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Zed Shaw's Free Hackers Union
- majesticdesign 18y agoI want to hire hacker to help me to remove articles in Chinese about the bad news of our company from the internet .Can you help me? Thank you majesticdesign88@yahoo.com.hk
- pengdan03 18y agoplease help me get back my mail password thank you ! (Internet) site: www.163.com username:pengdan03 keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
- pengdan03 18y agoplease help me get back my mail password thank you ! (Internet) site: www.163.com username:pengdan03 (prove your skill) keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
- pengdan03 18y agoplease help me get back my mail password thank you ! (Internet) site: www.163.com username:pengdan03 (prove your skill) keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
- pengdan03 18y agoplease help me get back my mail password thank you ! (Internet) site: www.163.com username:pengdan03 (prove your skill) keep in touch with me:pengdan03@126.com
- btw0 18y agoThe website looks good.
- btw0 18y agoWhy downmod me? Doesn't the site look good?
- swombat 18y agoBecause your comment is totally irrelevant to the discussion. Oh yeah, and forewarning you - you'll probably get downmodded for asking why you got downmodded, too.
- shiranaihito 18y agoI almost refrained from writing this, but couldn't help it.. So we're discussing the Free Hackers Union, right? It seems to have a website. Someone thinks the site looks good. Saying that the site looks good is probably not an upmod-worthy contribution to the discussion, but there's no harm in it either.
- swombat 18y agoYep, so I didn't downmod it myself. I don't think it's so bad as to need to go below 0. I was just explaining to the OP why he was being downmodded.
- shiranaihito 18y agoAlright, sorry for ranting :)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- maxklein 18y agoThat's a good idea. When one start up in my area I'll go there give my presentation. It will be good marketing anyways.
- OneSeventeen 18y agoDoesn't it say something specifically about not wanting marketing pitches?
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- icey 18y agoWhere do you get the idea that this is for pitching a startup? (http://freehackersunion.org/rules.html http://freehackersunion.org/rules.html - Rule #8)
- maxklein 18y agoAh okay, I misunderstood it. I did not read the rules :( Okay, I still think it's a good idea.
- philcrissman 18y agoFrom how I read "the rules" it sounds like: * demoing a product/website: fail. * showing how something (which could be a startup product, but most likely isn't) works under the hood (code, etc.): win. So exposure is not the point; the hack(s) that make it work are the point. At least, that's my take on it. Sounds interesting.
- adbachman 18y agoThe group was pretty much founded as an anti-business alternative to the existing business friendly events. I don't think marketing or "startup culture" have a place in the FU. But that's just my impression from reading the initial blog post and other essays building on the idea. See http://freehackersunion.org/why.html http://freehackersunion.org/why.html for a better explanation.
- fallentimes 18y ago"They’re given the rules to remind them, keeping close watch on the no powerpoint/website only rule (powerpoint+website+code is cool, weird hardware is better)." We've used this rule for every single one of our presentations. It's worked well.
- KirinDave 18y agoI'm still not sure how I feel about the F.U.. There is something incredibly leap-out-of-a-cathedral-window-and-fall-to-the-ground-hitting-a-power-chord about it, but at the same time it seems incredibly judgmental and hopelessly hostile to newbies. There's definitely something to the idea though. I remember the last CodeCon I attended with great fondness, and CodeCon is to some degree and exemplification of the F.U. ideals without the hostility.
- gruseom 18y agoleap-out-of-a-cathedral-window-and-fall-to-the-ground-hitting-a-power-chord Did you just make that up? I like it!
- KirinDave 18y agoYeah. It's like saying "Je ne sais quoi" and then hanging truck nuts off of it. ;) Or shouting "YOU ESS A!" during a wedding. Something indescribably asinine and unmistakably western but still awesome and laudable at the same time.
- orib 18y agoI don't see it as being especially unfriendly to newbies. Perhaps a bit nerve-wracking, but "Bring something cool to show on your first meeting. And make sure it's actually cool. We'll ask lots of questions" seems like it may actually be fun. And IMO, it would definitely help keep a good atmosphere with interesting hacks alive. You'd need to be careful to prevent people from being assholes to the noobs, and prevent things from degenerating into hazing. However, if it's done right with care to keep things polite, this could be a demanding, challenging, and therefore fun experience. Anyone interested in starting one up in the Greater Toronto Area? =P Edit: Clarify things a bit
- tel 18y agoThe hostility is undoubtedly Zed's calling card, but I feel a great deal of affinity for it. Trial by fire keeps a well defined line between FU and everyone else. Selective permeability is how you maintain a gradient.
- gruseom 18y agoPeople watching the presentation get to ask questions and try to trip up the newbie. If that's what it's like, I wouldn't want to be either the newbie or the tripper-upper. I get that this is all intended in fun, but making that a founding principle seems like a mistake to me.
- Dobbs 18y agoWhat I think this is trying to say is know your shit. If your building a jabber-do-hickey know how it works. If someone asks you a question be ready to answer. As for the audience this would probably be better as ask away, try and learn about it and get as much information on the a/w/c as you can.
- gills 18y ago"If it's your first night at fight club, you have to fight." ???
- gaius 18y agoDo NOT talk about Fight Club.
- demallien 18y agoSomeone's watched Fight Club one time too many. Snarks aside, it sounds like a good idea. Forcing newcomers to present on the first night does enable you to know straight away if someone is for real, or just a poser. On the downside, you run the risk of having a lot of very simple stuff being presented over and over again, because newcomers don't know that red over there in the corner presented pretty much the same thing last month... Finally, the success or otherwise is going to very heavily depend on just how alpha-geek the environment is. If you have too many people trying to exclude newcomers because they consider the newcomer to not be up to their very high standards, it'd quickly devolve into a... less than interesting group to participate in.
- orib 18y agoIf you're presenting your own work -- and it seems like they're trying to give a very strong bias towards this -- then I don't think repeat presentations would be a major issue. I definitely agree that you need care to prevent things from degenerating into an unfriendly and unpleasant meatspace flamefest, though.
- demallien 18y agoEven if it is your own work, if you are attacking a popular problem, and you are an average programmer, you are very likely going to hit upon the same sort of solution as others have already discovered. For example, I'd be willing to bet that there will be a relatively large number of people that would present some sort of implementation of remote procedure calls - it's something that lets you do cool stuff, whilst still being hard core hacker stuff - dynamic code, low-level syntax analysis, memory management, blah blah blah. A while back I did an RPC implementation to allow transparent interfacing between a custom VM I had written, and native C code. Basically you write the entire app in one big C code blob, but then during compilation you specify that certain modules are going to live in the VM. I had created some tools used during compilation to handle the creation of proxy objects on both sides of the VM interface, that could talk to each other. I was really impressed with myself. Then I discovered that 90% of the solution was simply an implementation of RPC, and that my code was a slightly messier, slightly buggier version of code that had been written many many times before. I think I'd get bored pretty quickly seeing multiple presentations of slightly messy, slightly buggy implementations of already solved problems. You see, unless you are a genius, or a complete beginner, you will probably end up with a solution that resembles, a lot, solutions already produced by other competent programmers.
- alex_c 18y ago"When The Freehacker’s Union was originally devised, it was going to be 10 geeks in a local New York City coffee shop hanging with [hyperlink]me[/hyperlink]" It took an effort of will to read past that.
- corentin 18y agoLooks like a 2600 meeting, minus the open-minded spirit.
- SwellJoe 18y ago1 Super Happy Dev House + 1 asshole = Freehackers Union Or am I missing the point?
- cridal 18y agoI'm an asshole and by the time I'm done with you, you will be an asshole too. And you'll like it! Now, go to the back of the fucken line...
- lvecsey 18y agoAll its missing is the concept of a lurker mode. Orange County Choppers has it when they build motorcycles, and so do forums and chat sessions. So the rules just have to be tweaked a bit to make that possible, especially since getting enough like-minded people to coalesce in the first place is so difficult.
- sown 18y agoIt seems more "Fight Club" and less "Model Train Club". :(
- jaaron 18y agoI have a hard enough time getting events up and started here in Hong Kong without putting every person thru a trial by fire. While perhaps Zed and friends intend on a friendly merit-based club, it still comes across as egotistical and hostile. The focus shifts to who they want to keep out, not on who they want to invite. It's like a barcamp with a bouncer: "Show me your a/w/c or you can't get in." Not sure I'd even _want_ to get in.
- jamongkad 18y agoOff topic you live in HK? where? awesome to know that there are fellow hackers in the same region that frequent YC.
- zby 18y agoIt is always fun to be in the Inner Ring (http://www.geocities.com/bigcslewisfan/ http://www.geocities.com/bigcslewisfan/). It is not very mature - but fun does not need to be mature - just have some distance from yourself and don't treat it too seriously. On the other hand it all depends on the assumption that the people from the outside would really want to get into the ring.