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Comment by _xzxj | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, when I was a kid whenever I broke something on the computer it was my responsibility to fix it. My parents told me I broke it, so I'm able to fix it. So this particular paragraph really actually resonated with me, because if it weren't for my parents going "Well, you broke it, if you don't fix it it's going to stay broken." I probably wouldn't be nearly as computer savvy as I am today, and I probably wouldn't have gotten into programming (ok, maybe I would have, but certainly not as young as I did)

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I get this, and it makes sense. But the combination of network connectivity and expensive closed-box devices means I'm not sure how to implement it.

The computer I grew up with was isolated. If I broke it, I had a broken computer. I could take my time fixing it. Nowadays, a computer is connected... to the other computers in the house, and the entire internet beyond. If my kid breaks his computer, he might get in all kinds of trouble. I can't let him play around and fix it if it breaks, for the same reasons I don't let him play around with something plugged in to the mains electricity as a way of learning about electronics.

I'm also not going to let him wire up the x-box, because I know that a busted HDMI connector that broke because I was letting my kid plug the thing in is unlikely to be covered y the warranty.

For the computer thing, that's pretty much exactly why Raspberry Pi was created, so there was a cheap open (relatively) computer that kids could play around with, and even if they somehow manage to break it, it's only like $30.

As for the XBox, couldn't you just supervise while your kid hooked it up? Hand him/her the parts, tell him/her to go to it and you'll answer questions and keep an eye on things so he/she doesn't break anything but otherwise leave him/her to figure it out.

Oh man this is so bad, you're worried about a HDMI connector but not worried about your kids illiteracy?

"If you think the cost of education is high, try the cost of ignorance, it is even higher!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQENHCkiMBU

I got to play games because I learned the magic of memmaker.exe, autoexec.bat, config.sys, and boot disks. And I was motivated to learn how to fix things back when they broke because I shared a PC with my dad, who used it for consulting work--and who did not take kindly to service outages.

Hi. Are you me? :)

That's exactly how I learned this stuff. The damn game wouldn't play, so I had to make a boot disk.

Then I learned to make a bootdisk with a menu system called from the autoexec.bat - cos I realized that several games had the same emm386 requirements. And now I program things.

Ahh good times... good times.

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