If you want to meet people "talking hacker-speak" in the Bay Area, then I would suggest that you go to events that would only attract that sort of person. In ge

If you want to meet people "talking hacker-speak" in the Bay Area, then I would suggest that you go to events that would only attract that sort of person. In general this will mean shying away from events about technological pop-culture and instead focusing on the events that cover very specific and "boring" topics. In your particular case, I would suggest going to events that focus on building things ("project nights", etc), events that cover a specific "unpopular" languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang), or events that feature talks from people who aren't "popular" but should be (Fabrice Bellard, Jan Hubicka, etc).