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Comment by acgourley | Hacker News Reader

I'm also throwing a hacker only event.

It's called stay home and get shit done.

We already have that the other 51 weeks of the year; sometimes we like a little variety.

I hate this attitude. Especially when we all know that it is impossible to be productive for 12 hours a day, 365 days per year - let alone the 16, or whatever hours, some 'hackers' claim to do

I would rather work an effective 4 hours a day (which you end up doing, or less, anyway, between all the web surfing and snarky comments on HN), take a few weeks off a year, take the odd year off, and actually enjoy life through meeting and interacting with other people.

I'm not saying you should stay home and work every day, I'm saying there is no way to turn SXSW into what it isn't - something for hackers.

That is a bit different then. I agree about the conference, I have never been inclined to go.

The impression that I get is that the program is full of self-proclaimed experts who pack themselves and their 2 page bio's onto panels to talk about subjects that nobody outside of that room cares about, and that nobody in the room will ever actually implement or do anything about.

I applaud the effort of setting up an area of sxsw that is more hackerish - but it would probably be better to just organize something separately, preferably in a different city and at a different time.

Edit: relevant: http://ttk.me/t4AY6

Two years ago such a comment would have -2 votes and would be hidden just because of its tone.

Sorry for the meta, but I am missing the old HN.

I doubt we would be able to have the whole front page dedicated just to Erlang news if the need appeared.

It seems that the problem of maintaining quality of discussion in an open forum remains unsolved.

Maybe limits to entry (like the problem in the link) or ability to provide negative feedback to posters would help.

How would a comment pining for the days of yore have fared two years ago?

Even worse.

I'm not sure if you're right or not, but if you are right it's very interesting because I've been here since almost day 1 and it's not as if my old comments routinely got down-voted. So if what you're saying is true, not only has the hivemind's up-vote heuristic changed - I've changed my posting habits.

Can I come?

And indeed that is often a good solution. But it's nice to hack socially at times too. Edinburgh Hacklab had a coding event last Wednesday; I went along, got a fair bit done (the fact that I was in a different environment helped my productivity), chatted with friendly people, showed them the project I was working on, got help with some CSS stuff, etc. Overall a productive way to spend an evening.

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