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Do they let children sit and program for 3 days (without breaks?) at these events without a single person checking in on them?! That's absolutely bananas if true, how could something like that even happen, is it a sweatshop of programmers or what's going on?

Truly, if they're forcing children to sit and code for 3 days straight someone should call the police this moment.

[linsomniac]

There was no forcing involved. Since there seems to be a lot of interest in this, I'll go into more details. As I said, this was discussed with organizers at the time, largely it was largely a matter of "the kids'll figure it out" failure. Some specifics will be vague due to time.

This event was a camp out. They had tents for the campers, but it was, in my kids view, a free-for-all. Like a "go figure out the tent situation", and my child couldn't figure out the tent situation, so decided to sleep outside. And woke up with a bunch of bugs (I don't remember exactly what, leaches sticks in my mind). So they decided they'd caffeinate the rest of the event and not sleep.

(edit: Typo fix)

[Charmunk]

No one is forced to code, they have sleeping areas, and plenty of time for breaks, and no one will care if someone decides to take a break for a bit

[pupwithcomputer]

Hey! You can probs recognize me by the username. Dunno anyone else who's open about being a fuckin dog on the slack.

During Scrapyard, Hackatime was mandatory, and was one of the biggest defining factors to HQ about the success of a satellite. So yeah, technically attendees aren't _forced_ to code, but getting the most weighted grants is still your biggest focus.

For those who don't know, HC uses a unit called "weighted grants" which supposedly equates to 10 hours of good quality work, in order to determine success. The issue is, the definition of good quality work is currently set as "most lines written", excluding R&D and the 20 other steps that it takes to design something.

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The previous commentator said "could have very easily turned into life threatening" and when asked what that was about, they sent the link about that person dying after sitting playing games for 3 days.

Are you saying they're lying or are wrong about this? They seemed to have personal experience about it, and I'm assuming they're not outright lying, but I do think it sounds strange they would let children sit and code for 3 days straight.

[sadeshmukh]

That article has no relation to Hack Club whatsoever.

But that's beside the point - they provide rooms, plenty of food and snacks, workshops, and activities to do during breaks. Organizers are on-site at all times, and there is a live hotline for parents or kids to call at any time. "sit and code for 3 days straight" is a gross mischaracterization.

Here's an example of an event hosted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXWMr0gdLJA

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So again then, what exact "life threatening situations" could children be put in, besides the things parent already said it wasn't about, during these events? Parent themselves linked that article, I'm not 100% sure what they meant, but all I could think was that they experienced something similar, otherwise I'm not sure why they'd link that.