Ask HN: Where do you go to meet interesting like minded people? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you go to meet interesting like minded people?

32 pointschunky199431 comments

This could be a website, an actual location, anything! I'm curious to know where you first met your most interesting friends, and whether you still frequent that place!

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Hacker News, Twitter, IRC. I follow a lot of people on Twitter and I have interesting tweets, and many follow me back. I have made several new offline friends this way.

Some of my IRC friends from the 90s are some of my closest friends now, too. It's cool 'cause they're geographically distributed so I have people I'm tight with in almost every major country.

Interestingly enough, one of my closest friends in my city I first "met" on the GNU Screen mailing list. I met him randomly at a conference here after moving and recognized his name.

Also, local user groups are good places, too.

PS: Freenode irc is full of dorks, but it's a good starting point. Try EFNet or one of the smaller hacker darknets (e.g. Buttes or hardchats or antisec/anonops) for the real motherfuckers.

In my experience "interesting" is often at odds with "like-minded".

Usenet, back in the day, was a great place to meet awesome people. I still have several great friends whom I first got to know via usenet. Unfortunately usenet kind of died, and for some reason all the replacements that have shown up since are but a pale shadow of what usenet once was.

School.

If you're in college right now, and especially a top-tier university, try to meet as many people as possible. Don't miss this opportunity; your network will be invaluable once you're done with school. College is a great place to step out of your bubble and college admissions committees usually do a good job of putting a diverse group of interesting people in one place. Meet people from different backgrounds, countries, and majors. Even though you may not realize it now, you will one day need most of the people that you meet in school.

Try attending local TEDx meeting: http://www.ted.com/tedx

I've found that my local Perl Mongers was a great place to meet like minded people - http://www.pm.org/ for your closest one :)

This is very location-specific, but if you're in the north of the UK, the Geekup (http://geekup.org/) network has been invaluable. It's a loose-knit group of groups, which usually meet in pubs and hold a few tech talks.

The Geekup template would be easy to replicate elsewhere (it's essentially a site and a mailing list, though I don't mean to denigrate all Andrew's hard work!). Personally, it's been a great source of contacts and friends, and I'd love to see the model expand elsewhere.

I also find a lot of interesting and smart people at Barcamps; there are enough regulars that attend a LOT of Barcamps (again, I'm in the UK, and elsewhere may vary), and they're usually great fun.

University, online (if you do interesting stuff people will find you), lots of meetups (mostly programming language related meetups), co-working spaces / shared offices and sometimes randomly in bars. Make sure you talk to a lot of people.

Also: a lot of (most?) people are very interesting if you look well enough. Not everybody seems to be interesting, but once you get to know people well, they might surprise you.

Local hackerspace draws an eclectic crowd. Hardly like-minded in most ways, but always interesting. (http://tangleball.org.nz)

Networking through it also often leads to people from neighbouring groups, including artists, academics, entrepreneurs, politicians, activists and so on (many of whom might not self-identify as hackers/makers).

Scour the local meetups that look interesting and research the age of the group and the average attendance. Contact frequent attendees and query them.

I'm in a large metro area so there are professional, hobby, social and sporting/outdoor groups of all types. I've met folks from hikers, body builders, travelers, sci-fi readers, robotics enthusiasts, radio operators to MSSQL DBAs.

1. Startup Weekend (They might have one in your city.) 2. Internet Marketing Summit 3. Founders Institute 4. Toastmasters/Rotary or other business clubs in your city 5. Tech Conferences 6. Online Forums/discussion boards (marketing/biz/tech ones)

Since I'm on my computer all day and at home a lot, I have to go to events to meet people which I'm getting better at.

I'm from the Philadelphia area, so I head to Philadelphia tech meet ups and more so hackathons lately now that I'm working and want to keep churning out side projects while meeting awesome people who, broadly put, like hacking. You still need to search out for the "interesting, like minded people", but I find they're worth it.

http://metalab.at/

Its the only place I bother going for a good time here in Vienna ... ;)

That is AWESOME! I've always wished for something like that where I live (currently Sacramento, CA USA) and had seriously considered starting something very much like that. Way cool that it has started somewhere already. Kudos!

Want to know something more random? I happen to be in Wien right now on vacation :) Definitely going to check this out...

edit: typo

That looks awesome. Is there a resource online to find all the start-up/tech incubators in Europe, or the world? I'll be traveling in Europe soon and would love to visit more places like this. Thank you!

Get thee verily to http://hackerspaces.org/ !

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you!

Try www.meetup.com I joined some local startup meetups. I went to my first one a week ago and it was a really great experience. I was able to speak to like-minded people about my ideas to get feedback. I was also able to get marketing advise and listen to other interesting ideas people had

Most of my longterm friends were either in or peripherally attached to the warez scene on efnet in the 90s.

I go to a local go (wei qi) club - it's full of guys who have a tendency to get obsessed by abstractions...

I've met tons of really interesting people while traveling. I Couch Surf with interesting strangers all over the world and some of them end up becoming very good friends.

http://couchsurfing.org/people/johndbritton

I am tech minded, hence to meet such people I would either go to Tech conferences, talks and universities. I find it the best way to get inspired while at the same time meet new people. Even better is volunteering in such conferences as you get to meet many new people

I started a meetup 4 years ago to solve this problem. It's turned into a startup of sorts:

http://beta.hackersandfounders.com/faq/meetups/is-there-a-ha...

Try cold emailing people. Really, it helps. Find a list of people doing like-minded things and just shoot off a bunch of emails. You can ask them a question, or comment on something they did or wrote. Some won't reply, but most do.

My roommates at helsinki university of technology have been a real eye openers for me. I can't say they are really like minded, but interesting as hell. Roommates don't have to be just roommates, they can be great friends.

I meet interesting guy at meet-up, or friend of friends. that's why I build meetcliv.com It collect & analyze the information from web and let u meet the guy u want to meet. :)

http://Meetup.com

Public Access Unix Systems. sdf.lonestar.org is my favourite.

Unconferences/barcamps.

my local hookah bar

Burningman.

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