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A community for tech people on sabbatical who are full-time exploring new ideas and figuring out what to do next.

Info on our beta batch up here: www.recesslabs.com

If you have an inclination to try out remote work for 2-4 weeks and think your company would go for it, we've had several people successfully use their prof. development budget for Hacker Paradise.

We're like an extended unconference that pops up in different cities around the world, and more fun / in-depth if you can get away for a bit. We do weekly talks and other workshops for professional development, and you get to connect with people from the local tech scene as well as those from around the world.

It makes more sense if you replace "our generation" with "our portfolio."

1 & 2 are basically the reason we started Hacker Paradise, to make it so you can travel the world without having to think as much about logistics, and while immersed in a tight-knit community.

Sounds like you're pretty set on being settled down, but if you ever do choose to travel again, definitely check us out! I myself have mostly settled now, but still like to get away for 1-3 months per year. A large segment of our community has that mostly-stationary lifestyle accented by stints of medium-long travel :)

Used to be a programmer.

A few years ago, started Hacker Paradise, which is basically a travel company. We organize trips around the world for people (mostly in tech) who want to work remotely while traveling.

I came from a background of startups & some freelance web dev, and my co-founder was a senior software engineer. We didn't have much experience in travel, but we both had some experience organize events & managing community (running hackathons in college, etc.).

Interestingly, after 3 years of doing more operational / community work, I'm moving back towards spending more of my time programming and tinkering with hardware. My old co-founder already made the switch and is back working as a software engineer.

I think the takeaway for us is that there is no panacea. There are some fun parts about operational & community work, but it also ends up being pretty admin-heavy. After awhile, knowledge work becomes something that seems like a lot of fun again.

My $0.02 - doing the same thing (regardless of what it is) for 3 decades sounds boring! Feel free to make the jump to something else, but be open to coming back to software or jumping into other areas as well.

While I respect your opinion, I think that there are a large number of people who struggle with the feeling of not having accomplished anything / not being "good enough" even in be face of what most would consider career success.

Psychology has some terminology for this: cognitive distortions, and in particular, minimization and magnification. Whether it's due to upbringing, environment, what have you, some large number of people tend to discount their successes and zero in on whatever they see as their flaws or failures.

The field of CBT is one way to work with this. I particularly like the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, which talks about how the stories we tell ourselves about success and failure lead to happiness / optimism or depression / pessimism. He also talks about some of the research that's been done to help change peoples' explanatory style.

This + meditation has been helpful to me, as well as trying to take other peoples' positive feedback to heart more, rather than discounting it as politeness.

Also, although I think it can be helpful to produce things, I feel like your advice can feed into the story of "not doing enough," even if they are. There probably are some people who feel this way because they're actually not doing much, but I feel like a lot of the people on this site are more likely to be the types with unrealistically high standards whose problems are not their output, but their perception of their output.

On that note, spending less time on HN and more time with friends / family / doing other things you enjoy can also be helpful, as it helps to diversify your identity.

We stayed in Tallinn, Estonia w/ Hacker Paradise for a month in the summer of 2015.

Great experience - the tech scene there welcomed us with open arms. Got to meet some cool ex-Skype execs, and even did a fireside chat w/ the CIO of the country.

Would definitely recommend it as an up and coming tech city.

We wrote up our discussion with the Taavi, the CIO, here if you're interested -- it was fascinating to hear about how much more advanced they are technologically compared to other nations due to the young relative age of their country: http://www.hackerparadise.org/blog/2015/06/17/welcome-to-e-s...

It seems like this was a project someone worked on during one of our trips in the past. While he's not scamming people, it does look like he copied the text from smsprivacy.org.

We don't have any connection to the project, but we've reached out asking him to change / delete the copied text. Hopefully this gets cleared up shortly.

Hackathons and meet ups might be a good place to start.

I like this idea bc art implies an intrinsic interest in the work. You're not just building things for the solution, you get joy and take pride in the work itself.

Also, one small typo: it's principles not principals in that context.

Great post.

What do you look for when evaluating nonprofits?

Also, would you be open to funding a nonprofit in a similar space to one you've already funded that's doing things in a different way?

This is cool. My inbox is woefully unequipped to function as a to-do list, but that's where most of my tasks live now. Hope this lives up to the hype.

Would love to hear more about this (where you organize, any structure, is it collaborative, etc.). Did this a bit on my own in the summer but it kind of petered out after a couple months.

Thanks! We wrote some blog posts last year, but I've been meaning to do an update on the whole project.

Here's our main site: www.hackerparadise.org

Here's a blog post with some of our marketing experiments: http://www.hackerparadise.org/blog/2015/05/06/marketing-less...

What would you like to know more about?

I started Hacker Paradise as a side project in 2014, and now we're a full-time team of 3.

We organize trips around the world for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs who want to work remotely while traveling. People pay us to organize housing, accommodations, and community events wherever we go (past speakers have been CIO of Estonia in Tallin, Matz in Tokyo, etc.).

Happy; to answer questions about running more of an ops business that still is related to tech.

I have a very similar experience with #3. I feel like so much about care for chronic injuries is super sub-optimal.

Brewpublik is a curated craft beer delivery service to your home or office. They're a 500 Startups company:

http://www.brewpublik.com/

I hear this product was built while the founder traveled to 20+ countries. Pretty cool.

It's normal. I'd recommend joining a coworking space or getting involved with communities of some kind, going to meet ups, etc, as that will keep you social and may end up getting you work.

If you're interested at all in traveling, check us out: hackerparadise.org

I think it's a phase entrepreneurs go through. I know I spent time during college trying to get little social apps or other services off the ground.

With the passage of time and a couple failed startups, working on one of these pointless apps now holds no interest. I started a side project after my last failed company that turned into something and which I've been bootstrapping since, but I don't have any illusions about it saving the world or anything like that.

I do however have a laundry list of 3-5 big hairy societal problems that I want to take a stab at some day, and I regularly find myself thinking about how I can take this side project-turned-company into something more meaningful. Otherwise, what's the point in working on it long term?

I think over time, a lot of these founders will tend toward more impactful ideas. Blaming them, calling it a "problem" misses the point hat it's all part of the maturation process.

This is super cool. Love the quantity goal - I think that's super important, as opposed to "I want to make the perfect game." Would love to experiment like this with something like 100 products (digital / physical) in 5 years, or some similar time period.

Do you have some links on the cyclic progression of civilization? Would be super interested to read more on that.

How is the vacation / remote-work policy?

If anyone is interested in co-living around the world with other people in tech, Hacker Paradise will be in Bali from March 13 - April 9 with ~30 people.

We've been up and running for a year and a half now, organizing 1-3 month trips for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs all over the world (Bali, Costa Rica, Barcelona, Tokyo, etc.).

Before Bali, we'll be in Vietnam. Afterwards, we'll be in Thailand for a month and then in Portugal for the summer.

Check out our site for more info: www.hackerparadise.org

Also happy to answer questions here.

Interesting point. From that perspective, you could argue that giving a loan against the collateral is a way to account for some of the risk on Paypal's side while still giving us some funds.

Still, we've been with Stripe since then and have had no problems.

This is totally fair. We knew this was something we might have to deal with given the nature of the business.

Still, things change when they then turn around and offer you a business loan. It's hard to argue that they need to freeze your funds for collateral when they then deem you credible enough to lend you money.

It's not so much that our accounts got frozen that makes this interesting. It's the fact that they froze our accounts and then offered us a loan.

I'm really excited to see more companies like this. While the economics are interesting, I think the real value that co-living brings is community.

People used to get their feelings of belonging from their church and religion. As religion takes a backseat, people are finding that sense of community in new areas (like Crossfit).

I personally felt really lost toward the end of university. Due to injury, I was unable to play sports, which is where I'd found my "tribe" growing up. I also was doing a lot of soul-searching after shutting down my last company, and so was feeling disconnected from a lot of the people in the startup world.

Anyways, through a series of random events, I ended up starting a coliving experiment for developers & entrepreneurs in Costa Rica.

I thought the value would be having interesting people around while abroad, but the best part was getting thrown into a collegial atmosphere, where people would just hang out and shoot the breeze about anything they found interesting. It was a really profound experience for me, and I've since spent 11 out of the last 14 months in various co-living arrangements around the world through Hacker Paradise.

There are definitely drawbacks to intense levels of community. You have a bit less privacy, and interpersonal friction will arise.

Still, I think it can be a really remarkable experience for people in their "Odyssey years," while they're still trying to figure out what they want to make their life's work. I know I've made closer friends through co-living than I would have otherwise.

Also, is this static, or will it continue to generate new posts?