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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

This feels more like a marketing campaign for Replit than an actual widespread problem.

The Tweet is from Paul Graham, an investor in Repl.it

The HN submission is from the founder of Repl.it

The only evidence I could find that this was happening at all is some Tweets, which I initially read to be tongue-in-cheek rather than serious problems.

Is this the case of a single IT admin blocking a website somewhere being blown up into a viral marketing campaign? This narrative that incompetent school admins are preventing brilliant students from learning how to code feels like it was written to trigger the HN crowd. How many people are now researching Repl.it because they read some Tweets that claimed it was being blocked by schools?

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I have five kids, and have had this kind of thing crop up multiple times. The most recent was when I was showing my youngest how to make web pages on his school issued Chromebook. They school had locked down everything, including the browser's developer tools. So, I called the administration, and they told me that they didn't want kids having access to programming tools because the kids could use them to cheat, access "secure" data and otherwise cause mischief.

I asked, so, what if my son wants to learn to code? The IT guy said, "use your own computer". This isn't incompetence. It's outright foolishness. He also went out of his way to remind me that unauthorized access was a criminal offense and the school would go after any student who "tried".

I pulled my son out of the school.

Out of genuine curiosity, would you quit a job if the equipment they gave you was locked down to meet enterprise requirements?

It's a school issued computer. I think it is more than reasonable for the school to lock down their own property as they see fit for security, and likely for liability, reasons.

I'm not saying kids shouldn't be able to learn programming, obviously they should be able to, but we have to stay in touch with reality.

IT standards should not block the mission of the organization or block a user from doing their job. If I were hired as a developer, and the "enterprise requirements" prevented me from doing my job to the best of my ability, I would find another job. The problem here is that administrators (IT or business) have lost sight of what it means to be an educational institution, and are denying students a very powerful chance to learn.

This is a bit hyperbolic.

A more apt analogy would be an enterprise blocking, for example, the Tor protocol on the laptop which was given to you to do graphic design. The laptops are given to students for school-related activities, and evidently learning the developer console of Chrome is not a school-related activity.

We're on the same page when it comes to the fact that students should have ample access to learn programming and other CS fields. The fact is that it is not currently in the curriculum, and no one is entitled to use the organizations laptop for things the organization says it doesn't want. This isn't even touching the aspect of liability the school's face for the actions taken on/with their property.

The fight should be to change the curriculum, not to get mad at the IT guy who is enforcing the administrations rules about using the organizations property for unrelated activities.

Perhaps there is a larger fight to fix the curriculum. In the mean time, the kids need to be somewhere that they can safely explore.

The only way your example would be equivalent is if the school was offering a class on programming, but then blocked access to the development tools required to complete the class.

You seem to be doing a bit of hand-waving at the end there trying to equate the school’s purpose with the entire idea of education and learning. That’s something that takes place on all of life, not just in school.

Well... if a school's purpose is not education... What is it?

The school's purpose is still education...

It's just not educating in the specific areas you want. I imagine your kids aren't learning quantum physics or fine dining etiquette either. That doesn't mean that the school is no longer educating.

"It's just not educating in the specific areas you want."

You are right. I do not want my children to learn whatever is being taught when the school's IT department is threatening children with the police for trying to learn to make a web page and fiddle with CSS and Javascript.

That is a separate issue, and one I wholeheartedly agree with. If that is what the IT department or administration said, I would also be upset. Saying that it is locked down for XYZ is one thing, adding in a line which threatens kids with police action for wanting to learn something is obviously out of bounds and inappropriate.

However, that is different than claiming that schools purpose is no longer education. It's conflating an entire system with the disappointing actions of a few people working within a school.

That's funny though, a good chunk of companies forces you on macbooks nowadays, which for devs working on ubuntu the entire life, does stop them from working to the best of their abilities.

I would quit if the corporate computer prevented me from doing my assigned job.

Programming is literally an option to sign up for, after which it is an assigned task on which you get graded.

You can’t tell me there is no way to let someone use an entirely web based programming environment. I understand locking down the machine, but then provide a VM.

If we were discussing a school which offered programming, I would agree.

We aren't. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Seems like a successful press hit: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Another HN commentator notes that the repl.it team is busy deleting things off their website in response.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210120075709/https://repl.it/t...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210119055116/https://repl.it/t...

The look of hurriedly sweeping things under the rug, and asking HN to sign petitions without any information...

I understand why they would do this, in light of the attention this is getting. Whether the attention itself is the purpose of the posts or not isn't really relevant to what gleaned from this.

Learning to evade restrictions is a powerful motivation for curious kids. How many kids are initially interested in figuring out how to play a browser-based game on their Chromebook, but in the process discover that learning programming is something that they enjoy and is accessible to them?

Some of my first "tech" experiences were learning to get around copy protection schemes for 90s-era software. That has directly lead me to the career I have today. These posts seem like the 2020 equivalent of learning just enough assembly to do a hex dump of an executable, find the serial number conditional, and invert the logic.

I went to a religious grade school and a public high school. I started coding and playing with Linux when I was around nine.

The answer, in my experience as a kid, is yes -- schools actively block all kinds of programming activity on school resources.

The reasons are pretty simple:

- Schools don't pay the best admins and much of their advanced capabilities come from vendors.

- The vendors often don't produce "secure" software like you and I (read: in the industry) would expect. A lot of this software has obvious holes. I have fond memories of exploiting the Novell boot process to mount Linux or implementing my own pass through proxy on my home server so I could browse the "real" web while at school. Another example, one of my best friends/colleagues/fellow students/future boss installed a Halo server on our 3D rendering server and you can bet I could join a game at any time from anywhere on the network.

- Schools don't implement zero trust (zero trust didn't even really exist back then, but I know this to be true to this day) and much of this is derivative of that simple fact.

- Software vendors are often limited by the OS. A lot of Novell's exploits were because of opaque API's provided by Windows that they didn't fully understand or that changed. This encourages further locking down of the environment.

So the problem is a lot more nuanced than Amjad and Paul make it seem, I suspect they know that are using this as a conversation starter. If that is indeed the case, I would prefer they just start this conversation rather than this ridiculous round about method that takes advantage of outrage and sensationalism.

Schools need help more than they need vague criticism.

It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp

> It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp

> Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects.

In this quote, which schools called your product a distraction? Why ask HN to sign a petition with no further information?

Look into vendors of "security software" for schools. I had to lawyer up at the beginning of the school year to get securely.com (edited) (government has no business deploying this kind of spyware against children) removed from my children's chrome accounts. I ended up having to pull my kids out of the school system as two of the three started to have mental health issues.

Awesome! This is a good lead. I think you meant securly.com. Will reach out.

If you want you can resubmit this to one of the filter systems for recategorization. https://archive.lightspeedsystems.com/SubmitDomain.php?Domai... https://archive.lightspeedsystems.com/SubmitDomain.php?Domai...

I was surprised to see that Amjad was the one to post this.

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