"Hacker School" has always been an actively bad name for us.
And so it became imperative to change it.
Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
21–30 of 106 posts
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#22Frankly, I'm still confused about what "recurse center" means even though I know what recursion is. I wonder what it will first mean to people outside of industry. I also can't unsee the substring "curse center". :/ Slightly off-topic: How would someone structure a study to predict the effectiveness of a rebranding?
A recurse center is is either:
- a minimal room made of concrete walls, having one door and one window
- a recurse center, plus the opening of one more window
- the union of two recurse centres horizontally, by a tight wall-wall juxtaposition of the two of them, with the removal of one of their walls, and the opening of a door in the remaining one, if necessary
- a similar vertical union, with the addition of a stairwell
- the union of two recurse centres by the addition of an external hallway, and the necessary doors.
- a few additional cases that can be neglected for the purposes of this paper
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#23Quick anecdote: A close friend of mine had recently graduated college and after a series of interviews got in Hacker School. When he went for the visa interview (in India), the officer got really wary of him on learning that he's going to US, right after graduating of college, with no job to a place called "Hacker School". He had open the website and spend a long time in explaining him in what HS is about. Quite expectedly, he was denied the visa.
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#24"We were able to get recurse.com, which is short, pronounceable, and easy to spell." And so many businesses end up with names because of this. I feel them on this. Everyone sitting around, throwing out their ideas for names, someone at their laptop checking domain registrations at the same time till something sticks.
That scene you just described happened many times over the course of the past few months :)
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#25"Hacker News to be renamed Recurse Board"
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#26"Hacker News is now the Recurse Board"
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#27From the site: "The Recurse Center is a free, self-directed, educational retreat for people who want to get better at programming, whether they’ve been coding for three decades or three months. ... The lower bound for experience for people who have successfully done a batch at the Recurse Center seems to be about two months." So, OK, it's not a "boot camp". It's more like Advanced Infantry Training. You go there and program for three months.
The site is all about "Apply Now", before they tell you anything, even the fact that it's in New York City. The FAQ doesn't tell you much about what they actually do once you get there. The Manual is a little more helpful.
In Silicon Valley, we have Hacker Dojo, which is more about talks and classes on advanced topics. (It's really mostly a co-working space for app developers now.)
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#28Quick anecdote: A close friend of mine had recently graduated college and after a series of interviews got in Hacker School. When he went for the visa interview (in India), the officer got really wary of him on learning that he's going to US, right after graduating of college, with no job to a place called "Hacker School". He had open the website and spend a long time in explaining him in what HS is about. Quite expe…
I had very similar experience, but was able to convince the immigration officer that Hacker School has nothing to do with Hackers nor Schools (which require F1 visas). That was a fun experience and added to the charm of the original name :)
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#29Frankly, I'm still confused about what "recurse center" means even though I know what recursion is. I wonder what it will first mean to people outside of industry. I also can't unsee the substring "curse center". :/ Slightly off-topic: How would someone structure a study to predict the effectiveness of a rebranding?
In my technical writing class in college, the professor made the point that "recursion" is based on the verb "to recur", and that "to recurse" means "to curse again".
Yes, though it's a bit of an odd situation: we have two noun/adjective pairs, recursion/recursive and recurrence/recurrent, which don't mean exactly the same thing though they're related (see for example [0]), and which all come from a single verb. It makes some sense to create a second verb by back-formation to reflect the two meanings.
Re: Hacker School is now the Recurse Center
#30While catchy, “Hacker School” has always been an actively bad name for us. Both words are problematic and misleading. “Hacker” is bad because so much of the world thinks of hackers as computer criminals and not clever programmers, which is the meaning we intended. And even for many people familiar with our use of the word, “hacker” can feel exclusionary. (“Hacker” was also not exactly helpful to the roughly 30% of ea…
Also present this as Exhibit A for how much of a knuckle dragger most border agents are. You really do have to pick your words carefully with them as most of their job is "gut instinct" and most aren't really that well educated or informed (even as much as knowing all of the countries).