Zed Shaw's Free Hackers Union
freehackersunion.org
freehackersunion.org
Snarks aside, it sounds like a good idea. Forcing newcomers to present on the first night does enable you to know straight away if someone is for real, or just a poser.
On the downside, you run the risk of having a lot of very simple stuff being presented over and over again, because newcomers don't know that red over there in the corner presented pretty much the same thing last month...
Finally, the success or otherwise is going to very heavily depend on just how alpha-geek the environment is. If you have too many people trying to exclude newcomers because they consider the newcomer to not be up to their very high standards, it'd quickly devolve into a... less than interesting group to participate in.
I definitely agree that you need care to prevent things from degenerating into an unfriendly and unpleasant meatspace flamefest, though.
For example, I'd be willing to bet that there will be a relatively large number of people that would present some sort of implementation of remote procedure calls - it's something that lets you do cool stuff, whilst still being hard core hacker stuff - dynamic code, low-level syntax analysis, memory management, blah blah blah.
A while back I did an RPC implementation to allow transparent interfacing between a custom VM I had written, and native C code. Basically you write the entire app in one big C code blob, but then during compilation you specify that certain modules are going to live in the VM. I had created some tools used during compilation to handle the creation of proxy objects on both sides of the VM interface, that could talk to each other. I was really impressed with myself. Then I discovered that 90% of the solution was simply an implementation of RPC, and that my code was a slightly messier, slightly buggier version of code that had been written many many times before.
I think I'd get bored pretty quickly seeing multiple presentations of slightly messy, slightly buggy implementations of already solved problems. You see, unless you are a genius, or a complete beginner, you will probably end up with a solution that resembles, a lot, solutions already produced by other competent programmers.
But I agree with you - I don't think I would be sufficiently interested in belonging to a group of hackers to put myself in the situation of risking public criticism, or having to kowtow to the sensibilities of others that may have a very different philosophy of life to me. I reserve that risk for things that I actually consider worth it, such as making lots of money :-)
There's definitely something to the idea though. I remember the last CodeCon I attended with great fondness, and CodeCon is to some degree and exemplification of the F.U. ideals without the hostility.
You'd need to be careful to prevent people from being assholes to the noobs, and prevent things from degenerating into hazing. However, if it's done right with care to keep things polite, this could be a demanding, challenging, and therefore fun experience.
Anyone interested in starting one up in the Greater Toronto Area? =P
Edit: Clarify things a bit
Did you just make that up? I like it!
A lot of the discussion seems to be focussed on excluding people, this just strikes me as elitist.
The idea is good. I really love the idea that people are required to show something. I often fall into the trap being interested in stuff, but not actually creating new stuff. Forcing people to create stuff is a really good way to keep the focus on the creativity side of things.
Selective permeability is how you maintain a gradient.
It's only a kind of renaissance of sharing exemplified by sites like github that are showing a return to the enthusiastic sharing of early hackerdom.
This cuts both ways though... will most hackers really be able to muster up the will to tell someone to go away? I know I wouldn't really like doing that. While I have no doubt that Zed - or at least his internet persona - could, I wonder how it'll work out in practice.
If that's what it's like, I wouldn't want to be either the newbie or the tripper-upper. I get that this is all intended in fun, but making that a founding principle seems like a mistake to me.
It took an effort of will to read past that.
We've used this rule for every single one of our presentations. It's worked well.
Or am I missing the point?
Now, go to the back of the fucken line...
???
While perhaps Zed and friends intend on a friendly merit-based club, it still comes across as egotistical and hostile. The focus shifts to who they want to keep out, not on who they want to invite. It's like a barcamp with a bouncer: "Show me your a/w/c or you can't get in." Not sure I'd even _want_ to get in.
On the other hand it all depends on the assumption that the people from the outside would really want to get into the ring.
See http://freehackersunion.org/why.html for a better explanation.
Deleted comment
* demoing a product/website: fail.
* showing how something (which could be a startup product, but most likely isn't) works under the hood (code, etc.): win.
So exposure is not the point; the hack(s) that make it work are the point. At least, that's my take on it. Sounds interesting.
(http://freehackersunion.org/rules.html - Rule #8)
Oh yeah, and forewarning you - you'll probably get downmodded for asking why you got downmodded, too.
So we're discussing the Free Hackers Union, right?
It seems to have a website. Someone thinks the site looks good.
Saying that the site looks good is probably not an upmod-worthy contribution to the discussion, but there's no harm in it either.