

Hacking while homeless? - diminium

Do you guys know of any successful startup founders or successful hackers or famous people in the tech world who are or were basically homeless?<p>I've been reading a lot of history books and the stories of various famous mathematicians, artists, and scientists can end up being a pure tragedy in some cases.  I'm wondering about modern day stories on creating success out of tragedy.  I'm also wondering about why these people succeeded while so many others did the normal thing ("Woe is me").
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abbasmehdi
While I was in college there was this kid in grad school who was living in the
lab. All the other grad students made fun of him. Our school's graduate
program pretty much made education free. He moved on to become a prof in the
electrical engineering department, which in my opinion is a huge success,
especially given with he had to deal with.

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guynamedloren
Not sure about homelessness particularly, but if your flip through some Forbes
lists that contain short bios, many of the wealthiest people in the world had
difficult upbringings, often revolving around a lost parent at an early age
and/or rough childhood.

If you go beyond the tech world and into hip-hop (quite entrepreneurial, in
fact), then absolutely. Jay Z and P Diddy were raised in housing projects in
New York and are now worth around $400 million apiece, I believe. If that
doesn't inspire you, I don't know what does.

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Turing_Machine
There's a story about Hans Moravec living in the suspended ceiling at the
Stanford AI lab when he was in grad school.

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dkersten
Besides what rick888 said about Richard Stallman, I don't know of anybody. I
assume that finding somewhere to live is a more pressing concern for a
homeless person than hacking would be.

That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I guess none of them were successful
enough for us to hear about.

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rick888
I know there are some legendary stories about Richard Stallman living in his
office. Does that count?

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amorphid
I was pretty much homeless 18 months ago in San Francisco, and now my
startup.is taking off. My email is in my profile if you want to chat.

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stray
What do you consider successful? I've been homeless twice involuntarily and
once voluntarily.

How does one rise up from homelessness? Pure force of will and creativity.

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liquidm
Could you elaborate on this story? I'm very interested.

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stray
Sure. A lot of it is covered in a book I'm writing (working title: The
Minglewood Blues)...

Things were tough all over in 2000, and the company I worked for held out
longer than most. But it died too. And I found myself looking for work at a
very bad time to be looking for work. For months I scored a fair amount of
contract work - not a lot - but enough to get by.

Around August of 2001 it didn't look like things were going to improve any
time soon where I was so I developed a plan: we were going to head to the bay
area because the bay area always bounces back from a recession faster than
anywhere else. We sold off everything except my computer, my VW bus
("Minglewood") and the absolute necessities we needed to live out of
Minglewood for a few weeks until I had a paycheck coming in.

Two big things happened in September that year and one of those things is that
I took a huge gamble and headed to california to look for work. By the time we
got to San Francisco we were down to some small amount of money (I don't
remember how much) and there weren't any computer jobs anyway.

And as luck would have it, Minglewood broke down right after we got there.

Oh yeah, and it turns out that San Francisco isn't even in Silicon Valley. Go
figure.

I ended up doing day labor when I could get it, begging when I couldn't --
constantly scamming for wifi to look for _real_ work.

The scary thing about being homeless is that it really sucks to be invisible
and that (at least in SF) the way most people deal with the suckitude is with
meth or heroin. And most of our friends on the street were junkies.

Oh yeah, and heroin is dirt cheap. Dirt, dirt cheap. Cheap enough than $10
will buy you enough to stay high for a week, whiledeveloping a productive
heroin addiction.

Eventually I figured out how to escape San Francisco: I saved money to take
the SF taxi driver course and got a gig driving a taxi - which btw was harder
work than day labor and paid about the same. What I did was to save what money
I could until I had enough to put Minglewood in storage and buy greyhound
tickets back to Arizona.

By this time we had moved out of Minglewood and were living in hotels around
union square. On escape day, I checked out an ADA taxi (a van) so I could haul
all our stuff from the hotel room out to Minglewood. I got everything moved,
called for the tow truck and got Minglewood put in storage.

I turned in the taxi, met my gf at the greyhound station and left for Phoenix
where we at least had friends with homes. And without heroin.

Total time in San Francisco: about 10 months.

In Phoenix I went to truck driving school and got a gig driving an 18-wheeler.
That only lasted 10 days though because I finally scored an interview for a
sysadmin gig at ASU.

I abandoned the truck in Kansas City and hitched to the greyhound station and
had my girlfriend wire me a ticket back home. Another huge gamble and she was
not pleased, but this time the gamble paid off with a sysadmin gig that
allowed me to participate in NASA and ESA missions.

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dkersten
Thanks! That was really interesting.

I take it "we" was you and your gf?

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stray
Yes - "we" was me and my gf.

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rabidonrails
Was your gf working also? Looking? Student? Just curious, trying to fill out
the story.

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stray
Not at first.

At first she was pissed at me for getting us into such a predicament so I left
her to hang out in golden gate park while I went out to scrounge for food,
money and a job.

Once I had proven to her that I'd eventually get us off the streets, she
quickly bored of smoking weed on hippie hill and got a gig as a waitress at
Lori's Diner which is how we got into the hotel.

