hackclub VS Zulip

OMG I love this. Go get em! Also, this is perfect material for Hack Club. You should join! https://hackclub.com/

Hi! I'm Lexi, I wrote this article/mini-book. There's a classic question of "what happens when you load a website?", but I've always been more interested in "what happens when you run a program?". About 3 months ago, I was really annoyed at myself for not knowing how to answer that question so I decided to teach myself.

I taught myself everything else I know in programming, so this should be easy, right? NOPE! Apparently everything online about how operating systems and CPUs work is terrible. There are, like, no resources. Everything sucks. So while I was teaching myself I realized, hey, I should make a really good resource myself. So I started taking notes on what I was learning, and ended up with a 60-page Google Doc. And then I started writing.

And while I was writing, it turned out that most of the stuff in that giant doc was wrong. And I had to do more research. And I iterated and iterated and iterated and the internet resources continued to be terrible so I needed to make the article better. Then I realized it needed diagrams and drawings, but I didn't know how to do art, so I just pulled out Figma and started experimenting. I had a Wacom tablet lying around that I won at some hackathon, so I used that to draw some things.

Now, about 3 months later, I have something I'm really proud of! I'm happy to finally share the final version of Putting the "You" in CPU. I built this as part of Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), which is a community of other high schoolers who love computers.

It was cool seeing some (accidental) reception on HN a couple weeks ago while this was still a WIP, I really appreciated the feedback I got. I took some time to substantially clean it up and I'm finally happy to share with the world myself.

The website is a static HTML/CSS project, I wrote everything from scratch (I'm especially proud of the navigation components).

I hope you enjoy and learn something!

Hi! I'm the person who made this thing!

Some backstory on me: I'm 17 and left high school a year ago to work full-time at Hack Club (https://hackclub.com/). I've been programming for as long as I can remember, and started homeschooling about 6 years ago to focus more on that (and my other interests).

Since I'm entirely self-taught, I haven't taken any college systems classes — and while I had picked up a lot, I wasn't happy with my answer to "what happens when you run a thing." So I let myself spend a shit ton of time actually learning as much as possible. What I found was that:

1. Operating systems and hardware are really fun to learn about!

In the face of the recent devastating floods in Vermont, Hack Club, a Vermont-based nonprofit, is offering free use of Hack Club Bank for any flood relief efforts in Vermont, New York State, and New Hampshire.

Facing recent floods, Hack Club is offering free use of Hack Club Bank for relief efforts in VT, NY, and NH. Collect tax-deductible donations easily through various platforms, including GoFundMe. Manage funds collaboratively on our easy-to-use online platform, and issue physical or virtual cards for your charitable expenses. As Vermonters, we’re eager to assist fellow Vermonters. Start within 24 hours by emailing [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) or filling out the form on https://hackclub.com/bank.

Something like https://hackclub.com/

FIRST alumni and founder of Hack Club here.

Hack Club is a nonprofit network of hackathons, student-led coding clubs, and open source projects. Our website is https://hackclub.com and our GitHub is https://github.com/hackclub.

We have been receiving free email hosting from Google Workspace and providing it to the Hack Club network, but we recently hit the domain limit (600 domains) on Google Workspace for Nonprofits. Each domain is typically a hackathon or a chapter at a high school.

Does anyone have any recommendations for email hosts that we could look into? As a mostly volunteer-driven nonprofit, we can't afford pay per-user pricing as there are thousands and thousands of accounts.

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.