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What I did at Recurse Center

132 points · 43 comments · bingden

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ykonstant · 1790537485 · focus · HN ↗
Let me guess: the webpage simply contains a link to itself.
1. ykonstant · 1790599428 · focus · HN ↗
  ...really? Downvoting for the recursion joke?
rus20376 · 1790541919 · focus · HN ↗
This place sounds like an adult daycare.
Has there been a business started based on work done there? Publishable research results? (that second one is actually a pretty low bar, and yet if there is something it is not easily discoverable)
1. thomascountz · 1790542251 · focus · HN ↗
  I don't get it. Why would you ask if an adult daycare leads to a business or new discoveries? Daycares are for nurturing curiosity and fostering development in a socially engaging environment—much like the Recurse Center—not for publishing papers.
2. saulpw · 1790542552 · focus · HN ↗
  You are missing the point. On the line between explore and exploit, RC is basically 100% explore. The point is to learn, and more importantly, to flex the muscle of learning without being taught. And to participate in a community of kind and curious people who are also motivated to do the same.
3. ebiester · 1790543738 · focus · HN ↗
  From what I see, this is more of a sabbatical time to just explore and enjoy programming without needing a productive end. I've been considering it myself.
4. winwang · 1790543921 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
5. applfanboysbgon · 1790544303 · focus · HN ↗
  The practical goal of Recurse is to make connections. Starting a business or publishing research are explicitly non-goals.
  1. roncesvalles · 1790545608 · focus · HN ↗
    The paradox of networking events is that nobody who attends "networking events" is very valuable to network with.
    applfanboysbgon · 1790546180 · focus · HN ↗
    It's weird to say that about a YCombinator-affiliated event on a YCombinator forum. I'm not especially fond of YC but there's pretty clearly potential to make valuable connections in this sphere.
    roncesvalles · 1790574448 · focus · HN ↗
    Recurse Center is only YC affiliated in the sense that the founders did YC. It's not YC sponsored or endorsed as far as I could find.
    applfanboysbgon · 1790587876 · focus · HN ↗
    It's not sponsored by YC, sure, but I didn't say sponsored, I said affiliated! I feel like there's pretty clearly an informal connection between the two.
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48949551">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48949551
  2. ahmeni · 1790592150 · focus · HN ↗
    Getting people hired is also a goal as they rely on it to stay afloat:
    > How can you afford to make RC free?
    > RC has a built in recruiting agency. Companies pay to hire RC alumni.
6. fragmede · 1790546573 · focus · HN ↗
  > This place sounds like an adult daycare.
  You say that like it's a bad thing.
7. blululu · 1790546642 · focus · HN ↗
  Here is an honest good faith answer to a pretty aggressively hostile question: Adult daycare is almost the opposite of what Recurse center is. Recurse is largely unstructured: people do what inspires them and make their own plans. You will find more structure, hand holding and mandatory time wastes in virtually any business than you will at Recurse Center. A 12 week batch is not a lot of time to carry out a major research project, but it is generally not intended to treat this as a start up incubator. There are other places for that kind of activity. Recurse is a place to freely learn and explore. There are a few companies that have emerged but they are not huge money machines (most companies are not). There is also some interesting research that is done. Some things that pop into my head immediately are: Dan Luu's studies of Motion to Photon Latency in keyboard input [1] Raph Levien's work on Xi [2], and Andrew Kelly's work on Zig [3].
  I'm sure there are other people could dig up more examples, but that really isn't the point. A school's purpose is to produce educated people. Recurse is more of an unschool but the aim is to help people learn and think - it should be judged on those terms first and foremost.
  [1] <a href="https://danluu.com/input-lag/" rel="nofollow">https://danluu.com/input-lag/ [2] <a href="https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-raph-levien" rel="nofollow">https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-raph-levien [3] <a href="https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-andrew-kelley" rel="nofollow">https://www.recurse.com/events/localhost-andrew-kelley
8. Bjartr · 1790549708 · focus · HN ↗
  Even if for the sake of argument its conceded it's a "daycare", what's wrong with that? No one's being forced to go there. It's free for the participants. There's no harm in a group that facilitates people exploring what interests them in a setting where others are doing the same.
9. simonw · 1790559207 · focus · HN ↗
  > Has there been a business started based on work done there?
  Greg Brockman went through Recurse in Summer of 2015, and co-founded OpenAI in December of 2015.
triyambakam · 1790545170 · focus · HN ↗
I always shudder hearing about RC. It feels like both wrong ends of career and hobby intersecting and the whole experience sounds dank and clammy.
1. dev_dan_2 · 1790546054 · focus · HN ↗
  I am sorry about the negative feelings and associations you have towards RC. Let's think constructively: What are 1-2 points you would do differently?
  1. ModernMech · 1790593566 · focus · HN ↗
    The main problem I see with RC which has prevented me from applying is there’s no stipend or housing. Most people can’t afford a summer in NYC without pay. So I’m not sure who the target audience really is, I guess wealthy SV engineers.
  2. yayachiken · 1790595016 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really something you can control, but RC always feels "unauthentic" whenever people write about it.
    It is often portrayed like an old-school hackerspace or makerspace but it's definitely not. It has an explicit corporate background, and it always feels like that is somehow hidden. In these comments there is a comment that claims that RC is not for business builders and networking, then immediately gets disproven by a quote from its very website. This shows that you have an actual image/brand problem.
    It is similar to how the term "hackathon" evolved. In the old times it was people coming together who worked on shared goals (like a FLOSS project) but only communicated via mailing lists and probably would never met in person otherwise. A hackathon was often an emotional thing, involving poor people travelling to the other side of the planet to meet their online friends to drink beer and finally have a whiteboard to communicate some complex ideas. Then corporations came and organized soulless "hackathons" and turned it into an idea farm and talent recruitment. The term "hackathon" is pretty much burnt completely nowadays.
    So anything that feels like it gets subtly used by corporatism just naturally gives techies the ick. It is not the first time this bait-and-switch happens, so people are fair to assume intent.
    I say you cannot control it, as obviously the public image comes from those blog posts of RC "Alumni" (Another great example: that term alone gives me the creeps). And those people have the right to feel excited about a nice experience that it probably was for them.
    But Recurse Center should probably be proud of the corporate background and actively counteract the impression of being a hobbyist makerspace that just has better inventory and manpower.
2. azhenley · 1790546588 · focus · HN ↗
  Really? Why? Sounds like an ideal way to spend a sabbatical to me!
rtpg · 1790552183 · focus · HN ↗
> This included what was probably the most interesting part, writing the tricky recursive code to implement the match statement.
Back in school I found this book[0], "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages". Flipping through it was very neat because it kinda demystified the nuts and bolts of implementing the "fancier" functional programming features for me.
Chapter 5 is about implementing pattern matching.
You read this kind of stuff and realize how easy things become when you just tackle a problem with the right mindset and abstractions. And this is a book from 1987! We've always had decent answers for a lot of the stuff.
I think it's interesting to flip through if you're a language implementer, though helps to be comfortable with reading some stuff sideways and not understanding every detail.
[0] <a href="https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-searchable.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-sea...
1. jan_m_savage · 1790564317 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. jonstewart · 1790564849 · focus · HN ↗
    The Reagan years were a golden age but not the 90s?
    jan_m_savage · 1790580035 · focus · HN ↗
    I meant the world, not the USA, but perhaps you think the world is all America.
  2. JackMorgan · 1790565495 · focus · HN ↗
    I think there's a lot more to be blamed on a planet that's getting hotter, pesticides in the food, lead in the soil, plastic in the food containers, hormones in the meat and cheese, and cost of living that goes up while salaries don't. Social trust is at an all time low. 99% of the population gets poorer everyday and can feel it. There's no hope of things getting better, so yeah plenty of people stop doing enriching activities.
    Porn isn't the cause, it's a symptom of a population losing hope that things will be better for their kids. Or that can't afford kids at all.
    astrange · 1790567652 · focus · HN ↗
    This is slopulism, aka you read social media too much and got depression.
    > 99% of the population gets poorer everyday and can feel it.
    Absolutely not true in the US. What did happen is that poor people's incomes vastly increased since 2019, while upper middle class incomes stagnated.
    It may of course be true in some countries.
    > Or that can't afford kids at all.
    Birth rates declining is a sign of increased incomes, because people can afford entertainment, and prefer to consume it over having kids, which are kind of a bummer and mean you can't have fun for the next 18 years.
    LoFiSamurai · 1790625892 · focus · HN ↗
    > Birth rates declining is a sign of increased incomes, because people can afford entertainment, and prefer to consume it over having kids
    This is a ridiculous take.
    astrange · 1790655679 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
    jan_m_savage · 1790580104 · focus · HN ↗
    Eh, don't please.
    Just look at the effect it has had on yourself. And tell me it didn't depress you?
    I have clients telling me their lives were destroyed because they couldn't stop the addiction.
  3. paulryanrogers · 1790565614 · focus · HN ↗
    Older people have trouble sleeping all night, walking, doing manual labor. Maybe the neighbor just ... transitioned to a different stage of life.
    jan_m_savage · 1790580203 · focus · HN ↗
    I know several older people who live active, happy lives. Why is it so hard to admit this filth causes depression? There is research evidence for it, you know, a google search away.
    paulryanrogers · 1790597411 · focus · HN ↗
    Survivorship bias is also a thing. I'm not saying this neighbor I've never met was happy. Just that many of these symptoms are signs of aging.
    jan_m_savage · 1790644646 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
  4. vasco · 1790574942 · focus · HN ↗
    In a completely unrelated thread to the topic you wrote the word porn 5 times. Are you sure it's the neighbours you need to worry about?
    jan_m_savage · 1790579837 · focus · HN ↗
    None of what I write is unrelated; if I wrote, there must have been a connection. Perhaps you can't read?
    vasco · 1790581925 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed there must be a connection, which is why I advised you to look inwards!
    jan_m_savage · 1790644726 · focus · HN ↗
    And you haven't? You must be a saint, then.
2. fifticon · 1790595079 · focus · HN ↗
  It is even worse, we had decent answers for some of the stuff back in the 40s, 50s and 60s (e.g. Dijkstra's work on concurrency, before there even were computers to run them on.) Someone will reply to my comment with Lovelace or Babbage or Pascal :-/
  1. rtpg · 1790637166 · focus · HN ↗
    Not super aware of what Djikstra's work on concurrency you're referring to are. I've had to try to implement things from CS research papers directly and have always had a _bit_ of trouble (disclaimer: I'm dumb), and appreciate this book getting down to the implementation details in a bit of a fool-proof way.
    Of course this book is a bunch of "research papers" stapled together in some sense but the act of curating is quite nice
jdelman · 1790552313 · focus · HN ↗
Reading this conjured some feelings in me. At various points in my career, I’ve wanted to take a sabbatical and go to RC. Having spent the last year in the agentic coding world, the idea of writing code by hand seems quaint and outdated. Many have spoken of this feeling of loss so I’m not saying anything new here, but for some reason reading about RC in 2026 specifically cemented the idea that I’ll probably never write anything by hand again.
gwern · 1790559501 · focus · HN ↗
> The goal of the game is to give hints to a secret word without giving the same hint as another player; it was shocking how often all the agents playing would give the same hint, even at temperature 1. We resolved this by giving them all “personalities” which were really just topics; for example we’d be telling one agent to think about things in the context of sports, so their clue for “shell” might be “defense” or something, whereas the agent told to be a hippie might say “cancer” for the zodiac’s crab.
Mode-collapse is characteristic of pretty much all chatbots post-davinci-002 and a major challenge to anything creative or game-like.
jan_m_savage · 1790563913 · focus · HN ↗
This is what school should have been like. Instead, we got factory-style non-thinker exam-taker pencil-pushing excel-cruncher-wannabes.
eclectric · 1790564021 · focus · HN ↗
Always wanted to do this. Anyone attend from India remotely?
1. captn3m0 · 1790578065 · focus · HN ↗
  I did during the pandemic. Drop me a message if you wanna chat.

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