Originally written at the end of Arcade, our first “Universal You-Ship-We-Ship” program which ran during the summer of 2024. This is the second of three essays intended to introduce newcomers to some of the philosophical underpinnings of Hack Club.

The Hacker Mindset

In my last essay we learned what Hack Club is:

  • Hacker Culture for teenagers, institutionalized
  • The hacker-oriented arm of the public education system
  • A way of hacking the education system to produce more hackers

Now let’s talk about how we actualize those definitions. Hack Club operates on the basis of experimentation and iteration. There is no grand strategy in Hack Club; that’s not how hackers operate. A key distinction between hacking and engineering is that engineers have faith in their ability to design highly complex systems from fundamental principles. That confidence is necessary because a bridge has to work the first time, and well-founded because they almost always do! Eons of experimentation and iteration have allowed us to painstakingly extract very accurate abstractions of how bridges stand—and how they fall. Perhaps the earliest bridges were built with something closer to a hacker mindset… but at some point the discipline passed through a big fuzzy gray area into the realm of engineering, where enormous complexity can be safely navigated with the aid of rigorous fundamental principles.

There are no rigorous fundamental principles for what Hack Club does. It’s something new, and we are feeling around in the dark. We do have some fundamental principles for parts of what we do, most notably the parts that live wholly on computers. Hack Club employs many people who can (and do) build highly-scalable databases and blazingly-fast websites on the first try… but Hack Club is not in the business of databases and websites. Hackers may engage in engineering, but it’s not what makes us hackers. At Hack Club, the hacker mindset becomes most important and apparent when our systems make contact with humans. This is where the darkness envelops us, and we cannot trust our ability to design complex things from fundamental principles.

So, how do we navigate unknown terrain in the dark? How do we find the highest peaks, and avoid the lowest valleys, when we don’t have a reliable map?

Experimentation and iteration are the hacker’s tools for exploring new territory. To solve a problem, first we formulate an idea and try it out as quickly as possible (the “Minimum Viable Product”, or MVP). Speed matters much more than theoretical correctness here, because we assume at this point that our theories are no good, and we expect to have to build a bunch of experiments! The purpose of an experiment is not to be right, it’s to gather data; even when the result is negative, each real-world test reveals a tiny sample of truth about the overall landscape beneath our feet. Most things built in Hack Club do not work out. But eventually, inevitably, our parade of experiments will turn up something that works—even if only a little—and we can begin to iterate on our quest for the summit.

If experimentation is the process of looking for hills, iteration is the process of climbing them. Building and testing a single experiment tells you how well that one thing works—it gives you the height of the terrain—but a step in any direction from there tells you something more: the gradient. Every small tweak to an existing product is a step that tells you which direction leads upward. Good, quick iteration tends to rapidly improve a product… but then improvement slows down as you reach the top of the hill, which may not be very high. Most hills are not mountains, and you cannot iterate your way to Everest. It’s time for another round of experiments—but this time, you know where the foothills begin.

This process repeats. Every time you approach the top of a hill, you jump around looking for a bigger one to climb next. Eventually, you’ll find yourself on top of a mountain. Practically every good thing that has ever been built in Hack Club began as a humble, simple experiment. And among all the big, complicated, mountainous projects you see being built here—both from staff and within the community—there are hundreds of tiny, simple, nimble experiments blinking in and out of existence every day. You’ll never see most of them, because most of them never go very far; but each of them is as critical to this process as the steps we take atop mountains like HCB or Arcade. Which leads us to a beautiful truth: you, dear hacker, are as much a part of this revolution as I am. You don’t need to be an adult, spend years in our slack, or be some kind of wizard programmer. If you publicly try things, take small steps, and stay determined, you’re doing your part. Never forget: complicated things that work are almost always evolved from simple things that work.

On March 27th 2024, a 16 year old in Texas named Manitej created a channel in our Slack called #hack-hour as a place for other teenagers to use his personal pomodoro timer bot. Anyone can build a pomodoro timer. The original bot didn’t even have a codebase, it was just a Slack workflow. But this random little experiment worked well enough for a few other hackers to use it, so Manitej started iterating, and it grew. He created a proper Slackbot, gave it personality, and marketed it around the channel. Eventually, Max from HQ decided to run an experiment with him where they gave out rewards for your hours. More iterations. Another experiment. Less than three months after the channel was created, they renamed it to #hack-hour and launched what became the largest online event Hack Club has ever run, logging over 120,000 hours and distributing well over $100k worth of resources to teenage hackers all over the world.

This is how Hack Club works. Let’s recall one other definition of Hack Club from the previous essay: Hack Club is a long-term bet that the best technical education program for teenagers can be built by other teenagers

That doesn’t mean every bit of work in Hack Club is done by teenagers. It means that a critical mass of teenagers with a hacker mindset can be the engine of a revolution in education. We literally cannot do this without you. Neither me nor anyone else on our staff would have ever tried building a pomodoro clock, but that ultimately worked better than just about anything we’ve ever done. At the same time, Arcade had many problems… we are nowhere near the summit! Many, many cycles of experimentation and iteration lie ahead of us. I hope you’ll be a part of them.

An animation showing the processes of experimentation and iteration as a gradient descent algorithm.