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Comment by shmeeed | Hacker News Reader

Me and some friends used to attend the CCC some 15-20 years ago. Back then, we just showed up at the entrance on the first day and bought our tickets there.

This year we were toying with the idea of going for a revival. But man, did we underestimate how much this event has grown...

Tickets in the second presale round were gone within 1-2 seconds. We didn't stand a chance. I feel like we failed the entry exam tbh.

Anyways, to everybody who did score a ticket: have phun, and happy hacking!

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The easy way to get tickets is via local hackspaces that are somewhat (not necessarily formally) associated to the CCC. There is a ticket contingent for people active in and around the wider chaos community that gets distributed via the hackspaces. They all handle things slightly differently, but the way to get tickets is usually to show up at a hackspace once in a while (or knowing someone who is active there) and getting tickets from there in the presale phase.

The other guaranteed way for tickets is to volunteer enough as an angel at the Congress the year before to get an angel voucher. But you obviously need a ticket for a Congress in the first place do to that.

I've one ticket for sale (€190-255), since I bought two tickets (one € 255 supporter for myself and € 190 for partner) but also got a speaker ticket (https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...), since speaker announcement was after the first round of sales via vouchers.

So let me know if someone is interested in this ticket, see my GitHub for mail address. I know other speakers where even unaware of this (so I might know another ticket for sale).

Tickets are sold (to the first email that arrived at 10:25 CEST, and the second ticket of a friend who's also a speaker to the second mailer at 11:11 CEST).

It is no longer the same. It went from somewhat exclusive dining experience to full blown nuclear junk food chain vibe.

I've stopped attending it about 10 years ago. I rather prefer to watch some few interesting topics online, and skip all the wanna-be political junk.

You choose to ignore politics, but politics doesn't choose to ignore you. Ostriching doesn't seem productive.

> Ostriching doesn't seem productive.

But listening to pep talks of political opinions that are very opposite to yours does not seem productive, either.

Since 22C3 I really enjoyed watching online and chatting with a small irc community about it. I had this notion that if I ever lived in Europe I’d go myself. Well for the last three years it seems I haven’t gone - the ticket situation was a shock at first but makes sense. The number of unrecorded talks does feel like it’s gone up though which has been regrettable.

If you're associated with any hacker group you should ask them if they're included in the pre-sale round. You can get one then if they don't run out.

If you still have old friends from those times, ping them and ask if they have any tickets for friends. Most times I've gone, it's been via local/social associations and people I've known from those, only managed to buy a ticket once, but it's short of impossible normally.

If you're looking for a similar event, you might want to check out GPN - Gulaschprogrammiernacht (https://gulas.ch).

It skews a bit more German, but it's essentially a smaller "summer congress" that used to have free attendance until this year (tickets now cost 10€ to cover the breakfast, IIRC). A lot less people there, but the general vibe is very similar.

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