zachlatta

I’m reading Exhalation by Ted Chiang right now and every single story is blowing my mind.

Extremely prescient ideas that feel like they were written today in a world with AI, but many of the essays are 15 years old or older!

This is so incredibly interesting and one of the best things I’ve seen on HN recently. Thank you for the awesome post!

I just got one of these (https://aiphor.com/products/bluefox-nx1-4-0-android-smartpho...) that I'm hoping to try and make my weekend phone. It's a small Android phone. It runs WhatsApp / Google Maps. I am going to set it up to forward my calls to it on the weekends. It just arrived, so I'm excited to try it out.

The AI companies should all make visionary donations to the Internet Archive.

For teens ages 13-18, Hack Club is running a free grant program to help kids learn to solder! They can sign up and get a free kit from us at https://solder.hackclub.com/

One easy answer to the slopification of hackathons is to turn to the same method that game jams use - peer voting.

We made this switch in 2022 for nearly all Hack Club hackathons and it’s hugely helped project quality.

If you go to https://hackclub.com/clubs, there’s an application form. Once you fill it out you’ll get a response within a week. If anything comes up, please email jared@hackclub.com who runs the clubs program (or post in the clubs channels on Slack).

If you go to https://hackclub.com/programs, there are a bunch of things you can join right now! Another commenter mentioned it - but you should also join the Hack Club Slack at https://slack.hackclub.com

If you have any ideas on how we can better orient the community around self expression and self actualization, please email me!

It’s really important to me that Hack Club is a space that helps teens become the people they want to become vs. pressuring them down any one path.

zach@hackclub.com

Hey, you should join Hack Club! I was just at an event where a high schooler designed and built a continuous variable transmission (https://outpost.hackclub.com).

You’ll meet a ton of interesting, friendly teens who are all helping each other build awesome projects.

Cool project!

(Hack Club is a nonprofit and I’m the founder of it)

I once set up a 1 month hotspot with Verizon when I moved into a new place that didn’t have internet yet.

After the month, I returned the hotspot to the store and they told me I was all good (in writing too!).

Then I started getting monthly bills that I couldn’t cancel online or over the phone. I repeatedly went into the store and they told me it was a billing mistake and they’d fix it.

Eventually they sent me to collections, my credit score dropped, and a debt collector started coming after me.

It took 2 years to finally get them to stop and to remove it from my credit history.

Verizon is a bad company that doesn’t care about its customers.

At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years.

It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y

We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com

If you check the post on Pangram it shows up as 100% AI written.

Make sure you open it with a Chromium browser. Made by a 17 year old Hack Clubber.

Repo here: https://github.com/crabby605/DOSPDF

This is how you get bad stuff. This mindset will turn the software ecosystem into mechanical / electrical engineering. Closed source, bad, and expensive tools.

Two founders of a small startup in Europe trying to build a new decentralized git forge and open sourcing their code are anti-democracy?

Come on.

Just like engineering, monetizing is an iterative process. As long as they don't make it hard to move off their platform, IMO it's completely fine for them to try different monetization models.

We should celebrate people building open source stuff and in the public. The alternative is for the software tooling ecosystem to look like EE or mechanical engineering tools - all closed source, proprietary, and with super expensive licensing.

It's easy to take open source for granted - 'information wants to be free', but we are at risk of the open source movement dying with proprietary AI completely changing everything about software.

If we penalize people who are working toward the right goal, we contribute to that decline.

This kind of absolutism is crazy. People who are doing 90% of what we want them to do should be greatly celebrated and rewarded. Else we penalize idealistic people who are not perfect instead of penalizing the people who are actually doing the opposite of what we care about (ex. Autodesk).

Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!

This is a website created by a professional lobbyist who still has an active role taking lobbying contracts through a firm they founded called Steinhauser Strategies.

Running a nonprofit is really, really hard and I commend them for doing it. I hope they get through this crisis.

Hack Club almost went insolvent in 2017. We would have, if it wasn’t for 2 friends who stepped in near the end and saved us. Today there are tens of thousands of teens involved and doing amazing things.

I’m disappointed by all the negativity in the comments. I’m not familiar with Session, but raising donor funds is a very different skillset than software engineering and anyone who is trying to do both has my respect.

AI slop. Please see the Hacker News guidelines on writing with AI.

You are barking up the wrong tree. Ryan can't do anything to make government grants for this kind of work exist.

It would be a huge public service if you could get more public support for open source. Maybe you could do it instead of criticizing Ryan!

Some public support for this kind of work already exists, especially for the Python science ecosystem, but nothing that comes close to "competing" with VC for a project like Deno.

You should be the change you hope to see in the world and make this happen!

This is really not true. It’s important that when people say this, we hold them to it and reward them when they see it through.

The internet has a tendency to penalize people who try to do bold things. As a result, it’s too often strategic to stay quiet and boring and focus on the bottom line.

We shouldn’t be cynical. We should be excited when people say bold things and reward them when they live up to it.

This project was made by a teenager in https://blueprint.hackclub.com, a nonprofit program I'm helping run that helps teenagers learn PCB design and get up to $400 USD in funding to prototype and manufacture their designs!

We just launched https://stasis.hackclub.com, another similar electronics program.

If you know any teens that want to get into PCB design, please encourage them to join Hack Club and these programs!

Watsi is an incredible organization doing incredible work.

Chase and Grace are both incredible people.

When I was 15 and first starting Hack Club, I went to Startup School 2013 and watched Chase’s talk. It was the first time I had ever seen a startup founder who was starting a nonprofit instead of a for-profit. Afterwards he showed me the kindness of speaking with me.

Later as the years went on, both of them always replied to emails and gave great advice.

Many nonprofit founders understandably feel very protective of their experience and relationships because nonprofits can be zero-sum in a way that for-profits aren’t, but Chase and Grace are two of the most generous people you’ll ever meet.

Thank you for starting an incredible organization and being such an inspiration.

That’s awesome! The specific thing that was causing the long latency was the image LLM call to describe the current context. I’m not sure if you’ve tested Handy’s post-processing with images or if there’s a technique to get image calls to be faster locally.

Thank you for making Handy! It looks amazing and I wish I found it before making FreeFlow.

It takes a screenshot of the current window and sends it to Llama in Groq asking it to describe what you’re doing and pull out any key info like names with spelling.

You can go to Settings > Run Logs in FreeFlow to see the full pipeline ran on each request with the exact prompt and LLM response to see exactly what is sent / returned.

I just learned about Handy in this thread and it looks great!

I think the biggest difference between FreeFlow and Handy is that FreeFlow implements what Monologue calls "deep context", where it post-processes the raw transcription with context from your currently open window.

This fixes misspelled names if you're replying to an email / makes sure technical terms are spelled right / etc.

The original hope for FreeFlow was for it to use all local models like Handy does, but with the post-processing step the pipeline took 5-10 seconds instead of <1 second with Groq.

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!