Hacker News: zachlatta

New comment by zachlatta in "The AI Agent in the Billing Department of Verizon Is a Mentally Handicapped Thug"

zachlatta — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:59:01 +0000

I once set up a 1 month hotspot with Verizon when I moved into a new place that didn’t have internet yet.

After the month, I returned the hotspot to the store and they told me I was all good (in writing too!).

Then I started getting monthly bills that I couldn’t cancel online or over the phone. I repeatedly went into the store and they told me it was a billing mistake and they’d fix it.

Eventually they sent me to collections, my credit score dropped, and a debt collector started coming after me.

It took 2 years to finally get them to stop and to remove it from my credit history.

Verizon is a bad company that doesn’t care about its customers.

New comment by zachlatta in "RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon"

zachlatta — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:28:10 +0000

At Hack Club we have made tremendous investments to help teenagers get into electronics and design their own PCBs over the last 2 years.

It’s much harder to fake and in many situations much more exciting than software, especially for beginners. Some of you might like this video from a recent event at GitHub HQ: https://youtu.be/kaEFv7e49mo?si=sLer815jCJIyWR9Y

We have an upcoming event called Hack Club Fallout where we’re bringing a bunch of high schoolers from across the USA and world to Shenzhen for a 7 day hackathon because it’s one of the few places you can get same day PCB turnaround: https://fallout.hackclub.com

New comment by zachlatta in "Google killed my $1M ARR startup overnight"

zachlatta — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:10:59 +0000

If you check the post on Pangram it shows up as 100% AI written.

New comment by zachlatta in "DOS Running in a PDF"

zachlatta — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:32:46 +0000

Make sure you open it with a Chromium browser. Made by a 17 year old Hack Clubber.

Repo here: https://github.com/crabby605/DOSPDF

DOS Running in a PDF

zachlatta — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:32:46 +0000

Article URL: https://crabby605.github.io/DOSPDF/out/DOS-in-a.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347649

Points: 14

# Comments: 7

New comment by zachlatta in "We need a federation of forges"

zachlatta — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:42:52 +0000

This is how you get bad stuff. This mindset will turn the software ecosystem into mechanical / electrical engineering. Closed source, bad, and expensive tools.

New comment by zachlatta in "We need a federation of forges"

zachlatta — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:37:23 +0000

Two founders of a small startup in Europe trying to build a new decentralized git forge and open sourcing their code are anti-democracy?

Come on.

New comment by zachlatta in "We need a federation of forges"

zachlatta — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:21:20 +0000

Just like engineering, monetizing is an iterative process. As long as they don't make it hard to move off their platform, IMO it's completely fine for them to try different monetization models.

We should celebrate people building open source stuff and in the public. The alternative is for the software tooling ecosystem to look like EE or mechanical engineering tools - all closed source, proprietary, and with super expensive licensing.

It's easy to take open source for granted - 'information wants to be free', but we are at risk of the open source movement dying with proprietary AI completely changing everything about software.

If we penalize people who are working toward the right goal, we contribute to that decline.

New comment by zachlatta in "We need a federation of forges"

zachlatta — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:26:39 +0000

This kind of absolutism is crazy. People who are doing 90% of what we want them to do should be greatly celebrated and rewarded. Else we penalize idealistic people who are not perfect instead of penalizing the people who are actually doing the opposite of what we care about (ex. Autodesk).

Do you want software to become as closed source as mechanical engineering? No! So let's celebrate people building software that's open source, even if it's VC funded! They are awesome for doing that!

New comment by zachlatta in "AI Job Loss Tracker"

zachlatta — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:46:30 +0000

This is a website created by a professional lobbyist who still has an active role taking lobbying contracts through a firm they founded called Steinhauser Strategies.

New comment by zachlatta in "Session is shutting down in 90 days"

zachlatta — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:01:12 +0000

Running a nonprofit is really, really hard and I commend them for doing it. I hope they get through this crisis.

Hack Club almost went insolvent in 2017. We would have, if it wasn’t for 2 friends who stepped in near the end and saved us. Today there are tens of thousands of teens involved and doing amazing things.

I’m disappointed by all the negativity in the comments. I’m not familiar with Session, but raising donor funds is a very different skillset than software engineering and anyone who is trying to do both has my respect.

New comment by zachlatta in "Built $5M. Got 1%. Got let go"

zachlatta — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:06:06 +0000

AI slop. Please see the Hacker News guidelines on writing with AI.

I Trained a Chess Model on Just $14

zachlatta — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 23:58:10 +0000

Article URL: https://mostlime.pages.dev/blog/i-trained-a-chess-engine-on-14-dollars/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47524991

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by zachlatta in "404 Deno CEO not found"

zachlatta — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 05:41:25 +0000

You are barking up the wrong tree. Ryan can't do anything to make government grants for this kind of work exist.

It would be a huge public service if you could get more public support for open source. Maybe you could do it instead of criticizing Ryan!

Some public support for this kind of work already exists, especially for the Python science ecosystem, but nothing that comes close to "competing" with VC for a project like Deno.

You should be the change you hope to see in the world and make this happen!

New comment by zachlatta in "Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down"

zachlatta — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:59:20 +0000

This is really not true. It’s important that when people say this, we hold them to it and reward them when they see it through.

The internet has a tendency to penalize people who try to do bold things. As a result, it’s too often strategic to stay quiet and boring and focus on the bottom line.

We shouldn’t be cynical. We should be excited when people say bold things and reward them when they live up to it.

New comment by zachlatta in "PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug"

zachlatta — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:35:18 +0000

This project was made by a teenager in https://blueprint.hackclub.com, a nonprofit program I'm helping run that helps teenagers learn PCB design and get up to $400 USD in funding to prototype and manufacture their designs!

We just launched https://stasis.hackclub.com, another similar electronics program.

If you know any teens that want to get into PCB design, please encourage them to join Hack Club and these programs!

PCB devboard the size of a USB-C plug

zachlatta — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 05:04:14 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/Dieu-de-l-elec/AngstromIO-devboard

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47294582

Points: 262

# Comments: 69

New comment by zachlatta in "Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives"

zachlatta — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:10:27 +0000

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.

New comment by zachlatta in "Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"

zachlatta — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:11:34 +0000

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.

New comment by zachlatta in "Show HN: Free alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue"

zachlatta — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:15:54 +0000

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.