

Zed Shaw's Free Hackers Union  - smanek
http://freehackersunion.org/joining.html

======
demallien
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.

~~~
orib
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.

~~~
demallien
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.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Even so, you grow your talents and experience in the very doing of the act. I
always thought Hacking was for your personal gratification rather than the
accolades of others.

~~~
demallien
Sure. But I'm guessing that the organisers of this thing have proposed the
obligatory first night presentation in an attempt to filter out know-nothing
blowhards. You know, the guy that always criticizes everything, using all the
latest buzz-words, without ever really coming to grasp with _why_ you chose to
implement something without using Struts, or Rails, or Ajax, or whatever
tomorrow's buzz-word turns out to be.

But I agree with you - I don't think I would be sufficiently interested in
belonging to a group of hackers to put myself in the situation of risking
public criticism, or having to kowtow to the sensibilities of others that may
have a very different philosophy of life to me. I reserve _that_ risk for
things that I actually consider worth it, such as making lots of money :-)

------
KirinDave
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.

~~~
gruseom
_leap-out-of-a-cathedral-window-and-fall-to-the-ground-hitting-a-power-chord_

Did you just make that up? I like it!

~~~
KirinDave
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.

------
gruseom
_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
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.

------
alex_c
"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.

------
fallentimes
"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.

------
SwellJoe
1 Super Happy Dev House + 1 asshole = Freehackers Union

Or am I missing the point?

~~~
cridal
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...

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

???

~~~
gaius
Do NOT talk about Fight Club.

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

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

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

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zby
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.

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lvecsey
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.

------
majesticdesign
I 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

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

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btw0
The website looks good.

~~~
btw0
Why downmod me? Doesn't the site look good?

~~~
swombat
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.

~~~
shiranaihito
I 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
Yep, 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
Alright, sorry for ranting :)

