This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.

The largest enabling step for me was when I got my own laptop which I was free to break (software-wise) and free to take into my room so I could focus away from the distracting noises of the kitchen/living room.

Much of even the HN community would consider this irresponsible parenting. Probably even my parents wouldn't have let a daughter talk to strangers on IRC about something they don't understand. But how else is someone with nontechnical parents supposed to get started?

It's sooo much different when it's something you choose to do with your free time, rather than something half-assedly forced on you by parents or school curriculum. Especially to a kid.

The collaboration between my brother and I to get around these restrictions is one of the earliest memories I have of fruitful "hacking." At the time we both played (and I was obsessed with) a particular MUD, and a half hour per day was not enough playing time, so we wrote a very crude proxy server in VB6 over a week (7 hours between us) that hid in the system tray with a very "system" sounding process name and icon. That way we could connect to the MUD in secret from the laptop, hidden away in our bedroom. I think we later wrote a terrible, barely functional HTTP proxy too. We pulled a few more tricks like reverse engineering the screensaver password (it was stored as a hex string in the registry or something), which turned out to be the same as the BIOS password, before my parents caught onto what we were doing and kind of gave up (maybe they even saw it as a positive learning experience, who knows).

That summer introduced me to the idea that a computer is totally malleable in the hands of a determined and motivated person equipped with the right tools. I haven't looked back since.

As soon as I figured out the bios reset jumper existed on the mobo, it was game over. I would endure punishment to just go back and reset the bios password again in the middle of the night and hop on the computer. This was the ages 12-14 probably for me; the whole elegance in execution thing hadn't really sunk in yet.

At 15, my parents denied me every kind of interaction with computers except for talking with my girlfriend.

I created a MSN Messenger fake with various recorded videos for different days that replayed some of our text conversations. That gave me a lot of time to code my backdoors and others silly projects at age.

At one point my father became suspicious because I spent more time on others windows that on chat one, but the fake was reasonably credible.

A few years ago my father and me shared some laughs when I told him about two things: The one that I have just told and that the worm that made us reinstall the OS was me collecting the beautiful icons in "system32" folder.

My parents were nontechnical, but I was lucky enough to have my own computer and a good internet connection starting around 4th grade (8-9 yrs old). Feeling comfortable "breaking" my computer was another thing. I was deathly afraid of breaking things as a kid (unlike my younger brother), and I think it prevented me from coding and exploring things even earlier. I think becoming a great {coder, thinker, leader, etc.} requires internalizing that at some level, it's okay to break the rules.

I eventually found my way onto IRC around age 12, where everyone posed as a 17-yr-old female from LA. I was thankfully super paranoid and fended off child molesters by pretending I was a 56-yr-old man from Texas. ;)

Also ironically, breaking things is not only half the fun it's maybe 75% of the learning.

But with unlimited net access also comes extremely violent videos, social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around etc...

I really don't think it's responsible to let a 9-12 yo alone on the net in their room. Enabling them to access the net easily while still supervising what they do, giving them advice on how to use the web, find what they want etc... That sounds reasonable to me.

I may be a bit bias because while I consider myself a hacker I didn't have the net before I was 18 at home. My parents didn't care for it, only when I moved to my own studio did I get an internet subscription.

Before that I would use floppies (and later USB sticks) to download stuff from the high school library's computers and buying programming books. Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

Maybe I'm just a bit paranoid, but on the web you're always one click away from a video of someone being burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaw.

The draw of programming for me was that I do could do interesting work and create something all by myself, by the force of my own mind. I loved it largely because I could do it independently, without mommy and daddy steering. I would have lost interest quickly had it been supervised.

There aren't many other creative activities like that - hardware hacking requires 1) driving to stores to 2) buy parts 3) with money or 4) owning a credit card to order things online. Music requires 1) paying 2) an adult teacher and 3) driving you to lessons. Sports, again, requires money, equipment, and driving. As long as there's a computer and an internet connection, you can teach yourself to program all you want.

(As an aside, Cory Doctorow has a part in Little Brother where he talks about why programming is so amazing - there's really nowhere else where you can make living, acting things with just your thoughts.)

>violent videos

So what? Anyone who's slightly informed about the news sees violence all the time. It's part of living in this world. I watched Saddam Hussein hang on CNN.com and I'm not any different because of it.

>social networks with all kinds of shady types hanging around

You might be shady for all I know, but it doesn't matter unless we meet in person. Where your child is going and who he's letting into the house are perfectly legitimate things to supervise and even I wanted to walk into the arms of a predator, it would have been pretty difficult.

As far as Facebook, the shady characters are exactly the same shady characters at school.

>Didn't stop me from learning C and writing games on my TI calculator.

These were the dominant media for a while, but your CLI program in 2014 isn't very interesting to anyone else. Web and iOS applications are, and the web is pretty important if you're going to target these media.

I learnt programming on my school computers in lunch times and on a graphical calculator. I really didn't have much interest in programming at home.

It almost feels like you didn't read the article, the author talks about more generic problem solving, fixing a bit of tech, building with Lego. They're the core of hacking, that's what we need to stop labeling 'boy' in children's minds.

A hacker needs to be encouraged to tinker. They honestly don't need private web access to do that. Most of my time near computers was supervized, though I didn't think of it that way at the time.

And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang. I doubt any parent would allow their 12 yo access to that.

I did the same. My interest in programming actually started to decrease as my access to the internet increased. This was, however, in the mid-90s, when there weren't the big online communities that there are now.

Just because the internet wasn't accessible 30 years ago isn't a reason to restrict it in the future. The basic methods of learning are totally different today.. Librarys in financial woes. Wifi at Mcdonalds. Cell Phones for everyone. I know my local libraries don't have any of the information I enjoy reading about.

>>And there are a lot of people who are affected by watching people hang.

And your child shouldn't be wanting to watch those videos.

Sports can be pretty cheap too, playing soccer in a field is a popular activity with poor British youth.

Sports can be cheap but in extreme cases of (sub)urban sprawl, getting to a field - or the field where an organized game is happening - is pretty difficult without a car. Also you can't really play organized, coached, team sports without your parents signing liability waivers.

If not, I don't know how better off people in the UK can live with themselves. I would also be seriously concerned about my safety in those areas.

Web and iOS things are a dime a dozen, no offence. The only thing that matters is learning and having fun, and doing things your way. You can easily steer your learning towards marketable skills when the time comes.

Those are all there in the real world, too. You can't protect kids from anything harmful or scary, nor should you. Stumbling across a porn or horror site is probably more traumatizing for the adult, anyway. It's like people have forgotten what it's like to be a kid! You've been told your whole life what to do, so there is nothing more amazing than the freedom to be treated like everyone else on the internet.

Can we at least consider that there might be a psychological impact of the fact that in one afternoon you can see more horrors and more nudity than 99.999999% of the world would have seen in a lifetime two decades ago? That there is so incredibly much disturbing content and porn on the internet that the expected reaction is "meh", followed by moving on to yet more violence and porn? That there is so much porn that the craziest fetish you can imagine probably doesn't just exist online, but has an entire website dedicated to it?

It is not just a difference of quantity either. The internet trains you to just move on from things which would have been life-changing events had you witnessed them in the real world pre-1990. Do you really think seeing a picture of a mass grave on the internet is the same as seeing one in real life? Do you think even seeing one in real life now is the same as seeing one in real life before it was possible to just ask the internet for thousands of pictures of one?

In any fair comparison, the internet is absolutely nothing like real life.

In this decade, in the US? No, you are right. Otherwise? It's easy to find examples.

A sample of comments from this thread that I'm trying to argue against:

> That stuff was there during the BBS days as well.... You wrap your kids in cotton and stifle them throughout their childhoods with your helicopter parenting...

> Sure the internet is a HUGE medium, and it's a lot easier to get access to that material using the internet, but that content's been around for almost as long as we've had photography.

> When will people understand that people online is no different from people you meet in real life. Some are shady, some will cause trouble if you talk to them, and violence exist everywhere?... 24/7 supervising is not healthy.

> Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school? Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?

Whereas I say that the internet is not just the same old stuff we've always had, it does affect us, and not wanting your 10-year old to watch porn or beheadings is not the same as wanting to watch them 24/7 and force them to wear a wire to school.

In general, the reinforcement learning present in humans mean that neural systems that are activated more are more influential, easier to activate, etc.. Exposure to violent media unsurprisingly results in increased availability (basically, increased access speed) of violent cognitions and behaviors, and lowered emotional responses (which is not a good thing -- it is very good to be disgusted at violent images, this is indicative of a trait called empathy which can be very adaptive in even the modern world).

Humans are not designed, evolutionarily, to disbelieve things we see. In our evolutionary environment, everything we saw was real. Special effects did not exist. It is actually cognitively effortful to disbelieve -- making research participants complete distractor tasks while having them discriminate between information marked, explicitly, as true or false causes them to be less accurate at judging. When you see a video game character kill someone and experience reward, that is an observational learning experience that is associating positive valence with violent behaviors.

Within the scientific community there's virtually no disagreement on this topic. Denying it is in the same class as denying climate change.

There is definitely a causal link between violent media consumption and violent behavior. Violent media consumption is neither necessary nor sufficient for violent behavior, but it is causal.

(This also does not imply that violent media causes large violent outbursts -- heightened availability of aggressive behavior could manifest as simply as being more easily frustrated or having a slightly quicker temper. But very small effects build up over time, sometimes into large amounts of lost value.)

I suppose your rhetorical question could be read as a value statement, in that it's ethically subjective whether violent behaviors caused by violent media are "bad". But since you seem to care about drops in real-world violence, I'll assume that isn't the case.

People ask me all the time how I know what's safe online versus what's not, and the only thing I can say is experience. I've fallen for enough scams and clicked enough malicious links to know what they're going to look like.

Violent videos are bad, but so is bullying. Should we demand that parents supervise their kids at school to prevent bullying? What about all the shady people on the street, in the store, or on buses. Should a responsible parent prevent a child from ever leaving the home alone?

24/7 supervising is not healthy. Constant watching will cause worse psychological harm than any extremely violent video will do. Instead, talk to the child, and one might learn that they are not interesting to see people burned alive or decapitated with a chainsaws, and thus will close videos that has that kind of content.

Did this damage me? No, I'm fine. I gagged when I saw the images, then I scrolled down and looked at some more. Lasting effects? Well today as an adult, I smash spiders when I see them. Not a big deal.

(Granted, the same thing would have happened if I first saw them in my 20s, but at least I would have known what not to click.)

In this modern society, there are many adults who have never so much as seen a dead body (having never even gone to wakes). In previous generations, and in different societies, seeing dead bodies is common place and does not have the same power to disturb. Does it harm a child to desensitize them to the sight of a dead human body? I don't think so. Does it help? Probably. It opens them up to being able to experience a wider range things, even if it is just going to somebodies wake, being able to watch that optional-attendance autopsy video in highschool, or consider becoming a doctor.

Further, in particularly prudish societies people may not be desensitized to exposed human flesh. Is an Amish child going to be damaged by the sight of a bare ankle? Is an American child going to be damaged by the sight of a finnish sauna? I sincerely doubt it. On the other hand, which is going to have a more difficult time wearing speedos when they join the swim team?

Many humans in industrialized societies are unaccustomed to the sight of an animal being slaughtered and butchered. Are children that grow up in farming communities where they are desensitized to this somehow at a disadvantage when compared to children who grow up in urban communities and only know meat as "that stuff that comes from the store"?

Replace "motorcyclist missing a head" with "photos of Hiroshima or liberated nazi death camps" and I don't think anybody would think it particularly strange that disturbing images are available to view. Yeah, there is historic significance behind those examples, but that doesn't really come into play when considering the effects of disturbing images on people, does it?

But what's for sure is that the images of mass graves and emaciated bodies are stuck in my mind probably forever, and I don't think it's a bad thing as long as it came with proper guidance. It's not the same thing to see them in school with a proper explanation and to stumble upon them by randomly clicking around online on your own in your room.

The Hiroshima/Nazi photos were powerful because they were such a rare display of extreme violence. (At least, that's how I remember feeling when I first saw them.) Plus, their impact was lessened because they were grainy, old, and black and white. Would you be OK with kids today seeing a modern mass grave -- bodies hacked up, heads cut off, etc.? Me, I'd be wary.

I think it is good for kids to see photographs of modern atrocities and war crimes. I wouldn't want them to make the mistake of assuming that is something restricted to fiction and history.

I don't think the "physically ill" feeling is necessary to appreciate the severity or magnitude of those sort of images. In fact, I suspect those sort of feelings cloud the mind and prevent you from taking it all in. An academic appreciation for the horrors of reality is more important that a "gastrointestinal" appreciation.

I'm not going to defend the PTSD hypothesis in particular, or that it's important to be aware of past horrors. But there are real forms of trauma that only require seeing things, and it doesn't much matter whether it's in real life or a picture, only whether it's truly believed.

You're wrong. I know tumblr likes to use the word "trigger" for just about everything, but real diagnosed PTSD is predicated on events significantly more traumatizing than seeing some photographs. There's nothing life-threatening about an image, no matter how disturbing.

While I also find the use of "trigger warnings" rather strange, that usage has to do with triggering reactions that stem from actual PTSD, not that the images themselves can induce it. I know shooting victims can be troubled by fireworks, I don't doubt abuse victims can be troubled (or triggered) by images as well. I don't think that alone should be reason to censor everything we do, but that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either.

And yet, that's exactly what people are doing here.

>but that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either

Please, continue to lecture someone with diagnosed PTSD about being nice to people with PTSD.

>> (...) that usage has to do with triggering reactions that stem from actual PTSD, not that the images themselves can induce it.

>>> And yet, that's exactly what people are doing here.

And I agree that that is silly, was that unclear? Or are you saying that images cannot trigger reactions? I know that for me, looking at images from a time/place of trauma can take me back -- but luckily I've never encountered a trauma severe enough to result in PTSD.

Friends that have seem to be quite easily shocked by related images (say a picture of an abusing spouse) -- and while PTSD is treatable (and therefore no-one is doomed to avoid certain images forever) that doesn't mean that there aren't periods after an incident it might be painful (and maybe counter to recovery) to be faced with certain images?

> that doesn't mean we can't try to empathize with those that have experienced terrible things either

>> Please, continue to lecture someone with diagnosed PTSD about being nice to people with PTSD.

I didn't say be nice (although I think it is good to be nice to people), I said empathize.

Why exactly do you regret it?

I regret it because I feel it's shaped my personality, lessened my sense of empathy, and put a bunch of disgusting images in my head that I'll never be able to get rid of.

Use your words.

(This was in response to my comment getting downvotes.)

Personally, I much prefer linear discussions with hidden favorites, like Metafilter.

As I said, I also sometimes see these images in my head. I don't want to have anything to do with them, but now they're impossible to get rid of.

My son came to me when he was 8 and asked me what gangrene was, so the first thing we did was a Google image search. We talked about it, what it was, etc.

All too often we focus on content more than context but context is extremely important. Kids look to adults on how to react. A frightened parental figure is far more scary to a child than any image the child could ever see is.

Other things I don't allow in my home: ants, stray cats, earthworms, seagulls, termites, bears,... I operate with a whitelist when it comes to animals in my home.

I'm a hacker and "the net" didn't exist before I was 18.

My learning came from the books I bought, and the magazines I subscribed to. Somehow, without IRC or Google to help, I taught myself to program a computer, and wrote an entire game in assembly language (reinventing the concept of linking object files in the process) which I then sold. While I was in high school. I also designed and built an expansion board for my computer with only the IC technical manuals.

By college I was doing real video game consulting work.

I had one awesome friend who was also a good programmer, and we lived and breathed programming together. But beyond that, I was on my own.

It can happen without unfettered Internet access at 9 years old.

Of course, really this comes down to parenting philosophy more than anything else, but those are my 2¢.

I had a Z80 based ZX Spectrum (Sinclair) clone growing up. I had books on Z80 assembly, BASIC, tapes full of compilers (forth, C and pascal) but also tons of games.

The worst I could do in my room was catch the house on fire ;-) but anyway, does it makes sense to have a laptop today and be cut-off from the internet? Is it realistic? I don't know. I would certainly be "going out of your way" from the default setup most people assume today.

http://www.sibkray.ru/upload/blog/e4b/07.jpg (extremely NSFW)

I still consider it to be the most powerful image I've ever seen. It made me realize the absolute horror of war, in an instant. I would rather my child see this image than witness the cartoon violence of Call of Duty and then see military propaganda like the commercial below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkKF4ZcqW14

Kids can handle reality with the right guidance. I have been "desensitized" I suppose, but only in that I'm capable of seeing similar images without cringing. Hopefully that would extend to a situation in which someone was critically injured, I would be able to jump in and help them without hesitation or squeamishness over the blood/gore involved.

My kid if too small to go around the web yet, but I have the feeling there will be a point where as parents my wife and I will need to let him do what he wants without asking us anything, but we keep the ability to check the logs of everything he accessed with any device in the house

It means being able to have red flags triggered on specific things or be able to trace what happened on some social network 2 days ago. 20 years ago my parents didn't care much what I saw of who I talked to in a ny given day as long as I looked fine, but there is a huge gap between the content we could randomly access to physically, and the kind of content one can now stumble on online.

The hard part of course is at which point (8 years old ? 10 ?) will it be ok to let a kid with unlimited internet access and just try to guide him/her to dismiss corruptive infos and follow up on things the kid is not able to deal with alone.

Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school? Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?

If not, then what exactly justified reading texts/facebook messages/emails between friends?

>corruptive infos

What exactly is corruptive information?

Mostly porn and torture? I remember that when I was visiting my uncle, and he left me alone playing on his computer. I was poking around, until I found a folder containing video of a group of soldiers beheading a guy.

I didn't sleep well for a week.

I was left to roam the internet freely starting around age 10, saw my fair share of liveleak-style material, lost some sleep over it and grew up into what I like to believe to be a fairly well-adjusted adult who can only shake his head at the sort of things people in his generation experience irrationality-inducing terror over.

I've noticed that my son is the same way, so I tend to be very careful about what he sees. He's definitely more sheltered that some of his peers, but that's based on how he reacts. It's important to know your kids and know how much they can handle.

If a child is afraid of swimming, most teachers would find it reasonable to keep pushing and gradually acclimatise them to the notion rather than give up and say they are just not cut out for it; why would whatever reasoning that underlies this not apply in the case of "disturbing content"?

I'd image 'grooming' a kid would match the criteria of corrupting a kid's personality. Or suicide/'special' interests sites crafted to target people lacking enough discrimination to understand how they work. Honestly I think there are things that I don't know and don't really want to know about on the web.

In general I'd say information that is crafted in a way to bypass common safeguards and push someone to do or believe something that would usually be considered harmful and he/she doesn't agree with in principle.

> Is it okay for you to force your child to wear a wire to school?

The thing is, at school he will meet professional staff and other kids with roughly the same level of knowledge. In theory bad things could happen, but it's a very controlled environment. Actually teachers will inform parents of conflicts or marking events when it's serious enough, and kids are generally not good at lying or hiding things.

To try another analogy, letting a kid access internet without any check is similar to giving 1000$ in cash and just hoping for the best. Wonderful things can come of it, or the kid can go to a drug dealer. Personally I'd prefer to give him a credit card. If we get a phone call from VISA because of fraudulent transactions, at least we have a chance to do something for the kid.

There will be a time when just sitting down and talking to own's kid should be enough to avoid most of the very deep trouble. But until he/she matures enough to be able to have such discussions, parents need to compromise, with the two extreme of restricting the kid's freedom to such extent that he can't put him/herself in trouble, or let the kid free to do what he/she wants but keep an eye on everything's going on. I tend to err on the 'keep an eye' side until just trusting the kid becomes an option.

> Is it healthy to use the tapes to intervene in her conflicts?*

No, it's not, in any extent. As it's not healthy in general to intervene in a kid's conflicts. You'll intervene when there is a crisis and your kid will get critically hurt.

I think having a log of what a kid does online doesn't mean checking it every night word by word. I means having a place to look at when there is something going seriously wrong and you know or need to know if you have to intervene.

For everything less than that, it's business as usual, talking to your kid, just getting involve enough in his life to have a feel of how it's going and give useful advice.

This is very different from telling you what he talked about at lunch or what he read in the library.

I'd say that the bar for home schooling is set pretty low.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are ways of protecting your kids while still giving them the access that can seed a lifetime of curiosity.

While starting early is obviously a tremendous advantage, it's a shame that it's often discussed in such an exclusive way.

For reference, I am a female programmer who got a /relatively/ late start. I took my first cs class because I was embarrassed that I used my computer like an Internet Explorer box. Barely three years later, here I am knee-deep in code with a job offer from Google. Am I an exceptional hacker? No. Can I hold my own with the 'started-at-12' crowd? Pretty much.

It saddens me that more people don't feel empowered to dive into a new field. Many people, especially high-achieving students, suffer from the misconception that to succeed in various technical fields, you must specialize early. Whenever an outsider expresses any interest in programming or math, I encourage them to try it. "It's too late for me," and "I'm just not an X person," are common responses. These attitudes are caused in part by the way we STEM folks don't bother as much with non-children. You might tell a little kid about how cool programming is, but do you even attempt a real explanation of your work with a young adult? Your uncle? If so, gold star. If not, you are only contributing to the wall between the tech-savvy and general populace. It's never too late for someone to learn.

Too much stress on the early start just adds another barrier to entry for people like myself who lacked either the exposure or awareness to get started sooner.

If our goal is to make the tech universe more accessible, we shouldn't be perpetuating the idea that you need a certain background to participate or excel.

I do, constantly. Most people who haven't started by now do so because of lack of interest/motivation/dedication, though. I think people like you and me who come to programming late are definitely rather rare. I don't think the author was really being exclusionary--it's the case for most people.

It depends. There is no strict requirement onto starting at the early age. Yes, there is a correlation, but no strict requirement.

I knew someone, who had really started coding only at around 22, after she had finished a computer science / engineering degree. She was not a tinkerer/nerd, just a regular bright girl, her dad was not an engineer [was an architect]. Only she was really really bright, and she really put in some effort, and just in a few years she became really really good. I've since met many good hackers [having started at 4 and now some 30 years down the line :-/], and I still consider her to be one of the best overall, starting from the love to build things, to clean code and clear thinking, to teamwork...

You'll be excluded by 22 if you haven't started early. Excluded by whom? By nature. It was no accident that Zuck developed Facebook only after years of being a hacker, and that he also developed it while he was relatively young. By 22 you start to take on responsibilities which hinder your ability to learn as efficiently as possible. It's perhaps an unpopular opinion, but nevertheless it seems true from the evidence.

One thing that I think is pretty clear is that as we age, our thought processes change. This is something we don't like to talk bout because because it brings up spectres like age discrimination, but it is true.

The thing is, this isn't a neutral tradeoff. While purely abstract manipulation of data may be easier in one's twenties, solving real-world problems is much easier at the age of 40, not only because we understand the problems we are solving better but also because we understand problem solving better, and tend to be better at it.

Can someone with a liberal arts degree pick up coding on her spare time and make real, significant contributions to the world by so doing? Absolutely. Will she be interchangeable with someone who has been coding since age of 6? Probably not. But interchangeability is overrated and the ability to find our own problems to solve is not.

And I sure as hell don't think Zuck is "better" at tech or being a hacker than I am. Luckier, perhaps, but not better. I guess we'll see.

Also, I was married at 19, and a year later was a father. By 24, I had two children with a third shortly thereafter. So I definitely had the whole "lots of responsibility" thing dynamic, and while I do agree it slowed me down relative to what I could have done if I was single, it wasn't fatal and didn't stop me from learning, or becoming good at what I'm doing.

But again, I'm probably an outlier.

In other words, if we were willing to sacrifice our dependents to take more shots at the type of success which attracts people to YC, then we'd be in the same position as someone who was young. But we aren't willing, so we're not in that position.

Younger people have advantages entrepreneurially speaking. But we shouldn't mistake that for technical skill by redefining hacking as "being a technical startup founder."

I think what the author was saying with this is that you can't just throw them in a women's special ed program and expect them to become creative problem solvers in a few weeks if that wasn't (to at least some extent) their personality type to begin with.

Did I watch porn before I was of legal age? Yep, and I'm in a happy relationship with no sex problems. Break my computer often? Yep, I'd repair it every few days. I was also exposed to a variety of cultures, read about every operating system on Earth (toyed with emulated PDP-11s and VAXen and C64s for days and days) and wrote in every obscure language there is just because I was a kid and had enough time not to worry about whether spending a week to learn Forth was worth the hours I was putting into it.

I got my first unsupervised access to my grandparents' computer at age 7, but with no Internet. Then at age 10-11 some foundation for underprivileged kids gifted me my own computer with free unlimited dialup and a separate phone line. This was definitely a turning point in my life.

The fact that my single mother parent trusted me with my independence was a huge amplifier, too.

Nowadays we'd just give a scholarship to a rich PoC female.

Agreed! Those were about the ages I was when I learned to program and fell in love with computers. I became too sensitive to social pressures after that. (One memory I have is of being 13 and intentionally typing slowly in a class so that people wouldn't know that I was a fast typer, and therefore a computer nerd. The horror!) But that age was key to forming my passion for programming. Did I stumble upon "age-inappropriate" material? Of course, but so does any kid that rides a school bus.

Now programming is my job and my hobby. Turns out my parents are smarter then I gave em credit for at the time.

>This point cannot be overstated. I'd never have been a hacker without vast quantities of unsupervised, unfiltered internet time around age 9-12.

Sure. What about ages 3 to 7? I had access to a computer for those years, but no bbs or internet access (partly it hardly existed, partly we didn't have a modem). You definetively need to parent (all) media access these days - but I generally think if you can't trust your 10 year old to mostly do the right thing you already have a problem... Then again I also think that if you aren't involved with what your (young-ish) children are doing -you're not being a very good parent..

[edit: my point is that today this is a decision that needs to be made up there with bed times, comming in at night/evening times, watchingb(which) movies.. and for non-technical parents that's a decision they'll need help makimg]

I'm curious, were you on a linux os? Did you break your software often?

It seems to me people who get on linux early might have an easier time, because they can so easily break their system and rebuild it. It seems like a kid who breaks a windows/ mac os might need to go to their parents to deal with license keys, which might cause the parents to say "no more hacking".

Also we were covered by AppleCare and I had no problem calling in for myself.

This was in the PPC days so no VMs for me. Eventually I got a used PC from my dad's office for like $45 which has probably been through 80 Linux reinstallations. WiFi was a nightmare though, and I eventually gave up on desktop linux. Still have like 4 DO boxes and have experimented endlessly on AWS.

Since it is impossible to autonomously do payments on the internet before age 18, my parents' willingness to let me use their credit card (and then settle accounts each month via allowance and occasionally debits from my savings) was also crucial. No other way I would have been able to play with web hosting or actually make any projects live.

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!

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.

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.)

Thanks!

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.

Bitcoin (:

I don't see why you'd need to contact parents about product keys. OEM Windows puts it on a sticker on the machine. Or you get a pirated version.

(The BBC Micro had a large friendly notice in the front of the manual that you couldn't break it just by typing, so you should feel free to experiment. One of the things that made it a great learning system.)

MS DOS here. And fdisk could do a lot of harm to a HDD. Especially when you don't understand English.

Kids do not need to be warned to stay off the computer. They need to be taught right from wrong, to do the right thing, and to respect others.

Same here. Emphasis on "vast quantities," "unsupervised," and "unfiltered." All three were required.

Probably about half the time as a 10-16 year old (after 16, my parents stopped caring about what I did or where I went at all) I was banned from computer use for various reasons. That didn't stop me though, I'd go to bed at 10pm, wake up at 2am, then use it until school.

Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.

(I was also banned from having my own email address, using IRC or any sort of chat program, having my own blog... Basically my parents were deathly afraid that I would talk to any of my peers, even though they were sending me to public school. Most of my computer bans were for violations of these rules. Circumventing enforcement of these various rules was a significant driving factor in my self-education)

>Was four hours of sleep every night good for me? Probably not, but kids can get away with that sort of thing.

No they cannot. Children need sleep, perhaps more than adults. They need sleep for proper development and functioning. They also need more sleep than adults.

http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/sleep-children

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-08-12-kid...

http://www.atsjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1164/ajrccm.157.4.9704...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1998....

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/80/5/664.short

As far as that sort of situation goes, my particular situation was not even particularly extreme. At least they did not make an attempt to censor what books I could read.

  > This point cannot be overstated.

It is interest what counts. As they say, one man can lead a horse to the river but even forty won't be able to make it drink.

>Dump her in a situation that operates on different social scripts than she's accustomed to, full of people talking about a subject she doesn't yet understand. Then tell her the community is hostile toward women and therefore doesn't have enough of them, all while showing her off like a prize poodle so you can feel good about recruiting a females

This explains, better than I ever could, why I've always felt weird about all of the attention on getting women into programming.

As a kid, I loved programming. When I became a teenager, I got wind that it wasn't something "cool" and got spooked. For someone as insecure as I was, having a hobby that I couldn't really "explain" to normal people was embarrassing. Probably if I had known a single other kid/girl that liked computers like I did, I might have continued on that path and not been distracted for about 10 years.

When I was a teenager, coding or being technical in general wasn't cool either, and most of the people who were involved were or at least seemed insecure and embarrassed. Perhaps the climate in middle / high schools has changed since, but if not, we could also ask: what makes many boys persist in their uncool, embarrassing, low-ish status activity?

http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks...

I'd say the problem is less that being technologically adept is low-status, and more that the problem is that being technologically adept/geeky/mathematical/mechanical is considered unfeminine.

I mean sure, being a lawyer is a high-status career and you will likely have people in your personal life constantly asking for your advice or favours, but car mechanics experience the same thing. Being a car mechanic is respected in a way, and people certainly understand how those skills are valuable (and can think of many ways that you might use those skills for their own advantage), but it's not "high-status".

Actually, I think I'd put car mechanic as higher status than programmer. The money is not nearly as good, but on the other hand nobody is going to assume that you are a weirdo, until proven otherwise.

It's interesting to note, though, that it is only considered unfeminine by other women. Guys just think it's badass when they find a girl into the same stuff they're into.

This is only relevant for the very small fraction of the population that are "into" those things.

Guys are more tolerant of low social status the way that ML algorithms ignore noise: they're hoping that those currently at the top of the pack are at a local maximum, and they're willing to tolerate being low-status in exchange for the hope of finding a greater maximum at some distance. (http://calculatedbravery.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/what-mascu...)

Let's not bring pop-evo-psych into this unless you're going to post a pile of references to white papers backing up the assertions.

A link to a pickup artist's blog does not increase the quality of your statements.

And that is my blog, and I am certainly not a pickup artist.

There's also less pressure on men to settle down early. A man can more easily think "fuck it, I won't start dating until I'm 25 by which time I'll be successful, drive a nice car and be an eligible bachelor".

With the whole biological clock issue women are often hoping to be married and starting a family by that age or risk being seen as the archetypal "cat lady".

Mean age at first birth: 25.6

IMO this is probably the biggest reason for the under-representation of women as CEOs/engineers/etc. You don't have to make a lot of money as a female to attract a mate, but you're sure as hell going to have a hard time with that if you're a male.

I've wondered this myself! Perhaps archetypes of nerdy boys that grow up to be successful and respected adults are/were more readily available? I still think of a stereotypical "nerdy girl" as being really into literature or history, as opposed to building computers.

Because we know what we want, and aren't afraid to be alone.

Perhaps the fact that, social outcast or not, such boys are nowhere near alone? They can be social pariahs together with many other boys that enjoy the same things.

On the other hand, "foo for women" events are high-pressure environments that put a spotlight on poor newbies. It's a way of saying "You aren't just here to learn something, you're representing women, you're here to prove something for all of us". It implies that the mainstream groups aren't safe or okay places for women to learn. Additionally, they prevent those newbie women from learning the social scripts and memes that will help them fit in with mainstream hacker culture (or even programmer culture), so they get to be total outsiders as juniors instead of as freshmen, which really sucks.

I sincerely doubt it, but feel free to prove me wrong.

The team of psychologists examined all available research on single-sex education published within the past seven years, which included 184 studies comprising 1.6 million students from kindergarten to 12th grade in 21 different countries, and found no evidence to support proponents’ claims.

In their study, which appeared Monday in Psychological Bulletin, a journal published by the American Psychological Association, the psychologists said that students who attended single-sex schools weren’t any better off than peers who attended coed programs in terms of self-esteem or performance in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects."

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/2/5/study-single-...

I've never really cared, whether I'm at the top or bottom of my game. Biological sex of the people around me is irrelevant--unless I'm going to a gay bar.

http://www.atariarchives.org/bcc1/showpage.php?page=61

[The Best of Creative Computing Volume 1 (published 1976): Learning About Smalltalk, Marian Goldeen]

"My name is Marian Goldeen. I'm an eighth grade student at Jordan Junior High School in Palo Alto, California, and I would like to tell you about how I got started working with computers at Xerox and the class I taught.

It all started in December, 1973 when I was in the seventh grade (...)"

Couple things we've learned. First, girls default to pair programming. They cluster, they work together, when they have a problem, they solve it for one another before asking the teachers. They work together and don't compete. The boys compete and try to get way far ahead of the teachers, and end up getting lost. The girls all move at the same pace except for the ones who were advanced-class level when they showed up.

Second thing: little girls are not affraid, and not any less able to do this. It's a societal thing that pushes them away. They see the girls in their classes interested in other things, so they don't get interested in computers. Instead, they get interested in facebook, not the computer itself, because their older siblings use it, their friends use it, and they then learn that computers are for socializing. Given the proper environment, they can learn anything a geek would learn, it's just that they don't get spoon fed computer knowledge, they get spoon fed facebook, Snapchat, Pokemon and Minecraft knowledge.

Third: Minecraft cuts across all genders. All kids absolutely adore Minecraft, and about 50% want to learn programming just to make mods for the game.

Finally, girls who come to our classes keep coming back. They have a little social group with the other girls, and they welcome in other girls. The boys are left out, mostly, but that's fine as they're not having trouble learning or keeping up. The girls in our classes are their own support mechanism, and they tend to become friends outside of classes.

So, learn from this what you will.

Probably the best way to go about it is create a dumbed down interface for them to work with. When they inevitably want to go outside of what you wrapped, you can either wrap the additional functionality they need, or show them how to use the underlying API.

Actually, when I was looking through stuff for him, I found a project that implemented Minecraft bindings for JavaScript with the aim of creating a friendly environment for kids. The author was an HNer and had posted it here a year or two ago. But the project had languished since then, and it struck me (perhaps unfairly) that it probably wouldn't work out of the box in all configurations. The last thing one should put in front of a kid is something that immediately frustrates them by failing in strange ways. Tools like that need to be really, really well-hammered. Which is one of the advantages of Scratch.

Even the RPi Minecraft appears to lack information about modding:

http://pi.minecraft.net/

When those kinds of kids want to make Minecraft mods, we start them at the beginning, with Scratch.

A good place I think to go here would be a CraftBukkit "framework", something that would make a series of simple plugins easier to write for people with minimal programming ability.

That's how the Java camp was taught: with a game framework that required a few specific pieces of programming to fill in some blanks to make a predetermined game (a brick-breaker, IIRC) work.

How would you keep this up through their teenage years?

Sadly, my two daughters seem really rather interested in the whole affair (probably one two many nudges from dad in the past).

One thing about Minecraft though, even if kids can't make mods, they can learn useful aspects of logic just from playing about when redstone. When my daughter managed to make a set of points that switched automatically when her roller-coaster cart went over a pressure plate, she was well chuffed.

I'm told that will change, soon. Hoping to have a club, soon.

We are lucky and have some amazing teachers who make a new game each week in Scratch, and teach it to the kids. It's always Asteroids, or Moon Lander, or Nanacara Crash, or Pac-Man, or Flappy Bird (OMGWTFBBQ!?). Generally the best advice I can give you is to drag a roomful of kids at computers through the Scratch cirriculum MIT has created, and feel free to skip ahead if they get bored. MIT tends to be all engineery about the curriculum, and leaves no corner unexplained.

We find that if you ask kids 8-14 "Wanna learn to make videogames?" the answer is always yes. Then you just have to walk them through it in Scratch. It's super easy for them, and it does exactly what MIT designed it to do: teach kindergarteners how to code.

I'm glad I read on for an interesting and original viewpoint.

More Susan Sons' and fewer Adria Richards', please. The former have meaningful and constructive contributions to make while the latter just make political hay for their own self-interest. As a learner, the perception of an increased emphasis on identity politics is off-putting to me. Not because I secretly want to have a career and interest in tech to further my patriarchal tendencies, but because it's shifting attention away from the interesting stuff - the stuff that makes tech fun and interesting in the first place.

"SJW", while neither an apt nor particularly nice monicker, does (to some) refer to a practicing particular brands of off-putting rhetoric that are uncompromising to a fault. I see people largely in agreement talk past each other because one person's mind is already made up in a way incompatible with someone else's experiences.

A HN commenter once suggested that agreement has become a form of social signaling. I don't know if I believe that, but it would be dangerous and counterproductive because arguments need iteration. If you can't make your case in a way that convinces people with your same goals, you're not going to convince people that don't yet share your goals.

What I dislike is the braiding of tech with identity politics issues by people who are unaccommodating, and hostile in their language and behaviour, if not their motives. Here, I feel that SJW is an apt description for people whose interests are primarily identity politics. It's not a term that I apply universally.

Sons made her point in a thoughtful way. She was not hostile (explicitly or implicitly). If there are issues regarding identity politics and tech, I'd rather hear about it from people like her. The pity is (in an awkwardly expressed way), because of her position, she doesn't necessarily want a platform from which to say things on these matters because she doesn't frame her experience in terms of gender (and that seems to carry through into the comments).

This. This. A thousand times this.

Maybe it's possible that there are plenty of people out there who care about "ephemera", and yet are also capable of programming a computer or soldering things together? I think it's possible. And when I read stuff like this:

"Sometimes I want to shout 'you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!'"

it makes me think: this might be a problem. Is it harder to be a hacker if you also have an interest in social media and graphic design and popularity and friendships? Are we defining "hacker" to include only people with bad social skills and no interest outside of technology? I hope not.

It was that I had the good fortune to peek over her shoulder at some BASIC code she'd written in our completely noddy, intro-to-computers class. She wasn't going to put Grace Hopper to shame, but it was surprisingly well-structured and showed she knew how to reason about causes and effects within the machine. Which is, like, the first skill that you need to be a decent programmer.

But the thing about pretty girls is that they often find it is more immediately profitable to be pretty than to be bright. And staying pretty and popular -- keeping that limelight on you -- is a lot of work. It's a full-time job with potentially ruinous consequences without some sort of balance (look at Miley Cyrus). So she eventually forgot about coding and went on to become a television personality.

My point here is that you become what you invest time in becoming. If you want to ascend to elite-level hackerdom, then you almost have to put things like attractiveness and popularity on the back burner. You don't have to have poor social skills to be a hacker. But the people who are best at being popular and fitting in are the people who invested time and effort into doing just that, just like the best programmers are the ones who invested time and effort into programming. And we only have so much time to give, so yes, you kinda gotta pick and choose.

No, you really don't. You believe this because it's what you've seen around you, but that's a selection bias. Someone else on this thread pointed out that Von Neumann was an exceptionally stylish guy, but he's far from the only example. Only in the peculiar little world of computer programming do we seem to equate slovenly behavior with competence.

One of the great qualities of smart, capable people is that smart, capable people tend to have a lot of different interests. There's no reason that you can't be attractive and smart.

"Specialization is for insects." -- Heinlein

So your solution is to suggest everyone be as smart as John von Neumann so they can master subjects while still being a snappy dresser? Does this seem like something people can do?

The proverbial 10k hours of practice have to come from somewhere. Time is limited, activities are zero-sum.

Many hackers I know do have other hobbies besides hacking and they devote lots of time to those hobbies. Beer brewing, coffee making, writing poetry, music, languages, …

What if one of those hobbies is dressing fashionably? Or makeup? Or whatever?

Beyond a certain point activities are zero sum but do you seriously suggest that to be a proper hacker you have no time at all for anything beside that?

I don’t think anyone should ever feel obligated to be into dressing fashionably or makeup or even just feel obligated to dress a certain way. That’s awful. (I especially hate gender policing.) But telling someone they can only be part of the group if they aren’t into makeup isn’t all that much better than telling someone they should wear makeup to represent women better.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive.

I suspect this heuristic started out as a way for the outcast, socially unwelcome hackers to finally find a group to which they could belong, an activity that didn't judge them for their intellect or their appearance.

I further suspect that some of the pushback against lifting this heuristic comes from those same people, who feel that they will lose the only thing that gave them a reason to feel good about themselves in the face of total rejection by their peers. It would be just as tragic to force these people out of programming as it is tragic to prevent others from coming into programming.

Outcasts making others outcasts, bullied becoming bullies. Nice.

The general point is this: rejection because of the way you dress (no matter how) or look (no matter how) is not cool. The direction doesn’t really matter. But this groupthink is pretty disgustingly exclusionary.

Most of all, I'm disappointed. I had a haven, a place where no one cared what I looked like, what my body was like or about any ephemera—they cared about what I could do—and this culture shift has robbed me of my haven. At least I had that haven. The girls who follow me missed out on it.

You know what's disgusting? People getting disgusted over issues that don't warrant disgust.

Also, I think that statement is just outright wrong and misleading.

In my first comment I may have been speculating on the motivations of others, but I did so by drawing in part on my own experiences. Programming, computers, BBSes/online services/Internet, etc. gave me something I could do as a grade school child that didn't depend on other people's approval of my social identity. My point was and is that it would be just as tragic to drive off the social misfits as it would be tragic to exclude the socially adept.

Sadly, sometimes it seems the mainstream have seen how much money can be made by former and present misfits as hackers and want to take ownership of it for themselves.

Edited to add: After rereading the thread, it seems you may have been commenting specifically on the sentence that I quoted. I don't intend to justify the heuristic that leads some to assume non-social-outcasts are non-hackers, only to explain it, and perhaps find a way of bridging the gap between those who use that heuristic, and those who are harmed by it.

By the time you get a job that lets you afford both you don't necessarily want to learn fashion from scratch.

Also, computers have dropped massively in price during the last twenty years. I don’t think becoming a hacker was ever super-expensive compared to many other activities, at least not during the last two decades, but now it’s quite affordable. Always depending on what you want to do, but – just as a point of comparison – I think being serious about PC gaming would likely be much more costly (well, I guess equally as costly if you are really into game development or something of that nature).

Luckily computing has never been as affordable and accessible as today.

I disagree. In middle school I had a textbook on assembly language; the first chapters used DEBUG (a 16-bit debugger which came with DOS) but later chapters switched to programming in Microsoft MASM which was $180.

I remember thinking, "There's no way my hacking budget can take that. It'll take me years to save up that kind of money, and when/if I do, I'm definitely gonna blow it on video games."

I learned a lot by writing a QBASIC script which added label functionality to DEBUG to make it more usable assembling large programs.

Also, the only C compiler I had was Turbo C++ Lite for DOS, which came with another textbook I picked up for cheap (I recall $20). It was crippled: You could only run programs from within the IDE. If you used the "compile to EXE" option, it would work but the resulting executable would do nothing, just spitting out an error message along the lines of "Only the full version of the compiler can produce working executables".

But because different programs produced different-sized executables, I figured that meant the EXE file wasn't just a placeholder, it actually contained the compiled code but it was disabled somehow.

I figured out through tracing and in-memory patching (with DEBUG of course!) that there was a conditional branch within the first couple hundred instructions. Replacing it fixed the problem!

Kids these days have it so easy. All of the tools you need have excellent FOSS versions you can instantly download. Online resources are more comprehensive and up-to-date than any textbook. Modern languages have garbage collection and array bounds checking, eliminating entire classes of bugs.

As a teenager I didn't exactly grow up poor but my income was restricted to what I could earn by working around my studies, so at most 12 hours a week at minimum wage which for a teenager was something like £3 an hour.

At that sort of income doing things like renting servers , iphone SDKs, decent computers etc start to look more expensive.

Heinlein is wrong on this and a specialist himself: a writer who requires other specialists to meet his every basic need (water, food, shelter...).

Don't dismiss specialization as it is the key to both past and future success.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Long

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

- Hackers tend to have their own path in doing things.

A teenager hacker might look stange and alien to his peers because they do everything in the same way, extremelly conformist. Same thing for beauty: teenagers care less for beauty, more for copying things they understand.

This means that even social and stylish hacker might seem a freak in their teens.

So much of this depends on individual interest and temperament.

You couldn't have picked a more outlying outlier. Von Neumann was one of the most brilliant minds of the century.

100% agree with you. I also think a lot of the difference in the gender ratio can be attributed to the fact that women simply have far more options.

I never said any such thing. I didn't say "you are pretty, what are you doing here?". I said:

>> you're not a programmer, what are you doing here?!

I am a highly social hacker, and a polymath to boot. I have a vibrant love life, good friends from all walks of life, and plenty of non-coding interests: writing, reading, psychology, music, crafts (I do leatherwork, weave rugs, sew, do native american loomed seed beadwork, etc), backpacking, martial arts, and more.

What I don't do is walk into a room and tell a woman who's good at something I'm not -- a dancer, for example -- that she's being graded not on her ability to dance, but on whether she looks like my idea of what a dancer should be. I don't demand that her math skills (something just as orthogonal to dance as fashion is to coding) be evaluated instead of her dancing.

In my not-so-humble opinion, if you can't code, you don't get a vote on how it is or isn't okay to be a female (or any other) coder, period. Wave that "feminist" flag all you want, I'm not buying it. Women in generations before me didn't burn their bras so I could be judged on my fashion sense instead of my work.

I’ve real trouble integrating what you are saying with what I’ve heard feminists say about the issues you are talking about.

In my experience, feminists are more obsessed with making sure other women are dressed "correctly" than just about any other demographic outside of conservative christian republicans. Have you never read an article by a feminist about X or Y movie character is demeaning to women because she dressed too sexy, or wore something that the feminist herself would never wear?

When I see feminist criticisms of how female characters are dressed, they're not criticizing three dimensional autonomous characters that happen to wear revealing clothes. They're criticizing usually stock characters that perpetuate stereotypes about women and objectify.

That being said, some feminists (or should that be "feminists"?) absolutely do police women's clothing choices, and that's just as wrong from them as it is from anyone else.

Who do you think portrays them on tv and in movies? Fake women? Give me a break.

>When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male viewers to ogle. When a woman decides to dress that way, it's personal expression.

I like how if a man does it, it's sexist, but if a woman does it, it's "empowerment." I guess men aren't allowed to write empowered female characters. And yet, if they don't write them--that makes them misogynists, too.

>They're criticizing usually stock characters that perpetuate stereotypes about women and objectify.

In my experience, this is just very elaborate justification for plain old jealousy of another woman's looks.

Oh, I had forgotten actresses write their own roles and pick their own wardrobes. And since most producers are women [0], most directors are women, most writers are women[1] and most people behind the scenes are women [2], I don't know what I was thinking. You're absolutely right: Men really have no influence on the process at all.

/sarcasm

>>When a man draws or designs a female character with "sexy" clothing, it's likely sexualizing that character for male viewers to ogle. When a woman decides to dress that way, it's personal expression.

>I like how if a man does it, it's sexist, but if a woman does it, it's "empowerment." I guess men aren't allowed to write empowered female characters. And yet, if they don't write them--that makes them misogynists, too.

I'm comparing a woman's personal choice to a man's choice of how women are portrayed. Men can dress as they wish. What they shouldn't do is objectify women.

[0]: http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/percentage-of-wom...

[1]: http://www.thewrap.com/tv/article/tv-writing-remains-white-m...

[2]: http://entertainment.time.com/2014/01/15/report-women-are-st...

I think these sorts of differences in perspective are common to people in general. Some of it is jealously, but a lot of it is simply a failure to understand or take into consideration the viewpoint of the piece.

Dress and body policing of women is a reflection of misogyny, of which women and men both participate. However, it is definitely wrong to do so whether one considers themselves feminist or not.

> Have you never read an article by a feminist about X or Y movie character is demeaning to women because she dressed too sexy, or wore something that the feminist herself would never wear?

Media representation criticism != body policing of actual people.

Except that in many cases, it's actual women being criticized.

I read that more as "where do your passions lie?" People have many interests, but few passions, and passions demand sacrifices. When push comes to shove, hackers will give up popularity and fitting in for the sake of hacking - not because they don't care about those things, but because they'd rather be hacking. Girls who are told that the most important thing for them is to be beautiful and popular are deprived of the opportunity to develop a passion for hacking, because their passion for popularity chokes out other competitors.

I don't think it's harder to be a hacker if you're interested in social media or graphic design, but if you'd rather be tweeting about your latest logo design than figuring out how to fix a bug, you might not be a hacker.

Sure, Jobs did. On the other hand, Woz was the tech genius, not Jobs.

I've never heard of a tech genius who also cared much about the qualities you mention. This seems more than a coincidence. If it were, then there'd probably be at least one counterexample. Is there someone who is at the level of Woz or Blackwell who also cares about popularity, beauty, and fitting in?

How about von Neumann, famous for always being in an impeccably tailored suit? I hope he's genius enough for you.

You don't even have to go past the very first hackers to find ones that care about those qualities. There are many, many other examples.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Personal_life

> Von Neumann took great care over his clothing, and would always wear formal suits, once riding down the Grand Canyon astride a mule in a three-piece pin-stripe. Mathematician David Hilbert is reported to have asked at von Neumann's 1926 doctoral exam: "Pray, who is the candidate's tailor?" as he had never seen such beautiful evening clothes.

It's a big world out there, and there are a lot of smart people who will defy your expectations.

I hope you've considered that your worldly experience may not be comprehensive.

I've known plenty of good programmers who care about all the things I mentioned. They just don't self-select with the Linux user groups of the world, so you're unlikely to come upon them if that's where you hang out.

I also asked for an example of a programmer on the level of Woz. This is an important distinguishing quality, because otherwise there's no way to know how good a hacker actually is. Every story would be anecdotal instead of resembling factual.