Watsi is an incredible organization doing incredible work.
Chase and Grace are both incredible people.
When I was 15 and first starting Hack Club, I went to Startup School 2013 and watched Chase’s talk. It was the first time I had ever seen a startup founder who was starting a nonprofit instead of a for-profit. Afterwards he showed me the kindness of speaking with me.
Later as the years went on, both of them always replied to emails and gave great advice.
Many nonprofit founders understandably feel very protective of their experience and relationships because nonprofits can be zero-sum in a way that for-profits aren’t, but Chase and Grace are two of the most generous people you’ll ever meet.
Thank you for starting an incredible organization and being such an inspiration.
I just learned about Handy in this thread and it looks great!
I think the biggest difference between FreeFlow and Handy is that FreeFlow implements what Monologue calls "deep context", where it post-processes the raw transcription with context from your currently open window.
This fixes misspelled names if you're replying to an email / makes sure technical terms are spelled right / etc.
The original hope for FreeFlow was for it to use all local models like Handy does, but with the post-processing step the pipeline took 5-10 seconds instead of <1 second with Groq.
There's an open PR in the repo which will be merged which adds this support. Post processing is an optional feature if you want to use it, and when using it, end to end latency can still be under 3 seconds easily
That’s awesome! The specific thing that was causing the long latency was the image LLM call to describe the current context. I’m not sure if you’ve tested Handy’s post-processing with images or if there’s a technique to get image calls to be faster locally.
Thank you for making Handy! It looks amazing and I wish I found it before making FreeFlow.
Could you go into a little more detail about the deep context - what does it grab, and which model is used to process it? Are you also using a groq model for the transcription?
It takes a screenshot of the current window and sends it to Llama in Groq asking it to describe what you’re doing and pull out any key info like names with spelling.
You can go to Settings > Run Logs in FreeFlow to see the full pipeline ran on each request with the exact prompt and LLM response to see exactly what is sent / returned.
You can try ottex for this use case - it has both context capture (app screenshots), native LLMs support, meaning it can send audio AND screenshot directly to gemini 3 flash to produce the bespoke result.
[I'm using] Handy myself right now. And it's pretty good. I don't have any problems with it, except that I wish that it would slowly roll out the text as you talk instead of waiting to transcribe into the very end. because I like to rant and ramble a little bit and then go back and edit what I've written rather than having to perfectly compose on the first attempt. And that's one of the big advantages, in my opinion, of using a voice to text app is that it would let you ramble and rant and see what you have said and keep making additions and alterations to that. For instance, I'm doing this entire bit using handy in one stream of thought take. And so it's probably gonna be a bit rambly and not very polished, but at the same time it's more representative of a general use case. And I'm talking quite a bit so that I can actually put the system under stress and see how well it responds.
My only issue with it was that it cut off the words [I'm using] at the beginning and obviously it doesn't enter paragraph breaks. It took about 25 seconds to transcribe all of that on a 10th gen i7 laptop processor.
If they could incorporate combination typing out what was said while you're talking it would be pretty perfect.
I love this idea, and originally planned to build it using local models, but to have post-processing (that's where you get correctly spelled names when replying to emails / etc), you need to have a local LLM too.
If you do that, the total pipeline takes too long for the UX to be good (5-10 seconds per transcription instead of <1s). I also had concerns around battery life.
Hack Club (https://hackclub.com / https://github.com/hackclub) is a nonprofit where 1,000s of teenagers ship real projects — games, hardware, websites, apps — and we send them free stuff in return. 100k+ teens, 140 countries. Our motto is "by teens, for teens" and we operate with radical trust and transparency.
Every month, thousands of projects come through our You Ship We Ship programs. Program authors do the primary reviews. We need someone to QA the reviewers — a second set of eyes who can tell us: are they making good calls? Catching the fake projects? Being too harsh on legitimate ones?
Responsibilities:
- Spot-check approved projects (random sampling)
- Audit reviewer consistency and catch patterns
- Define what "high quality" actually means and document it
- Train program authors to make better decisions
- Handle appeals and investigations
- Build systems that work at 100k projects/year
You'll still do plenty of hands-on review — you can't spot-check effectively without understanding the projects deeply. But your mission is ensuring the integrity of the entire process, not being the bottleneck for each submission.
$55-70k. 4 weeks PTO. Health/dental/vision. Based in an 1800s building in Shelburne, Vermont. Full details: https://hiring.hackclub.com/38523
Hi all, Hack Club founder here. I just posted this on the Hack Club Slack and want to share here too:
Hi everyone, I should have jumped in sooner. I’m sorry - I’ve been afraid to post because I’ve been worried that any response whatsoever would be crucified. That’s left a lot of you understandably asking questions and that’s on me.
This has been a very difficult set of accusations to deal with this week, and a lot of bad memories have been brought up. Please keep in mind that there is often a lot of context not mentioned and that Hack Club can’t talk about everything as transparently as we’d like due to privacy for the people involved.
First - I want to give an update on the privacy policy. We hired a data privacy lawyer in August through a referral from our main lawyer. We’ve been working with them and expect to be able to release the privacy policy in ~2 weeks. It won’t be anything earth shattering - basically that Hack Club doesn’t sell your data.
From day 1 we have cared about data privacy at Hack Club. When I was a teenager, I’d PGP sign all my emails and refused to use Gmail / etc because of privacy. When Slack made it possible for organizations to read DMs of members in ~2017, we made a public commitment to never do that for Hack Clubbers unless legally compelled (and have never done so today). That’s part of why 100% of all of the code at Hack Club is open source, which none of our peer organizations do (to my knowledge).
Part of why we haven’t been sooner to respond or release a policy is because a privacy policy != security. Practices = security. We haven’t wanted to release something imperfect, so we didn’t release anything at all. We should have just hired a privacy lawyer earlier and published what they recommended - that’s on me.
I believe that Hack Club currently meets or exceeds the security and data practices of other organizations in our space, and where we have found issues (or people have helped us find issues), we have resolved them as quickly as possible. For example, most reports through https://security.hackclub.com are resolved in less than 24 hours. Earlier this year I found a bug (https://gist.github.com/zachlatta/f86317493654b550c689dc6509...) in Google Workspace that enabled phishing from g.co, which is owned by Google - it took them 11 months to fix it (I filed in Jan 2025, got a bounty payout 2 months after reporting, and just got confirmation the bug was fixed 11 days ago).
Here are some of the various steps we’ve taken to enhance security over the past year:
- Essential staff carry YubiKeys, including myself
- We moved to role-based access control in Airtable and Fillout
- We moved Hackatime and other sensitive apps out of the main self-hosted servers into their own separated server group
- https://identity.hackclub.com was introduced to securely handle ID verifications with audit logs and all documents stored encrypted at rest so individual programs don’t need to handle as much PII. Servers are completely separated from the rest of HC infra.
- We started working pro-bono with a cybersecurity firm that works with Tailscale and other security-critical orgs
- We separated PII collection across YSWSs so programs generally only have access to the individual data people submit to their program (and not the full Hack Club users table)
- And a lot more small things
There are a small number of known cases of accidentally unprotected API endpoints in YSWSs, which were all quickly fixed after being reported through https://security.hackclub.com. We don’t have any evidence any data was leaked. The people who reported all received bounty payouts. Since then, the staff members responsible have been trained and feel very badly about their mistakes.
I hope we can all have a breather and have a better day tomorrow. Thank you all. More soon.
Conversation about outsourcing aside, it isn’t fair to pick one example and generalize to say an entire country’s talent pool is poor.
The US has the best engineering talent pool in the world and you can find dozens of examples at major companies as bad (or worse) than the one you linked.
We've had a similar experience at Hack Club, the nonprofit I run that helps high schoolers get into coding and electronics.
We used to be on Heroku and the cost wasn't just the high monthly bill - it was asking "is this little utility app I just wrote really worth paying $15/month to host?" before working on it.
This year we moved to a self-hosted setup on Coolify and have about 300 services running on a single server for $300/month on Hetzner. For the most part, it's been great and let us ship a lot more code!
My biggest realization is that for an organization like us, we really only need 99% uptime on most of our services (not 99.99%). Most developer tools are around helping you reach 99.99% uptime. When you realize you only need 99%, the world opens up.
Disco looks really cool and I'm excited to check it out!
Cheers, let me know if you do / hop onto our Discord for any questions.
We know of two similar cases: a bootcamp/dev school in Puerto Rico that lets its students deploy all of their final projects to a single VPS, and a Raspberry Pi that we've set up at the Recurse Center [0] which is used to host (double checking now) ~75 web projects. On a single Pi!
Chase and Grace are both incredible people.
When I was 15 and first starting Hack Club, I went to Startup School 2013 and watched Chase’s talk. It was the first time I had ever seen a startup founder who was starting a nonprofit instead of a for-profit. Afterwards he showed me the kindness of speaking with me.
Later as the years went on, both of them always replied to emails and gave great advice.
Many nonprofit founders understandably feel very protective of their experience and relationships because nonprofits can be zero-sum in a way that for-profits aren’t, but Chase and Grace are two of the most generous people you’ll ever meet.
Thank you for starting an incredible organization and being such an inspiration.
reply