The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club must have this down to a very fine art.
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/
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.
> 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?
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.
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
I love seeing PSF support the community with fiscal sponsorship! It makes such a huge difference for these open source projects and meetups, letting them focus on software and community rather than the legal/financial back-office work.
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
It's incredible! HCB is a member run project where teens can also make their own non profits! Even Hack Clubs finances are made public at https://hcb.hackclub.com/hq/
Yes, they have hired a lawyer. Also, as part of Hack Club it is an incredible place, meeting like minded people, participation in hackathons, member run programs like YSWS(You Ship We Ship) and much more!
Mitchell Hashimoto is a real programmer in the old vein. It's lovely to see him succeed. Ghostty is fantastic to use.
There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
Ferrari, McLaren, Pagani, Lamborghini, Tata, Honda, Toyota, Wal-Mart, Zuora (named after the two founders), Garmin (also named after the two founders).
He mentioned in an interview Hashicorp was just a corporate entity that he used as a teenager to do some contracting here and there. He and the other founder weren't that keen on using it but the name stuck.
I don't know the specifics of naming that particular company, but being the majority stakeholder of two companies myself I can tell you that naming companies is just as hard as naming things in programming. Both of my companies are named after myself, one directly so and the other being a portmanteau of my business partner's and my names.
It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited. The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck. Branding is hard.
Charles Schwab has written (my memory) that putting one's name on the business stakes its reputation there, and such a business is theoretically more trustworthy.
Really nice to see a solidly valuable project develop a sustainable foundation instead of turning into yet another VC-backed devtools startup that will inevitably die in a few years.
Rather thank IBM for paying Mitchell an outrageous amount of money for Hashicorp, so he can devote all of his time on awesome projects like Ghostty without ever thinking about sustainable income ever again.
While you're not wrong, I think this undersells a little how much Mitchell has given of his time to OSS. Yes, he's fortunate that he doesn't have to worry about money, but even when he did, he still contributed openly and freely.
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
I always feel weird thanking IBM. On one hand, they've funded numerous FOSS projects, and made the thinkpad, an amazing CPU architecture (PPC), and seem to be the only ones actually innovating in the tech space sometimes. On the other hand, they bought Redhat and seem actively hostile to any FOSS projects that don't make them money
There are hundreds of thousands of software engineers who, given FU amounts of money, would absolutely keep writing software and do it only for the love of it. The companies that hire us usually make us sign promises that we won't work on side projects. Even if there are legal workarounds to that, it's not quite so simple.
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
> whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas, where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.
moonlighting is permitted by law in California (companies legally can't prevent you from doing it, iiuc), as long as there's no conflict of interest with your main job...
I'm hoping they'll get around to supporting command-number for switching between windows[0]. command-` is fine but clunky as hell when you have more than three or four windows. Without command-number, I'm still stuck using iTerm2 as my daily driver.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
A little unfair that this is downvoted. No search is like a dealbreaker for me. I'm happy with iTerm and for 99% of my use cases I don't need a "very fast" terminal. Thanks for pointing this out.
Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)
You can't build a house without the foundation (pun intended).
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
How do you expect that to change? What is the next step in your mind? Maybe asking for donations? If only he would set up some way that the general public could contribute money to the project! That’d be the smart thing to do. Then he could write a blog post about it, and maybe someone would post a link to HN. That’d really be something.
To be fair, that one guy happens to be the OG Mitchell Hashimoto, who's worth a giant pile of money from selling terraform to IBM, and he's the guy actually writing it in the first place, so I don't think that's, like, a terrible horrible no good issue.
I'm really excited about Ghostty (and Zig mostly because of my exposure via ghostty). Until ghostty I hadn't really considered that a terminal would be a catalyst for innovation and even startups. But, libghostty is REALLY fascinating. And, all the good AI coding tools, IMHO, operate inside a terminal, and my head is spinning with ideas about hammering on the container for these new CLIs.
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
I keep seeing Ghostty in the news, and I've tried it, but it feels like just another terminal emulator to men. This coming from someone who spends 90% of the workday in the terminal.
Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
To me it has a couple advantages over the other options on the market.
1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.
2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.
3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.
The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.
I tried it a few months ago, and didn't perceive any of those items as particular benefits.
1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous. Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary desktop environment.
2. Sensible defaults may be good for new users, but I already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to another within the same category isn't how welcoming it is to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust its configuration to match my long-established preferences. The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some extent.
3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to input.
What's an example of a thing you usually need to fiddle with? I feel like 1 and 3 are already true for my existing native terminal emulators, which I also never configure. So presumably there are things Ghostty does that aren't enabled by default on my other ones that I could take advantage of?
I've been using Kitty terminal and they are absolutely comparable in the feature set: GPU-based rendering, speed, customisation. OS-native controls in Ghostty are not very important to me, I like terminal being a terminal, not a GUI.
It's good at what it does. Starts quickly, doesn't get bogged down when dumping large amounts of text into it, got some nice themes.
I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part.
My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
Ghostty is quite slow to start on my Linux machine, very close the the first start of GNOME Terminal (or Terminator). Maybe because I'm on Wayland? Are you on X?
As another person that spends the whole day in the terminal. It's sad to see there is no Windows version. I do not understand why I would need gpu acceleration for a terminal, but I would still try it.
I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash
I used iTerm2 a lot, configured it to my liking, but then I tried Ghostty for curiosity and for some reason I sticked to it. I think it's just cleaner and leaner and the default looks pretty cool and minimalistic, I don't really miss anything from iTerm.
Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
Inspired by this I just posted a resonably niche feature request to the Ghostty discussion forum (copy and paste to support text/rtf)... and found out within half an hour that the equivalent of what I was asking for was already available on their main branch: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/9798
Kudos to Mitchell for doing it. Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status, but knowing Mitchell, he's not about the money, power, status, etc so the project is in good hands and you can expect this to stay free.
> A non-profit structure provides enforceable assurances: the mission cannot be quietly changed, funds cannot be diverted to private benefit, and the project cannot be sold off or repurposed for commercial gain
Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
> Unfortunately the "rug pull" issue has been severely crippled by OpenAI's about face turn on their non profit status,
The situations aren't comparable.
OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around controlling access to their data (which was never open), and controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB, Jenkins) is an option.
Readit News
The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club must have this down to a very fine art.
I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
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/
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.
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)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
https://github.com/hackclub/hcb/issues/12314
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced earlier this year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43519802), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130402
It might have improved since then?
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There was a devtools blackhole era once where if you got in that business you were just giving things away and never got to reap the rewards. Then there was this era of founders who figured out how to make it sticky and capture value in a Pareto-optimal way.
Love to see it.
Also, didn't said company piss people off in some way that led to Open Tofu being created?
It had very little to do with self aggrandizing and more to do with the tax authorities need a name and time was limited. The names were used mostly as placeholders and then stuck. Branding is hard.
So thanks, IBM! <3
That's part of what drew lots of us to HashiCorp in the first place - giving back.
Even still, whatever high salaries they do give us just flow right back into the neighborhoods through insane property values and other cost-of-living expenses that negate any gains. So, it’s always just the few of us who can win that lottery and truly break out of the cycle.
You break out of the cycle by selling your HCOL home and moving to LCOL after a few years. That HCOL home will have appreciated fast enough given the original purchase price that the growth alone would easily pay for a comparable home in a LCOL area. This is the story of my village in Texas, where Cali people have been buying literal mansions after moving out of their shitboxes in LA and the Bay Area.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
Seems I will wait a little longer before search is in the regular build (and not nightly ones)
I said in the linked post that I remain the largest donor, but this helps lay bricks such that we can build a sustainable community that doesn't rely on me financially or technically. There simply wasn't a vehicle before that others could even join in financially. Now there is.
All of the above was mentioned in the post. If you want more details, please read it. I assume you didn't.
I'll begin some donor reach out and donor relationship work eventually. The past few months has been enough work simply coordinating this process, meeting with accountants and lawyers to figure out the right path forward, meeting with other software foundations to determine proper processes etc. I'm going to take a breather, then hop back in. :)
(UWash CompSci strikes again, not that I'm biased)
Ghostty is blazing fast and the attention to detail is fabulous.
The theme picker is next level, for example; so are the typographical controls.
It feels like an app made by a craftsman at the top of his game.
Asking in good faith -- could someone tell me what's special about Ghostty compared to alternatives?
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
1. Feels 'native' and is built for each platform. This means I can use for example familiar right click context menu's and tabs that I find on every other app. I have the option to use the mouse as well as the keyboard which I appreciate.
2. It has sensible defaults with a "Zero Configuration Philosophy" meaning that many of the things I would usually need to fiddle with are already set.
3. It performs comparably to advanced terminal emulators such as kitty.
The combination of all three (and especially the first) is why I use it.
1. Terminal emulators that feel 'native' are ubiquitous. Sure, there are also a lot that have idiosyncratic UIs, but I'm not generally using those -- my go-to when working within a GUI environment is xfce4-terminal, which is about as native as I can imagine, given that I'm using XFCE as my primary desktop environment.
2. Sensible defaults may be good for new users, but I already have my terminal emulators configured exactly as I like them, and my benchmark for switching from one tool to another within the same category isn't how welcoming it is to novice users out of the box, it's how easily I can adjust its configuration to match my long-established preferences. The "zero configuration" philosophy is actually a detriment here, as it leads to configurability being obscured to some extent.
3. When I tested it, its performance was worse than xfce4-terminal, both objectively and subjectively. Its memory consumption was higher and it felt laggier in responding to input.
Deleted Comment
I find it a bit messy to build but I'm not exactly a compile binaries kind of person anymore so it's probably a good sign that I still manage to figure it out. If stuff like Zig is your thing you'll probably enjoy this part.
My main terminal emulator is the bog slow but reliable Terminator, though in a while I'll probably flip the i3 commands and move over entirely to Ghostty.
BTW, I recently discovered shaders and cursor_blaze is absolutely awesome.
I use a company managed/provided machine that runs windows, I do not have to bother maintaining it. All I use is basically Firefox and a MinGW to have a bash
I also like the “ghostty +list-themes” command and the splash page animation on their site.
Yes, it's just another terminal emulator, but a pretty solid one that just works.
Yeah, OpenAI has shown us that this is more negotiable than we might have believed. Fortunately nobody will ever think terminal emulation is a trillion dollar industry, so I think we’re ok.
The situations aren't comparable.
OpenAI was a non-profit foundation that held a controlling share in a for-profit organisation. It's model is based around controlling access to their data (which was never open), and controlling access to their models (which are also not open).
If Ghostty does sets up a for-profit org with the NFP as the majority holder then we can have the conversation, but even at that fork + move on (like OpenTofu, Valkey, CentOS, MariaDB, Jenkins) is an option.