This is not the Freehackers Union... | Hacker News Reader

This is not the Freehackers Union...

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62 pointsapgwoz28 comments

Was I the only one reciting the rules to Fight Club while reading the article?

Rule 8: If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club#Plot_summary

Basic rules that come to mind to keep it hacker centric could be:

  1. If this is your first night to Hack and Tell, you must
     Tell.
  2. Before leaving Hack And Tell you must vote yay or nay
     on each Tell. If your Tell has less than X votes, you
     are not allowed back for Y weeks.
  3. If you're just returning from a Y week layoff, you must
     Tell.
  4. You must have a Tell every Z weeks.

I'm not at all certain what the correct values for X, Y, and Z are. Z would obviously depend on the group size and time allotment. I think voting should be anonymous and not announced until after everyone's left so voters are more likely to be honest.

If it gets popular I could even see having a Hack and Tell website that hosted videos of "successful" Tells and so forth. Going out on a limb and having national votes to try and get a group of hackers together for a nationally voted "Best Hack" event or some such.

Could be fun.

[ed: formatting]

What exactly are you voting on? This isn't a competition. I should also note that I hand select the people that actually present after taking a look at the product description and a) checking to see that it doesn't violate the "no startup", "no work related things"... or attempt to. b) if there's overflow invite the ones I think will be best. So far it hasnt' failed, but, there's only been about 25 talks total over 3 nights.

Incidentally, don't do more than 7 or 8 of these talks a night--it gets way too long too quick.

The idea about voting isn't to select a "best" hack each night, its to say "take some time to find a better hack". That way if someone does get through the pre-screening you have a way to say, "take a couple weeks to think about your next Tell."

Granted the nation wide voting idea kinda gives the wrong impression on that part. I still think it'd be a good idea to keep videos somewhere.

Granted it was mostly just hand waving on how to keep the non-hacker attendees from overwhelming the hacker presenters.

Surely interacting with other people presenting their great hacks is a good way to get inspiration for your own hacks and to get a feel for what your group considers a "great hack". Kicking people out and telling people to work in isolation until they stumble upon something that meets your requirements seems both elitist and pointless.

I think rule 1 is good. The rest makes it sound like some combination of a a big bureaucratic corporation and survivor.

It's one thing to try and keep the group small to create a better, more comfortable experience for everyone, but denigrating anyone who doesn't present as "leechers" and keeping them out to maintain the purity of your group is disgustingly elitist. Your entire calculus is short-sighted and elitist; you are treating people as nothing but tools to advance your agenda. If they don't contribute something to you or your group you don't want them. What kind of community is that? Certainly not one that I'd want to be a part of, and certainly not one that has any hope of "preserving hacking and invention" as Zed Shaw described. First off, stop being so selfish and stop dividing people into those who can do something for you and those who can't. Secondly, if you want to foster a sustainable community you have to share, teach, and give to others. Who knows, those people might even grow into the knowledgeable, well-connected hackers that you so desire.

I apologize if I've completely misinterpreted your article, but after re-reading it a few times and thinking about it I still get the same impression.

Look, the bar is set pretty low. Just work on something (for fun!), and give a show-and-tell. That's the prospective minimum.

I think samd's offense was taken at the attitude more than the technical requirements. New York has a very interesting class dynamic about it: the social circles are just inundated with people who want to be successful (whatever that means to them) more than other places. In my opinion, this is the greatest reason we won't see "Homebrew Computer Club" style hacking, and Woz didn't hang around hacker news. I wonder if that's what drives PG's guilt of creating this place...

It's just the standard 8th rule: If this is your first night at FIGHT CLUB, you HAVE to fight.

Requiring participation in a community is not elitist; it is what makes it a community. Otherwise, you just have some vaguely related people coming together, some of whom are leeching. By requiring everyone invest in the community you create a shared bond and a shared ownership. It's not saying it's an elite club only for special people; but it is saying you have to make a minimal first step of your own before you can enter. It's the same as building a monastery or dojo high up a mountain -- partly for the peace and quiet, but also partly to make it hard to enter -- those who turn up have demonstrated some commitment.

In terms of motivation and teaching others, I'm imagining a fun club that I can't go to unless I get on with doing some actual hacking....motivation to load Vim in 3..2..1!

Also from Fight Club (which, if you think about it, addresses exactly this question -- making a difference to the world instead of just passively consuming,) is the scene where Tyler holds up a convenience store. Tyler drags an Asian convenience store clerk out behind the store, ostensibly to shoot him. Instead, he badgers the poor clerk into distilling things: that he never wanted this job; in fact, he's just making time as a clerk, and he was at one point in school -- he had a passion to become a veterinarian. Tyler opts not to shoot him and leaves him instead with the message: You're the living dead now. Go back to school and make your life mean something, or I’ll kick you into the grave for real.

Getting people to contribute something, before they can belong, is powerful.

You must not be from New York...

I don't mind the group getting bigger--that means a larger pool of projects, and a larger variety of presenters. But, if I only have space for 50 people, and 50 "leechers" RSVP before I have 7 presenters, that's a problem. Sure, they could be there because they are curious and, like I mentioned, even be contributors in some way (maybe they brought 4 of their friends from their CS program or something), but at that point we don't have a show.

Maybe the term "leecher" isn't a good fit for what I'm talking about, but that's the basic problem. We ultimately need some percentage of people willing to present that have interesting projects, or the group can't survive.

Ok, I would like to see a Hack And Tell in silicon valley. Who wants to help?

I'll list it on the site! What do you need for organization? Or is this thread enough?

I'd love to help. (We could run a Hack And Tell at SHDH?)

Aren't SHDH lightning talks exactly that though?

I've been. It kicks ass. Tons of great little weekend projects (and more).

second that, lots of fun to attend. The presentations I have seen so far have been awesome. It's nice to go to a tech event and not look at a powerpoint preso

Just curious, what is the typical size/complexity/difficulty of projects presented? Are we talking weekend projects, e.g.:

    $ sqlite_diff db1.sqlite db2.sqlite
    Table(futures),4
    > CREATE TABLE futures (date text, symbol text, qty real, price real)
    > 0 rows
    ---
    < CREATE TABLE futures (date text, trans text, symbol text, qty real, price real)
    < 0 rows

Or are we talking bigger efforts, e.g.:

    $ fajitalang --wall testprogram.mex; ./a.oud
    Hello automatically parallelized world.

Good question. Monday night's meetup had these presentations:

John Britton: Dinevore (http://www.dinevore.com/) mobile app, built on Titanium Appcelerator (http://www.appcelerator.com/products/titanium-mobile-appl...)

Nathan Hamblen: Pilot (http://www.github.com/n8han/pilot/), a web interface for Simple Build Tool (http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/). Also mentioned SPDE-sbt (http://github.com/n8han/spde-sbt), a plugin for sbt for SPDE projects, and SPDE (http://github.com/n8han/spde) a library for using Processing from Scala. (There was certainly some confusion related to this project, so if you were confused, be sure to checkout all the links to piece it together)

Sean O'Connor: Touralope (http://touralope.com), a Twillio (http://www.twillio.com) based cell phone tours app, written for AppEngine (http://code.google.com/appengine)

Zack Lieberman: EyeWriter (http://www.eyewriter.org), a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.

Sergey Chernyshev: UserBase (http://github.com/sergeychernyshev/UserBase), a user management tool to be used in on-line projects which includes an admin dashboard and support for various non-local authentication schemes such as Facebook Connect and OpenID.

Gregory Tomlinson: A photo viewer (http://github.com/gregory80/photo-viewer) which does dynamic, but cached, resizing of the photos, built on Tornado (http://www.tornadoweb.org/) and MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/)

Andrew Schaff: keyjson (http://keyjson.org),an order-preserving binary encoding of most JSON values

Andrew Gwozdziewycz: Text Please (http://textplease.appspot.com) and Thumb Through (http://github.com/apgwoz/thumb-through) a web service, and Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs) providing "just the text" for online articles.

Created a group to discuss starting up local Hack and Tells: http://groups.google.com/group/hack-and-tell-orgs

I joined the group -- may organize an event in Portland

I love the timer which claps at the end of five minutes :) Great way to get round that awkward 'Oh, it is finished? Should I clap now?' moment.

I've been to BarCamp a few years in a row now. They have 30 minute talks, usually 2-4 at at time, so you can pick and choose what to sit in on. It is totally volunteer for the presentations, and I've only seen a few that were about products for sale, and even those were about how they were made or some techie thing about them.

I personally would like to see more stuff like this in Toronto, maybe it would be worth my time to organize it...

I'm looking into doing a similar thing with month HN meetups here in TO.

I don't think I'd have done it, honestly, if I hadn't started working at Meetup. It's the kind of thing that does take time to organize, but I really wanted to discover what Meetup organizers go through. It's been all kinds of rewarding, fun and great though! Highly recommend it! Let me know if I can help!

Do you have an estimate of how many hours per month it takes to organize?

If it was reasonable I would definitely be interested in doing it, and I would be happy to affiliated with the official 'franchise'!

It's not that much in all honesty, but then again, I already have a place to meetup (at Meetup, which also provides us beer and regular drinks). All in all it's probably about 5 hours a month, in addition to about an hour total for setup and teardown the day of the event.

But, this of course would be a hell of a lot more stressful and time consuming if I had to beg for a place to host it that can hold 40-50 people, and find sponsors to get drinks and things.

Also, I can't imagine how much harder it would be if I wasn't using Meetup. Now, I work there, so you might think "Oh, he's just promoting his product" but, it has been instrumental in my success so far. It's worked well for promotion (there are emails that go out for topic alert lists, and we're often a "trending" meetup due to RSVP patterns), as well as member management, and communication. I ask people to talk about what they'd like to present as part of the RSVP process, for instance. And, if we needed to pay for a venue, or food, or something else, charging people $5 to RSVP is dirt simple to do and collect, manage etc from Meetup. (Sorry for the shameless promotion, but as an organizer, it really does work)

That said, there are certainly successful groups in NYC that have a standing meetup once a month, that aren't run via Meetup--just Google Groups, so it's certainly possible to do. It depends on the group who you're attracting, etc.

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