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Comment by nether | Hacker News Reader

Kids should be outside playing and interacting with other kids, not coding and gobbling candy.

I was one of those kids who stayed glued to a computer indoors and had all my friends online. Now I have a career and friends across the globe to thank for it. Not every person should follow a prescribed path.

How often do you socially interact with those global friends, in person? I'm all for learning awesome computer skills, but there is a time to be a child, and a time to be an adult. I wouldn't exchange growing up in the woods with BMX bikes, skateboards, and vine swings with the neighborhood kids. For sitting behind a computer all summer vacation, messaging people on the internet. I now have a career, and friends all over the world as well.

It's almost as if people can have very different upbringings and lifestyles and still do well in life.

In person? That's difficult for me since I'm not often able to travel to Finland, the UK, Egypt, etc. I interact with my online friends nearly daily, online. My point was that I would of never have met such diverse people early on had I not grown up around a computer + Internet. Nor would I have necessarily been able to get a job programming right out of high school that helped pay for my college education. I'm not claiming my path was superior in any way, only that there's more than one way through life.

Of course you would have, just like the rest of us have friends all over the world now. I respect your decisions, and I'm glad you're doing well however I'm not going to agree spending your youth indoors was a good choice. There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.

> There is no argument for what this type of lifestyle is doing to this current generation. They are basically incapable of socially interacting and dating.

I'm not downvoting you, but it seems this comes off as a sweeping generalization without any support. If you could at least back up your point with some basis for your statement (ie a reference to something), it would probably help to clarify what you're talking about.

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