The collaboration between my brother and I to get around these restrictions is one of the earliest memories I have of fruitful "hacking." At the time we both played (and I was obsessed with) a particular MUD, and a half hour per day was not enough playing time, so we wrote a very crude proxy server in VB6 over a week (7 hours between us) that hid in the system tray with a very "system" sounding process name and icon. That way we could connect to the MUD in secret from the laptop, hidden away in our bedroom. I think we later wrote a terrible, barely functional HTTP proxy too. We pulled a few more tricks like reverse engineering the screensaver password (it was stored as a hex string in the registry or something), which turned out to be the same as the BIOS password, before my parents caught onto what we were doing and kind of gave up (maybe they even saw it as a positive learning experience, who knows).

That summer introduced me to the idea that a computer is totally malleable in the hands of a determined and motivated person equipped with the right tools. I haven't looked back since.

As soon as I figured out the bios reset jumper existed on the mobo, it was game over. I would endure punishment to just go back and reset the bios password again in the middle of the night and hop on the computer. This was the ages 12-14 probably for me; the whole elegance in execution thing hadn't really sunk in yet.

At 15, my parents denied me every kind of interaction with computers except for talking with my girlfriend.

I created a MSN Messenger fake with various recorded videos for different days that replayed some of our text conversations. That gave me a lot of time to code my backdoors and others silly projects at age.

At one point my father became suspicious because I spent more time on others windows that on chat one, but the fake was reasonably credible.

A few years ago my father and me shared some laughs when I told him about two things: The one that I have just told and that the worm that made us reinstall the OS was me collecting the beautiful icons in "system32" folder.

My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring things even earlier. I think becoming a great {coder, thinker, leader, etc.} requires internalizing that at some level, it's okay to break the rules.

I eventually found my way onto IRC around age 12, where everyone posed as a 17-yr-old female from LA. I was thankfully super paranoid and fended off child molesters by pretending I was a 56-yr-old man from Texas. ;)

Also ironically, breaking things is not only half the fun it's maybe 75% of the learning.

But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc...

I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving them advice on how to use the web, find what they want etc... That sounds reasonable to me.

I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the net before I was 18 at home. My parents didn't care for it, only when I moved to my own studio did I get an internet subscription.

Before that I would use floppies (and later USB sticks) to download stuff from the high school library's computers and buying programming books. Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but on the web you're always one click away from a video of someone being burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaw.

The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself, by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised.

There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money, equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want.

(As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make living, acting things with just your thoughts.)

>violent videos

So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it.

>social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around

You might be shady for all I know, but it doesn't matter unless we meet in person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house are perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult.

As far as Facebook, the shady characters are exactly the same shady characters at school.

>Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is pretty important if you're going to target these media.

Sports can be pretty cheap too, playing soccer in a field is a popular activity with poor British youth.

Sports can be cheap but in extreme cases of (sub)urban sprawl, getting to a field - or the field where an organized game is happening - is pretty difficult without a car. Also you can't really play organized, coached, team sports without your parents signing liability waivers.

If not, I don't know how better off people in the UK can live with themselves. I would also be seriously concerned about my safety in those areas.

Web and iOS things are a dime a dozen, no offence. The only thing that matters is learning and having fun, and doing things your way. You can easily steer your learning towards marketable skills when the time comes.

I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home.

It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more generic problem solving, fixing a bit of tech, building with Lego. They're the core of hacking, that's what we need to stop labeling 'boy' in children's minds.

A hacker needs to be encouraged to tinker. They honestly don't need private web access to do that. Most of my time near computers was supervized, though I didn't think of it that way at the time.

And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang. I doubt any parent would allow their 12 yo access to that.

I did the same. My interest in programming actually started to decrease as my access to the internet increased. This was, however, in the mid-90s, when there weren't the big online communities that there are now.

Just because the internet wasn't accessible 30 years ago isn't a reason to restrict it in the future. The basic methods of learning are totally different today.. Librarys in financial woes. Wifi at Mcdonalds. Cell Phones for everyone. I know my local libraries don't have any of the information I enjoy reading about.

>>And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang.

And your child shouldn't be wanting to watch those videos.

Those are all there in the real world, too. You can't protect kids from anything harmful or scary, nor should you. Stumbling across a porn or horror site is probably more traumatizing for the adult, anyway. It's like people have forgotten what it's like to be a kid! You've been told your whole life what to do, so there is nothing more amazing than the freedom to be treated like everyone else on the internet.

Can we at least consider that there might be a psychological impact of the fact that in one afternoon you can see more horrors and more nudity than 99.999999% of the world would have seen in a lifetime two decades ago? That there is so incredibly much disturbing content and porn on the internet that the expected reaction is "meh", followed by moving on to yet more violence and porn? That there is so much porn that the craziest fetish you can imagine probably doesn't just exist online, but has an entire website dedicated to it?

It is not just a difference of quantity either. The internet trains you to just move on from things which would have been life-changing events had you witnessed them in the real world pre-1990. Do you really think seeing a picture of a mass grave on the internet is the same as seeing one in real life? Do you think even seeing one in real life now is the same as seeing one in real life before it was possible to just ask the internet for thousands of pictures of one?

In any fair comparison, the internet is absolutely nothing like real life.

In this decade, in the US? No, you are right. Otherwise? It's easy to find examples.

A sample of comments from this thread that I'm trying to argue against:

> That stuff was there during the BBS days as well.... You wrap your kids in cotton and stifle them throughout their childhoods with your helicopter parenting...

> Sure the internet is a HUGE medium, and it's a lot easier to get access to that material using the internet, but that content's been around for almost as long as we've had photography.

> When will people understand that people online is no different from people you meet in real life. Some are shady, some will cause trouble if you talk to them, and violence exist everywhere?... 24/7 supervising is not healthy.

> Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school? Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?

Whereas I say that the internet is not just the same old stuff we've always had, it does affect us, and not wanting your 10-year old to watch porn or beheadings is not the same as wanting to watch them 24/7 and force them to wear a wire to school.

In general, the reinforcement learning present in humans mean that neural systems that are activated more are more influential, easier to activate, etc.. Exposure to violent media unsurprisingly results in increased availability (basically, increased access speed) of violent cognitions and behaviors, and lowered emotional responses (which is not a good thing -- it is very good to be disgusted at violent images, this is indicative of a trait called empathy which can be very adaptive in even the modern world).

Humans are not designed, evolutionarily, to disbelieve things we see. In our evolutionary environment, everything we saw was real. Special effects did not exist. It is actually cognitively effortful to disbelieve -- making research participants complete distractor tasks while having them discriminate between information marked, explicitly, as true or false causes them to be less accurate at judging. When you see a video game character kill someone and experience reward, that is an observational learning experience that is associating positive valence with violent behaviors.

Within the scientific community there's virtually no disagreement on this topic. Denying it is in the same class as denying climate change.

There is definitely a causal link between violent media consumption and violent behavior. Violent media consumption is neither necessary nor sufficient for violent behavior, but it is causal.

(This also does not imply that violent media causes large violent outbursts -- heightened availability of aggressive behavior could manifest as simply as being more easily frustrated or having a slightly quicker temper. But very small effects build up over time, sometimes into large amounts of lost value.)

I suppose your rhetorical question could be read as a value statement, in that it's ethically subjective whether violent behaviors caused by violent media are "bad". But since you seem to care about drops in real-world violence, I'll assume that isn't the case.

People ask me all the time how I know what's safe online versus what's not, and the only thing I can say is experience. I've fallen for enough scams and clicked enough malicious links to know what they're going to look like.

Violent videos are bad, but so is bullying. Should we demand that parents supervise their kids at school to prevent bullying? What about all the shady people on the street, in the store, or on buses. Should a responsible parent prevent a child from ever leaving the home alone?

24/7 supervising is not healthy. Constant watching will cause worse psychological harm than any extremely violent video will do. Instead, talk to the child, and one might learn that they are not interesting to see people burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaws, and thus will close videos that has that kind of content.

Did this damage me? No, I'm fine. I gagged when I saw the images, then I scrolled down and looked at some more. Lasting effects? Well today as an adult, I smash spiders when I see them. Not a big deal.

(Granted, the same thing would have happened if I first saw them in my 20s, but at least I would have known what not to click.)

In this modern society, there are many adults who have never so much as seen a dead body (having never even gone to wakes). In previous generations, and in different societies, seeing dead bodies is common place and does not have the same power to disturb. Does it harm a child to desensitize them to the sight of a dead human body? I don't think so. Does it help? Probably. It opens them up to being able to experience a wider range things, even if it is just going to somebodies wake, being able to watch that optional-attendance autopsy video in highschool, or consider becoming a doctor.

Further, in particularly prudish societies people may not be desensitized to exposed human flesh. Is an Amish child going to be damaged by the sight of a bare ankle? Is an American child going to be damaged by the sight of a finnish sauna? I sincerely doubt it. On the other hand, which is going to have a more difficult time wearing speedos when they join the swim team?

Many humans in industrialized societies are unaccustomed to the sight of an animal being slaughtered and butchered. Are children that grow up in farming communities where they are desensitized to this somehow at a disadvantage when compared to children who grow up in urban communities and only know meat as "that stuff that comes from the store"?

Replace "motorcyclist missing a head" with "photos of Hiroshima or liberated nazi death camps" and I don't think anybody would think it particularly strange that disturbing images are available to view. Yeah, there is historic significance behind those examples, but that doesn't really come into play when considering the effects of disturbing images on people, does it?

But what's for sure is that the images of mass graves and emaciated bodies are stuck in my mind probably forever, and I don't think it's a bad thing as long as it came with proper guidance. It's not the same thing to see them in school with a proper explanation and to stumble upon them by randomly clicking around online on your own in your room.

The Hiroshima/Nazi photos were powerful because they were such a rare display of extreme violence. (At least, that's how I remember feeling when I first saw them.) Plus, their impact was lessened because they were grainy, old, and black and white. Would you be OK with kids today seeing a modern mass grave -- bodies hacked up, heads cut off, etc.? Me, I'd be wary.

I think it is good for kids to see photographs of modern atrocities and war crimes. I wouldn't want them to make the mistake of assuming that is something restricted to fiction and history.

I don't think the "physically ill" feeling is necessary to appreciate the severity or magnitude of those sort of images. In fact, I suspect those sort of feelings cloud the mind and prevent you from taking it all in. An academic appreciation for the horrors of reality is more important that a "gastrointestinal" appreciation.

I'm not going to defend the PTSD hypothesis in particular, or that it's important to be aware of past horrors. But there are real forms of trauma that only require seeing things, and it doesn't much matter whether it's in real life or a picture, only whether it's truly believed.

You're wrong. I know tumblr likes to use the word "trigger" for just about everything, but real diagnosed PTSD is predicated on events significantly more traumatizing than seeing some photographs. There's nothing life-threatening about an image, no matter how disturbing.

While I also find the use of "trigger warnings" rather strange, that usage has to do with triggering reactions that stem from actual PTSD, not that the images themselves can induce it. I know shooting victims can be troubled by fireworks, I don't doubt abuse victims can be troubled (or triggered) by images as well. I don't think that alone should be reason to censor everything we do, but that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either.

And yet, that's exactly what people are doing here.

>but that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either

Please, continue to lecture someone with diagnosed PTSD about being nice to people with PTSD.

>> (...) that usage has to do with triggering reactions that stem from actual PTSD, not that the images themselves can induce it.

>>> And yet, that's exactly what people are doing here.

And I agree that that is silly, was that unclear? Or are you saying that images cannot trigger reactions? I know that for me, looking at images from a time/place of trauma can take me back -- but luckily I've never encountered a trauma severe enough to result in PTSD.

Friends that have seem to be quite easily shocked by related images (say a picture of an abusing spouse) -- and while PTSD is treatable (and therefore no-one is doomed to avoid certain images forever) that doesn't mean that there aren't periods after an incident it might be painful (and maybe counter to recovery) to be faced with certain images?

> that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either

>> Please, continue to lecture someone with diagnosed PTSD about being nice to people with PTSD.

I didn't say be nice (although I think it is good to be nice to people), I said empathize.

Why exactly do you regret it?

I regret it because I feel it's shaped my personality, lessened my sense of empathy, and put a bunch of disgusting images in my head that I'll never be able to get rid of.

Use your words.

(This was in response to my comment getting downvotes.)

Personally, I much prefer linear discussions with hidden favorites, like Metafilter.

As I said, I also sometimes see these images in my head. I don't want to have anything to do with them, but now they're impossible to get rid of.

My son came to me when he was 8 and asked me what gangrene was, so the first thing we did was a Google image search. We talked about it, what it was, etc.

All too often we focus on content more than context but context is extremely important. Kids look to adults on how to react. A frightened parental figure is far more scary to a child than any image the child could ever see is.

Other things I don't allow in my home: ants, stray cats, earthworms, seagulls, termites, bears,... I operate with a whitelist when it comes to animals in my home.

I'm a hacker and "the net" didn't exist before I was 18.

My learning came from the books I bought, and the magazines I subscribed to. Somehow, without IRC or Google to help, I taught myself to program a computer, and wrote an entire game in assembly language (reinventing the concept of linking object files in the process) which I then sold. While I was in high school. I also designed and built an expansion board for my computer with only the IC technical manuals.

By college I was doing real video game consulting work.

I had one awesome friend who was also a good programmer, and we lived and breathed programming together. But beyond that, I was on my own.

It can happen without unfettered Internet access at 9 years old.

Of course, really this comes down to parenting philosophy more than anything else, but those are my 2¢.

I had a Z80 based ZX Spectrum (Sinclair) clone growing up. I had books on Z80 assembly, BASIC, tapes full of compilers (forth, C and pascal) but also tons of games.

The worst I could do in my room was catch the house on fire ;-) but anyway, does it makes sense to have a laptop today and be cut-off from the internet? Is it realistic? I don't know. I would certainly be "going out of your way" from the default setup most people assume today.

http://www.sibkray.ru/upload/blog/e4b/07.jpg (extremely NSFW)

I still consider it to be the most powerful image I've ever seen. It made me realize the absolute horror of war, in an instant. I would rather my child see this image than witness the cartoon violence of Call of Duty and then see military propaganda like the commercial below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkKF4ZcqW14

Kids can handle reality with the right guidance. I have been "desensitized" I suppose, but only in that I'm capable of seeing similar images without cringing. Hopefully that would extend to a situation in which someone was critically injured, I would be able to jump in and help them without hesitation or squeamishness over the blood/gore involved.

My kid if too small to go around the web yet, but I have the feeling there will be a point where as parents my wife and I will need to let him do what he wants without asking us anything, but we keep the ability to check the logs of everything he accessed with any device in the house

It means being able to have red flags triggered on specific things or be able to trace what happened on some social network 2 days ago. 20 years ago my parents didn't care much what I saw of who I talked to in a ny given day as long as I looked fine, but there is a huge gap between the content we could randomly access to physically, and the kind of content one can now stumble on online.

The hard part of course is at which point (8 years old ? 10 ?) will it be ok to let a kid with unlimited internet access and just try to guide him/her to dismiss corruptive infos and follow up on things the kid is not able to deal with alone.

Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school? Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?

If not, then what exactly justified reading texts/facebook messages/emails between friends?

>corruptive infos

What exactly is corruptive information?

Mostly porn and torture? I remember that when I was visiting my uncle, and he left me alone playing on his computer. I was poking around, until I found a folder containing video of a group of soldiers beheading a guy.

I didn't sleep well for a week.

I was left to roam the internet freely starting around age 10, saw my fair share of liveleak-style material, lost some sleep over it and grew up into what I like to believe to be a fairly well-adjusted adult who can only shake his head at the sort of things people in his generation experience irrationality-inducing terror over.

I've noticed that my son is the same way, so I tend to be very careful about what he sees. He's definitely more sheltered that some of his peers, but that's based on how he reacts. It's important to know your kids and know how much they can handle.

If a child is afraid of swimming, most teachers would find it reasonable to keep pushing and gradually acclimatise them to the notion rather than give up and say they are just not cut out for it; why would whatever reasoning that underlies this not apply in the case of "disturbing content"?

I'd image 'grooming' a kid would match the criteria of corrupting a kid's personality. Or suicide/'special' interests sites crafted to target people lacking enough discrimination to understand how they work. Honestly I think there are things that I don't know and don't really want to know about on the web.

In general I'd say information that is crafted in a way to bypass common safeguards and push someone to do or believe something that would usually be considered harmful and he/she doesn't agree with in principle.

> Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school?

The thing is, at school he will meet professional staff and other kids with roughly the same level of knowledge. In theory bad things could happen, but it's a very controlled environment. Actually teachers will inform parents of conflicts or marking events when it's serious enough, and kids are generally not good at lying or hiding things.

To try another analogy, letting a kid access internet without any check is similar to giving 1000$ in cash and just hoping for the best. Wonderful things can come of it, or the kid can go to a drug dealer. Personally I'd prefer to give him a credit card. If we get a phone call from VISA because of fraudulent transactions, at least we have a chance to do something for the kid.

There will be a time when just sitting down and talking to own's kid should be enough to avoid most of the very deep trouble. But until he/she matures enough to be able to have such discussions, parents need to compromise, with the two extreme of restricting the kid's freedom to such extent that he can't put him/herself in trouble, or let the kid free to do what he/she wants but keep an eye on everything's going on. I tend to err on the 'keep an eye' side until just trusting the kid becomes an option.

> Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?*

No, it's not, in any extent. As it's not healthy in general to intervene in a kid's conflicts. You'll intervene when there is a crisis and your kid will get critically hurt.

I think having a log of what a kid does online doesn't mean checking it every night word by word. I means having a place to look at when there is something going seriously wrong and you know or need to know if you have to intervene.

For everything less than that, it's business as usual, talking to your kid, just getting involve enough in his life to have a feel of how it's going and give useful advice.

This is very different from telling you what he talked about at lunch or what he read in the library.

I'd say that the bar for home schooling is set pretty low.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are ways of protecting your kids while still giving them the access that can seed a lifetime of curiosity.

While starting early is obviously a tremendous advantage, it's a shame that it's often discussed in such an exclusive way.

For reference, I am a female programmer who got a /relatively/ late start. I took my first cs class because I was embarrassed that I used my computer like an Internet Explorer box. Barely three years later, here I am knee-deep in code with a job offer from Google. Am I an exceptional hacker? No. Can I hold my own with the 'started-at-12' crowd? Pretty much.

It saddens me that more people don't feel empowered to dive into a new field. Many people, especially high-achieving students, suffer from the misconception that to succeed in various technical fields, you must specialize early. Whenever an outsider expresses any interest in programming or math, I encourage them to try it. "It's too late for me," and "I'm just not an X person," are common responses. These attitudes are caused in part by the way we STEM folks don't bother as much with non-children. You might tell a little kid about how cool programming is, but do you even attempt a real explanation of your work with a young adult? Your uncle? If so, gold star. If not, you are only contributing to the wall between the tech-savvy and general populace. It's never too late for someone to learn.

Too much stress on the early start just adds another barrier to entry for people like myself who lacked either the exposure or awareness to get started sooner.

If our goal is to make the tech universe more accessible, we shouldn't be perpetuating the idea that you need a certain background to participate or excel.

I do, constantly. Most people who haven't started by now do so because of lack of interest/motivation/dedication, though. I think people like you and me who come to programming late are definitely rather rare. I don't think the author was really being exclusionary--it's the case for most people.

It depends. There is no strict requirement onto starting at the early age. Yes, there is a correlation, but no strict requirement.

I knew someone, who had really started coding only at around 22, after she had finished a computer science / engineering degree. She was not a tinkerer/nerd, just a regular bright girl, her dad was not an engineer [was an architect]. Only she was really really bright, and she really put in some effort, and just in a few years she became really really good. I've since met many good hackers [having started at 4 and now some 30 years down the line :-/], and I still consider her to be one of the best overall, starting from the love to build things, to clean code and clear thinking, to teamwork...

You'll be excluded by 22 if you haven't started early. Excluded by whom? By nature. It was no accident that Zuck developed Facebook only after years of being a hacker, and that he also developed it while he was relatively young. By 22 you start to take on responsibilities which hinder your ability to learn as efficiently as possible. It's perhaps an unpopular opinion, but nevertheless it seems true from the evidence.

One thing that I think is pretty clear is that as we age, our thought processes change. This is something we don't like to talk bout because because it brings up spectres like age discrimination, but it is true.

The thing is, this isn't a neutral tradeoff. While purely abstract manipulation of data may be easier in one's twenties, solving real-world problems is much easier at the age of 40, not only because we understand the problems we are solving better but also because we understand problem solving better, and tend to be better at it.

Can someone with a liberal arts degree pick up coding on her spare time and make real, significant contributions to the world by so doing? Absolutely. Will she be interchangeable with someone who has been coding since age of 6? Probably not. But interchangeability is overrated and the ability to find our own problems to solve is not.

And I sure as hell don't think Zuck is "better" at tech or being a hacker than I am. Luckier, perhaps, but not better. I guess we'll see.

Also, I was married at 19, and a year later was a father. By 24, I had two children with a third shortly thereafter. So I definitely had the whole "lots of responsibility" thing dynamic, and while I do agree it slowed me down relative to what I could have done if I was single, it wasn't fatal and didn't stop me from learning, or becoming good at what I'm doing.

But again, I'm probably an outlier.

In other words, if we were willing to sacrifice our dependents to take more shots at the type of success which attracts people to YC, then we'd be in the same position as someone who was young. But we aren't willing, so we're not in that position.

Younger people have advantages entrepreneurially speaking. But we shouldn't mistake that for technical skill by redefining hacking as "being a technical startup founder."

I think what the author was saying with this is that you can't just throw them in a women's special ed program and expect them to become creative problem solvers in a few weeks if that wasn't (to at least some extent) their personality type to begin with.

Did I watch porn before I was of legal age? Yep, and I'm in a happy relationship with no sex problems. Break my computer often? Yep, I'd repair it every few days. I was also exposed to a variety of cultures, read about every operating system on Earth (toyed with emulated PDP-11s and VAXen and C64s for days and days) and wrote in every obscure language there is just because I was a kid and had enough time not to worry about whether spending a week to learn Forth was worth the hours I was putting into it.

I got my first unsupervised access to my grandparents' computer at age 7, but with no Internet. Then at age 10-11 some foundation for underprivileged kids gifted me my own computer with free unlimited dialup and a separate phone line. This was definitely a turning point in my life.

The fact that my single mother parent trusted me with my independence was a huge amplifier, too.

Nowadays we'd just give a scholarship to a rich PoC female.

Agreed! Those were about the ages I was when I learned to program and fell in love with computers. I became too sensitive to social pressures after that. (One memory I have is of being 13 and intentionally typing slowly in a class so that people wouldn't know that I was a fast typer, and therefore a computer nerd. The horror!) But that age was key to forming my passion for programming. Did I stumble upon "age-inappropriate" material? Of course, but so does any kid that rides a school bus.

Now programming is my job and my hobby. Turns out my parents are smarter then I gave em credit for at the time.

>This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.

Sure. What about ages 3 to 7? I had access to a computer for those years, but no bbs or internet access (partly it hardly existed, partly we didn't have a modem). You definetively need to parent (all) media access these days - but I generally think if you can't trust your 10 year old to mostly do the right thing you already have a problem... Then again I also think that if you aren't involved with what your (young-ish) children are doing -you're not being a very good parent..

[edit: my point is that today this is a decision that needs to be made up there with bed times, comming in at night/evening times, watchingb(which) movies.. and for non-technical parents that's a decision they'll need help makimg]

I'm curious, were you on a linux os? Did you break your software often?

It seems to me people who get on linux early might have an easier time, because they can so easily break their system and rebuild it. It seems like a kid who breaks a windows/ mac os might need to go to their parents to deal with license keys, which might cause the parents to say "no more hacking".

Also we were covered by AppleCare and I had no problem calling in for myself.

This was in the PPC days so no VMs for me. Eventually I got a used PC from my dad's office for like $45 which has probably been through 80 Linux reinstallations. WiFi was a nightmare though, and I eventually gave up on desktop linux. Still have like 4 DO boxes and have experimented endlessly on AWS.

Since it is impossible to autonomously do payments on the internet before age 18, my parents' willingness to let me use their credit card (and then settle accounts each month via allowance and occasionally debits from my savings) was also crucial. No other way I would have been able to play with web hosting or actually make any projects live.

I'm a high school teacher, and I teach some intro programming classes once in a while. I teach primarily low-income/ at-risk students, and this is one piece of the puzzle that keeps my students from gaining more real-world experience. It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack up a big bill if you think you know more than you do. So I can't really tell parents they should give their kids access to a credit card. Many parents probably don't even have a credit card.

That said, there is plenty of learning you can do by building your own server. This issue is not the main thing holding my students back, but I am aware that it will be an issue as soon as I start building stronger skills in my students.

Thank you for sharing your story!

That said, at his age I couldn't afford a VPS...I learned by setting up server daemons on my desktop and messing around with them.

Can you show this option available for, say, Chase? I hadn't heard of this reform, and I'm a bit skeptical it exists. (Although I'd be happy to be proven wrong.)

Thanks!

I've thought about that, but it really seems to be more expensive and less useful. DigitalOcean is $60/year and already has a server-grade internet connection. I could build a $500 server and host it illegally on my Road Runner connection (256kbps upstream) but that'd be inferior service for a lot more money.

>It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack up a big bill if you think you know more than you do.

This is certainly the case with AWS and a credit card, but on (for example) Linode or DigitalOcean it's pretty hard to "accidentally" spin up a server.

Cheap VPSes are so incredibly cheap though. It'd be great if e.g. middle and high schools would buy hosting for interested students. I doubt it would cost more than a couple grand a year.

Also I really wish there was something like a debit card that kids could buy (without ID verification and all that) at retail stores and spend online. I understand the money laundering concern, but it could be limited to low dollar amounts or something.

Bitcoin (:

I don't see why you'd need to contact parents about product keys. OEM Windows puts it on a sticker on the machine. Or you get a pirated version.

(The BBC Micro had a large friendly notice in the front of the manual that you couldn't break it just by typing, so you should feel free to experiment. One of the things that made it a great learning system.)

MS DOS here. And fdisk could do a lot of harm to a HDD. Especially when you don't understand English.

Kids do not need to be warned to stay off the computer. They need to be taught right from wrong, to do the right thing, and to respect others.

Same here. Emphasis on "vast quantities," "unsupervised," and "unfiltered." All three were required.

Probably about half the time as a 10-16 year old (after 16, my parents stopped caring about what I did or where I went at all) I was banned from computer use for various reasons. That didn't stop me though, I'd go to bed at 10pm, wake up at 2am, then use it until school.

Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.

(I was also banned from having my own email address, using IRC or any sort of chat program, having my own blog... Basically my parents were deathly afraid that I would talk to any of my peers, even though they were sending me to public school. Most of my computer bans were for violations of these rules. Circumventing enforcement of these various rules was a significant driving factor in my self-education)

>Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.

No they cannot. Children need sleep, perhaps more than adults. They need sleep for proper development and functioning. They also need more sleep than adults.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/sleep-children

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-08-12-kid...

http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/ajrccm.157.4.9704...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998....

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/80/5/664.short

As far as that sort of situation goes, my particular situation was not even particularly extreme. At least they did not make an attempt to censor what books I could read.

  > This point cannot be overstated.

It is interest what counts. As they say, one man can lead a horse to the river but even forty won't be able to make it drink.