zachlatta

Wow, Handy looks really great and super polished. Demo at https://handy.computer/

I love this idea, and originally planned to build it using local models, but to have post-processing (that's where you get correctly spelled names when replying to emails / etc), you need to have a local LLM too.

If you do that, the total pipeline takes too long for the UX to be good (5-10 seconds per transcription instead of <1s). I also had concerns around battery life.

Some day!

The death of trust on the cloud.

Hack Club | Quality & Integrity Lead, YSWS | Shelburne, Vermont (USA) | ONSITE

Hack Club (https://hackclub.com / https://github.com/hackclub) is a nonprofit where 1,000s of teenagers ship real projects — games, hardware, websites, apps — and we send them free stuff in return. 100k+ teens, 140 countries. Our motto is "by teens, for teens" and we operate with radical trust and transparency.

Every month, thousands of projects come through our You Ship We Ship programs. Program authors do the primary reviews. We need someone to QA the reviewers — a second set of eyes who can tell us: are they making good calls? Catching the fake projects? Being too harsh on legitimate ones?

Responsibilities:

- Spot-check approved projects (random sampling)

- Audit reviewer consistency and catch patterns

- Define what "high quality" actually means and document it

- Train program authors to make better decisions

- Handle appeals and investigations

- Build systems that work at 100k projects/year

You'll still do plenty of hands-on review — you can't spot-check effectively without understanding the projects deeply. But your mission is ensuring the integrity of the entire process, not being the bottleneck for each submission.

$55-70k. 4 weeks PTO. Health/dental/vision. Based in an 1800s building in Shelburne, Vermont. Full details: https://hiring.hackclub.com/38523

Hi all, Hack Club founder here. I just posted this on the Hack Club Slack and want to share here too:

Hi everyone, I should have jumped in sooner. I’m sorry - I’ve been afraid to post because I’ve been worried that any response whatsoever would be crucified. That’s left a lot of you understandably asking questions and that’s on me.

This has been a very difficult set of accusations to deal with this week, and a lot of bad memories have been brought up. Please keep in mind that there is often a lot of context not mentioned and that Hack Club can’t talk about everything as transparently as we’d like due to privacy for the people involved.

First - I want to give an update on the privacy policy. We hired a data privacy lawyer in August through a referral from our main lawyer. We’ve been working with them and expect to be able to release the privacy policy in ~2 weeks. It won’t be anything earth shattering - basically that Hack Club doesn’t sell your data.

From day 1 we have cared about data privacy at Hack Club. When I was a teenager, I’d PGP sign all my emails and refused to use Gmail / etc because of privacy. When Slack made it possible for organizations to read DMs of members in ~2017, we made a public commitment to never do that for Hack Clubbers unless legally compelled (and have never done so today). That’s part of why 100% of all of the code at Hack Club is open source, which none of our peer organizations do (to my knowledge).

Part of why we haven’t been sooner to respond or release a policy is because a privacy policy != security. Practices = security. We haven’t wanted to release something imperfect, so we didn’t release anything at all. We should have just hired a privacy lawyer earlier and published what they recommended - that’s on me.

I believe that Hack Club currently meets or exceeds the security and data practices of other organizations in our space, and where we have found issues (or people have helped us find issues), we have resolved them as quickly as possible. For example, most reports through https://security.hackclub.com are resolved in less than 24 hours. Earlier this year I found a bug (https://gist.github.com/zachlatta/f86317493654b550c689dc6509...) in Google Workspace that enabled phishing from g.co, which is owned by Google - it took them 11 months to fix it (I filed in Jan 2025, got a bounty payout 2 months after reporting, and just got confirmation the bug was fixed 11 days ago).

Here are some of the various steps we’ve taken to enhance security over the past year:

- Essential staff carry YubiKeys, including myself

- https://security.hackclub.com bug bounty program was introduced

- We moved to role-based access control in Airtable and Fillout

- We moved Hackatime and other sensitive apps out of the main self-hosted servers into their own separated server group

- https://identity.hackclub.com was introduced to securely handle ID verifications with audit logs and all documents stored encrypted at rest so individual programs don’t need to handle as much PII. Servers are completely separated from the rest of HC infra.

- We started working pro-bono with a cybersecurity firm that works with Tailscale and other security-critical orgs

- We separated PII collection across YSWSs so programs generally only have access to the individual data people submit to their program (and not the full Hack Club users table)

- And a lot more small things

There are a small number of known cases of accidentally unprotected API endpoints in YSWSs, which were all quickly fixed after being reported through https://security.hackclub.com. We don’t have any evidence any data was leaked. The people who reported all received bounty payouts. Since then, the staff members responsible have been trained and feel very badly about their mistakes.

I hope we can all have a breather and have a better day tomorrow. Thank you all. More soon.

Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn’t fair to pick one example and generalize to say an entire country’s talent pool is poor.

The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as bad (or worse) than the one you linked.

Tons of little Slack bots and apps and stuff! It’s a vibrant community and people are always making cool little tools

We've had a similar experience at Hack Club, the nonprofit I run that helps high schoolers get into coding and electronics.

We used to be on Heroku and the cost wasn't just the high monthly bill - it was asking "is this little utility app I just wrote really worth paying $15/month to host?" before working on it.

This year we moved to a self-hosted setup on Coolify and have about 300 services running on a single server for $300/month on Hetzner. For the most part, it's been great and let us ship a lot more code!

My biggest realization is that for an organization like us, we really only need 99% uptime on most of our services (not 99.99%). Most developer tools are around helping you reach 99.99% uptime. When you realize you only need 99%, the world opens up.

Disco looks really cool and I'm excited to check it out!

I built a pretty janky self-hostable version of https://archive.org called Arker. It's open source here: https://github.com/hackclub/arker

It's hosted at https://archive.hackclub.com. You can see a sample archived page here: https://archive.hackclub.com/lX1mm.

It's archived about 22k links so far and hasn't crashed yet!

It would be a generational mistake to rob kids of all of human history and knowledge.

You should see if there's a Daydream game jam near you! It's a game jam for teens ages 13-18 happening in 100 cities simultaneously worldwide on September 27th and 28th, 2025.

There'll be workshops to help people get started and everyone else will be her age: https://daydream.hackclub.com/

Here are some videos of recent hackathons like Daydream. All for ages 13-18.

- Hackathon on an Island (August 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXWMr0gdLJA

- Largest Hardware Hackathon (July 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaEFv7e49mo

- Scrapyard: Build Silly Projects (March 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

(I run Hack Club, the nonprofit hosting this event)

I run Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), a nonprofit where lots of high schoolers learn to code and build awesome projects together.

Here is how the ones who are successful do it:

1. They make small technical projects they're proud of, like this https://gabitzu3.github.io/MemeOS-v0.1/

2. They do it in a way where they make friends (ex. on the Hack Club Slack, on Discords, or by going to in-person events like https://daydream.hackclub.com which is an upcoming global game jam we're hosting)

3. They do it in a way where they go on memorable adventures (either physical - like traveling to hackathons, or intellectual - like trying to build a compiler from scratch)

Tuned LLMs will become more accurate than bookkeepers for most day-to-day small business transactions. I think you underestimate the amount of errors that normal bookkeepers tend to make.

Most small businesses cannot afford CPAs for everyday tasks. At best a CPA signs off on the annual summaries. Most day to day work is done by bookkeepers who are not CPAs.

In my area (Vermont) the going rate for a good CPA is $200/hr. Bookkeepers are $20-30/hr.

We are only 2 years in! 1.2% of GDP is enormous! The fact that we can even make any of these comparisons is stunning.

Wow, this is an amazing project. Great work!

Yeah, I’m saying that I expect us to have a world where we can cram almost all business knowledge into the context window for coding LLMs and we can get an early glimpse of that today by pasting in the full contents of 50+ files into Gemini 2.5 and only using 10% of its context window today, which is the worst it’ll ever be.

Yes… I did?

I’d encourage you to try the 1M context window on Gemini 2.5 Pro. It’s pretty remarkable.

I paste in the entire codebase for my small ETL project (100k tokens) and it’s pretty good.

Not perfect, still a long ways to go, but a sign of the times to come.

Can you link your dotfiles? I’ve been having trouble figuring out a good way to structure mine

I checked and the quality of schools there are fine! 75% of students in high school at grade level in math and reading. Pretty normal.

I run a nonprofit called Hack Club that helps organize most of the hackathons for high schoolers in the USA.

We’ve been trying to make high school hackathons much more around building fun projects you’re proud of than building something “impressive” - and it’s working!

You may like this video of Hack Club Scrapyard, our hackathon where you had to build stupid projects. We had 3,000 high schoolers come to the 61 locations: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

What makes Hack Club events different is:

1) You must actually ship a project with a live, deployed URL and open source code, or it doesn’t count

2) They are peer-judged, instead of judged by clueless “experts” who can’t tell if a project is fake or not

3) They are organized by high schoolers, for high schoolers so there is a heavy emphasize on friendship-building and helping people go on adventures

One cool project from Scrapyard was “Desktop Circus”, where your home screen gets invaded by a circus cast that messes with your mouse, moves windows on your screen, etc. It’s inspired by Desktop Goose, which was built by another Hack Clubber.

https://bucketfish.itch.io/desktop-circus

It’s funny, when you have those 3 constraints suddenly everything feels less like “college application” and much more about building cool stuff to show your friends. All the ChatGPT wrappers rank poorly.

It’s really important that we as a society encourage young people to have fun with technology.

Thank you so much! Will investigate.

I highly recommend Coolify. I evaluated every option when looking for a Heroku alternative, and Coolify is clearly the best as long as you don’t absolutely require zero downtime deploys.

We are hosting over 100 services on it for https://hackclub.com and it’s been great. We’re 3 months in now.

The key is to think about it as a GUI on top of Docker, not as a fully managed solution.

It’s one of those PHP apps that’s weirdly reliable. I see lots of other comments recommending Dokku / Dokploy / others. None of those options are nearly as mature as Coolify in my experience.

FYI that I did a bounty for database SSL connections and they implemented it, so they should be live now!

Dokploy unfortunately isn’t nearly as mature as Coolify.

Come on. You don’t need to be a bully. This person worked hard on their thing.

We are a nonprofit and are in the process of switching all of our hosting over to Coolify. It's been great. We've moved 13 apps over to it so far.

I think he just found a random engineer from Google on LinkedIn and is pretending to be him.

I am a paying user of Google Workspace, and also run a charity that is a user of Google Workspace with thousands of accounts. The account they were trying to phish was a paid Google Workspace email.