Oh yeah, I did this thing back in the day called Freehackers Union and then it didn't go anywhere and failed and then like random people bring up that it failed almost two years later. Awesome.

Well I'm sure this will be successful, since I'm not running it and NYC is primed for it. You're welcome.

But, here's how I really solved the problem:

I FUCKING MOVED TO SAN FRANCISCO

The amount of cool awesome technologists in SF and the entire economy that supports them combined with the respect the business people here have for technologists is massive compared to NYC. Out here people with money ask, "Can I play with your tech." In NYC they ask, "Which Ivy League school did you attend?" That's why SF is awesome.

Here, let me put this into perspective for you another way.

In NYC I wrote a massive rant, got Freehackers Union going, setup mailing lists, and servers, tried to coordinate what could have been an awesome experience. I spent a good few months getting things ready. I put a lot of effort into the concept and what happened?

About 30 people showed up, 11 in person. 2 of them were trolls.

I put up a single tweet on a random day saying I'll be at Union Square to play guitar and have had up to 5 people show up. Friends, coders from Bittorrent, Twitter, Facebook, stealth startups, lawyers, fretwar players, dudes traveling from other countries. Every day I meet with programmers and smart people and talk about deep topics and bounce ideas off them for an hour.

Just my little "I'm going to play guitar in Union Square" tweets have got me in contact with more people in SF than all of the work I did to create FU.

And that's why I say, "FU NYC".