Dreaming of Digital Glory At Hacker Hostels 71
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times has a story about a small chain of managed residences that has sprung up in the Bay Area to provide a cheap place where programmers, designers, and scientists can live and work. These 'hacker hostels' are a place for aspiring entrepreneurs to gather, share, and refine ideas. 'Hackers ... have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems. In the 1960s, researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory slept in the attic and, while waiting for their turn on the shared mainframe computer, sweated in the basement sauna. When told about the hacker hostels, Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, said they reminded him of his days in the last decade studying at M.I.T., where graduate students would have bunk beds inside their small offices.'"
Hackers get free housing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hackers get free housing (Score:4, Interesting)
We have done this for years here in Europe. Typically they are called hacklabs. Often they may be squatted houses converted into social centres, or a funded space (like a hackerspace) with people living on site.
Here's a photo of one from 2004:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/genjix/2169785087/in/photostream [flickr.com]
A large factory with ~20 hackers living and working on projects. People would come and go as they please, and we held several hackathons there like the 2007 Crystal Space hackfest:
http://crystalspace3d.org/main/La_Fibra_hackfest_report [crystalspace3d.org]
This has been going on for decades throughout major cities in Europe such as London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Spain, Italy, Austria and Prague.
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The picture in your first link has a text saying "computers to make me want to leave my wife." Well, not for me. The PCs look like 1995. There might be only one flat screen visible under the table but I am not even sure this is it.
It reminds me a lab we had in 2003 where the company would only supply us with old PC desktops from 1995.
Throw in a few cray computers, a few Sun servers and actual PC servers with double power supply etc., more flat screens and I might want to leave my wife.
Still, I remember sim
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If your servers need double power supplies, you're not building proper failover into your software.
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Who talked about needing dual power supplies ? Not me...
Sometimes you may leave your your wife for things that you don't really need !
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What place where hackers live together do you have in mind regarding Prague? I'm living here and I'm not aware of any.
"provide a cheap place where..." (Score:5, Interesting)
FTA:
"But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent — $40 a night — as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping."
$40/night * 30 days (month~) == $1200/month
Well, I guess it is San Francisco.. so maybe that's cheap for them.
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The dude stole his money, it's important that he is publicly shamed so nobody incurs a debt with him ever again.
THANK you, I'm glad somebody gets it. Hey, maybe nobody will ever see this comment, especially now that it's been downmodded. But on the other hand, maybe someday it'll save somebody some money, and it didn't cost me anything. Maybe someday it'll cost the guy a job, and then at least a very small slice of justice will be served.
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Yeah, moving to the west coast is certainly an eye opener in this regard. My last apartment in the South was $525/month for 1200 square feet, a garden plot/yard, and a parking spot. I get a 350 square foot shit hole on the edge of Koreatown for about $800/month here in los angeles, and rent in SFO scares the hell out of me...
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$1200 for just some house is a lot. But add the infrastructure, possibly some furniture, and especially all the extra brains (neighbors, other nerds) and the price might be totally worth it.
But "cheap" is not the word I would use to describe it.
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"But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent â" $40 a night â" as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping."
Lots of hackers homes in close proximity? Cue federal wiretaps and police thuggery to attack the terrorists and downloaders in 5...4...3... :(
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For pay-by-the-day it's not a bad price at all. You can do better than $1200/mo for a room, but usually that requires you to sign a lease.
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When this stuff was done in the past as described, it was done primarily because graduate students were poor. Going home to a dump is not an improvement over sleeping at the lab. Crowded conditions are not desirable but they occur when there is not an alternative. When scientists and engineers get jobs with decent pay then they stop living like lab rats.
From the article (Score:5, Funny)
Hackers — the Mark Zuckerberg variety, not the identity thieves — have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems.
Wait, Mark Zuck is not an identity thief?
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He didn't steal it, you licensed it to him in the ten pages of legalese.
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Page 4: """You grant Facebook an unlimited, nonexclusive license to use, distribute, modify, and distribute modified versions, of your personality."""
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Is it stealing if someone just gives it to you?
After all, the information on Facebook is provided voluntarily by its users. It wasn't obtained through hacking their computers or purchasing their information from the various databaes. It was provided to Facebook free of charge by the user.
It's really hard to stea
good idea (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe the hackers crammed into this hostel can work on some sort of global information sharing system that would allow them to collaborate without being in the same physical location.
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even if you have direct Tier 1 access to the net you still need a POP and a place to be when you have to go offline that is secure enough for your Terminal and other Bits. Plus you need to have someplace that you can Nike.Net at.
Hole-In-The-Wall Hostel + Digital Glory (Score:2)
= Digital Glory Hole
This is yet another example... (Score:1, Flamebait)
And the smell is wonderful! (Score:2)
Ummm, these rooms smell like rainbows and Mila Kunis hugs!
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Ummm, these rooms smell like rainbows and Mila Kunis hugs!
I'll be right there!
*phew* (Score:2)
Betcha that plays smells like an overheated CRT at a Linux convention.
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What could possibly go wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
"But inside, in a third-floor apartment, there are enough Ikea bunk beds to sleep 10 people, crammed into two bedrooms." And they mention that the house "captain" gets his/her own room, meaning you have 11 people in a single apartment.
This violates so many different housing codes, it's not even funny. Cramming that many people into such a small space is downright dangerous. Fire, sanitation, etc., ... all problems. These are not niggling little "lets find something to fine you for" issues... this is a serious safety problem.
"Katy Levinson, who runs another hacker house, declined to give its exact location because she had heard about several houses being shut down after running into trouble with landlords."
She doesn't even OWN the house? That tells me two things:
1) She's badly violating the terms of any lease agreement, which certainly would not allow subletting of this magnitude.
2) She's utterly ignoring any landlord-tenant laws herself.
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That's intresting. In my country (Hungary) the minimum per person is 44 square feet (4 m2), so your 70 sq ft for 2 would violate that. And this is an Eastern-European country.
Not quite (Score:2)
What you cites is true only for housing designed to house people in this way. Youth hostels are certainly not illegal.
Putting great numbers of people in a regular apartment? Not so much.
"Crammed into odd or tiny spaces . . . " (Score:3)
. . . sounds like a perfect description of cubicles to me. Smart parents might want to prepare their children early for cubicle life, to give them a head start before the neighbors' children:
How about cubicle cribs for babies, and cubicle summer camps? They'll be better prepared for life in their cubicle future!
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Do you mean the people setting up the hostels, or the guests? As far as I can tell, the article only gives one example of an actual business plan two of the residents were trying to implement. It sounded like a real thing to me, but since I'm not an entrepreneur, perhaps I'm missing the vital thing that would qualify them as "real" entrepreneurs.
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Yeah, it's kind of sickening hearing about them. They start some sort of idea, often one that's been done before and better, and then put a hell of a lot of effort into trying to find VC investors dumb enough to fund them while they polish it enough to sell it and perform a 'successful exit'.
This is why women don't like IT (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear god, as a female I would see this as a nightmare. I already have to set and constantly re-establish boundaries with the male-dominated work force that I'm in (physics, specifically). I would not want to sleep anywhere near them. I would not want to be stuck cleaning up after them all because my preferred standards of cleanliness are much higher than theirs.
This is part of why women don't join these fields in parity with men. We can't afford to completely dissolve boundaries like this, because some cre
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Huh, I don't see why anyone would think you were crazy for not wanting to share a room, particularly with someone of the opposite sex. I certainly see the attraction of a setup like this, but I'd rather pay more for a private room. I think the social setting would be very cool, but on a practical level, I don't think it would work for me. I _have_ stayed in hostels like this for mountaineering courses up in the Sierras, and it worked okay except for the snoring, but I think I slept with my wallet in m
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I am happy, happy to socialize with Indian scientists and French scientists and Chinese scientists and American scientists and all the rest. I am not happy to give these same scientists access to my wallet while I sleep, or to my bed, or to my luggage (meager though it may be). They have no serious motivation to be a good room mate because they will likely never see me again. I refused to share my room with some total stranger and the guys in charge thought I was a complete nutter for it.
So you automatically assume that your fellow scientists want to steal your money and rummage through your luggage? Wow, paranoid and racist much?
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Dear god, as a female I would see this as a nightmare.
And as a female, I think it could be kinda cool provided I could be in an all girl house (or at least an all girl room), but that has more to do with my religious standards then any disgust at living with boys. I've lived with enough girls that I've had to clean up after that I don't think it's fair to play the boys are slobs card. But then again, I'm in CS and like tech and all that, and only find the start-up culture a little off putting 'cause so many of the people in it aren't all that technical.
I do th
In China... (Score:2)
Pathetic (Score:3)
These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants.
Exactly.
The US is in the process of reducing living standards to the level of Shenzen. Already the 40 hour week is a memory. Then there's the "internship" work-for-free racket. Now, overcrowded dorms. Public housing projects provided more living space per person than that. Even SRO hotels rent you an individual room.
This is pathetic.
$40 a NIGHT!! (Score:2)