Hacker News Reader

Comment by philaquilina | Hacker News Reader

One suggestion on working spaces if you're traveling up to the city. There's a place called Noisebridge in the Mission that is more or less a free hacker lounge with a lot of creative folk in. The only caveat is that it tends to be noisy and sometimes it feels a little too hipster for my tastes.

View on HN

To set the record straight: Noisebridge is NOT free. There's membership fees just like all the other hacker spaces, and there's rent and bills to pay to keep the space open and the lights on. Even if you're not a full dues paying member, you should be chipping in $5-10 into the donation bin every visit.

There's also been a lot of problems recently with homeless (mostly nonhackers) trying to live out of and take advantage of the space, without contributing anything back to the community.

That being said, please, please come to Noisebridge and work on your startup, or hack on something else exciting. There's lots of great tools and cool, knowledgable people there. Noisebridge has an ethic of radical inclusivity, so you're most definitely welcome to just show up and ask someone to show you around.

Just plan on being a contributing member of the community by hacking on something cool, chipping in for rent and bills, and by not sleeping/bathing/etc there.

While I won't argue with the fact that you should donate, I never felt any pressure to donate while I was taking classes there. I didn't even know there was a donation bin on-site until you mentioned it. To me, that was the cool thing about the place and made me want to donate more.

I admittedly haven't been there in about 9 months though and I never noticed a homeless problem while I was there. Everyone seemed to be a contributor. Have things changed?

You're right, it's not a high pressure donation situation (hacker dojo is _way_ more in your face about it). However, there are two donations bins right in front of you when you walk in the upstairs door into the space. I just really want to see Noisebridge continue on in all its glory, and making sure that people know that it's all membership/donation run is part of that.

Being on Mission St., it seems there's always been somewhat of a problem of Mission St. craziness colliding with Noisebridge awesomeness. However, from what I can see not being in the space a ton (I live in Palo Alto, and only make it up a couple times per month at best), there's been added pressure on the space in the past 6 months or so. Anecdotally, it seems word has gotten out in the homeless shelter community and Occupy community that Noisebridge is an awesome place to store your food/stuff, hang out on the free wifi, and sleep on the couches. Needless to say, that's not seen as excellent use of the space, and has been a challenge for the volunteer run, often introverted, consensus based organization that Noisebridge is.

Having said that, I've been up there several times recently to hack on hardware projects, and Noisebridge has been awesome, vibrant, and filled with great people working on cool stuff. It's just going through some challenges that would benefit from people helping promote it in the right light.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com