Zed Shaw's Free Hackers Union

http://freehackersunion.org/joining.html

by smanek • 18 years ago

74 39 18 years ago

freehackersunion.org

btw02• 18 years ago

The website looks good.

btw02• 18 years ago

Why downmod me? Doesn't the site look good?

swombat2• 18 years ago

Because 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.

maxklein• 18 years ago

That'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• 18 years ago

Doesn't it say something specifically about not wanting marketing pitches?

adbachman• 18 years ago

The 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 for a better explanation.

fallentimes• 18 years 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.

KirinDave3• 18 years ago

I'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.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

leap-out-of-a-cathedral-window-and-fall-to-the-ground-hitting-a-power-chord

Did you just make that up? I like it!

KirinDave3• 18 years ago

Yeah. 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.

orib2• 18 years ago

I 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

tel2• 18 years ago

The 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.

KirinDave3• 18 years ago

But at the same time, most hackers are introverts. Even today people are incredibly reluctant to show code before it is "done" for fear of rejection. It's going to be very difficult for the shy kid who may be a great coder but is bad with rejection to walk into that gauntlet knowing full well that people will give them a rough time.

It's only a kind of renaissance of sharing exemplified by sites like github that are showing a return to the enthusiastic sharing of early hackerdom.

khafra• 18 years ago

I would attend one if it had a whelk's chance in a supernova of spreading to Tampa Bay. 1) People aren't as tactless and rejection-happy in real life as they are on the internet. 2) If it survives past two meetings, it'll be because the respected elders have cultivated an environment of constructive criticism, focused on the hack. Relentless haranguing of the hacker doing the presenting will be reserved for the marketing flacks that try to sneak in.

dhotson• 18 years ago

Yeah, I'm a bit the same. I was really enthusiastic about it at first. But after following a bit of the discussion on the mailing lists and IRC, I'm a little put off with a few things.

A lot of the discussion seems to be focussed on excluding people, this just strikes me as elitist.

The idea is good. I really love the idea that people are required to show something. I often fall into the trap being interested in stuff, but not actually creating new stuff. Forcing people to create stuff is a really good way to keep the focus on the creativity side of things.

gruseom2• 18 years ago

People 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• 18 years ago

What 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• 18 years ago

"If it's your first night at fight club, you have to fight."

???

gaius• 18 years ago

Do NOT talk about Fight Club.

demallien3• 18 years ago

Someone'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.

orib2• 18 years ago

If 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.

demallien3• 18 years ago

Even 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• 18 years 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• 18 years ago

Looks like a 2600 meeting, minus the open-minded spirit.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

1 Super Happy Dev House + 1 asshole = Freehackers Union

Or am I missing the point?

cridal• 18 years ago

I'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• 18 years ago

All 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• 18 years ago

It seems more "Fight Club" and less "Model Train Club". :(

jaaron• 18 years ago

I 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• 18 years ago

Off topic you live in HK? where? awesome to know that there are fellow hackers in the same region that frequent YC.

zby• 18 years ago

It is always fun to be in the Inner Ring (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.

majesticdesign• 18 years ago

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Zed Shaw's Free Hackers Union

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