nicholasjbs

I'm not sure who you are, but I'm sorry that RC was a bad experience for you. I appreciate your sharing your experience so respectfully, and I hope you've since found other communities or opportunities that are better a better fit for you!

Yes, we want people to be making an intentional choice to come to RC, and not just to do it because it's free, so we don't lead with that. Our hope is that people will get excited about the idea, and then be pleasantly surprised when they discover that it's completely free.

(While we don't like to lead with being free, we also don't mean to completely bury that fact -- e.g., we do have it on the front page, albeit at the very bottom. Perhaps we should make this a little more prominent. Thanks for the feedback!)

Zulip is a critical piece of software for my business: It's the main tool my company has used to communicate for more than 13 years, and it's the primary forum used by our 3,000+ person alumni community. Our Zulip realm has over 4M messages.

I share this because I hope it makes it clear that I have a vested interest in Zulip's future. And I'm happy about this news; I'm confident Zulip will continue to improve for many years.

Also, for those who don't know: Zulip was initially a for-profit startup, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. Tim then went to great lengths to get Dropbox to later open source it, and allow him to found a new company (the one that was today donated to the new nonprofit foundation) to continue work on Zulip. I can't think of any other cases where a founder has gone to such great lengths to do right by their users.

I've known Tim personally for over a decade. I'm certain that he's not doing this because he wants more money.

Congrats to Tim and the rest of the team!

I've been a happy Zulip user (and realm admin) for 13 years: it's one of my favorite pieces of software, and I use it daily. My understanding is these changes will be very good for Zulip's long-term stability and success.

(I'm a volunteer member of the new foundation's advisory board.)

Thank you!

Would they be easier to easier to answer without the superlative? E.g., "What's a project you're proud of?"

Thanks for the feedback!

(I'm one of the founders of the Recurse Center.)

At least so far, the impact of LLMs has been overall positive for RC. We have a big-tent community, which includes everyone from those who avoid LLMs at all costs to those who are all-in on them, and everyone in between. We have folks who come to our retreats with the explicit goal of not programming with LLMs[1] (usually because they've been using them extensively at their previous jobs) and others who use RC as an opportunity to learn how to program effectively with AI. There's also a lot of discussion here about how (and to what extent) to use LLMs effectively in the context of learning.

We wrote up our position on AI last July, and while a lot has changed since then, I think all our conclusions still hold up well[2]: "...whether you choose to embrace or avoid AI in your work at RC, you will need to build your own mental structures to grow as a programmer. When using AI, use it to amplify your ambitions, not to abdicate your agency. And regardless of what you do, be curious about and kind to the people around you."

Like everyone else, I have no idea what the future holds, but I'm confident we'll find a way to navigate it. I'm sure I have some motivated reasoning here, but I really do believe that humans will still want to understand and build things no matter how good the models get.

[1] https://miguelconner.substack.com/p/im-coding-by-hand

[2] https://www.recurse.com/blog/191-developing-our-position-on-...

If you've not seen them, the All Souls questions are really worth checking out. I've found them to be both fun and inspiring: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers

(Recurse Center cofounder here)

Most folks do RC between jobs, either because they quit their job specifically to do RC or because they lost their job and then decide to apply. Other common ways are as part of a formal sabbatical (returning either to an industry job or to academia), as part of garden leave, or while on summer break (for college and grad students). We also get a fair number of freelancers/independent contractors (who stop doing their normal work during their batches), as well as some retirees.

Some folks use RC as a way to enter the industry (both new grads and folks switching careers), though the majority of people who attend have already worked professionally as programmers.

We've had people aged 12 to early 70s attend, though most Recursers are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.

All the games are custom ones built by people at the Recurse Center!

I don't think he's released the code yet, but my understanding is that he plans to!

I've had the pleasure of following Peter's progress on this project over the past 18 months or so, and it's been incredible to see how far he's taken it.

When he first described it to me, I didn't really "get" it (is it a game? a simulation? some other sort of environment?), and it wasn't until seeing an actual demo and hearing Peter explain his thinking more deeply that it clicked.

It's basically a giant simulation environment that is 1) visually stunning (and all visual aspects are meaningful / carry semantic information and aren't just glitter), 2) technically quite impressive, and 3) built for rapid exploration and experimentation. If that sounds at all interesting, you should watch the video to hear Peter's talk!

(Writing this as someone who generally doesn't like to watch videos online; this is one of the rare cases where I think it's worth it, and a video is a better format than text in explaining the thing.)

We were among the first Paper users (starting from the private beta). We loved the product for the first few years, but then it stagnated. We finally switched away from it a year and a half ago.

Their export feature has been broken for over a year. Support hasn't helped, and our data is still trapped.

A sad end for a once promising product.

Recurse Center (YC S10) | Career Facilitator / Full-Cycle Recruiter | Onsite | Brooklyn | Full-time | $70-135k + good benefits

We operate a programming retreat with an integrated recruiting agency.

We're hiring a Career Facilitator to support our mission to transform lives by helping people direct themselves. This is a full-time, onsite role in Brooklyn with meaningful work, good benefits, great colleagues, clear goals, and a healthy culture.

We're a small, privately held business with no outside investors (except for YC, which invested ~$17k in 2010). We do not plan to raise money or go public.

Full details and how to apply in our job post: https://recurse.notion.site/Career-Facilitator-22300db231b58...

I don't agree with your characterization of my post, but I do appreciate your sharing this piece (and the fun flashback to old, oversized issues of GWS). Thanks for sharing it! Such a tragedy that Holt died shortly after he wrote that, I would have loved to hear what he thought of the last few decades of computing.

(Author here.)

This was a really fascinating project to work on because of the breadth of experiences and perspectives people have on LLMs, even when those people all otherwise have a lot in common (in this case, experienced programmers, all Recurse Center alums, all professional programmers in some capacity, almost all in the US, etc). I can't think of another area in programming where opinions differ this much.

Recurse Center (YC S10) | Career Facilitator | Onsite | Brooklyn | Full-time

We operate a programming retreat with an integrated recruiting agency.

We're hiring a Career Facilitator to support our mission to transform lives by helping people direct themselves. This is a full-time, onsite role in Brooklyn with meaningful work, good benefits, great colleagues, clear goals, and a healthy culture.

We're a small, privately held business with no outside investors (except for YC, which invested ~$17k in 2010). We do not plan to raise money or go public.

Full details and how to apply in our job post: https://recurse.notion.site/Career-Facilitator-22300db231b58...

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

Yes! I've noticed it's 10x worse for my professional email address than my personal one; nearly all of the spam that gets through Gmail's filters is (horribly targeted) B2B marketing. Is that what others are seeing too?

Submitter and author here: My friend Dave and I made this over a decade ago, and I just stumbled on it again. I found it to be a fun walk down memory lane, and more broadly, an interesting time capsule of HN's culture and tropes.

That's helpful feedback, thanks! We have it on the site[1], but it's not discoverable enough (nor is the page easy to scan/parse quickly).

[1] https://www.recurse.com/career-services

(RC cofounder here)

If you attend RC and want a new job afterwards (either right away or years later), we have a team to help you. We can suggest specific openings (after discussing and hearing your preferences), review your resume, set up mock interviews, and provide whatever support you’d like throughout your search.

All of this is optional — there’s no requirement you get a new job after attending RC, and there’s no requirement you work with us exclusively or at all if you do look for a job.

This all works (and we can keep our retreats free for all participants) because we have contingency recruiting agreements with a number of tech companies, and those companies pay us a fee whenever they hire someone we refer to them.

I hope that helps!

Congrats, Garry! Well-deserved. Excited for you and for YC.

I saw a subway ad for this a few weeks ago and immediately downloaded it. During setup, it asked for my home and work addresses so it could save my commute.

I trusted the app when it said, “We won’t share this info with anyone.”

Here’s a screenshot: https://mobile.twitter.com/nicholasbs/status/113532302185253...

After setting it up I wondered how a free app with no ads or in-app purchases and which didn’t share your data could possibly make money, so I googled it.

I discovered that Pigeon is made by Google. I went back to the App Store listing to see how I could have possibly missed this and found there is no mention of Google anywhere in the App Store or the app itself unless you click through to the Privacy Policy.

There are, however, plenty of reviews from people confused why an app like this would only support sign in with Google.

Congrats to the whole PagerDuty team!

We were in the same YC batch (S'10), and the founders were all kind, smart people. They were also determined and hard-working: I believe they'd been rejected by YC three times before getting in.

Recurse Center founder here.

Many people have asked over the years what types of things people do at RC. It's a surprisingly hard question to answer, because the work people do here is varied and diverse, from contributing to OSS projects to silly hacks to algorithmically generated art.

We built Joy of Computing to answer this question. It's a daily link aggregation site which posts one piece of work done by a current Recurser or an alum every day.

I'm happy to answer questions if anyone has any!

We don't run our own instance; we're hosted by zulipchat.com. Perfect uptime isn't a priority for us, so I don't know what (if any) availability they promise. But we've had almost no downtime over the past five years, and we've certainly had less than the public Slack outages I've seen folks talking about on Twitter :)

As far as I know Dropbox has no connection to Zulip now. Zulip was initially started as a company, which was acquired by Dropbox several years ago. Dropbox open sourced the code, and Tim (one of the Zulip cofounders) later left Dropbox to focus on running Zulip as an open source project.

We (the Recurse Center) have been using Zulip since early 2013, and it is the core of our online community. Zulip is excellent both for small teams (we use it for our team of 7) and big groups - we also run a realm with over 1,000 users posting 10s of thousands of messages monthly. I can't recommend it highly enough.