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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

I had a similarly irritating experience with one of the CCC videos, but I'm not sure if it's just me being spoiled (these are otherwise excellent quality talks, provided at no cost to me). The first 20 minutes of the Snowden/family talk was a presenter fiddling around with her laptop which had run out of battery, interspersed with a guy whistling into the mic to "entertain" the crowd. I was able to skip past it, but whistling - wtf!?

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I feel a bit sad to read this.

The CCC is a super-cheap conference. It costs 100Euro (about 100USD currently?) to attend a 4 day conference.

The venue is massive, and roughly 13,000 people attend. There are often 3 or 4 talks going on at the same time. The talks are among the most technically interesting available anywhere.

In top of that, they have areas where people can hack on group projects, and the venue is open 24hours during the conference (some people even crash there over night).

This is all run on a largely volunteer basis. And in my view to a very professional standard.

Someone screwing up and delaying one talk seems pretty insignificant in light of the amazing work they do.

Hey hold on - I did say that the talks were excellent and delivered at no cost, and conceded that I was probably just overreacting. Why are you commenting as I didn't?

The audience at CCC whistling the Jeopardy theme song during delays has been a thing for a loong time. They have a popular Hacker Jeopardy event late at night (now only every second year), where random delays can happen e.g. when the game UI crashes.

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