Hacker News Reader

Comment by ww2 | Hacker News Reader

I feel sick to read this. The kids learned the world in a twisted way. I really think kids should know how transistor work before work on computer. Otherwise he took too much unreal things for granted.

View on HN

You really think it's feasible for a 2 year old to have an idea how a transistor works when all they want to do is watch videos of kitties and puppies on YouTube?

I have a feeling that parent's comment was intended as a joke.

starx/xmonad push this to a limit.It is just much more not feasible.

I believe ww2 was facetiously pointing out that the father in this piece chose to introduce his kids to an arbitrary point in the abstraction chain under the premise that anything higher is hiding too much of the implementation.

That said, while you could try and have your 2 year old build ENIAC out of from-scratch vacuum tubes I doubt you'll have much luck - I'm pretty surprised at the degree of success the author had with text terminals at that age, to be honest. As the father of a nearly-2-year-old this definitely has my gears turning...

And here I was playing with Legos as a tot.

I think it is likely a pretty solid idea to not teach kids how digital circuits and whatnot work, but rather to tell them. Make them aware that the knowledge of how they work is out there. Humans have a tendency to fill in gaps in their knowledge with superstition, though even the most basic of naturalistic frameworks should be sufficient to keep that tendency under control.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com