(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)
Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here
I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions
Please don’t downvote this advice into oblivion. As a person who owns MacBooks all his life, I do want something more open now, and honestly, I have no idea what else I can buy. Any polite input into this conversation is actually valuable.
Would make sense if this thread was about laptop purchasing choices.
Surely, there are other places on the internet where NGO's are politely criticized for getting kids the wrong free laptops - those likely contain valuable advice on what brand of computer you can buy
Not available in Bangladesh. There’s every reason to believe that this person weighed the pros and cons of everything available locally before deciding on the Apple product.
Framework 12 is well aligned with this use case. Hackable, durable/utilitarian design, lower priced, aimed for youth and education markets (has a bit of the EeePC spirit). Well, those were the initial design goals of the concept, but then they sort of made a more general purpose laptop that everyone at the company fell in love with, which led to it actually going to production.
12" is on the smaller side, but it's also a 2in1 that can be used in a desk setup as an extra monitor. I'd ship them a cheap lightning portable monitor, simple keyboard+mouse pack, and for $100 more they have a durable portable laptop and a simple two monitor desk setup for dev.
Sounds untrustworthy. Bangladesh's standard of living is roughly on par with India's, so cheap Chinese laptops should be fairly common there, and repairs for such laptops should be pretty available.
So, instead of one MacBook, you could buy about 10 laptops for 10 Bangladeshi kids, and developing on them would be about as comfortable as on a MacBook.
Why don't you start a non-profit that gives laptop to kids so you can decide over the kind of machine to procure. These constant opinions on other peoples decisions where you have no insight to the whys is very ego-centric in a i-know-best kind of way.
About… the teenage boy’s… “bs” about his preferences? About his supporters recognizing his free labor, wanting to reward it, asking him to make a choice for himself and him making it?
This case was different from hackclub’s usual donations. Someone spotted OXY2DEV, a prolific Neovim plugin dev, coding on his phone and shared it with the community. People rallied to raise money specifically for him, and hackclub stepped in to facilitate. The drive ended with a small surplus, and since the funds were raised only for him, they let him decide how to use it. Smart choice because in South Asia chasing service centers is such a hassle and Apple’s service process is a dream in comparison.
I can't talk for the entire region, but what I saw across my travels is quite the opposite. You enter a repair shop the owner typically knows how to solder and will fix about any laptop and mobile phone. Back home in Europe is where repairs are overpriced or deemed "impossible". I can't recall more than once in south east asia the words "you better off buying a new one", oh so common in the "west".
I agree the critic sounds misplaced though, he wanted a Macbook. However not because all the other models are complicated to fix in his land.
Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?
I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.
Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.
Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.
Listen, I'm an old fart who may have been messing around on IRC when you were just a twinkle in your parents' eyes. IRC does suck along a lot of important metrics. The GPL open-source community-developed project I worked on for 19 years moved from IRC to Matrix several years ago, and the payoff in terms of engagement was obvious immediately.
I agree that walled gardens are a trap. But you're not going to convince people to move to free solutions without being able to recognize clearly why they walled gardens are so attractive in the first place.
What's your definition of "engagement" here? Because it makes me think of social networking tactics to keep you ... well ... engaged ... the longest time possible.
Moved on to matrix? Many did... and they're all realizing matrix doesn't actually work long term. There's only the synapse server and there's literally no way to trim data from the db in synapse or everything breaks. That means the db just grows and grows until it's too expensive, or too slow (re:IO), to work. That's why the matrix.org homeserver has a 55TB db. That's why many long running IRC servers gave up on running matrix bridges because it simply became too computationally/resource costly to run the simple text based server even if they loved the features.
So unfortunately Matrix is a dead end. The matrix foundation gave up control 2 years ago. Matrix is now controlled by Element.io corporation and they only care about their government hosting contracts. It's really only viable if you have a significant constant money stream to pay for the ever increasing server resources like governments/corps.
IRC persists. It is the text chat layer of the internet which is the platform. Trying to build the entire internet into your text chat platform, and storing everything, is the kind of insanity only for-profit operations do... and eventually die from. Whereas IRC being a dumb pipe with lists of IPs associated with sockets will live forever. And cheaply.
Synapse server is the only server that does the things matrix says it can do. All those others don't. Notice only two of those say 'stable' and only one, synapse, implements the full set of features. Also can't switch between them.
And your links to synapse features ("Please note that, as this feature isn't part of the Matrix specification yet, the use of m.room.retention events for per-room retention policies is to be considered as experimental.") may describe certain synapse functionality but in practice is doesn't work and the db keeps growing as does IO load. The compression thing is an attempt at mitigation because the protocol just doesn't handle it.
Right, I misunderstood your last line. I initially took you to mean, "We've had IRC since forever and Jabber since the early 00's..." Reading it again, I now understand you to mean, "Before you say 'IRC sucks', which I agree with, better protocols like Jabber have been around since the early 00's."
No, I like IRC, but IM has different uses. IRC is for technical/non-private/random connections to roam around, like going a public place IRL. IM it's for personal stuff, as talking between relatives, close friends, word colleagues and so on.
IRC can be used for private communication, in fact it was the protocol for private communication used by for example warez scene groups years ago.
IRC, because of its simplicity, can be layered, so adding encryption is trivial if we want to hide from the server (FISH). By default IRC servers show hostname of the user, but that depends on the network; for example LinkNet hides it.
Right, well, the project needed something like IRC / Discord / Slack, where random people could just show up, ask questions, hang out, whatever. You know, engage with the community.
"Lots of clients" -- that's actually a problem. "Oh, you want to have a quick chat with experts in our community? First, here's a list of 50 IRC clients, half of which haven't been updated since 2003, all of which have different advantages and disadvantages. Go through and choose one and go through all the configuration. Oh, and you wanted to be able to read something someone wrote while your laptop lid was shut? Like, maybe you're not in the same timezone as many of the contributors? You're going to need to find an always-on server and set up this IRC bouncer. Also, because of spam, we only allow registered users to post, so you're going to need to type these runes in the command-line and make yourself a certificate."
Matrix certainly had its warts when we switched, but it was still an immediate quality-of-life improvement, particularly for newcomers.
I mean, HAM radio is basically a chat room with an entrance exam; there's certainly something nice about having communities full of people with that sort of filter up front. And, for a charity designed to teach kids to code, maybe helping them munge around with IRC clients is a bonus. But for a normal community, IRC isn't the right tool for the job.
This. It is mind boggling to see an organization that teaches tech related stuff be so clueless about the dangers of proprietary software, cloud services and walled gardens.
I am somewhat guessing here: They used to sell this app (for, idk, $300 I think?) until recently. The FAQ might not have been updated in full to reflect the fact that it's now open source.
I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.
In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.
Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.
I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.
Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.
Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.
We've deployed mattermost at my company because it meets most requirements that slack did minus the SSO. Surprisingly used by some big government agencies (NASA/USAF)
Even now it costs extra to have file uploads over 50MB, high quality audio, and large video calls. Features that an organisation like this could legitimately need.
we use discord, it's great, we wrote our own bots for the things we need. In terms of making money, it's just discord has a different model for making money, it doesn't want the servers to cost money, it wants as many servers as possible so many people want to use discord. It sells directly to users.
>To change per-app settings for any application, including Discord, on an iPhone or iPad, go to the Settings app > Accessibility > Per-App Settings. Tap Add App, select Discord from the list, and then customize settings like Display & Text Size to alter the app's appearance or behavior without affecting other applications.
Yep, time to self host one of the awesome self hosting list's chat options. This will teach independence too. I have a ready ansible deployment for zulip using docker in my repos [1], publicly available. All that's needed is a server, setting some variables in ansible, deploying that thing, and adding backups. It will cost significantly less than any slack subscription and will not cost per user.
It's really easy to join! There are lots of cool programs currently running. Maybe wait until next week so the migration is done, but do check our website: https://hackclub.com (we have/had 100k people in the Slack)
> don't use proprietary services just because they are trendy. Prefer always open standards!
So if you use an open standard, but not self hosted, and your provider tells you "pay 250k or lose all your data in 2 days", I'd say are not necessarily in a better position than they are now.
It's not impossible to migrate off of slack, but migrations take time.
It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.
1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.
2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.
FYI Hack Club helps fiscally sponsor organizations that do not have the capacity to apply for nonprofit status (https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/). The 7% income covers dev fees for lawyers, engineers and a bunch of other stuff to help it kept running.
Hi, Hack Clubber here. Fun fact: The 7% does not completely cover the cost of running a fiscal sponsorship program like HCB! That fee does not make HCB a net positive product to run in terms of cost. It just helps offset it a little.
Welp -- this explains why Slack's sales teams is going scorched earth after them. If Hack Foundation is the same as Hack Club their revenue has skyrocketed in recent years, and they're showing consistent growth. So do sales people at big tech companies keep tabs on non-profits financials and decide when to pounce on them for money based on growth like this? something tells me probably.
The word “nonprofit” shouldn’t really be used for these organizations anyway because you can see right there the people in charge of it are literally profiting.
It does matter. People working for a non-profit should not work for free. It's completely acceptable for a non-profit to have an income and assets. Revenue may increase and it would be irresponsible to immediately increase expenses to match when they can conservatively plan for the future.
This is said knowing nothing about the company in question, just from my own experience working for a non-profit. Employees still need to be paid.
This raises some interesting questions. Would you expect to see people in charge of this org, performing the day-to-day jobs, to work without receiving any pay? When you say the people are profiting, do you mean the organization is receiving more money each year than they are spending? That is certainly the goal of all orgs, businesses, churches, soup kitchens, and government NGO's.
It's an interesting question. I suppose they could take on jobs elsewhere in the private sector, and then perform these jobs for Hack Club at zero cost to the company. I would say it comes down to time spent. How big is Hack Club? If it can be managed for 10 minutes worth of work a day, then perhaps that should be donated time. If it requires more than 8+ hours a day. And if the work is specialized then it def needs the right person there, WITH the expertise to run this company --- then they should receive pay for his/her work.
Hi this is to cover the cost of the non-profit. There's a thing called fiscal sponsorship where you can basically let people use your non-profit status and it's great for kids who want to throw hackathons to not worry about taxes, but hack club still needs to pay for that non-profit status.
Wow, this stirred up a memory because at some point I had like the most messages sent on Hack Club Slack ever (or at least per month). That was a long time ago.
Alternatively: do teach coding to kids (which includes logical reasoning and problem solving)
You don't want an entire generation of people who can barely operate the devices that enable and control a huge portion of their lives.
Kids will benefit immensely from being able to logically reason, and will be less afraid to repair or work around shoddy software, even if they never write another line of code in their lives.
Professional programmers dont fear kids taught to code any more than novellists fear kids taught literacy or accountants fear kids with numeracy. If anything, they know personally how important it is to learn these things.
I would love it if future folks can write their own random scripts without needing a developer to do it for them.
I would love to see more people writing software. There will always be advanced work that needs doing. There will always be larger challenges.
I want the world of the future, where every 10-year-old knows calculus and python and is incredibly capable, and then I want to see the future we get when they grow up.
https://hackclub.com/
(They do help clubs sell things, taking "7% of income", so they do have a revenue stream, but the money that Slack wants would pay a veritable army of student interns.)