The Python Software Foundation acts as a fiscal sponsor for a much smaller set of orgs (20 listed on https://www.python.org/psf/fiscal-sponsorees/) and it keeps our accounting team pretty busy just looking after those. Hack Club must have this down to a very fine art.
I wrote a bit more about PSF fiscal sponsorship here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/board-of-the-python-so...
I was working with Hack Club students on an experimental VPN client (https://github.com/hackclub/burrow) but never got the momentum to finish it. Made some great friends, though! It's a really fantastic organization.
The students have one big global Slack instance. If you're a student and on here, you should also be in there: https://hackclub.com/slack/
> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
i didnt even consider that having to configure everything with a config file allows apps like this https://github.com/zerebos/ghostty-config to exist. neat
Given features it's more comparable to Kitty than foot IMO.
You should watch his talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
In any case, good luck on finding the right community!
"get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate."
https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
Take a good guess where the three commas come from.
(It'd be nice if it supported other standard macOS UI conventions[1] too)
[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions/8131
[1] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/issues?q=is%3Aissue%2...
Hack Club's been a fiscal sponsor for about 7 years now (since 2018), and it's evolved quite a bit since the early days. I run engineering & product for the fiscal sponsorship program there and would be happy to chat/share any tips!
oh, and while it's on my mind, the codebase was open-sourced earlier this year (>>43519802 ), and we just launched a mobile app yesterday! >>46130402
Please fund projects that actually need it, and don't voluntarily gift money to a literal billionaire.
> I get asked the same about terminals all the time. “How will you turn this into a business? What’s the monetization strategy?” The monetization strategy is that my bank account has 3 commas mate.
Original post: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1964785527741427940
VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an example that you're looking for though.
It might have improved since then?
FullStory namespace conflict. Please set window["_fs_namespace"]. script.pageview-props.tagged-events.js:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error edge.fullstory.com/s/fs.js:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error ghostty:1 Access to XMLHttpRequest at 'https://d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-...' from origin 'https://hcb.hackclub.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: Request header field beacon-device-instance-id is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Headers in preflight response.Understand this error installHook.js:1 Unable to Load Beacon overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error installHook.js:1 $ overrideMethod @ installHook.js:1Understand this error d3hb14vkzrxvla.cloudfront.net/v1/e3d6bbe1-aa48-43cb-8f8b-be1e33945bab:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILEDUnderstand this error [Violation] Potential permissions policy violation: payment is not allowed in this document.Understand this error rs.fullstory.com/rec/page:1 Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENTUnderstand this error 29[Intervention] Unable to preventDefault inside passive event listener due to target being treated as passive. See <URL>
Are you back on Slack as the primary comms channel after their sudden attempt to upcharge you (followed by the U-turn after the PR backlash)? Do you have some mirroring and other kind of fallback strategy if something like that happens again?
(Context for those who missed it: >>45283887 )
It does. And the barebones complaint is literally funny (I'm mentally giggling) because Ghostty didn't have modern features like... search, literally 4 days ago https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/9756
That's why I'm staying on Alacritty on my company mac.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/podcast-episode-hack-f...
It's not hype. Here's a comprehensive review of a lot of terminals and Ghostty did very well--"State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions" [1]
[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...
Nope, that's not it.
It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without compromising its cross-platform features.
Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I’d love to see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That would be a killer combination!)
From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions": [1]
Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct
In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.
[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...
https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/unscroll/ <- this for example makes such a difference when using multiple splits and some TUI style history search or whatever to unscroll.
Zero trolling when I say this: Two things also make it (more) popular on HN: (1) Mitchell Hashimoto (a well respected hacker who got rich, then kept on hacking) and (2) Zig. (Only Rust could attract more attention.)
Ouch, that is enormous. They forgot to handle images properly, so they’re serving ginormous images in inefficient formats instead of scaled thumbnails in efficient formats—just the first page transfers more than 40MB, and the second page is just as bad, and the third significantly worse. You get things like 11827×13107 “17230 Aluminium Falcons” logo being rendered at 64px high. (I’m surprised that one’s under 9MB.) Across pages 1–3, it’s averaging 1MB per item, which if it continues all the way to page 53 would exceed 2.5GB. Done properly, I’d expect most to be under 10KB, with a few up as high as 50KB, staying well under 1MB per page, and comfortably under 50MB for all 53 pages. It’d load faster and be cheaper to serve too.
(I know this isn’t what you meant, but it loaded so slowly that I looked, and that’s easily big enough to cause problems for some users.)
This was exactly my issue with the Rust Foundation back in 2021 when it was formed, 501(c)(6) are for trade organisations. To this day, individuals still CANNOT donate to the Rust Foundation which means it is not community led.
> Note: At this time, the Rust Foundation [still] does not offer individual memberships.
https://rustfoundation.org/get-involved/#donations
The main issue of the Rust Foundation is that makes it easy for companies to buy influence in the project by buying a board seat as a benefit.
I agree that the Rust Foundation should change their governance structure to a 501(c)(3) instead of a 501(c)(6).
Personally -- for context, not to be confused with an argument-from-authority -- I've worked in the not-for-profit sector (3+ orgs) as well as studying how to make it work better. There are people with immensely more knowledge than I, and I have learned from them, and I respect the lessons they try to convey.
In case it puts people at ease, yes, I want Ghostty to succeed. I tend to agree that a not-for-profit home is likely be a good choice, especially relative to an alternative where it might be mostly reliant on one person and/or beholden to corporate interests.
So what I am saying, at core? More or less: this is probably a good start but only a start. I am suggesting more awareness of:
1. There is a psychological tendency for people to _believe_ others who express more confidence. Being aware of this helps us notice it and prefer evidence over statements of belief.
2. What does evidence show about making OSS project succeed? Giving it a not-for-profit home seems like a good start, but how important is this relative to other choices? What does the evidence show?
To mention one place to start, here is a open-access article from the ACM that I skimmed: "Open Source Software Sustainability: Combining Institutional Analysis and Socio-Technical Networks" [2] However, I didn't find it particularly useful in answering my #2 question above. Also the paper seemed mostly to promote a method of analysis but didn't drive towards actionable nor causal recommendations.
[1]: Maybe the misunderstanding comes from one or more of the following?
(a) halo effect (e.g. "Michael is a good guy, your words imply an indirect criticism of him");
(b) tribalism (e.g. "you are either with us or against us");
(c) timing-oriented (e.g. "this is not the time to be critical; this is a time to be jolly.");
(d) past success implies future results (e.g. "Hack Club has done well so far, trust them");
(e) tone-policing (e.g. "You seem grumpy, dude");
(f) feeling lectured-at (e.g. "You seem to act like you know things we don't.")
All of these possibilities would involve a some degree of presumption about what is appropriate and some level of disengagement with the substance of what I'm writing. Remember, we have a big tent here with room for many different points of view.
HCB staff also do not take kindly to missing receipts or fraudulent behavior.
But there was a values tension, and resulting values clash with someone who fell firmly on one side of the tension, seemingly a bit self-righteous in not feeling it to be a tension at all.
I find the tension totally understandable and even healthy, and not something to "just fix" in a clear way, as the youth might have readers believe.
My synopsis here got the +1 from a staff, so I'm assuming my experience in messy organizing gives me a decent read of the complexity of the situation: >>45917234