Traveling Neighborhoods | Hacker News Reader

Traveling Neighborhoods

supernuclear.substack.com

14 pointssurprisetalk9 comments

I think this targets an extremely esoteric group. (Sort of like an article titled "How to Invest Your $1 Billion.") But it is a cool idea.

Since Esmeralda was mentioned: I hadn't heard of it and am glad to see the emergence of cities/neighborhoods starting from scratch. We need more experiments to jump start strong culture as existing cities and towns decay. Hopefully these places offer a very human experience.

I think there’s a decent number of remote-working, highly social people with substantial disposable income, who have friends living elsewhere that they’d like to spend quality time with. Especially in the tech crowd. This would appeal to a lot of people I know.

I think as people start to have kids it would be less appealing, but people seem to be doing that later these days (or not at all).

No doubt 25-35 y.o. or so could pull it off. Probably don't even have to be fully remote, just tell your laid back boss you want to work remotely for a couple weeks.

According to the article the quality of the pool matters. If you want a neighborhood feel, the challenge is to come up with 8-40 people who are going to jive. Devon noted that (at least one) FoaF experience didn't work out. I think it is great if you have the social sense to select such a chill group but I'd be surprised if many people could accomplish organizing a successful large group.

Not super related, but for whatever reason I've had a flare up in thinking about sci-fi moving cities/neighborhoods again. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 with a Mars city going around the terminator (not super well described tbh but fun), Hannu Rajaniemi's Fractal Prince (book #2 of Jean le Flambeur's series) with a reconfiguring Mars city wandering around on stilts (iirc). We live in an age with so many new malleable systems, but so much of the world about us is fixed and rooted, and these sci-fi realms where not just people but places too move about is an interesting idea. That what I thought of, seeing the traveling neighborhood title.

I dig this idea a lot. I hope we can expand more on remote work, make great use of new freedoms for such excellent purposes.

I can't think of 10-20 people I would invite on a trip, let alone that many people who somehow happen to all have vacations at the same time as I do. I'm really not sure who the audience of that article is supposed to be.

The article mentioned that most people are working remotely the whole time. I don’t think remote workers are that rare, and even in-person jobs often offer a few weeks of remote work per year as a perk.

As for having lots of friends… I don’t know how rare that is. I could easily find 10 people, 20 would be a stretch. And I’m far from the most social person I know.

I do this with my friends sometimes. It’s definitely fun. But it’s even more low-key than what the author describes. There’s no big group chat or lighting talks, which would be weird cause we all know each other so well. And I don’t think we get together as much as the author. And there’s no main organizer. We didn’t even have dinner with others the last time. Just meeting at different beaches/parks/forests. Maybe a hang at a house one night.

This sounds like a fun format for travel! I'll suggest it to my extended group of family members. What's the size of your original invite group vs the number of people who end up joining? Why not let unknowns tag along? It seems low commitment enough that if the unknown is a bore they could just be ignored.

Great idea I had a similar one. Especially for skiing for example

Reply on news.ycombinator.com