That is annoying that we have such a law. I’d recommend putting 1901-01-01 as your birthday. Companies don’t need to know your real birthday…I never give that out, it is just lawyer-proofing.
Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
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Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#22> The problem is that I use GitHub OAuth everywere Sorry you are learning the lesson about keeping all one's eggs in one basket the hard way. Don't single-source your identity authentication management and make backups for things important to you. If at all possible use adversarial services and treat accounts at services as ephemeral so that if one bans you, the other probably won't. There should probably be a 12 Fac…
In more generalized terms, OP what you need to do is called risk management analysis.
At your age, your parents typically do this for you but its never too early to start learning it. It applies to many aspects in life, in chess its called adversarial thinking, or prophylaxis.
To do this, basically, you start by having a goal, something you want to do or have done. Then you start by asking yourself what are the most likely risks or outcomes (what can happen), then you extend that to the uncommon but do happen risks, potentially the risks and the rare risks if the failure is particularly critical as well (i.e. safety-critical, or impacts your well-being).
Write them down, then determine what your requirements, dependencies, and what your points of failure are, how many points of failure do you have, is there a single point of failure where everything depends on a single thing, can that break?
Once you have it on paper, then reorganize to reduce, eliminate, mitigate, or remove those points of failure. Sometimes that means creating redundancy (more than two of a thing to combat a single point of failure) because that provides flexibility. Brittle systems break, flexible systems can cope or gracefully degrade if a leg of the system diagram is broken. This is called system resiliency in IT.
Unexpected things will happen, and if you've gamed out what those outcomes are ahead of time, and worked backwards, and have a plan for dealing with them (mitigating), or have removed the issue by investing more or doing something differently, you are well on your way because you prepared ahead of time, and if something does happen you don't have to deal with the emotional shock alongside trying to figure out what you are going to do because you've written your plan out (step-by-step) and have contingencies in place. You just need to pull out the instructions you made, and follow them, and hopefully you've written the instructions, and validated them ahead of time.
They should be written in a way that you can mindlessly follow them because you won't be nearly productive while you are in it, strong emotions have a way of clouding our thinking and sapping our productive efforts.
When you first start doing this, it takes practice, which is why I said write it out, it can be as simple as a series of circle nodes as long as you account for those previous items how you write it out doesn't matter.
This is used in many different places, and its particularly critical in IT (i.e. backups, business continuity, disaster recovery). Contingency planning (another name for a part of this), means you always have at least one fallback plan. If its not written/documented, its not a plan.
Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Waterluvian: I also think maxbond raised a valid point; it could be kind of you, if you could remove the name of the child, to not permanently attach its real name to the posts. He/she can edit the bio later, but he/she can't edit your post. I'm pretty sure this kid is going to be very successful, especially when you see how he is acting today and curious about learning.
I hear what you’re saying. But minors are people and if they’re allowed on here at all, they should be treated with respect and equality. I will gladly change the message if they ask me to or if a moderator determines that is the correct course of action. As someone who mentors young people in STEM, something I’ve found to be very important is to respect their agency. If this is a “this person is not competent enough…
I think that would be a needlessly bad outcome.
Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#24Hi Xiyue Zhang! A few things: - have you tried emailing support@github.com? They can help tell you what’s wrong or fix it for you. - it probably has nothing to do with Linux vs windows. - “Microsoft is bad” is a mindset that restricts many opportunities. Consider avoiding “black and white” ideas about things. Good luck!
Could we not attach their name to this so that it comes up when future employers search for it? It just seems unnecessary.
Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could we not attach their name to this so that it comes up when future employers search for it? It just seems unnecessary.
If I search for a job applicant's name and see them at 12 years of age trying to use github then that's totally a plus. What sort of idiot would think it a minus?
Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#26"You are marked as spam, and therefore cannot authorize a third party application.", they said. I am quite furious. I can't do anything.
Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I search for a job applicant's name and see them at 12 years of age trying to use github then that's totally a plus. What sort of idiot would think it a minus?
Feel free to replace this metanym with something you find disagreeable.
Fair enough.
Re: Tell HN: I am 12 and my GitHub account is flagged for no reason
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear what you’re saying. But minors are people and if they’re allowed on here at all, they should be treated with respect and equality. I will gladly change the message if they ask me to or if a moderator determines that is the correct course of action. As someone who mentors young people in STEM, something I’ve found to be very important is to respect their agency. If this is a “this person is not competent enough…
You realize if we did that, dang would have to ban this person? There's no guideline about age afaik, but HN is in the United States & is bound by COPPA. I think that would be a needlessly bad outcome.