I normally roll my eyes at "wrong generation" stuff, but holy shit it seems like it would have been really fun to have grown up or even worked in the industry during the golden age.
As someone who was messing around with computers back then, I'm jealous of kids who are getting serious about this stuff now. I was lucky to have a computer at all to learn on. If I did anything remotely hacky, I would be warned about breaking an expensive and irreplaceable piece of equipment. There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources. If I didn't stumble upon HyperCard a…
> There was no help or documentation. No Internet to download the most basic of resources.
I remember my grandparents had internet before we did at home so I had to cycle to their house and print out documentation to bring home and continue working.
Allow me to preface this by saying that I am, in fact, a teen, and absolutely do not represent the majority of teenagers. This post is a generalization and a subjective rant that absolutely doesn't hold up in real life. >>>When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you. In my experience, although there may be some teena…
While I do agree that the article is written in an ill-conceived manner, I do believe that much of the discussion regarding it is fairly biased.The user base on hackernews is not comprised of people who are unfamiliar with development or "figuring things out themselves". The problem resides in how highschools are not staying current with the science curriculum. All of the highschools I've visited, in the past 4 years, both in Ireland and in the Netherlands have not offered any sort of computer science education, which I myself would believe to be fairly important in a modern education. Of course it shouldn't be a mandatory class, just like how the other sciences are not mandatory. It should simply be a subject which is available to be chosen. While we did have an "IT" class in Ireland, it was solely about teaching the kids about typewrite. This doesn't give the students a chance to learn about the world of Computer science in school. I study computer science now despite this, but many students never decide to study something irrelevant to school in their free time.
This encapsulates my coming of age in computing perfectly, to an eerie level of specificity. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Down to the Neopets tables and divs... I remember making a lot of in game currency for building out people's pages. I don't even remember any details about the core mechanics of the game but that part stuck with me.
All I remember is you had to take care of your animals pretty regularly. Coming home from vacation would be a mad dash to the computer to feed your starving virtual pets. Kind of traumatic, in hind sight.
this article has bad spelling. not to be a snob but i could do it better, as a non-english speaker. also i dont get why the youth always has to be represented in a bad way. i mean most uf us are kinda stupid, but not all of us.
Those level ups are pretty bad though. They take you from owning your data and devices to third parties having complete control.
Because we (as a society) failed to make those layers compatible with privacy and data ownership ?
Apple deserves a lot of blame imo. They could have shipped the iPhone with terminal and root access and opened the floodgates on some very unique ideas with the new technology, but instead forced the hacking community to be this kind of unsupported/illicit grey area that shrunk every time a jailbreak was patched.
You want to know who's fault this is? Yours, whoever wrote this article. It constantly complains that modern teens barely touch anything underneath the surface in tech but ironically completely smears over any of the underlying issues. Let's have a think... Do any of the mainstream tech publications cover low level programming? No. Are any low level computer skills taught in college or other mainstream programming co…
Hate to break it to you, but I’m in college learning C and assembly right now, don’t know how much lower level you can get.
You can build it all from diodes, relays and other electronics.
I unironically find green text on a black background really nice to read, it contrasts well without being fatiguing on the eyes like dark text on light background. not sure what the author is on about
I prefer beige/amber and black because I don't like too much color saturation and I feel it's a wee bit easier on the eyes. Like the default colors in CDE on Solaris.
turned my shell font color to a close approximate of the hn background beige and it's been great.
> What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. > Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better…
General experimentation does break tech quite often for adults. If they mess with settings, they are unable to later fix them. For example, they end up without internet working and have absolutely no way to figure out that proxy was set to something random. Or even something as simple as having all the fonts too small/too big and being unable to fix them back. Accidentally hiding toolbar you need. There are many ways…
That's not breaking it. If you can reinstall the OS, and it works afterwards, it's not broken.
You want to know who's fault this is? Yours, whoever wrote this article. It constantly complains that modern teens barely touch anything underneath the surface in tech but ironically completely smears over any of the underlying issues. Let's have a think... Do any of the mainstream tech publications cover low level programming? No. Are any low level computer skills taught in college or other mainstream programming co…
The author of the article seems to be a teen themselves (cf. the first paragraph and usage of 'they' and 'we').
'Mainstream tech pubs with low level programming?' Depends on what you count as low level programming. The tech publications I check out sure contain information about, for example, C and C++ developments.
> What happened to the millennials, though, is that about the time we started to hit that age of discovery, technology got a whole lot more featureful, and software developers did a very bad job of coaching users on how to use these features. > Adults didn't know how to use them, but kids knew a lot about them. And the conclusion that people mistakenly drew was that kids just fundamentally understood computers better…
General experimentation does break tech quite often for adults. If they mess with settings, they are unable to later fix them. For example, they end up without internet working and have absolutely no way to figure out that proxy was set to something random. Or even something as simple as having all the fonts too small/too big and being unable to fix them back. Accidentally hiding toolbar you need. There are many ways…
I think it used to be easier to break things, in any case. When I was a child, I used to delete things to make space for games. I quickly discovered the 'Windows' folder was taking a lot of space. I don't honestly remember if that was the move that really bricked the computer, but the computer was certainly bricked by the time I was done with it.