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Comment by conradev | Hacker News Reader

Hack Club builds software, so the students naturally built a banking product to scale their fiscal sponsorship: https://hackclub.com/fiscal-sponsorship/

I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization.

The students have one big global Slack instance. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/

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This community sounds amazing, is there anything similar for adults rather than teens?

The “understanding through building” mentality is something I never got to experience as a group, the obvious answer is open source and the like but I wonder if there’s something more learning oriented.

Seconding this. I pivoted to tech in my early 30s and feel I've missed out on a lot of community building opportunities.

Recurse Center might be a good option https://www.recurse.com

I would second Recurse Center. I've heard universally great things!

Recurse center is awesome! The community is curious, kind and supportive. I did 2 batches there and each one expanded my horizons as a programmer.

Self-plug: consider Handmade Cities. We have a simple meetups [0] page if you decide you appreciate our ethos. Hopefully we have an active meetup location near you?

In any case, good luck on finding the right community!

[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups

My city is on the list but when I submit I get a 404

Which one is this? Las Vegas? If you don’t wish to reveal it here shoot an email so we can fix it: support at handmadecities dot com

I know I'm jaded but anytime I see a business situation and they specifically say you must be a MINOR to work with them... I get kinda suspicious.

>Yes, I'm a teenager ,18 and under

So not actually a teenager but a minor is what they mean and use what I would call deceptive language around it. But why?....

Yeah, I get suspicious when schools say only minors can enroll there

You already made the point but yea that’s overly jaded to a significant degree

That's not jaded, that's paranoid-ly misreading this.

It's an organization for hacking working with high schools and young people. They don't want small children enrolled, and they don't want older people.

"teenager 18 and under" is perfectly fine description for 13-18 or 7th to 12th grade.

It's tangential but civic hack groups might offer what you're looking for. There's Code for America in the states and g0v in Taiwan and some other places.

> The students have one big global Slack instance.

Are you back on Slack as the primary comms channel after their sudden attempt to upcharge you (followed by the U-turn after the PR backlash)? Do you have some mirroring and other kind of fallback strategy if something like that happens again?

(Context for those who missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887)

I do not speak for the 'club, but I believe it was resolved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45292042

Yes, as I mentioned, Slack made a U-turn after the thread got popular and became a PR disaster (after having ignored the issue again and again previously). That kind of behaviour indicates a service that shouldn't be relied on so much, at least not without low-friction alternates that you keep ready to jump onto, in case some exec there decides again that the Club is too tempting a prize to not attempt another squeeze.

We interviewed their founder Zach Latta on the EFF podcast[1] a few years back: I hadn't heard of them either, but he was pretty impressive, both on the goals and the political issues.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...

MMW: this will likely end up being the SVB for nonprofits

They're using Column (https://column.com/) under the hood, so more like Stripe (payments + Atlas) for non profits I think? Still very powerful and material value of course on top of the banking partner primitive.

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