Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linsomniac | Hacker News Reader

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My child has been involved in Hack Club for a number of years, and I support their mission. However, HC do seem to be lacking in "adult supervision", and I understand that is kind of their approach: having the kids figure stuff out on their own. However, there are things that kids, due to lack of experience, just can't figure out for themselves. For example, the reliance on ChatGPT and reluctance to use professional SMEs is a very "immature" attitude.

This sort of cavalier attitude is going to get them in trouble; I'm honestly surprised that this hasn't already gotten them into trouble. Hack Club has enough money that they can easily be a worthwhile target if any of their decisions turns out badly.

I'm going to be a bit oblique here because I don't want HC to take this out on my child, but at one of the HC events, the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening. Another situation led to our child being "ditched" in a foreign city and unsure how to get ahold of anyone on the ground to help.

Hack Club is a great idea, and I'm glad it exists, but I do think that the way it is currently organized is going to end badly.

Hello! This is Chris from Hack Club staff (the one cited in the post)

I addressed the post itself in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=45921428&), so I'll skip that part.

I would really like to know more about these incidents at HC events. We have a lot of very complex tradeoffs within hack club involving security/privacy/safety for exactly the reasons you identified (ie, giving teenagers a very high level of agency/responsibility in running programs). However, staff try to be extremely conscious of these tradeoffs and highly attentive to the realistic risk vectors that come about in our operations.

No teenager will ever (ever!) have anything 'taken out' on them by myself or anyone else that works here. Any time things go wrong or almost go wrong, we just want to know so we can manage that risk in the future. If you are willing to share, please reach out at cwalker@hackclub.com

The incident has already been discussed with organizers at the time.

> the "figure it out for yourselves" lead to our child making decisions and taking actions that could have very easily turned into life threatening

I haven't heard about Hack Club until this very story, so forgive my ignorance, but what exactly happened here? According to their website, it seems to be about a community for teenage programmers, who build open source projects together, sometimes during events. Looking around at the types of events they host, nothing really looks life threatening at all? I'm not doubting your experience, just curious how a bunch of programmers could end up in a life threatening situation during those sort of events.

During Hack Club's IRL Hackathons, teens can get their parents to sign a "freedom waiver" to allow them to leave the hackathon venue and explore the city (they usually happen in high profile cities like NYC or Boston) without supervision. I assume what happened to them was they got lost during this optional exploration period

No, that was not the situation, it happened at the event.

You don't have to share any specifics or details, but could you at least share how they could end up in a life threatening situation while attending a programming event?

https://www.cnn.com/2015/01/19/world/taiwan-gamer-death#:~:t...

Do they let children sit and program for 3 days (without breaks?) at these events without a single person checking in on them?! That's absolutely bananas if true, how could something like that even happen, is it a sweatshop of programmers or what's going on?

Truly, if they're forcing children to sit and code for 3 days straight someone should call the police this moment.

There was no forcing involved. Since there seems to be a lot of interest in this, I'll go into more details. As I said, this was discussed with organizers at the time, largely it was largely a matter of "the kids'll figure it out" failure. Some specifics will be vague due to time.

This event was a camp out. They had tents for the campers, but it was, in my kids view, a free-for-all. Like a "go figure out the tent situation", and my child couldn't figure out the tent situation, so decided to sleep outside. And woke up with a bunch of bugs (I don't remember exactly what, leaches sticks in my mind). So they decided they'd caffeinate the rest of the event and not sleep.

(edit: Typo fix)

No one is forced to code, they have sleeping areas, and plenty of time for breaks, and no one will care if someone decides to take a break for a bit

Hey! You can probs recognize me by the username. Dunno anyone else who's open about being a fuckin dog on the slack.

During Scrapyard, Hackatime was mandatory, and was one of the biggest defining factors to HQ about the success of a satellite. So yeah, technically attendees aren't _forced_ to code, but getting the most weighted grants is still your biggest focus.

For those who don't know, HC uses a unit called "weighted grants" which supposedly equates to 10 hours of good quality work, in order to determine success. The issue is, the definition of good quality work is currently set as "most lines written", excluding R&D and the 20 other steps that it takes to design something.

The previous commentator said "could have very easily turned into life threatening" and when asked what that was about, they sent the link about that person dying after sitting playing games for 3 days.

Are you saying they're lying or are wrong about this? They seemed to have personal experience about it, and I'm assuming they're not outright lying, but I do think it sounds strange they would let children sit and code for 3 days straight.

That article has no relation to Hack Club whatsoever.

But that's beside the point - they provide rooms, plenty of food and snacks, workshops, and activities to do during breaks. Organizers are on-site at all times, and there is a live hotline for parents or kids to call at any time. "sit and code for 3 days straight" is a gross mischaracterization.

Here's an example of an event hosted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXWMr0gdLJA

So again then, what exact "life threatening situations" could children be put in, besides the things parent already said it wasn't about, during these events? Parent themselves linked that article, I'm not 100% sure what they meant, but all I could think was that they experienced something similar, otherwise I'm not sure why they'd link that.

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