOS has supported ad blocking for a bit.

Brave blocks this on iPhone. I’m using it now, even though much of HN hates Brave.

I am genuinely sick to death of people taking up arms in some sort of faction war against their supposed "opponent" technology.

I see it everywhere. PlayStation or Xbox! PCMR or Console! MacOS or Windows! iOS or Android! Disturbing tribalism.

Liking Apple does not make you cool, not liking Apple does not make you cool. Apple produces hardware and software, it is not a religion. I see so many people taking up arms against Apple as if it's some kind of religious crusade or imperative for the betterment of mankind, while at the same time rallying behind Microsoft (of all companies).

I'm guilty of a bit of elitism too, I can't stand Windows and it hurts me to see people using it when I know better things exist (or, better for me at least, I'm one of those pesky linux users) but at the same time: It's a fucking tool, you don't see tradesmen getting all pissy about people buying DeWalt power drills.

For the love of all that is good: stop giving a fuck unless it affects you directly.

Yeah, I thought that. Though disliking Apple products isn't abnormal, making that part of your identity is sad.

Making your preference for "contrasting" Microsoft products (or whatever) part of your identity is even sadder.

I think it's a combination of human nature and a side effect of marketing.

Since neither human nature or marketing are liable to go away any time soon I doubt the team mentality to buying things will either.

"Side effect"? Good advertisers do whatever they can to trigger that part of human nature. Actually, Apple's "I'm a Mac" campaign was entirely about this very thing from the very beginning.

Item: a woman friend of mine recently told me that she'd broken off a (hitherto) stimulating exchange of e-mail with a young man. At first he had seemed like such an intelligent and interesting guy, she said, but then "he started going all PC-versus-Mac on me." What the hell is going on here? And does the operating system business have a future, or only a past?

1997!

I agree. All three major OS platforms have their own faults. I hear Mac people praise Mac as dev ready but just like Windows you gotta install additional things to make it useful for building things you can deploy to a Linux server.

Linux has its own flaws especially with how they handle package management: I wish Debian would differentiate between system required packages and user app packages, imagine letting the system run their sanctified version of Python but as a user being able to run any and all versions of Python.

I could easily argue Windows is easier than either one with WSL. Unlike on macOS you need to install Homebrew or similar plus then all your utils. With WSL you can install all sorts of Distros that may have everything you need OOTB.

They all have their benefits and trade offs and from year to year I go to and from Linux and Windows, I dont get compensated enough to be buying Macs so I only have the one Macbook Air but its enough to asess all three imho. I have also used dozens of Linux distros. I used to hop from distro to distro. My favorite thus far is still openSUSE.

Two things: if you believe system-required packages should be separate from user app packages you should check out the BSDs. Also, why do you like openSUSE the best? I've never tried it.

I have tried the BSDs but their hardware support is lacking. Being unable to connect to wifi easily during install is one problem I have ran into. Also I am all for CLI utils but the installation process is needlessly confusing and complex by sticking to that approach.

I dont want to spend more than 15 minutes installing an OS. Aside from the time it may take for the automated bits to run.

> "I could easily argue Windows is easier than either one with WSL."

No you definitely couldn't.

The experience is sub-par, having to deal with the Win boundary sucks, it's slower, and many apps don't work. This is very visible when trying to use an editor that's not imbued with Microsoft's magic.

WSL is a glorified virtual machine, that's all.

Homebrew does not install a virtual machine. I'm not 100% happy with it, but it usually works fine, and the packages are up to date, which you can't say if you'd go for Ubuntu, whose repo tends to lag behind, especially on LTS (and you want to be on LTS if you actually want a usable system).

If you want to take it to the next level, we also have Nix running on macOS ;-)

Windows is easier than either one with WSL. If two people can make that argument, maybe you can in fact make that argument? Something to consider.

One person. You didn't make an argument, you made a declaration.

> Liking Apple does not make you cool, not liking Apple does not make you cool. Apple produces hardware and software, it is not a religion.

I disagree: For example accepting or rejecting a golden cage is a deep decision about one's moral values - thus near to a religion.

So picking up trash is a religion. Lax definition is as bad as no definition.

This was the impression we had 20 years ago looking at RMS talking.

It felt like a cult, we felt he asked to us make completely unpractical sacrifices purely in the name of an ideology, the Free.

In hindsight he might have been right, but there clearly was a communication problem, and our kneejerk reaction was to take distance from anything that looked like a cult.

That’s still how people react when they’re just told Apple is evil and they should give up their iPhone for some open source hardware phone or they’re sheeples.

> you don't see tradesmen getting all pissy about people buying DeWalt power drills.

Tribalism is everywhere. Dodge vs Chevy vs Ford is one that certain tradesmen might be inclined to take part in. Certainly even tool brands like DeWalt vs Makita.

I don't see a problem with it. This is like complaining that people have opinions and that they might argue about them. It's 100% human nature. Arguing against it is like arguing against the wind.

Perhaps there's even a tribe of folks who think that opinions are bad and everybody should just think like they do and not give a fuck. Well, that's just like, your opinion man.

If my opinions are not part of my identity, what is?

IMO your identity is how people think of you. You might think of yourself as an credible person, but if other people don't think so then what's your identity? You might think of yourself as a safe person, but if other people don't feel that way, then what's your identity?

In this perspective, identity is about relating to other people, whether on matters of Chevy, Apple, or skin color.

This strikes me as the belief of a person who doesn't have much of their own self-identity.

I certainly don't need others to tell me whether or not I'm a credible person.

When we go to listen to a doctor or lawyer, do we do so because we know the reality inside a doctor's head, or because the doctor relates to the rest of society through high credibility? To what degree does being a doctor affect your relations with the rest of society?

If a doctor knows they're good enough, is that good enough?

Why not both? \0/

Obviously every person has their own personal view of themselves and everyone also has their view of other people. Which one you call "identity" is pedantry.

This multi-universe of identities is allowed. Through interactions they may change - or they may not. They are used to inform our decision making in either sense.

They are all allowed to exist simultaneously - whichever one you value more.

It's not about having opinions, it's about spending energy arguing about them. Everyone has opinions, but they're not going to go to war about ice cream flavors, nor should they. It's worth going to war with people who think keeping slaves is okay. It's not worth going to war over which brand of phone people use.

Overzealous tribalism can lead to otherizing and dehumanizing and all sorts of terrible things. Let's save those side effects for things that are a little more important than which car you like to drive.

You're comparing the civil war to people texting each other on social media.

Nobody has ever gone to actual war over personal opinions about cars, phones or computers.

People routinely destroy cities when sports teams win or lose. Get in brawls because someone is wearing the wrong color. The list goes on. Of course it's not the same, but the kernel of otherizing remains.

OK, but nobody has ever destroyed a city over opinions about technology, among many, many other things that people argue about online such as favorite celebrity, music, cars, etc.

Just because you can cherry pick a couple of examples of people destroying things over their opinions, that doesn’t mean anybody’s going to actual war and it doesn’t mean that having opinions or even arguing about them is bad in general. It’s human nature.

I get the point though - being less opinionated can be good and if you find that you’re better without them then I support that. I have sometimes wished to go live on an island or in a cave myself, to escape the constant culture war but instead I just turn off my Internet devices. Most days I just wade through it to find the stuff I agree with.

Indeed from what I've heard it seems that DeWalt is despised by many professionals, while some feel that Makita is only one step up.

DeWalt is just another brand owned by Stanley Black & Decker https://www.stanleyblackanddecker.com/

Makita is a standalone company that doesn't have a stable of brands (although potentially some OEM?).

See https://pressurewashr.com/tool-industry-behemoths/ for lists of brands owned by parent companies.

Not saying that you can't judge by the "brand"; just saying that many people are unaware that many brands are somewhat cosmetic...

It’s just back-filling a personality when you don’t really have a strong internal identity. We all do it a lot when we’re very young - defining yourself as someone who likes a certain Venn Diagram of interests whose intersection makes you feel unique and cool.

Actually, many tradespeople are pretty elitist about their power tools. There are a lot of brands that have gone downhill or been amalgamated so there are those that hold out for older era models that were allegedly better built (ala Thinkpads).

I’d be a real power tool guy if I could afford Hilti, but I get some cred for being a Makita guy.

While tribalism does have its bad points, am not sure modern capitalism/consumerism could survive without it.

I'm in team Bosch.

Given modern consumerism is making the planet uninhabitable this is a weird argument to make in favour of tribalism.

> I can't stand Windows and it hurts me to see people using it

There's an entire industry (pc gaming) that is still a pretty piss poor experience on other platforms. This has been true for 25 years and isn't showing any signs of changing. And the current direction Apple is taking is going to ensure the iPhone with all the impressive hardware is going will only be utilized to play candycrush and scroll through instagram photos, because quality games (and applications, e.g. Spotify, Netflix) rightfully don't want to give Apple 30% of every dollar they earn.

So I agree iOS walled garden is an issue, but the 30% thing isn't the sole problem there, and really all digital game platforms with the exception of the Epic Games Store uses that same rate. The big difference on PC for developers (besides the literal technical differences between Windows and MacOS) is that you can choose to not use a store at all (self host on your own website), or to be on a bunch of different stores at once.

> There's an entire industry (pc gaming) that is still a pretty piss poor experience on other platforms. This has been true for 25 years and isn't showing any signs of changing.

I would disagree there. Valve is still pushing Linux fairly successfully, despite the fact that "Steam Machine's" never took off.

I don't really care what OS people use, they might have reasons I don't see after all.

On the other hand I did work in an IT department and saw people getting 3k€ devices where I know there is no way on earth they are going to need that horsepower, and I knew because I helped them using it daily. And guess what: it is usually Apple. The shiniest new thing just for the good of their own souls.

3k+ devices for sending screenshots wrapped in docx as a mail attachment.

And yes I get judgemental there. That doesn't mean all the people with an expensive Apple machine are status driven egomaniacs, there are people where these 3k+ are more than well invested — but over here they were too few..

There’s people paying upwards of a thousand dollars on Intel i9s or Threadrippers when all they do is game.

What I’m saying is that there’s fanatics on everything, not just Apple. You were just exposed to Apple fanatics. There’s also Windows fanatics (not as common, but they exist). And, of course, there’s Linux fanatics.

There’s also fanatics in regards to hate. A big one we see here is Microsoft. Some here seem to think that the Microsoft of today is exactly the same one as the 90s. Never mind the fact that practically nobody from then is still there. But, “It’s their corporate DNA,” is something I’ve seen quite a bit here.

Yeah but when you game you are at least using the hardware, which means there is a real benefit for you to have that expensive hardware.

What I mean is a bit more like buying a toddler a Ferrari. Of course they like it — it is red (so it must be fast) — but they can't drive well enough to even leave the driveway.

I start to sound more bothered about this than I actually am, in fact it doesn't really bother me that much at all. It is just sad to observe how money is misused to stroke (most often male) egos and hurting the whole organisation through it.

With Apple laptops at least you aren't paying for the horsepower (which the machine can't actually make sure of due to terrible thermals), you are paying for the aesthetic of the OS GUI and the industrial design. That's no an insult, any more than buying nice furniture or plants is an insult. Aesthetics matter of you aren't living on subsistence.

The power is just the fig leaf to rationalize it.

I've been sick to death of it since the days of Nintendo vs Sega, but I'm starting to come to terms with these being relatively benign outlets for tribalism.

I'd much rather people burn off that kind of tribal or religious energy via PS vs Xbox and Red Sox vs Yankees than Left vs Right, which is an unfolding disaster.

“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games." - William S. Burroughs

Maybe it's the opposite, whatever was into politics, funneled into consumer brands?

Something something, identity, wanting to belong and signaling your position.

I have issues with some colleagues who are very opinionated about which language/tech to use. Overtime, I learned to value more pragmatic people who can get work done without going into sterile religious discussions.

I'm not entirely sure. Your argument would be completely fine and correct had they actually been only tools or only technologies. As a company, they have policies - and policies can be based on ideals - and people can like or dislike those. Personally, for me, I am mainly an average Windows and Android user because it suits my needs the best - but what gave me my 'tribalism' was the exact same reason that you pointed out - that's probably the only tribe today where majority of the people don't suffer from elitism. While I was growing up, I saw that from both Apple users and Linux users (from the other end, but 'bitter' elitism). Me, an average computer user didn't like that behavior then, don't like it now. In fact, I hate any kind of elitism like a religion - so naturally that translates into my product choices - I never wanted myself to become them.

P.S. - I still gave Linux a try a lot of times (and have to use it professionally everyday anyway), but sorry, all the ones that we use at our workplace still look like unfinished grad projects, not a professional OS to me - I have tens of reasons for believing that, but it would initiate the same wars that we're talking against here).

I agree that much of this is tribalism that exists in other parts of our culture (Ford vs Chevy, etc). However, in the 1990s, at least on the Apple side, it felt like we were fighting to hold on to resources that would go for supporting our platform. Developers, understandably so, were leaving the Mac. The web as well as many other historical changes that readers of this website are familiar with changed the conversation. Though I do not think platform fanaticism is justified or helpful, does this behavior stem from a legitimate issue, even if now it is a historic footnote?

My takeaway from the article is that the author's father just didn't deal with bullshit from companies.

I can tell you for sure I'll never use any of the bells. I'll go without a phone before I use any of them. Why? Because I had a weird charge show up on my bill 1 day. I called them, they told me it was a mistake and took it off. It showed up on the next bill. I called them, they told me it was a mistake and took it off.

This went on for a while until I eventually moved to another house. Down the road I find out that that mysterious charge somehow came back and then got sent to collections. This happened 25+ years ago and time hasn't tempered my feelings on the matter at all.

Same thing with my mobile. I went through AT&T & Sprint, leaving both of them early over some bullshit, and it will be a cold day in hell before I ever give them my money again. I eventually landed on Verizon and haven't had any issues for the roughly 10 years that I've been using them.

I still remember the day I got a huge bill from Sprint due to running over my minutes. I call them up and I shit you not the person on the phone told me they could give me the details of everything on that bill except for the 2 days in the middle of the month that I supposedly used up all my minutes. They could tell me who I called and for how long the day before those 2 days, and the day after, but not those 2 days. Oh, and also, if I pay right now while I'm on the phone they'll give me a discount on those minutes! I cancelled my account right then and there.

It's not unreasonable to expect a company to be able to tell you what they're charging you for.

Or Cox. I hate them with the passion of a thousand burning suns. If there were a viable alternative I'd be gone in a second. Just this Friday my internet goes out so I call them up. Do you know what the man on the phone led with? That my equipment is old. He started to blame that on the outage. The best part? It's a docsys 3 modem that's not even 5 years old. I told him in no uncertain terms that the reason it's "old" is because it works and doesn't need to be replaced. I had to convince this jackass that the problem wasn't on my end. Then he started trying to lecture me on how it must be my internal equipment. Only it wasn't my internal equipment because at some point it just miraculously started working again.

I have NO tolerance for bullshit from companies. I don't setup autopay for anything, I sit down every month and manually pay bills. Why? Because I've had companies believe I owed them money I didn't believe I owed and had them just straight up pull it from my account.

---

My point here is that the feeling I got from the article is that this isn't about simple fanboyism, but about having high expectations of companies.

It makes much more sense to me when I view it as a coordination problem[1] with sunk costs. Let's not forget there are real costs associated with making a choice. If switching power drill brands means that your old batteries are not compatible, then sure people will resist switching brands. It represents a real cost.

The same story plays out in tech especially when digital goods are purposely made non-compatible. The cost of switching brands includes not being able to access games, movies, music, or having to repurchase for the new platform. Those most heavily invested stand to lose the most.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Holy-wars

Portlandia studio guy is a good spoof on gear heads. People that think they have to buy the right amp or classic guitar before they can write their masterpiece.

I like that line from the departed, "im an artist, give me a fucking tuber, ill get you something out of it."

Agreed in general.

However, people who use windows/office have a tendency to try to force you to use windows as well. Even today.

I disagree. Mainly because Apple is the main driving force behind destroying computing. The iPhone today is as much of a computer as my microwave.

> It's a fucking tool, you don't see tradesmen getting all pissy about people buying DeWalt power drills.

But farmers are getting pissy about tractor DRM. If you can't control your tools, they will control you. I'm sure everyone on HN could list plenty of examples.

Back in the day, having a MacBook gave you way more nerd cred than the school issued Thinkpad or cheap ass Dell that everyone had.

More exotic power tools are similar. Before I start butchering a project, anyone with a clue can spot my Ryobi or harbor freight junk and know I’m a noob.

Rich kid cred (startup or FAANG free-floating money), not quite the same as nerd cred.

A good craftsperson can produce amazing output with mediocre tools.

A poor craftsperson will still produce shit regardless of how good their tools are.

I just use technology. I never was a windows kind of person, just didn't gell with it. I was more unix. I know that system. I know what it does and why it does things. I could have done that with windows, but just never wanted to.

I guess I was more of a tinkerer than the author of this piece, which is why I went with Linux. And I'm talking Linux when Linus first put it out there decades ago.

Before that, I tinkered with DOS, of course. Windows 3.1. OS/2. Windows NT. But, like I said, it just didn't gell with me. Linux was where it was, and still is. Yes, I've gotten Macs because again, with OS X, they were unix and I knew the underlaying structure. I didn't really find the need to install a gaming OS like Windows, because I'm not a gamer and that's basically all I saw it offering.

And now? I don't allow any Google products in my home. I don't even use Chrome nor any Chromium derived browser. And absolutely no Android.

No Amazon Alexa anything.

No "smart" devices at all. No "Internet of Things" BS.

I wish that a significant portion of people today held the tech industry to such high standards.

Imagine the progress we would have made if our industry was forced into making sure that tech is extremely reliable and highly functional.

Instead, we get half baked broken things with all notions of quality and craftsmanship completely abandoned to make room for fast iterations.

> Imagine the progress we would have made if our industry was forced into making sure that tech is extremely reliable and highly functional.

Do you remember the progress of landlines? In 2000 (and beyond), some people were still paying extra per month for touchtone dialing. Extreme reliability comes at a large cost.

If everything had to be reliablr before it was released, we'd have a lot fewer things to try, and a harder time deciding what we liked. By shipping half broken stuff all the time, we can figure out what we like, and then make it reliable if it's warranted, or throw it away if that's the right choice.

Wow, what a bizarre world to grow up in.

I can understand avoiding certain products because other products are better or because of something that contradicts one's values. Yet the author's father seems to be doing so because he held grudges and had a weird sense of brand loyalty.

Gateway, of all companies! Then again, I grew up in a family that went to computer dealers and had systems built. There was no real brand loyalty there, not even loyalty to a particular dealer, but it taught me the value in a custom built PC.

That upbringing reflects how I choose products today. I would much rather spend an hour shopping for components and an hour putting them together than spending several hours shopping for a computer.

My recent experience trying to find an acceptable laptop has driven me to the point where I probably won't buy a laptop in the years to come. I'm the type of person who won't touch a laptop unless the RAM and storage can be upgraded, as well as knowing what type of CPU and GPU it has. Having to dig around support sites or even third party sites to get such information does not impress me. Granted, finding the information often reveals why vendors are so hesitant to provide it. (The performance of your $800 laptop is worse than my middle-of-the pack eight year old PC?! Yeah, that's comparing desktops to laptops, but it's an eight year old desktop!)

But that's different. It's based upon my wants and (perceived) needs as well as the information currently available. If things change in a few years time, the decision will change with it. It's not because of a problem that was fixed several years prior. It's not driven by a misguided sense of brand loyalty.

Edit: missed word, extra word. Sigh.

Off-Topic:

There's two misplaced or missing words in just the first paragraph of that article - the sort of thing that happens when you're going back and rephrasing things.

I was getting ready to enjoy a good story, but was immediately punished for not just skimming instead. These mistakes happen to be really easy to catch for everyone but the author himself and they will trip up specifically those readers who are trying to pay attention.

Since even major professional online publications clearly don't hire editors anymore, maybe they should at least adopt a policy of having co-workers proofread.

I noticed the exact same thing immediately. Turned me off a bit to the article, and the mistakes appeared to continue throughout.

My father didnt want to have cable tv. On antenna we only got ORF (austrian television) and local one (which sucked). I needed almost 10 years to actually hear how Captain Kirk in Raumschiff Enterprise really sounds (everything is synchronized to german) like.

Side effect: I also fluently speak german.

And banning social networks is positive for your kids. Also ads.

> Side effect: I also fluently speak german.

May have been useful living in Austria!

> everything is synchronized to german

I suspect that's not the word you were looking for.

PS: I guess that explains it: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronisation_(Film)

He he, true, but we also use that word in native language. Thank you for remark :D

My guess is parent lived in another country bordering to Austria. Italy? Hungary?

Ah, that makes sense. I thought it was Austrian + regional/city (and assumed he was a foreigner living temporarily in Austria), but it probably is Austrian + <home country> (could also be Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic; or Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia depending on the epoch).

Slovenia or Yugoslavia at that time.

Tech banned in my house :D

- Windows and telemetry-based apps. I do have a VM for a work VPN however.

- Google, except the school district forced an exception.

- Youtube, unless supervised on a shared anonymous tablet.

- Double-click and other advertising sites.

- Third-party cookies, and most third-party javascript.

- No giving out information to any site, make it up if required.

- Alexa etc, wife uses Siri.

As you can see, outside entities have forced a number of exceptions. Other additions:

- Screen time

- dnsmasq whitelist for kids

Maybe the internet is a different place now but if these restrictions were placed on me as a kid I never would have grown up to be who I am today.

There is a chance that OP doesn't want his kids to end up like you though.

Fair enough, obviously OP has the right to parent as he pleases. I think that my tinkering intuition has led me to many of my professional successes, and this talent was garnered by experimentation with computers as a child.

Eh I sometimes wish parents weren't basically given ownership rights over their kids.

Yeah. Different people have different values.

In the same way people see "free speech" as being a good thing, "free parenting" is similar, both in concept and result.

Clearly, some people talk shit and some people parent shit. And the results are as per expectation.

But without the mixing pot of variation we wouldn't have the better ways either - and we try as a society to have education(for parents and kids, for speech and parenting) make up the difference.

And worse come to worse, there is the unfortunate need for Child Services, however that works out...

They aren't, most developed countries have some form of Child Protection Services for cases of abuse.

No disagreement from me. Without gaming on Windows systems I would may never gotten involved in programming in the first place. I'm currently watching what looked like my nephews Roblox/Minecraft addiction turn into some real amazing content creation utilizing youtube as a very real learning source.

Kid has Linux, every programming lang available, Minecraft, ebooks, wikipedia, educational websites, etc. We live a block from the library. No shortage of quality learning materials basically. Perhaps ya'll've misread the list.

It's a preference for quality over quantity.

Everybody has their parenting preferences based on their experiences. I believe educated parents making an effort have favorable results. I can't imagine anyone with your lists of rules not raising intellectually stimulated and curious individuals either.

> Kid has Linux, every programming lang available, Minecraft, ebooks, wikipedia, educational websites, etc. We live a block from the library. No shortage of quality learning materials basically. Perhaps ya'll've misread the list.

Yes - because every kid wants to program purely for the fun of it. There's never an end goal in mind - they just learn functional programming for the fun of it! They all enjoy finding ways to chain esoteric commands together in a terminal.

There's a place for kids who aren't into that shit.

It's called "Outside".

What's your point? The programming languages reference was due to comments above that tech folks wouldn't have become who they are without the ability to program.

> Without gaming on Windows systems I would may never gotten involved in programming in the first place.

I'm just the opposite. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 -- with no games! As far as I was concerned, all it could do was BASIC. It did come with a helpful instruction guide to teach you the rudiments of programming.

I got later systems and games for them later on, but my experience with the VIC-20 put this bias in my head that computers were meant for programming, like pencils were meant for writing with. If it is difficult or impossible to program a digital device, I have trouble considering it a computer at all (even though it technically may be).

Me too. Here's a blast from the past I recently came across:

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...

Personally I had the most fun with the sentence generator, but I did find a game somewhere. Something like Missile Command. Had to type it in from a magazine I believe. It never worked quite right however. Had a few obvious bugs which I corrected, and a few I wasn't able to.

The manual is amazing from today's perspective. On the first few pages it has cartoons and teaches you how to use the shift key and such rudimentary things. A dozen pages later you are learning how to PEEK and POKE memory locations. It assumed you were intelligent. I miss that.

Recently I've read there was assembly language book and modem addon, that I never knew existed, a shame really.

I think I'll submit it.

This is a false premise. It looks at it from the perspective of what you would loose now. But if other things had happened in your life, that would be the you that is. There would be no comparison because the you who is now wouldn't be and never would have been to consider not being.

What percentage of these technologies were available when you were a kid? Chances are addictive nature of these engagement driven websites would have sucked up our curiosity and autodidactism to an extent that there wouldn’t be much time left for actually doing hands on experimentation, self-directing our research, coming to our own conclusions and experience inventiveness that come from boredom. I think this downside is more important in comparison to the information they make available.

All of those existed 9 years ago, there are adults today who grew up with them.

I don't think you can compare the addictiveness of sites today to those of a decade ago. The algorithms are very different. It should be unsurprising that in the last decade that they have gotten better at engineering ~~addiction~~engagement.

okay but have you ever played elf bowling? snood? chip’s challenge??

1. "Back in the day" people actually were forced to work on computers to get anything to work (much like boomers had to work on cars to have them run). Now for many kids it's a passive learning experience, they can just say "Siri give me Youtube" and then hit whatever recommendations it has. They don't even need to learn how to spell, let alone configure a modem.

2. More broadly, while children (and young adults) resent restrictions and rules, was Rousseau really right about nature being best? Rousseau was a guy who put his own children into a French orphanage (it's unknown whether any survived) rather than raise them himself, not sure if he's got a lot of real-world experience. And even cultures that have had time to get things right (unlike our rapidly developing society with lots of scary new risks that we aren't evolved to handle) generally seemed to have a lot of rules to avoid behaviour that was risky (either in the short term, or creating long-term bad habits).

3. The internet is a distributed race to create the most "engaging" content possible, powered by evolving AI. Letting kids play on it unrestricted these days is like letting them loose in a red light district with drug dealers on every corner giving them unlimited money and thinking it will end up well.

Thanks. Finally a voice of reason drowned by the cacophony of "I roamed the internet as a baby and look at me now!" bozos. Facebook, YouTube and whatever SnapCrap of the week is in vogue these days employ hordes of PhD's whose sole job is to ensure you get addicted to their pulp feed as much as humanly possible. Stories of internet addiction among kids involving serious sleep deprivation and complete social withdrawal are everywhere to be found. Yet the people who grew up with Geocities as the biggest site on the web think they understand the magnetic pull of the modern sites highly tuned for stickyness.

The internet didn't exist when I was a kid and I became a software engineer. "porn" on my computer consisted of a random sentence generator loaded from cassette tape on my Commodore and given profanity as input.

Turns out constant surveillance is not a necessity for learning.

>Turns out constant surveillance is not a necessity for learning.

Didn't you just make a post above this one about how much you surveil your households tech usage?

No, the problematic stuff is blocked automatically. There is no manual tracking done by me, that's the point.

Besides, you know I'm talking about government and corporate actors. Although I have assigned screen-time to myself. ;-)

Which restrictions? YouTube is about the only one that I could see having an impact. Having your information tracked doesn’t help you grow to any better than being anonymous.

My dad shut off the internet when he went to bed every night. At 7:00-8:00 PM. I presume so I would sleep? 'Videogames ruined your life' was what I heard constantly.

For a while, I had a timer click it back on and off. At some point I learned kali linux just enough to crack the neighbor's WiFi. There was also the time my BIOS was locked, but I found out there was a jumper circuit on the MB that reset it.

I'm now a very successful software engineer with a long history of devop experience. Shrug

Tech banned in my house:

- amazon alexa anything

- any smart speaker that uses persistent voice recognition (ok google etc)

- things like thermostats, security systems/cameras (ring doorbells, etc) that require a functioning WAN connection and cloud based services. anything you would find here: https://twitter.com/internetofshit?lang=en

- smart lightbulbs and other "internet of things" devices that require a connection to a cloud based service, anything of this category that I can't completely admin and control on my LAN.

- internet of things consumer devices that require the use of a manufacturer-proprietary android or ios app to set up and configure on the home wifi.

- consumer electronics devices that for some unknown reason require a proprietary shaped connector/charging cable. if it doesn't charge from microusb or usb-c I'm very unlikely to buy it. in an era when even my road bicycle front and rear lights charge from standard microusb this should be obvious.

- things that are obviously designed to be throwaway with no way to ever economically replace the battery. such as apple airpods. anything that's given a 1/10 or 2/10 repairability score by ifixit, such as the microsoft surface notebook/tablet that is entirely glued together. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+2+Teardown/121471

- cloud managed wifi APs and routers

- wifi mesh extenders and other things that create a CSMA half duplex RF hell, for network reliability and performance reasons. If I need an additional AP somewhere I can give it a 1000BaseT 802.3af/at wired connection back to the home core switch.

- Any ISP-provided all-in-one cablemodem/router/wifi device that I can't fully control. I have a DOCSIS3 modem that is a dumb layer 2 bridge with no routing or wifi functions, and my own router that I control.

- any of the microsoft cloud-managed login accounts for windows 10 PCs

- any consumer electronics/appliance device that has embedded android in it unlikely to receive operating system/updates after 2 or 3 years. For example fridges with a giant android tablet built into their door. Not going to spend $2000 on a fridge that might have a 10-15 year service lifespan but the operating system on the tablet will be woefully out of date and risky to put on the Internet after 5 years. This also means no "internet of things" washing machines or similar. Just a couple of weeks ago I saw fridges for sale with Android 7 on them.

- apple icloud

- zoom, due to its many prior egregious security vulnerabilities and the location of 80%+ of its developers

- anything else that is legally obligated to be backdoored by the ministry of state security (wechat, alipay, tiktok, etc)

> - anything else that is legally obligated to be backdoored by the ministry of state security (wechat, alipay, tiktok, etc)

Does that include everything by PRISM participants, or just foreign states?

From a purely pragmatic perspective as a citizen and resident of a five eyes country, I consider it a much lower threat to myself and my career, political life and financial life to have my data in the possession of the NSA than the MSS.

I've also previously held a security clearance and worked for a large defense contractor in a network engineering role, so I have some inside perspective on how the sausage is made.

It would not be unreasonable of me to assume that a Chinese domestic citizen could hold exactly the same positions but in the inverse. The main difference being that even if they desired to go all-in on cloud based computing services from a US based firm (google, icloud, azure/office365, fb messenger, paypal, etc) they would be prevented from effectively and reliably doing so by the great firewall.

> From a purely pragmatic perspective as a citizen and resident of a five eyes country, I consider it a much lower threat to myself and my career, political life and financial life to have my data in the possession of the NSA than the MSS.

Why is your information being in the hands of an agency of the government that has to break the constitution to have said information somehow a lower threat than a foreign government that has zero impact on your life?

It isn't in the hands of the former and is actively filtered and modified by the latter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klayman_v._Obama

The phone metadata collection in the first suit stopped. The alleged collection of Americans' data in the second suit doesn't actually occur, and since the plaintiffs were American, the plaintiffs did not have standing.

Did you mean to post a link that disputes your earlier claim?

Regarding the protection of one’s children, I am not comprehending why you would have such an extensive list but still allow facebook and instagram.

I didn't say I have children. It seems like a very extensive list because I went into a lot of detail, but it can be summed up as:

- no IOT devices I can't fully control, and which are known to stop functioning when there's a last mile residential ISP outage.

- no consumer-abusive electronics that I believe will be a waste of my money in the medium to long term

Sorry, I just assumed this was about children due to the nature of the article.

This makes me think of this book: https://www.amazon.com/OBD-Obsessive-Branding-Disorder-Illus...

The author outlined in part of it a move from appeals to ego to appeals to id for marketing, and how this is a more powerful approach since it appeals to sense of belonging.

You see that in the fathers commitment to particular brands, and how they define him.

My house rules (I have 3 kids):

- do whatever you want on your devices, but you break it - you fix it (your brothers might help you but it’s up to them);

- on school days, all internet ends at 10pm, but you are welcome to hack into my firewall;

- everything you post online is public and saved forever;

- use generated passwords and 1password for all passwords and all password recovery questions.

This is definitely the most reasonable response in this thread.

> - everything you post online is public and saved forever;

That’s a useful thing to know, but may be a bad thing to truly internalize:

“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”

How do you deal with phone data connections?

Also a past hardware engineer. Also I've never bought anything Apple. And also never bought anything Microsoft for about 20 years (unless the license came with a computer).

I'm not dogmatic about tech though, I just don't care for companies telling me what I can and cannot do.

Just a point... MP3 players existed before ipods... they were also incredibly cheap and easy to add Mp3's to, unlike Ipods with their Itunes. just sayin

Yeah, man. Screw the iPod. No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

I am a bit like the author's dad :). But sure, just like everyone we have our own reasons and it's hard to argue against personal preferences.

Some kids today are lucky was my initial thought, mine wouldn't get a phone-line after the film Wargames came out.

Though that era was also the days when a child could buy a knife, matches, all sorts of chemicals and even glue. Oh and chemistry sets with chemicals that would get you upon a terrorist watch-list today :(. Today's kids are with that all in mind - perhaps not as lucky in hindsight.

As someone who had a child later in life, I like to pretend that being a dad isn’t a fundamental part of my identity. That, mostly, I’m the same person I always was, except now I just happen to have a 19-month-old.

But then I read pieces like this and find myself deeply, almost inexplicably, moved and realize that no, I’m definitely a dad.

Wow - first dial-up in 1997-8.

I grew up on the Peninsula, Back when Silicon Valley's northern edge was pretty much the Oracle buildings on Redwood Shores and was just starting my path in the tech industry. One of my first jobs in tech was for Excite@Home in early/mid 1999 - so that was when I went broadband - and never looked back.

Maybe it's just the mood I'm in this morning, but this article just made me feel that the author's father had some serious mental health issues.

If anything, I would say it was more about that than the tech bans.

This reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnqAXuLZlaE

Sony's proprietary Memory Stick bugged me to the extent that I banned anything with this logo from my life. And of course no Apple.

When I was growing up, my parents adhered to Douglas Adams' rules of technology (and I think many still do today):

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I think that's a clever bit by Douglas Adams, and there's some truth to it in some contexts, but I hate to see it voted to the top on HN specifically.

The reason is that our industry right now doesn't make a secret about widespread, accepted ageism. And a common talking-point defense of it is "not learning new technologies".

I think it's clever because we all (at least those of us over 35) recognize this tendency in our own thinking, at least to some extent. It certainly doesn't mean we reject or are incapable of learning new technologies. It's more about introspection—realizing for instance that the fact I have little use for TikTok is more about me than it is about TikTok. Personally I don't feel it needs to have any ageist connotation.

It's not that simple. A lot of technology today is manipulating or is spying on its users.

Downvote for trashing your parents.

Observing that someone's behavior matches a pattern is not "trashing" them.

It's a good sound bite but I don't think it really reflects the reality of parenting. I know reality is that helicopter parents have taken over but I'm a light-touch parent. To me parents helicopter because they're bad at politics. When my daughter had trouble with boys or tried drugs I knew immediately because I've never given her something I couldn't compromise at an unnoticeable level. On the other hand, I've never used this to force her hand.

If I know my daughter is being bullied or having trouble with a boy I wait for her to come to me or I make unassuming statements that give her the opportunity to decide if she thinks she should open up to me. Obviously if she got into something like meth the situation would be different, but in the case of things like weed or vaping I focus on topics that let her feel in control of her life because the point of parenting is imo to teach our kids to handle themselves when we're gone. For example, when she went through a weed phase I focused on noticing her grades had been slipping while stressing that I wouldn't be worrying if that hadn't been the case. The result is that she still smokes weed sometimes with friends but she's made a point to bring her grades up because she thinks it'll curb my concerns and convince me to give her more agency (which I do). To her credit, she seems to genuinely be trying to balance her peer group against the pressures I push on her and so as long as I don't think she's on a path that's destructive in the long haul I try to respect her choices.

Focusing on things like social trends or teen-tech is the wrong angle imo because the truth is that money is freedom and money comes from carefully considered action. Kids make mistakes and get hurt in hard ways sometimes, I hate that but it's the world we live in. So as long as my kid is chasing money and grades I don't mind giving her the freedom to make mistakes and get hurt (even if I hate it).

I was set with a modifier of -50. On some days -150.

My parents banned toy guns.

Not all parents did. A couple of kids at school were really into them. I wonder how they turned out.

Probably just fine.

My mother hated toy guns; my father insisted we be allowed to play with Nerf. Friends of the family weren't allowed toy guns at all, but the mother finally gave up: one morning, she saw her sons chew toast into the shape of pistols and chase each other around the table shouting "pew! pew!"

Way too many typos to bother continuing to read this. Very confusing.

> Unsurprisingly, the first mantra my dad imposed on everyone was (in the voice of Faye Dunaway) No. Apple. Products. Ever!

As someone who has to maintain my extended family's fleet of outdated apple products. I can only daydream.

just be glad it's not windows XP

Skimmed the article, whats the list?

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