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Comment by rus20376 | Hacker News Reader

rus20376

This place sounds like an adult daycare.

Has there been a business started based on work done there? Publishable research results? (that second one is actually a pretty low bar, and yet if there is something it is not easily discoverable)

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Here is an honest good faith answer to a pretty aggressively hostile question: Adult daycare is almost the opposite of what Recurse center is. Recurse is largely unstructured: people do what inspires them and make their own plans. You will find more structure, hand holding and mandatory time wastes in virtually any business than you will at Recurse Center. A 12 week batch is not a lot of time to carry out a major research project, but it is generally not intended to treat this as a start up incubator. There are other places for that kind of activity. Recurse is a place to freely learn and explore. There are a few companies that have emerged but they are not huge money machines (most companies are not). There is also some interesting research that is done. Some things that pop into my head immediately are: Dan Luu's studies of Motion to Photon Latency in keyboard input [1] Raph Levien's work on Xi [2], and Andrew Kelly's work on Zig [3].

I'm sure there are other people could dig up more examples, but that really isn't the point. A school's purpose is to produce educated people. Recurse is more of an unschool but the aim is to help people learn and think - it should be judged on those terms first and foremost.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/ [2] https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-raph-levien [3] https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-andrew-kelley

From what I see, this is more of a sabbatical time to just explore and enjoy programming without needing a productive end. I've been considering it myself.

> Has there been a business started based on work done there?

Greg Brockman went through Recurse in Summer of 2015, and co-founded OpenAI in December of 2015.

I don't get it. Why would you ask if an adult daycare leads to a business or new discoveries? Daycares are for nurturing curiosity and fostering development in a socially engaging environment—much like the Recurse Center—not for publishing papers.

Even if for the sake of argument its conceded it's a "daycare", what's wrong with that? No one's being forced to go there. It's free for the participants. There's no harm in a group that facilitates people exploring what interests them in a setting where others are doing the same.

The practical goal of Recurse is to make connections. Starting a business or publishing research are explicitly non-goals.

The paradox of networking events is nobody who attends "networking events" is worth networking with.

It's weird to say that about a YCombinator-affiliated event on a YCombinator forum. I'm not especially fond of YC but there's pretty clearly potential to make valuable connections in this sphere.

Recurse Center is only YC-affiliated in the sense that the founders did YC (S10). It's not YC sponsored or endorsed as far as I could find.

It doesn't really attract the YC kind of people either.

Getting people hired is also a goal as they rely on it to stay afloat:

> How can you afford to make RC free?

> RC has a built in recruiting agency. Companies pay to hire RC alumni.

You are missing the point. On the line between explore and exploit, RC is basically 100% explore. The point is to learn, and more importantly, to flex the muscle of learning without being taught. And to participate in a community of kind and curious people who are also motivated to do the same.

> This place sounds like an adult daycare.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

That's wild. (Aside from the already-made points on explorations and learning) RC has no monetary transaction here, yet RC itself is somehow a business with revenue. Think on that for a second.

Here's my low-bar result, mostly from my time at RC. Is it literally published? No. Does it have novel arguments and code? Yes. winwang.blog/posts/dphm-1

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