Comment by nicholasjbs

This Hacker School is essentially a training ground for startup programmers, focusing on everything from writing code to scheduling and managing expectations.

I'm not sure where you got this impression, but this is definitely not what Hacker School is. We encourage students to work on projects and not "products" and certainly not startups. We especially encourage code that's written for other programmers to use (e.g., frameworks, libraries, command line utilities). We also focus purely on code and there's nothing at Hacker School about "scheduling or managing expectations" (that confusion might have come from our use of the word "shipping"? We use that to mean "getting code out and to a publishable state" because so many people -- ourselves included -- have a tendency do the first 90% of a project and then not put in the last bit of effort to put it on Github where others might benefit from it).

A hacker de-assembles, re-assembles, engineers, and reverse engineers systems, on their own time, at their own pace, and is not motivated by profits and deliverables as much as the mere process.

There are no profits or deliverables (at least in the traditional sense of the term) at Hacker School. We just build stuff we love and that we think will help us grow as programmers. For instance, last batch a Hacker Schooler and I wrote an Apple II emulator in JavaScript (https://github.com/nicholasbs/appletoo), simply because we'd never done it before. We also pair up and work through SICP, or do problems from K&R, or study different concurrency models.