Dreaming of Digital Glory At Hacker Hostels

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.'"

Comments

"provide a cheap place where..."

[nsanders]

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.

From the article

[Georules]

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?

good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

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.