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In case anyone here hasn't read it yet, this should be required reading for any would-be computer geek: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Stev

In case anyone here hasn't read it yet, this should be required reading for any would-be computer geek: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Levy/dp/1449388396 https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Computer-Revolution-Steven-Le... I picked this up randomly off a university library shelf and before I knew it, I was halfway through the book and my feet were hurting.

archagon 9y ago
Reading the book now and it’s making me a little sad. Where can I find today’s Tech Model Railroad Club, Homebrew Computer Club, Community Memory, People’s Computer Company? Are there still places left where computing is small, local, non-commercial and so alive? I love programming, but I’ve never felt myself to be part of any tribe like the people in Hackers clearly do. It all just feels so commoditized and un-magical these days!
- brlewis 9y ago
  I've been programming since the 1980s. The number of small, non-commercial and alive projects only increased with sourceforge, github and gitlab. For local, check meetup. Programming is more magical than ever these days IMO.
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  If it's just small, local, non-commercial you're looking for, there's any number of hackerspaces you can get memberships to. There's still lots of domains where you can do discovery, like 3D printing and making electronic music live. What made the H:HotCR environment so weird and crazy and compelling was a) the fact that they were the very first to be working with this equipment, b) they worked in a university setting, and c) the weird dynamic between school administrators and the geeks.
- racer-v 9y ago
  There's Homebrew Website Club. These guys are doing the hard work to take back the Internet from social media conglomerates https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club Also the distributed Internet (e.g. IPFS) and DIY CPU (as in free FPGA tooling) communities.
- atmanthedog 9y ago
  This is a 'classic' take on a phenomenon that I believe is deeply related to what you are describing: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths FWIW, I think I originally read this here on HN.
- westoncb 9y ago
  Hackers was very inspirational to me when I read it as a ~17 year old. I'd been programming off and on for a while, but just really getting into it at that point—and the attitudes of many of the folks in the book resonated strongly with me (especially the early MIT hackers). I naively thought I'd find a group of people like this in college, and of course failed to. I moved around the country some looking for people, too (mostly in Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA)—but never had much luck. Definitely not saying they aren't out there, or that my searches in those places were exhaustive, but I did look and failed to turn anything up. My current view is that it's difficult for at least a couple of reason: 1) It requires the group to have some some kind of unifying aim (even if it's very loose/general) and (ideally) a physical location members can return to regularly which fosters both serious work and the ability to relax/socialize/goof around. Seems like some makerspaces are pretty good with this, but from what I can tell typically don't have sufficient focus on software/CS to be of interest to me. 2) It's hard to search for these things because the results will overwhelmingly be filled with folks who don't actually feel much compelled by pure hacking but describe themselves as such for professional reasons. In my experience this is mostly what programming Meetups are about: making contacts to find jobs, or people trying to get themselves to learn some new tech, not because they are particularly curious but because it would improve their resume. I think part of the problem may also be related to viewing the discovery/creation of such a group as something easier than it really is. I'd bet both the difficulty of finding it and the potential rewards of doing so are higher than people typically expect. Doing a few google searches and occasionally asking around town will not be sufficient. That said—anyone else here in Tucson presently? :)
  - archagon 9y ago
    Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey! One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so inspiring (apart from the Berkeley connection) was because it described a piece of technology that brought local people together by design. Today, we can go online and find out what people are saying in any part of the world on any conceivable topic. But barring a few notable exceptions like Nextdoor, there seems to be relatively little focus on technology that connects us with our neighbors and colleagues (except in a roundabout way). When I was a student at Cal, our Livejournal group hosted a biannual event called AnonCon, where hundreds of people would gather in a single thread and anonymously moan about finals, gossip about campus life, and discuss who they were crushing on. At the co-op where I was living at the time, this was a Big Event: people would huddle in the living room under blankets and have a merry old time reading threads and adding their own thoughts to the pile. You'd run into AnonCon participants in the real world who you'd have never thought were clued in to this sort of thing. It felt like the campus was suddenly electrified through the comments section of this simple blog post! We weren't really online, but part a quirky campus community brought together by way of technology. It makes me wonder if maybe these kinds of communities could be kickstarted with a modern take on Community Memory: a distributed database or forum combined with some sort of physical beacon that would facilitate peer-to-peer connections between local devices. There would be no pathway to the internet: if you wanted to know what was going on in your community, you'd have to go to a particular location (or find a friend) and grab the latest snapshot of the database directly. Perhaps someone might hide a beacon in their favorite café, seed it with some comp-sci talk, and then see who shows up to trade thoughts! Idealistic communities with unified aims and physical haunts could almost emerge out of the ether — in cafés, libraries, community centers and parks. If globally-hosted communities incentivize people to spread out, perhaps peer-to-peer communities could incentivize people to grow closer together. And maybe, the kind of unity and camaraderie evident in those oddball Hackers communities would subsequently follow.
- carwyn 9y ago
  Create your own. That's what we did with http://northwales.tech/ http://northwales.tech/
barbs 9y ago
Indeed a great book, but when I mentioned it to my friend he cracked up at how corny the title was.
zandorg 9y ago
The secretive Hacker Conference is for people featured in the book Hackers. Ted Nelson is one person who I know, who is in it.
- archagon 9y ago
  Interesting, this pointed me to a documentary that might be worth watching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Wizards_of_the_Electronic_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Wizards_of_the_Electr...

archagon 9y ago

Reading the book now and it’s making me a little sad. Where can I find today’s Tech Model Railroad Club, Homebrew Computer Club, Community Memory, People’s Computer Company? Are there still places left where computing is small, local, non-commercial and so alive? I love programming, but I’ve never felt myself to be part of any tribe like the people in Hackers clearly do. It all just feels so commoditized and un-magical these days!

brlewis 9y ago
I've been programming since the 1980s. The number of small, non-commercial and alive projects only increased with sourceforge, github and gitlab. For local, check meetup. Programming is more magical than ever these days IMO.
vinceguidry 9y ago
If it's just small, local, non-commercial you're looking for, there's any number of hackerspaces you can get memberships to. There's still lots of domains where you can do discovery, like 3D printing and making electronic music live. What made the H:HotCR environment so weird and crazy and compelling was a) the fact that they were the very first to be working with this equipment, b) they worked in a university setting, and c) the weird dynamic between school administrators and the geeks.
racer-v 9y ago
There's Homebrew Website Club. These guys are doing the hard work to take back the Internet from social media conglomerates https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club Also the distributed Internet (e.g. IPFS) and DIY CPU (as in free FPGA tooling) communities.
atmanthedog 9y ago
This is a 'classic' take on a phenomenon that I believe is deeply related to what you are describing: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths FWIW, I think I originally read this here on HN.
westoncb 9y ago
Hackers was very inspirational to me when I read it as a ~17 year old. I'd been programming off and on for a while, but just really getting into it at that point—and the attitudes of many of the folks in the book resonated strongly with me (especially the early MIT hackers). I naively thought I'd find a group of people like this in college, and of course failed to. I moved around the country some looking for people, too (mostly in Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA)—but never had much luck. Definitely not saying they aren't out there, or that my searches in those places were exhaustive, but I did look and failed to turn anything up. My current view is that it's difficult for at least a couple of reason: 1) It requires the group to have some some kind of unifying aim (even if it's very loose/general) and (ideally) a physical location members can return to regularly which fosters both serious work and the ability to relax/socialize/goof around. Seems like some makerspaces are pretty good with this, but from what I can tell typically don't have sufficient focus on software/CS to be of interest to me. 2) It's hard to search for these things because the results will overwhelmingly be filled with folks who don't actually feel much compelled by pure hacking but describe themselves as such for professional reasons. In my experience this is mostly what programming Meetups are about: making contacts to find jobs, or people trying to get themselves to learn some new tech, not because they are particularly curious but because it would improve their resume. I think part of the problem may also be related to viewing the discovery/creation of such a group as something easier than it really is. I'd bet both the difficulty of finding it and the potential rewards of doing so are higher than people typically expect. Doing a few google searches and occasionally asking around town will not be sufficient. That said—anyone else here in Tucson presently? :)
- archagon 9y ago
  Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey! One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so inspiring (apart from the Berkeley connection) was because it described a piece of technology that brought local people together by design. Today, we can go online and find out what people are saying in any part of the world on any conceivable topic. But barring a few notable exceptions like Nextdoor, there seems to be relatively little focus on technology that connects us with our neighbors and colleagues (except in a roundabout way). When I was a student at Cal, our Livejournal group hosted a biannual event called AnonCon, where hundreds of people would gather in a single thread and anonymously moan about finals, gossip about campus life, and discuss who they were crushing on. At the co-op where I was living at the time, this was a Big Event: people would huddle in the living room under blankets and have a merry old time reading threads and adding their own thoughts to the pile. You'd run into AnonCon participants in the real world who you'd have never thought were clued in to this sort of thing. It felt like the campus was suddenly electrified through the comments section of this simple blog post! We weren't really online, but part a quirky campus community brought together by way of technology. It makes me wonder if maybe these kinds of communities could be kickstarted with a modern take on Community Memory: a distributed database or forum combined with some sort of physical beacon that would facilitate peer-to-peer connections between local devices. There would be no pathway to the internet: if you wanted to know what was going on in your community, you'd have to go to a particular location (or find a friend) and grab the latest snapshot of the database directly. Perhaps someone might hide a beacon in their favorite café, seed it with some comp-sci talk, and then see who shows up to trade thoughts! Idealistic communities with unified aims and physical haunts could almost emerge out of the ether — in cafés, libraries, community centers and parks. If globally-hosted communities incentivize people to spread out, perhaps peer-to-peer communities could incentivize people to grow closer together. And maybe, the kind of unity and camaraderie evident in those oddball Hackers communities would subsequently follow.
carwyn 9y ago
Create your own. That's what we did with http://northwales.tech/ http://northwales.tech/

barbs 9y ago

Indeed a great book, but when I mentioned it to my friend he cracked up at how corny the title was.

zandorg 9y ago

The secretive Hacker Conference is for people featured in the book Hackers. Ted Nelson is one person who I know, who is in it.

archagon 9y ago
Interesting, this pointed me to a documentary that might be worth watching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Wizards_of_the_Electronic_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Wizards_of_the_Electr...