Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 278 posts

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

#131

Post by mixmastamyk »

formercoder wrote: post #89
mixmastamyk wrote: post #78

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…

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.

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.

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

#132

Post by searchableguy »

aaomidi wrote: post #104

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. Nothin…

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.

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

#133

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

meddlepal wrote: post #85
generalizations wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

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

#134

Post by httpsterio »

xwdv wrote: post #13
cowmix wrote: post #6

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 conso…

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

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.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #126
Shared404 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#137

Post by Izkata »

cowmix wrote: post #45
protomyth wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

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

#138

Post by elliekelly »

sukilot wrote: post #120
aaomidi wrote: post #104

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. Nothin…

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.

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

#139

Post by CyberRabbi »

aaomidi wrote: post #104

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. Nothin…

There are pedophiles online who specialize in preying on kids that have parents like you

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

#140

Post by narag »

aaomidi wrote: post #104

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. Nothin…

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