A few months ago, I read Cory Doctrow's Makers. Having grown up in Orlando, rat as villain was blissful reading. Earlier this spring, I pulled Little Brother off the shelf at the library. As it happened, my son was just finishing Slaughter House Five: or the Children's Crusade at the very point I realized that he might enjoy its young adult tenor more than I would enjoy finishing it out of obligation.
Ever since Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy's cover in my hand grabbed his attention at the library [following up quickly with a purchased copy of the complete series helped seal the deal] last winter, I've been on a roll for recommending books with him. Player Piano was the only thing close to Hitch-Hiker's Guide I could think of, and his finishing it was how we got to Slaughter-House Five. Indeed, the mentioning of last year's suggestion of Sword of Shannara has been rendered less painful between us by the recent success.
Anyway, he really dug Little Brother. So much so he made sure to take it to middle-school everyday and walk out to the bus stop "reading" it, in the morning. As fortune would have it, the evening of the very day he finished it, I was at the library and what should be on the new fiction rack but Homeland. He finished that, too.
Now one of the questions that comes around on Ask HN is how do I get my child interested in programming, and I don't think you do, really other than perhaps by modeling behavior, and I've said as much from time to time. But, reading Doctorow sparked my son to check out the computer section at the library - that trip was with mom and he came back with an "Intro to turning a computer on" type book. A couple of days later it was in the back-to-the-library stack.
Then about two weeks ago, he asked me if I had a book about Lisp because that was what he had really been looking for at the library. Well of course I did, and he knew it - Graham's Ansi Common Lisp has been floating around the house since I picked it up used from Amazon last August. So a few nights a week he sits and reads and takes notes for a half hour all on his own and in his own way, which is of course the best way to come to any adult activity for a young person.*
*OK so I did Youtube the first part of the first SICP lecture video for him on our way to a soccer tournament a week earlier. Until he fell asleep about 15 minutes in. As he was dozing off, however, we got to the part where Sussman says that what we can program is only limited by what we can imagine. That got him to stop nodding his head.
I've come to a similar conclusion. We homeschool, and my oldest is 15. "How to teach my kid to program" is the wrong question. My oldest is barely interested. He's getting to the point where it might be good as job skill, and he knows that, but he's not hacking his nights away. Could care less. My middle son however is 11 and is constantly hacking at stuff. Setting up his friends' minecraft servers. Asking me questions like "what is Lua" because he wants to mod roblox. Opening the chrome dev tools and changing shit on pages for hours. lol
They have all the opportunity they could want. They will all "graduate" with deeper than average computer science knowledge, but that urge to hack isn't something that can be taught.
Do you have links to relevant articles/essays/etc. about homeschooling?
All the homeschooling families I've seen were the religious-nut kind, but I frequently see commenters on HN mention that they homeschool their kids, which is causing me to do a double take on the whole thing.
I'm quite a few years from having kids, but am curious about the subject. Thanks in advance!
John Taylor Gatto[1] was a huge early influence for me. You are right about the religious saturation in the homeschool world. They paved the way (legally), so I respect that, but there is a lot more opportunity in home education outside of religious exclusion.
The time we get together is amazing, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I love the fact that they can spend a Thursday building Lego and making stop motion animations, and it is an acceptable educational activity.
They get a lot of social time too. People generally worry about that, but it hasn't been an issue.
what really got me into programming or really interested in tech at all, was basically working with my dad ON stuff around the house, being able to take things apart, move electronics components around and see the effect, and then get to slowly transition to doing it myself.
the big block to doing these sorts of things really tends to be fear of failure. after a few electrocutions, burnt devices, and realizing that failure really isnt quite as bad as it's built up to be, I think any kid would be much more brave to try and open tech up.
if you are a programmer, do a 24 hour project yourself, a quick game, a quick project on arduino, basically something to get tangled with quickly and accomplish quickly.
hah what got me interested though is just curiosity / hunger for more knowledge, some of my first conversations with my dad revoled around ohm's law, newton's laws. and learning how to take things apart meant that I also had to learn to put my dad's toys back together before I got caught :)
anyways I'm a 3d artist now, but I'm also one of the only ones at my company who can write cgfx shaders, fix hardware, and troubleshoot the computers without calling IT.
Some of my early programming was messing with graphics -- first in BASIC and Assembler on the Amiga -- later on a Casio calculator (mixing the worst of assembler and BASIC, with performance lower than our old VIC20) -- using the book "Mathematical Toursit"[1] as guide.
I was very proud when after 4 hours I could look at the screen and see a black-and-white mandelbrot :-)
>Indeed, the mentioning of last year's suggestion of Sword of Shannara has been rendered less painful between us by the recent success.
This made me smile. I had forgotten about that book and how much my young self enjoyed escaping into it. I'm guessing from your comment that this is one of those "better remembered than revisited" fantasy titles :)
I'm going to keep pretending it was close to perfection :p
As for "similar to Hitch-hiker's guide" -- I strongly recommend "Last Chance to See" if you can get a hold of a copy. Fair warning, though - that might make your child take an interest in protecting the environment.
I am often confused by how quickly the futurist community jumps from "machines which mold plastic shapes" to "machines which are capable of creating a laptop". Surely every modern electronic requires an enormous number of materials, some very rare, some in minute quantities, and some of which may require chemically and/or thermally active reactions in their implementation.
Do many people genuinely think that we are close to this kind of machine? Because to me I simply see far too many hurdles for it to even become realistic. I know everyone is excited about 3-D printers, but within the current constraints of reality I cannot see how the current ones can do much more than print small plastic mechanical parts.
Surely modern electronics exist for like, 50 years now. And progress is getting faster, not slowing down. Research for self-replicating machines is being done on many fronts now.
And those are not "machines which mold plastic shapes", these are "machines that put various materials to precise computer instructions and can be built at home for less than $1k".
You can spin up US cloud providers from inside China and tunnel to them in about 15 minutes. It's just that most people don't bother -- there'll always be the people on the edge, though.
>> As soon as 3d printers will be able to replicate themselves, every regulation will be moot.
> I don't get this. In theory, if it were illegal to print "Item #325" having 200 printers doesn't make it any less illegal to print "Item #325".
It might be illegal. But the law would be unenforceable.
>> Information always finds a way to propagate.
> Doesn't this presuppose that no secret has ever been kept?
Valid point. What I meant is information that is out in the open. The cad files by Defense Distributed where published intentionally. You need a North Korean style regime to significantly slow down the propagation of such material.
You're not? I know some places ban very specific elements of 'knifes' that have nothing to do with how pokey they are for political reasons, but there are areas that actually ban having a knife?
Well, the other question is whether it will be legal to manufacture/sell printers which are capable of printing illegal things. If the printers are capable of self-replicating it will be implausible to enforce that sort of regulation.
It is presumably already illegal to 3-D print several types of 3-D things, where such things themselves are illegal or where there is some form of copyright, trademark or patent infringement.
So, one wonders--how does anyone who detests the idea of getting arrested for printing things and having printer tech confiscated simultaneously detest the idea of printing weapons with which to defend yourself and your means of production?
On the risk of sounding like a libertarian, there is no scenario in which it is good idea to use violence against a government. They will win, it is their own game. The way to change a government is political action, not use of force.
I can conceive of some edge cases where shooting at a policeman or a soldier using home-printed weapons does have positive expected value. But in general I agree with you - it's like wrestling a herd of rhinos.
As long as policeman and soldiers are humans, especially from the same country as you, there's the hope of appealing to their humanity to stop them from committing atrocities. Unmanned drones or robot soldiers are much scarier.
The thing with war is that the odds can change quickly. If you don't have any weapons and the enemy soldiers have machine guns, but you can sneak up behind one of them before anyone notices, now you have a machine gun.
The thing is, drones and robots work pretty much the same way. They work much more that way, actually, because if you find a vulnerability in one, it's likely present in all of them since they all came off the same assembly line. You don't have to kill all the drones, you just have to kill the ones guarding the drone control facility, or convert the drone operators to your side.
The most dangerous thing about robot armies isn't that it will make governments too powerful, it's that a terrorist could take control of them. And the only way to prevent that is to not build them.
It bears pointing out that the vast majority of changes to government have, historically, been brought about by violence. Only a vanishingly small minority of them have been effected through nonviolent political action.
(Once a society has achieved democracy, the equation may be different (and closer to what you are saying). However, only a small minority of human societies have achieved democracy.)
Why would one wonder that? Besides the "getting arrested" part, it seems like two pretty different concepts to me...even with the positive spin you put on weapons.
The story seems relevant due to recent news articles about people printing guns. It makes me wonder about what other printable items will be criminalized. Also gets me thinking about the materials used by 3d printers. Right now plastic is the most popular, but who knows, maybe someday it will be "goop".
While we're on this subject, what's the best DIY printer for an eager beginner like me? Last time I checked, it was Prusa Mendel, but there's been a lot of new additions to the market since then.
this kind of reply makes me cringe.. i had a manager once who would do something similar on rare occasions i asked about something he already stated in the past. he'd re-paste it into the chat window (sometimes twice).. as if fostering proof that i must be retarded for missing a nugget of his eternal wisdom. the only thing that kept me alive was collecting such snippets for eventual book or at least a blog post about how much he sucked at being a manager.
this was one of many valuable lessons of what not to do. ever.
Small world, I think I worked for the same guy. My favorite nugget of wisdom from him was a dismissive "connect the dots..." that turned out to imply something that was disastrously incorrect.
and peterkelley wasn't being "snarky" either. he was making a joke, based on the description of the subject-matter of the book.
oh, and i'm not being "snarky" either. but it's so very difficult to resist the temptation!, i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do it!, i can feel myself slipping even as i continue typing!...
After "printcrime" there will be: "look-crime" where you are caught peeking into or learning about how the insides of a system work on a base level, so you can replicate it without the backdoors, spyware, government mothership authorizations, credentials, alarms, and limitations.
Close that vehicle/system lid citizen, there are trade secrets in there, step away, don't make me Taze you.
What is the solution if a person uses a printer to print devices that are used for what most people consider criminal behavior? For example, someone printing high performing secret remote detonating bomb materials for political enemy rallies. After they serve the prison sentence. Do you let them own an open source printer again and let them use it without restriction?
With the power to print "anything" at low cost comes a tremendous power to kill thousands, even millions of people easily. How do you find the balance between freedom to let people print anything their hearts desire, and restrictions to stop the evil people from using that tremendous power for great evil?
Change a few words and see if it still makes sense: what is the solution if a person uses their garage to make things for criminal purposes? If they get out of prison, do you still allow them to have a garage?
See that's not the same though, unless the garage directly led to making the crime possible. Change a few words and see if it still makes sense: what if the person used their life for criminal purposes? If they get out of prison do you still allow them to have life?
What defines a crime is intention. For instance, firing a gun is not a crime per se. Or in the case of the United States, even building one isn't illegal, since no one made a law to make it so. [1]
On the other hand, attempt to shoot, shooting or killing someone, are all possibly crimes, depending if there's intention and the circumstances (e.g., self-defense).
So in your example, if someone makes materials for political enemies, first you need to prove intention or connection to the crimes committed by these parties (I'm assuming you don't mean illegal/controlled materials here). Then, when this person is sentenced, the judge can rule about restricting access to these materials anymore (for instance, restricting him from getting a job in industry). It's the same case as hackers sentenced for years away from computers.
>It's the same case as hackers sentenced for years away from computers.
Which always was, and remains, complete nonsense.
If someone steals a car, you don't prohibit them from driving their own car to work after they return to society.
The analogy the proponents of this nonsense will present is that it's more like lawyers being disbarred or bankers being prohibited from working in the financial industry. But that analogy fails, because prohibiting you from using a computer is not the analog of prohibiting you from being a lawyer or a banker, it's the analog of denying access to the court system or the ability to use money.
What about changing it then... If I build a detonator using a soldering iron and spare parts from a radio, should I be banned from ever owning a soldering iron... or a radio
Your argument goes the other way. If someone with a printer can do the malicious thing quickly then prohibiting ownership of the printer is useless, because someone prohibited from owning it could just borrow one from someone not so prohibited for a very short period of time, do the crime, and return it without being detected. You might as well just prohibit the act of making detonators, because you'll never catch one without the other. Prohibiting ownership of the printers will just prevent those trying to reform themselves from using their skill in using printers to make legitimate things that benefit society.
What does printing have to do with the legality of possessing something? If it's illegal to have then it's illegal to have. Does it fundamentally matter how you got it?
On what basis can you really restrict peoples capacity to do something illegal using generally benign tools? You can't. Not without some serious shenanigans. I can bludgeon you to death with a stout leather shoe you know. No one is outlawing loafers next Tuesday.
After they serve the prison sentence. Do you let them own an open source printer again and let them use it without restriction?
According to one of the extra features on a well-known activist documentary about health care, in Norway a man convicted of murdering his family with a chainsaw was rehabilitated in part by employing him as a (well-supervised) logger, presumably to ensure his mind is well-trained in correct and incorrect uses of chainsaws.
So "serve the prison sentence" is the wrong way to look at it. Instead we should be saying, "After they've been rehabilitated and reintegrated into society," with the focus on rehabilitation to prevent recidivism, rather than retribution to satisfy our primitive lust for revenge.
Ever since Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy's cover in my hand grabbed his attention at the library [following up quickly with a purchased copy of the complete series helped seal the deal] last winter, I've been on a roll for recommending books with him. Player Piano was the only thing close to Hitch-Hiker's Guide I could think of, and his finishing it was how we got to Slaughter-House Five. Indeed, the mentioning of last year's suggestion of Sword of Shannara has been rendered less painful between us by the recent success.
Anyway, he really dug Little Brother. So much so he made sure to take it to middle-school everyday and walk out to the bus stop "reading" it, in the morning. As fortune would have it, the evening of the very day he finished it, I was at the library and what should be on the new fiction rack but Homeland. He finished that, too.
Now one of the questions that comes around on Ask HN is how do I get my child interested in programming, and I don't think you do, really other than perhaps by modeling behavior, and I've said as much from time to time. But, reading Doctorow sparked my son to check out the computer section at the library - that trip was with mom and he came back with an "Intro to turning a computer on" type book. A couple of days later it was in the back-to-the-library stack.
Then about two weeks ago, he asked me if I had a book about Lisp because that was what he had really been looking for at the library. Well of course I did, and he knew it - Graham's Ansi Common Lisp has been floating around the house since I picked it up used from Amazon last August. So a few nights a week he sits and reads and takes notes for a half hour all on his own and in his own way, which is of course the best way to come to any adult activity for a young person.*
*OK so I did Youtube the first part of the first SICP lecture video for him on our way to a soccer tournament a week earlier. Until he fell asleep about 15 minutes in. As he was dozing off, however, we got to the part where Sussman says that what we can program is only limited by what we can imagine. That got him to stop nodding his head.