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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

> Since it is impossible to autonomously do payments on the internet before age 18, my parents' willingness to let me use their credit card

I'm a high school teacher, and I teach some intro programming classes once in a while. I teach primarily low-income/ at-risk students, and this is one piece of the puzzle that keeps my students from gaining more real-world experience. It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack up a big bill if you think you know more than you do. So I can't really tell parents they should give their kids access to a credit card. Many parents probably don't even have a credit card.

That said, there is plenty of learning you can do by building your own server. This issue is not the main thing holding my students back, but I am aware that it will be an issue as soon as I start building stronger skills in my students.

Thank you for sharing your story!

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Recent bank reforms in the US created a requirement for any institution offering any checking account to offer at least one checking account option with no fees and no overdraft protection. At my banker's suggestion, I opened this type of account for my son. He has a debit card, but no checks. When he runs out of money, the debit card gets rejected -- no debt and no overdraft fees are possible. It's a great tool for him to learn money management, doesn't cost me anything, and enables him to buy ebooks online and other stuff he's interested in with his own money.

That said, at his age I couldn't afford a VPS...I learned by setting up server daemons on my desktop and messing around with them.

>Recent bank reforms in the US created a requirement for any institution offering any checking account to offer at least one checking account option with no fees and no overdraft protection.

Can you show this option available for, say, Chase? I hadn't heard of this reform, and I'm a bit skeptical it exists. (Although I'd be happy to be proven wrong.)

This is a really good suggestion. If I could recommend an approach for students and parents where they would know their exact level of risk, ie $100 on a debit card, not connected to any other account, I wouldn't feel nearly as reluctant to help coach students into learning about web hosting.

Thanks!

>That said, there is plenty of learning you can do by building your own server.

I've thought about that, but it really seems to be more expensive and less useful. DigitalOcean is $60/year and already has a server-grade internet connection. I could build a $500 server and host it illegally on my Road Runner connection (256kbps upstream) but that'd be inferior service for a lot more money.

>It's a hard issue, too, because you can rack up a big bill if you think you know more than you do.

This is certainly the case with AWS and a credit card, but on (for example) Linode or DigitalOcean it's pretty hard to "accidentally" spin up a server.

Cheap VPSes are so incredibly cheap though. It'd be great if e.g. middle and high schools would buy hosting for interested students. I doubt it would cost more than a couple grand a year.

Also I really wish there was something like a debit card that kids could buy (without ID verification and all that) at retail stores and spend online. I understand the money laundering concern, but it could be limited to low dollar amounts or something.

In Canada we have this. You can even buy them as gift cards. http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/personal/productsservices/vi...

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