We are teen hackers from around the world who code together | Hacker News Reader

We are teen hackers from around the world who code together

hackclub.com

368 pointsmooreds88 comments

I recently supervised a Hackclub Counterspell event at our office. I was there only in the capacity of being an adult in the room, for health and safety and safeguarding reasons.

The entire event had been organised by a single teenager, with mini workshops, hack time and a global show and tell.

Kids that attended were not only coders, but musicians and artists as well.

The whole event was amazing, with more pizza than I thought it possible to eat.

The kids produced some genuinely interesting games, learned some new skills, and had a great time socially.

I fully intend to support more events in the future.

> Kids that attended were not only coders, but musicians and artists as well.

Creatives are Creatives. Don't reduce yourself as a programmer purely to a scientist. There is an art in what we do.

Edit: if you disagree then tell me why I have a religiously strong opinion on spaces vs tabs

I agree - programming is it's own medium for creation - not just a tool to produce other media.

There is art in science, too.

It's a word without an agreed upon definition that keeps changing. One could probably argue there is art in everything humans do

Then 'art' is soul!

Define soul please

Dedication to a creation of some sort.

> Edit: if you disagree then tell me why I have a religiously strong opinion on spaces vs tabs

Because you did not think this through logically I assume. There is only one answer: indent using tabs, align using spaces. This way the text never looks "broken" on any other machine, and personal preference for how deep indentations should be can be applied.

I think people mostly form strong religious opinions because they want to belong to a group or feel a sense of purpose. Do you feel that when defending your stance on tabs vs spaces?

But I fail to see how this is related to programmers being creatives

Personally I don't think there is such a thing as "creatives". All humans are creative - that's what we do, we solve problems by coming up with solutions. Whether that is to create a painting, or coming up with a joke/punchline or writing a novel, or creating a product with code - that's a matter of aptitude/interest and environmental exposure.

While I sort of agree with you, I'm a software engineer with a background and hobbies in the arts. My wife and I are part time performing magicians, and I used to play various instruments in rock bands, I produced an indie album a few years ago etc. I'm saying this because I hang around people who are hyper-creative.

I compare those hyper-creative people to other people that I know and I work with and it becomes very apparent that what we tend to think of as "creativity" is not something that even the majority of people possess.

I definitely agree that everyone is "creative" to an extent within their respective interests and productive pursuits. But I think we might be conflating creativity with productivity. Everyone produces, or at least is capable of producing things. But what we tend to think of as "creativity" involves abstract thinking and piecing together things that are non-obvious.

In that sense, hackers and engineers do tend to often exhibit this form of creativity. I mean using something in a way that it was not original intended is an example of that "outside of the box" abstract thinking.

But my point, as anectodal as it is, in my 40+ years on this planet I've encountered far more people who are incapable of abstract thinking and coming up with novel ways to combine things than I have people who do possess this ability.

Now it might be a muscle, it might boil down to interests and personal ambitions. But, and I think you'd even agree with this, that's a hypothesis. I don't personally see evidence in support of that. The people who can't think abstractly are even some really decent programmers that I've met. They can produce shippable code and solve problems, but they can't think in terms of design patterns and abstractions... they need concrete examples for everything. The second you start to abstract a solution and talk in terms of generics you lose them. And I'm not putting them down, they're still great people to have on your team. Great work ethic and love what they do. They just can't think abstractly and are therefore not "creative" in the way that I interpret that word.

No, the answer is that I should never have to think about whether a coworker uses spaces vs tabs. That's a sign that either your text editor/IDE is misconfigured or that your project needs a tool like Prettier.

Also it was a joke. I just thought using the concept of religion might make people consider the spiritual side of a profession that is otherwise mechanical. But no worries. Jokes are always funniest when you're forced to explain them, right?

I will dive into the webpage a bit better later on, but at a glance I don't seem to be able to find how to 'help' as an adult. Would love to either organize or help something in my town.

I could only find a slack channel to join but no other public info. Was this how you got in touch with them? Or did I miss something?

it's only organized by teenagers who are a part of hack club :) hack clubbers will then reach out to adults in their city for help organizing the event, but most of the work is done by the teenager.

Thanks for the reply. No hack clubs in my area so seems it is a no-go for now.

HackClub is great. I feel like I aged out of their target demographics recently though.

I can share my single and very positive experience with them. In summer 2020 (I was 18 then), they were going to host/sponsor some hackathons (IIRC), but because of Covid they couldn’t do that so instead they gave away that money to students who had some project idea. If your project was accepted you got $100 for it - but you had to share the result with the community.

I applied and got that 100, and used it to make a remote-controlled mobility scooter [0] with my friend. Not the most useful thing in the world but it was ton of fun!

[0]: https://youtu.be/WWUe42dH6nw

I saw the Hack Club presentation at the Ubuntu Summit 2024 ("How 30K teenagers build open source software") and it was an unexpected highlight of the conference for me. I'd expected it to be a boring kids program, but Hack Club looks very cool! https://youtu.be/AdgU-_1vDco

Love to see these youths reclaim the word "hacker."

And in such a positive light

which is the original meaning.

The original meaning was not only positive: "hacker"/"hacking" always had some subversive/countercultural (though clearly not criminal) undertone in it.

In other words: hackers were only "positive" for the "in-group"; to the establishment, they were annoying (up to somewhat dangerous).

ArchiveBox uses HackClub Bank, their FSP platform (like Open Collective but better) and we love it. I enjoy using it more than any other billing/invoicing system I've used, and I'm constantly amazed at the quality of software they're able to put out with a team of teenagers!

I helped develop hackatime (https://github.com/hackclub/hackatime/) this fall for our latest project high seas, and it's been a truly amazing experience. I'm 16, and I never thought I would be maintaining and operating a program with over 17 thousand users and 25 million+ rows! It's been a wild ride that I don't think I would have gotten without hackclub :) Also just in general the community is amazingly supportive; I joined a little over a year ago and I've made a ton of really amazing friends that I hope I can keep for the rest of my life ^_^

Hackclub is currently running a program for high schoolers until January 31st where time spent working on hobby projects is rewarded with prizes. By my understanding the pay rate is about $2-5 dollars per hour, so no replacement for a full time job but if you have kids that code for fun something is better than nothing!

Hack Club has absolutely changed my life, I live in a suburban area and there are not many people interested in tech but Hack Club has allowed me to find people like me. I’ve done things I’ve never thought I would do and it’s been such a great thing in my life.

Hey! I work here. Happy to answer any questions!

We'd be happy to help some of these kids do Show HNs of their projects. Would that be of interest?

Absolutely - they’d fit right in here. My email is malted@hackclub.com.

Couple of questions:

1) I see the mention of highschool throughout, what about younger hackers that are 13+ (7th & 8th grade)?

2) The directory (https://directory.hackclub.com/) is not working for me. Are there existing clubs in Asia? Specifically Taipei, Taiwan.

For 2), there is a much more comprehensive map at the top of https://toolbox.hackclub.com/ that you can look at

Hi! Hackclubber here.

When we say Highschool, we really mean 18 and under (we have a lot of people from Middle-school and up)

Hello frankacter, Hong Kong hackclubber here ^-^ there will be a Hack Club Highschool Hackathon hosted in Taipei at March and they'll announce more information on instagram.com/hackit.tw

thanks for the reply, that is an odd instagram you've linked. It was just set up a couple of months ago, has made 0 posts and follows no one. It links to https://hackit.tw and https://counterspell.hackit.tw, neither of which seem to resolve.

I found this Thread post ( https://www.threads.net/@hackit.tw?xmt=AQGzSJCZSi-xlWjNR7_1C... ) which seems to suggest that Counterspell (?) is doing a combined hackathon with GenAI Hackathon sometime in 2025.

I've followed their social, but for "hackers", it certainly feels off.

Hey, what’s the best way to sponsor this?

https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/

I see that in-person clubs are for High Schoolers only. But, is everything else for only high schoolers?

Can home-educated teenagers with government issued ID join? Throughout the site, high school student and teenager seem to be used interchangeably. At https://hack.club/high-seas-faq: "Who can participate in High Seas?" "Anyone 18 or under can participate in High Seas![...]" "Why do I have to verify?" "We need to make sure that you’re a high school student.[...]" "What form of ID is accepted?" "A government issued ID (eg. drivers license or passport), or A dated school ID[...]"

Yes, definitely. We consider anyone ages 13-18 a “high schooler”.

How is this all financed?

The front-page talks about giving away "Get free Raspberry Pis, Framework Laptops, iPads, and more."

Oh they do have transparency on it. I was confused about the "fiscal sponsorship" tab since it appears also to be a product they are selling at 7% of income.

They appear to do well with nearly $6 million USD(?) in their "checking account) Good for them.

501c3 nonprofits can ‘fiscally sponsor’ projects that are too small for their own nonprofit but still need all the same legal/accounting/finance support. Some of that $6M in their checking account will ‘belong’ to the projects they are sponsoring. Basically like a nonprofit incubator.

I work at Hack Club on our fiscal sponsorship team and wanted to clarify something: each fiscally sponsored organization has its own account, with funds stored and represented separately on the HCB platform.

You can check out some of these nonprofits and their transparent finances at this link: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/directory/

Founder here. Donations are the vast majority of Hack Club's revenue and make it possible and free for teenagers. Donate here: https://hackclub.com/philanthropy/

We also make a very small amount of revenue through the fiscal sponsorship program the other commenter mentioned: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/

Hack Club is also 100% transparent, and you can see all of our spending here: https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq

this is so cool. hats off to the creators. I bet it's a ton of logistics to manage. I surfed around the site but couldn't find any information re: volunteering with them? I wonder if they need them and what kind of commitment it would be? I'd be interested!

They mostly seem to be "by and for high schoolers". This is what I was told when I was asking how I could help with my son setting something up.

Hack Club is run by adults (you can see the team page here: https://hackclub.com/team), and every aspect of Hack Club is also built by teenagers contributing to everything from HCB (our fiscal sponsership platform) to High Seas (https://highseas.hackclub.com), a program we're running right now.

Happy to help if you still need help setting something up for your son :)

Changelog did a great interview with Akon from Hack Club recently: https://changelog.com/podcast/620

Akon (sob)

There's a Japanese-language club if that's of interest to anybody: https://onecodeclub.io/

Hack Clubber here :)

I love Hack Club because it's truly one of the most radically kind & creative spaces on the internet. Before I found Hack Club, programming felt very solitary to me. It didn't really feel like it's something I could do with other people, yet alone myself. But since then I've found community, made friends, and pushed myself to build things I never knew I could make. Along the way, I've got to attend crazy hackathons like Outernet (which we ran on a campground in VT), and got to organize Canada's largest & biggest high school hackathon back in May (https://apocalypse.hackclub.com), and have all sorts of other adventures.

I'm really grateful for Hack Club :)

Big fan of Hack Club and everything you guys are doing! Such a phenomenal initiative

This is awesome. Love the site too.

This is quite awesome to see. Kudos to all involved.

Bit of an aside, I found this bit from https://hackclub.com/clubs/ interesting:

> in the Hack Club Slack (Discord-style online groupchat), you'll find a group of 27,253+ fabulous ...

See, in my head Slack comes first before Discord. It was released, after all, 2 years prior. My mental shortcut for Discord is that it's like Slack but for games so it has better audio support. But here it's the other way around.

It's ok ~ perhaps the on-ramp path is Discord -> Slack -> IRC :).

Seriously though, this is really impressive. Not just flashy UIs, they actually have an intro to Assembly: https://github.com/hackclub/some-assembly-required

Kudos to these teenagers.

Keep going!

This is awesome! I love to see projects like this.

Ahh to be young again.

Does this exist for adults/non-teens? And not in the professional, career sense but a chiller, more human sense.

Yes, depending on where you live. There are many such events on meetup.com. Although the pandemic shut down a lot of this stuff. The open source world also has a lot of this spirit, although the "hacking together" is often virtual rather than in-person (although conferences provide a good venue for in-person meetups for people who are geographically distributed).

www.recurse.com

This.

See if there’s a hackerspace or makerspace near you. Many have regular nights/days where they get together and work on stuff.

Our local one does Tuesday nights and Friday days where everyone who’s available comes on and works on projects, either their own or group projects.

Not that there’s anything wrong this this, but I tend to see them focused around 3D printer stuff and rarely much software. I’d love to see more software hangouts

wondering the same thing as a 30yr kind of person who is a not a professional dev but would love to find a community out in SoCal!

The Ruby Meetup I attend used to have hack nights once a month where you could work on what you wanted.

Makerspaces might be a good place to contact?

So, I ran a few of those, called them Hacking Society. In Fort Collins we have a Linux Users Group that meets on Tuesdays, in Boulder it meets on Thursdays. So the remaining Tue/Thu of the month I would secure space, often at a coffee shop, for us to get together and work on projects. It has worked very well, I did it for ~20 years, I know the Fort Collins one is still going strong. If you want a location page on HackingSociety.org, let me know and we'll figure out a way to set you up one.

But mostly it's about just finding and announcing a place with a regular schedule. For the first ~10 years, I took "meeting notes" about what people did, which I felt helped keep people in mind of the "working on projects" component.

Does grey hair hacker club exists somewhere ? Need to join.

Are those that are keeping their color but suffering from rapidly receding lines allowed to join too?

I'm sure someone will chime in to say there are plenty of these "clubs" but honestly, I grew up in a small town with no real "hacker" peers then have gotten so bogged down with work (and worked in areas without HUGE cultures like this) that I'm now starting to feel quite disconnected.

I just want to make silly things, learn some new skills and have fun -- having a "Safe" space to share that would be a boon.

Perhaps there is one in your area: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces

I'm in Asia so no luck, but on the bright side, tools are quite affordable here.

Also in Asia, I know of a few smaller ones, but they come and go - and with space at a premium I’ve not found them that useful.

I think it’s more about the community than the physical space though (to a point)

Makerspaces? If you're lucky enough to have one close by. The nearest one to me is a plane ride away.

I was in TPU when I was a teen: teenage programmers unite. Not sure if they still exist but maybe all us old members can start a construction company together!

Ahh: http://www.tpu.org/

> I was in TPU when I was a teen

Considering that in particular 3D-printing enthusiasts and material scientists associate something different with "TPU" [1], this sentence has a slight sexual/fetish undertone. :-D

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoplastic_polyurethane

wish there was one for us old guys 50+

Go to a tech conference of your prefered language?

they are too far away and too expensive

Contribute to an open source project?

Fosdem in Brussels is free. But that might still be far away for you?

There are a ton of open source things to participate in and contribute to. Obviously anything that involves travel costs money.

present day demoparties (as in, demoscene events) are pretty much that these days

2 years ago I created a private slack and invited a bunch of old colleagues (in both senses), we now meet weekly to hack on side projects, participate in CTFs, all low expectations. Sometimes we just catchup and bitch about work.

I assume you know about 2600? Its a very fun and global hacker community, with monthly meetings, yearly conferences, a radio show, and great magazine. 2600.com

> wish there was one for us old guys 50+

I don't know about 50+ who code together. But if you're interested in a community for old folks who enjoy reading computing stuff together, there is a small and cozy reading lounge on IRC (and Matrix) here: https://bitwise.codeberg.page/

I think they call that GitHub.

But why does it have to be "for" a certain age? Just ditch ageism.

It's not that simple. Depending on the culture, interacting with people of drastically different ages can be uncomfortable for all involved. If you add the general lack of soft skills among programmers, it's easy to see why someone would prefer a "safer" group that's closer to their age over the more general community.

Let those people have their groups, fine. But there's no rule saying you have to cater to them. There's all kinds of people including people who enjoy going out of their comfort zone and experiencing "danger."

cc Daniel Gross

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