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.'"
Re:From the article (Score:3, Insightful)
He didn't steal it, you licensed it to him in the ten pages of legalese.
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 creep will make it a huge problem for us (even if there's only one creep in dozens). Honestly, since men are more likely to be victims of crime, I don't really see why y'all want to completely give up any privacy either. You do know you ain't getting any with a living situation like that, right?
It reminds me of a science conference I went to. My lab was paying for me to attend, and there were no huge budget issues to worry about. However, the conference organizer decided it would be a jolly good bonding experience to assign everyone random room mates at the conference hotel! This was a group of people who had, by and large, never met each other before, with an international set of attendees. 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.