these may help

https://hackaday.io/hackerspaces/

https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Bay_Area_Consortium_of_Hackers...

The closest one to me on the map is something called "the fifth space," but I can't find any online presence at all for it (it shares a name with an interfaith org in India, which is what most results are for).

The consortium lists spaces in SF, Oakland, and father out. This could be a major motivator to move to SF.

* * *

I appreciate your well-intentioned effort to help. Thank you.

Old and outdated lists.

The best thing to do is find some cool rich peeps, go in on a small commercial/industrial space to make it sort of like a college dorm, and keep the membership invite-only and tiny.

yes old and outdated, but breadcrumbs... finding the trail and the desired endpoint is often an effective filter for prestige accounts [hey, im on 31l337h4X0r space] that dont have the properties of "adept hacker"

900913 maps is probably anathema to some thus they dont show up.

its best to look thru a span of search engines with different DNS providers, you can dive deeper past the search bubbles

My space in Cambridge is not on the list. It’s hastypastry.net. Been there for 20 years. It’s private so no need to advertise. I think it’s good to be on these lists so people know hacker spaces exist

Leave the bay area, or go find some artists with a warehouse and give them some cash to let you keep some machines there

We used to have that. It was called the Ghost Ship. It caught fire. A bunch of people died.

Come on you're just holding it wrong, Zero to One is the most important thing! One to zero is next.

Really, how did he become a board member? Donated money or self-important resume? The rest of the board let him do it so it's a bigger problem than just him. Get the email list of membership and start a real space... there's lots of empty office space now so you might be able to get a donation since they get to write it off at old pricing, but it's a huge amount of work for very little return (unless you like running these sorts of things).

Sorry for your situation.

Yeah, I'm not incorporating and ponying up $30k to get an office lease. There's commitment, and then there's commitment.

Our hacker space has had tons of leadership drama over the years, from misuse of funds to a co-founder trying to get a trademark on our name to do a hostile takeover.

Basically, if your hacker space exists because some tech people made big money in company stocks and decided to buy a personal playground, you're constantly subject to their whims and caprices.

So start one that's completely toxic to the current mainstream culture. People forget just how unpopular tech was in the 90s/00s. Or that counter cultures are always reviled by the majority.

This was something that blew my mind when I visited out there. Visited every space I could, and the startup/commercial culture was just incredibly pervasive. Couldn't talk about a cool idea for more than a minute or two without some tech bro trying to monetize it.

Maybe that's someone's jam, but I just wanted to hang out with some nerds that reminded me of back home. Everywhere else I've traveled, I could visit the local hackerspace and get my fix, but the bay area was..... different.

But then those nerds can't be sexist, or racist, or translhobic, or smell bad or ... basically people want their office mates to be in the hacker space but also somehow be magically interesting.

That's a false dichotomy. You don't need be sexist, racist, transphobic or smell bad to be interesting.

Depends on how strict your definitions for those things are. The kind of person who works hard to not be sexist, racist, transphobic or smell bad is often very boring. A person who cares less about those things will have more interesting things to say and opinions, and about the smell thing a person who doesn't dare to smell differently will constraint their hobbies and activities.

For example, you have probably heard people say they don't want to do X since it would make them sweat. That makes them more boring than a person who would just do it without caring that they might smell a bit afterwards.

> The kind of person who works hard to not be sexist, racist, transphobic or smell bad is often very boring

Most smart people don't need to "work hard" to not be any of those, it's a bare minimum and takes barely any effort.

To think that avoiding smelling bad or being racist is some sort of mental drain that leads to people becoming boring is a silly notion. It romanticizes a kneejerk contrarian misanthropy that's just as boring.

> Most smart people don't need to "work hard" to not be any of those, it's a bare minimum and takes barely any effort.

That was exactly my point, those things doesn't take any effort. But if you put in a lot of effort to get as far away from those things as possible then you will be boring. And such people will often accuse others of being racist or sexist even when they weren't, thus forcing the entire environment to become boring.

If I didn't agree with your here I wouldn't say "depends on how strict". But of course you here is too strict, since me even talking about that made you judge me. Thankfully this website is pretty open and not very strict, so interesting opinions are allowed here, while you seem to want to shut down interesting discussions even when they aren't racist or sexist.

> It romanticizes a kneejerk contrarian misanthropy that's just as boring.

How is diversity ever more boring than monoculture? I support diversity and therefore I am against monoculture. The important part here is to not judge people. Traditional internet forums were full of feminists etc as well, they weren't mono culture, it was very rich.

> you seem to want to shut down interesting discussions even when they aren't racist or sexist

I'm not shutting down the discussion, I'm adding to the discussion by offering my opinion. You're adopting a persecution complex when there isn't one to the extent you're implying.

I do agree there are the normal people who are honest about their biases but generally try to treat people fairly, and the "hyper-PC" people who make it a game of being the most "on the right side of history" to the extent that it becomes all they care about. I know those people and they are just as annoying and vitriolic as those who are openly sexist. However my point is generally that isn't not a simple "both sides" issue. The golden mean isn't a medium amount of sexism and transphobia, it's a neutral yet accepting attitude, which by default isn't anything phobic, thus leans more towards not being either than being either.

> I'm not shutting down the discussion, I'm adding to the discussion by offering my opinion. You're adopting a persecution complex when there isn't one to the extent you're implying.

I guess you just didn't read what I wrote, that is fair, I make such mistakes all the time. If you read it you would notice that the thing I said is basically exactly what you said here, and since you disagreed with that it makes sense that I thought you wanted to shut down interesting conversations.

The anti-"isms" have a large mottle and bailey problem, so when people say they don't want you to ban racists or sexists they mean that they don't want to force everyone to tiptoe around sex or gender, it doesn't mean that they are fine with racism or sexism.

I think the level of racism and sexism on HN is roughly optimal. It isn't enough to drive people away, but discussions are still allowed. Too much and you create a racist/sexist monoculture.

You will be flagged dead, rightly, and eventually banned from the site if you engage in racist and misogynist tropes on HN. The community here isn't tolerant of it in any meaningful titration. What little of it survives here is couched, hedged, and obscured to the point of plausible deniability. If you like HN's culture, as I do, you like a culture that rigorously pushes this form of "interesting" thought out.

Nothing you said there disagrees with anything I've said though. HN is much more accepting of sexism and racism than most parts of reddit for example, and that makes HN much more interesting. I don't think that HN would become better if we moved more towards reddit style mono culture.

For example, I would have gotten banned from most subreddits for what I said here.

> sexism and racism than most parts of reddit for example, and that makes HN much more interesting

My point, in my first post in this thread, was with this point, which is what I identified as what you were implying in your first post. You have a mentality that accepting racism/sexism is what causes HN to be interesting, or at least more interesting than Reddit. Your general mental frame seems to be "Reddit is always tip toeing about racism and offending people, which neuters how interesting/dynamic their discussions are, while HN explores the full range of thought and doesn't trivialize itself with those matters"

You are claiming that accepting racism/sexism causes things to be more interesting, but I'd wager it's a symptom of the general difference in culture, not a cause.

It's still possible to have a very interesting culture of discussion without racism or sexism, it just slightly narrows the scope of discussing not what is racist/sexist, but what simply appears racist or sexist. At what point, however, would discussing the history of development in nuclear physics, or compiler libraries, or any technical topic, be more interesting if racism/sexism were tolerated vs not tolerated?

I think the few cases where things which may be considered racist/sexist being tolerated making the site more interesting are cases where HN discusses caste discrimination, or the causes of the discrepant gender ratios in the tech world, or certain aspects of human behavior. But even so, what makes those discussions interesting isn't the subset of the discussions that may be sexist or racist, but rather the general analytical and investigative culture this forum has borne out of the more libertarian edge of 2000s silicon valley and internet culture.

My gripe is that a lot of people think that the capacity to tolerate sexism/racism is an inherent strength, an inability to be phased by the squeamishness and hall-monitoring style policing that affects most people, when in reality it's just their ability to justify their normal human biases with their intellect.

Traditional "hacker" culture is anti-authoritarian. Freedom of speech is an aspect of that. And therefore the acceptance of the expression of racist, sexist, and transphobic ideas is too.

It's not that "accepting racism/sexism" is a symptom or a cause of the general difference in culture. It just is the culture. A logically necessary aspect of the culture. Remove it, and you've lost the culture.

None of this is true; it's just something that people who enjoy racist and misogynist jokes say to rationalize the behavior.

My point is that freedom of speech is crucial to a great intellectual environment, and that you can't have freedom of speech and ban the discussion of vast swathes of theories about the world.

You claim that this is just something that people who enjoy racist and misogynistic jokes say. That is absurd. Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, John Stuart Mill, etc. - are these people all just racists and misogynists? Norman Finkelstein, when he says that Holocaust denialism should be taught in college by Holocaust denialists - is that because he just wants to be able to make jokes about the Holocaust?

> you seem to want to shut down interesting discussions even when they aren't racist or sexist.

No one has tried to "shut you down." They're just disagreeing with you. Isn't that what you wanted? A vigorous, diverse dialogue? You can't praise diversity of opinions and then claim oppression when someone's opinion diverges from yours.

I assumed he argued that we should shut down such conversations. I am perfectly fine with people disagreeing with me, otherwise I wouldn't post these things. In fact, the whole reason I post these things here is that I know people will disagree with them, I don't post in monoculture forums.

> I assumed he argued that we should shut down such conversations.

Perhaps you shouldn't assume things that were never said.

Well, he said that the strictest versions of anti-sexism and anti-racism are very easy to adhere to and should be enforced more or less. Because that was what he argued against. However later it turned out that he didn't really read my post, meaning that he really agreed with me from the start.

So yeah, although he never said it he strongly implied it. And then we resolved the differences later. Anyway, the whole point is that people go extremely hard on you, so they misread what you say and take it you are racist or sexist etc for basically nothing, that is why these things results in so boring communities. And his post is an example of such a missunderstanding, in a less accepting community I would have been banned there and never be coming back.

Taking a shower is easy, but performing mental gymnastics 24/7 not to be have a sexist or antisemitic thought would drain my energy.

Why do you think you have so many sexist and antisemitic thoughts in the first place?

> The kind of person who works hard to not be sexist, racist, transphobic or smell bad is often very boring.

Yeah. That’s a weird hill to die on.

Do you agree with "racism and sexism are bad for all definitions of racism and sexism"? I disagree with that statement, I don't think it is wrong to disagree with that. But lots of people agree with it, and then define racism and sexism to be whatever they don't like and you get a boring monoculture.

That is why I hedged my comment with that it depends on how strict you are. Depending on how you define racism and sexism all of those things will change. So blanked statements that we need to ban them without properly defining exactly what we are banning is really bad, but that is what happens almost everywhere in discussions.

I think you’re painting a lot of people with a really broad brush and you should cite some specific examples of category. What, exactly, is an example of racism and sexism that shouldn’t be banned? Why?

> The kind of person who works hard to not be sexist, racist, transphobic or smell bad

Agree with the sibling comment to say this isn't hard work. Generally speaking you're saying basic requirements to be a functioning human in society, which also involves a certain amount of emapthy.

> is often very boring.

I don't understand the correlation here. There are plenty of exist, racist, smelly transphobes who are also boring.

> Agree with the sibling comment to say this isn't hard work.

Read my first sentence: "Depends on how strict your definitions for those things are."

Or do you think that the strictest versions of anti-racism and anti-sexism are easy to adhere to? If not you agree with me.

Maybe a more appropriate term would have been "pedantic" instead of strict, to avoid the miscommunication? I think I understand what you mean. I am nor racist nor transphobic nor <insert-minority>-phobic (at least I hope so), yet I think that the debate about, for example, biologically male people in female sport competitions ought to be (whatever my opinion on the matter might be) and that alone could flag me as transphobic to some people. But I'm not sure they are more "strict anti-transphobe", I just think they are more pedantic, that's all.

Anyway, in the end of the day it was clearly a miscommunication, not necessarily a divergence of opinion. Words are hard.

Then why are all the most anti-ist people dull as dishwater and working in hr? If you have no opinions that mainstream culture finds repulsive then you're not done much thinking.

There's even a pg essay about it: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Or maybe you can have opinions that mainstream culture finds repulsive without being "sexist, or racist, or transphobic, or smell bad".

Just because the US media landscape has split the people into 2 camps engaged in culture war does not mean that most people neatly fit into one of those categories. Many are a combination of both categories, with opinions on one subject matching one camp and another subject matching the other camp. With your comment you are merely repeating stereotypes we already know are just that and therefore inaccurate.

All humans are flawed and we should not use positive traits to justify or excuse negative traits. There is no net total of a persons personality.

Why do you engage in trying to associate the traits you listed with being interesting and their absence with dullness?

I don't see any of those things as negative traits.

Beliefs that are labelled as racism, transphobia, and sexism are often sensible beliefs. Combined with smelling bad, they imply to me in a person a prioritisation of sincere intellectual pursuit over popularity and financial success/social success more generally.

Pretty much every interesting person has at least one proscribed but sensible belief. If you don't allow the expression of such beliefs you lose every interesting person who is in the habbit of speaking his mind.

Part of why I moved out of the Bay Area and to NYC!

I'm not anti-monetization by any means, but so often I'd end up in conversations that the other partner wanted to be a startup pitch, and I wanted to just talk about something cool. There's so much premature optimization of monetization out there.

+1 for the New York tech scene. I spent a few months going to Meetup events around Manhattan and Brooklyn and the people were so friendly and full of ideas. Really great environment.

In the 90s the L0pht was not commercial and was funded as a hobby. Nearing 2000 we wanted to make it our day job and not a hobby and transition from to jobs we all had working for someone else. It was the beginning of my journey to entrepreneurship but this transition was very rocky. Manu didn’t survive. It was a huge learning experience documented in Space Rogue’s book.

Rent for a suitable space is one umptillion bucks per month. You need to be corporate-friendly to score a sponsor for the rent

I see a lot of similarities with VR actually. A lot of people tell me the tech is in no way there, nobody wants it and it'll never find a purpose.

I always compare this with the grumps back in the day who thought computers were worthless. And all have a smartphone in their pocket now of course.

We could see where it was going, and as well as that the journey there was just a ton of fun. Tech doesn't have to be perfect to be worth the time.

> It is almost impossible to find tech-adjacent countercultural spaces in the Bay that aren't fully co-opted by a self-devouring corporate mindset.

HN being a prime example outside of SF.

A news website run by a VC firm that is also a startup accelerator? "Countercultural"?

Yeah, but the website community is decidedly anti-startup so that does make it countercultural in the local culture.

I've heard a lot of strange things on HN but this one absolutely ends up in top-ten. How in the world is HN anti-startup? Sure, there is some anti-startup sentiments in the comments usually, but there is also comments anti-anything in the comments. HN is very much a startup-centric place if anything.

Not at all, I'm saying that HN is coopting the word "hacker".

Ah, got it.

you may wish to visit Noisebridge someday

I'd need to move from South Bay to SF first to make repeated visits worthwhile. Over an hour each way is... yeah.

well, not loading this on you, but many Bay Area hackerspaces started after people spent time at noisebridge or another related space, and then realised they could work with others to build one somewhere nearer to them physically or ideologically: Ace Monster Toys (now Ace Hackerspace), Queerious Labs, Double Union, Sudo Room, Mothership Hackermoms. It's not hard if you find likeminded people, and the best place to look is just dropping by casually to a hackerspace not-so-near you..

Not a criticism of your response, but you'll notice that every space you mentioned is either in SF or in Oakland. I have been looking for and trying to build community in South Bay for almost a decade now. The conclusion I've come to is that the people who might populate a healthy hacker space don't live here in sufficient numbers, and the people who do live here have very different interests, goals, and community needs.

I've obviously been to Noisebridge. It didn't become a part of my life because it is at least an hour drive away, and often much longer during the times of day when I can reasonably go there.

fair enough: I've lived in the South Bay too, and it's certainly hard to pull such community projects together. I meant to add Biocurious, which is in Santa Clara, but I don't know what it's like these days (I assumed from your description that the space you were initially describing was HackerDojo, but I'm a bit out of the hackerspace drama grapevine these days, so maybe it's Biocurious?)

Are you far from San Jose? I can see a way to get there from there, as it were. Redwood City has some of the right dynamics; I can also imagine something adjacent to the Computer History Museum. Again, not belittling your efforts over a decade (and I realise this sounds a bit like those drive-by health comments that say something like "have you tried taking vitamins?"), but I have some experience in this myself, and you've got me vaguely problem-solving around it now.

I appreciate the response! (As an aside, there's also Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale.) I didn't mean to aggrandize my efforts, which have been largely personal: trying to organize groups and projects on topics that I care about. I have not been running a failing hacker space for a decade!

I've mostly been active around Palo Alto and Mountain View, which is ultimately my biggest mistake. The long and the short of it is, people from the larger companies generally don't seem interested in "extracurricular" activity, and students at local colleges don't stick around in the area. The most enthusiastic hackers here are growth hackers, which I am not and don't care for. I also get a lot of individuals who feel like they're washing out of their profession, but that's not the same mindset as tech enthusiasm.

I agree that fishing in San Jose proper is likely to turn out more students, recent grads, and other kinds of people who are more about exploring and trying things.

Hahah. Yep. Is that Hacker Dojo or some shitty place like that?

Corporate, BMW SUV-driving assholes who think of themselves as "liberals" but are ready to turn on anyone for any reason and excommunicate them without the possibility of fair treatment.

You clearly never spent any time at Hacker Dojo.

Counterculture in general seems scarce, everything and everyone feels so hyper normal these days.

There is heaps of counter culture both online and in the real world - even in my small English town. And so much of what was counter culture has been co-opted into general culture now too.

I'd say things, ideas, opportunities and ways of being/thinking are even broader now than they were than when I was a teenager in the 90s.

There is a pretty strong reason for this; deviancy from the norm is punished heavily on social media. No one wants to be the main character when they have 300 followers and they're just posting their opinions.

Mastodon, Gemini and the 2007-reborn Gopher.

But yes, you are right. Back in late 90's/early 00's Linux and Unix desktop were trully different and unique. Fluxbox had zillions of different themes. 3D, black, retro, flat-ish, metal-ish, Java styled, Gnome styled, KDE-alike, Gaudi, childish, Bohemian, alien looking... every style was fine for anyone.

Ditto witht the icons. One day I felt technical and I switched into the Slick theme being "workstation/highend" themed with a gray color scheme, and the next day I felt nice and cheerful and switched into Noia with a blue Keramik theme.

Now everything looks bland, flat and everyone looks afraid on having an style.

It's pretty annoying that Gnome themeing tools, rather than developing and becoming better/more cohesive, were made totally irrelevant

I can't quite understand how "Linux GUI, make it look how you want! Personalized OS!" became "Linux - this one unchangably bland tablet UI on your desktop!"

I know that other WM/DM exist, but Gnome is incredibly popular, often the default, and was so close to being what people saw as the ideal Desktop.

Not just tablets. Every single theme now in /r/unixporn at Rddit looks the same. Either i3, i3-gaps, some catpucchino/nord theme and Gnome/KDE cloning Mac. And, yes, we even tried to clone OSX even from Fluxbox and FVWM, but we had a bunch of several other themes.

social media, especially but not limited to social media revenue models for content creators, demand regression to the norm. When every interesting idea for a video/song/blogpost gets literal orders of magnitude less views, when a clickbaity video with only the most surface-level engagement with whatever "topic" is your usual fare gets far and away the biggest numbers you've ever gotten, its no surprise there is less counter culture.

Take a look at for example the youtube creator dashboard for an established creator, how it directly compares your videos against each other, trying and pushing you to get more numbers, entirely uncaring for anything other than eyeballs.

There is a ton of counterculture. You just need to stop looking for large and noisy groups that are taking most of the attention space. It is just that the hum of the crowd got louder. The signal is still there, it is just the noise that got stronger.

Modern counterculture (for the sake of argument, defined as non-commercial and deeply personal crap produced by marginal individuals) has shifted to mostly online and mostly to expressions that I'm not interested in: most particularly, furries. Furry software, furry art, furry music, furry meetups.

maybe it's because I'm a bit older, but I noticed that too. also noticed that "counterculture" went extremely far off into covid-19 hysteria and has never come back. Seeing anime cons demanding proof of vaccination and strictly requiring masks in April 2023 is just bizarre to me.

I'm not looking for counterculture, I'm quite happy doing my own thing in relative obscurity. I'm merely being nostalgic for when it used to be a lot more visible (physically). Punks, weirdos, hackers, oddballs, flâneur's, were in plain view - their associated shops and hangouts (record stores, counter culture book stores, etc), rowdy pubs, etc. Perhaps they're all just at home on computers now. Or gentrified/normalised. I don't know. Merely anecdotal.

You remind me of a guy called Brian. He is a very naughty boy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

The L0pht had no leadership. Only partners that paid rent and utilities. You had to pay to cover your share of expenses but also contribute with sweat equity. We ended up kicking out a couple of people that ceased to contribute to the common good even if they paid.

> We ended up kicking out a couple of people that ceased to contribute to the common good even if they paid.

As a member of a hackerspace myself who's always wondering how to get rid of bad eggs: how does this "kicking out" process happen for the L0pht? Who gets to quantify their sweat equity and decide?

Kicking people out can be tricky depending on the structure and bylaws of a given place. I've seen different kinds and you'll always have a part of your members that wilm think it is too much and others not enough. In the end what caused 99.9% of the issues I saw in the hackerspaces I've been part of wasn't the people kicked out arbitrarly or too lightly, it was that abusing people were allowed to stay for too long. The reasons were multiple. But in the end if you want to keep the culture alive you have to remove the elements that work against that culture. Or start/find a new place if the whole culture shifts with the majority of the members.

It was unanimous except for the person getting kicked out. The violations of rules or lack of effort was given ample warning to be corrected.

Who is sick enough to put KPIs on a for fun hobby?