On Hacker Houses

LIII

2024.06.30

Back by popular demand, a more fun lifestyle post in which I discuss my phenomenal experience staying at the Harvard Hacker Houses.

Harvard St. Commons

Harvard St. Commons, also known as the Harvard Hacker Houses, is a collection of hacker houses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adjacent to, you guessed it, Harvard.

The place is comprised of two houses and two apartments right next to each other, centered around C House. Over the last school year, C House itself served as a hacker house. This summer, it’s ballooned to include the three other locations as it hosts members of The Residency and other digital nomads like myself.

Staying here is absolutely great—the concentration of talented people is pretty astonishing. Not only do I feel like it’s put me around people working at the bleeding edge of technology development, I also just generally love being around the people that gravitate towards a place like this. They tend to be open to new experiences, authentic, and genuine.

The post that ensues is a bit eclectic, just like Harvard St. Commons itself; maybe you can even read it as my love letter to the place.

Lingua Franca

Examining the local lexicon of a culture is a great way to learn about the people, myself included. So, below are some commonly used words around Harvard Street Commons:

• Based - Internet slang for someone doing what they want regardless of societal pressures.

• Category Theory - The math of maths. Perhaps the last math, in the sense that you can use it to unify other maths, and confuse almost anyone you’re talking to.

• Cooking - Intensely focused on some work. See also, “Let ‘em cook.”

• Timmy’s - Slang for Tim Horton’s. For better or for worse, there is a high concentration of Canadians in the community. While they generally consent to America’s supremacy, they desperately cling on to some semblance of national identity by occasionally musing about the scarcity of Tim Horton’s in the US. Also, Timmy’s is Canada’s most valuable natural resource.

• Insanely Based - Like based, but more.

• Lisp - Coding language from the 60s. Arguably better than all other languages combined.

• Crodie - Consistent re affirmation that Kendrick handily bested Drake. Pronounced like Kendrick does near the end of Euphoria.

• Monad - Something to do with Category Theory, but I’m not quite sure what.

• Is this Communal? - Question to determine if some good is up for public consumption.

• Cracked - Incredibly skilled / competent at something. A term I think applies to everyone here. See next section for more.

• Skill Issue - If you can’t get the thing to work, it’s probably a skill issue.

• Monoid - Plural of Monad? Maybe?

• Knowledge Graphs - Storing and displaying info with nodes and edges. Pretty cool looking.

• Sawri - Canadian pronunciation of “Sorry".

• Mewing - The thing 16 year old boys do to make their jaw line “pop.” I’ve come to find out there’s no age limit on the practice, however.

• Giga Chad - The ideal man: certainly based, likely cracked, studies Category Theory, and definitely mews. Oh, did I mention he’s cooking right now? And that whatever he’s cooking is written in Lisp?

It’d be cool to see some sort of frequency of the use of these words over time on a person by person basis. I’m sure it’d be a quite interesting flow, some of the words spreading like a virus from one human to another across the Harvard St. Commons population.

Interestingly enough, most of us probably arrived here with some preloaded subset of these terms, which would certainly contribute to their use.

Defining “Cracked”

So, we’ve come to cracked. A word frequently used, and perhaps not the easiest to define. While I haven’t settled on a perfect definition of it, I think a working one is as follows:

Cracked: The ability to efficiently and repeatably get above average results in disparate fields.

One person here and myself have gone to great pains to craft a definition; some things we’ve thrown around are being incredibly competent or insanely good at some task. The one thing that we keep going back to, though, is Naval Ravikant’s definition of intelligence:

I think this is a pretty great definition, and very adjacent to how we think about cracked: a person who gets the desired outcome by whatever means necessary. This, in my mind, is also what differentiates a hacker from a programmer. A hacker will find the path of least resistance to a goal and ignores most preset parameters, while a programmer will paint within the lines their employer sets for them.

Note the difference between the given definition of cracked and Naval’s definition of intelligence, however: with cracked, I think an important part of it is the ability to jump from field to filed and quickly figure it out.

I tend to think about James Bond when I think cracked—he can shoot guns, offensively drive cars, pilot aircraft, speak different languages, is stellar at martial arts, and, of course, is phenomenal at poker.

Below are some things that people at Harvard Street Commons do that I see or hear and think “cracked.” The most important note, though, is that all of these people also are either running a company, building a product, attending school, or performing serious research:

• A girl was able to listen to “Another Love” by Tom O’dell and immediately start playing it on piano with no sheet music. Cracked.

• A guest was growing rat brains to use as a computer. Cracked.

• A math wizard dj’s by talking to LLM’s and using mathematical transformation to make vibes based music. Cracked.

• A woman building houses with moving walls also casually models on the side. Cracked.

• Someone took a spontaneous two week trip to teach AI in Indonesia. Cracked.

• Half the people here are casually incredible chefs. Cracked.

• A guy designed a wearable to record and transcribe his conversations, built a wrist mounted flamethrower, four electric skateboards, an iron man helmet with voice control, and was willing to jump off of a bridge with me. Cracked.

Maybe I’m using the word out of it’s original spirit, but it does seem to me that I tend to apply cracked to people when it feels like they’re “casually above average” in multiple things. There’s a certain effect that seeing someone do five cartwheels in a row has when you know they’re also doing medical research. While the “casual” term, of course, misses the hard work that goes into the disparate things, it certainly captures the feeling that these people will just quickly figure out how to be good at whatever challenge is in front of them.

For me, that’s cracked.

HerBERT

Now, I’ll leave you with the parting story of Herbert.

Herbert was a bird, affectionately known by all of us as a “Birb.” One of the members of the house, we’ll call him Mike, was at a music festival last weekend. There, he found Herbert, all alone, away from his nest.

Mike took it upon himself to nurse the bird back to health. He had done so twice before, so he had some experience with such a challenge.

Mike brought Herbert with him back to Harvard St. Commons and spent nearly all of last week tending to him: feeding him, giving him baths, keeping him warm, taking him outside and on public transit. It was really incredible to watch. While Herbert wasn’t able to fly, Mike was teaching him how to by helping him flap his wings and move from a perch on one of his fingers to the other.

Later, we would find out that Herbert was actually a female. That doesn’t really change the story, though. Unfortunately, Herbert passed on Friday. Mike had a little service for her as she was buried out back.

The point of the story is to highlight perhaps the most important part of the Harvard Street Commons: outside of being “cracked,” the people here tend to be genuine and compassionate. I’m not sure if I know any other place where not only would someone go out of their way to save a baby bird, but everyone else would be okay with and supportive of the endeavor.

That’s more important than being cracked will ever be.

Thus concludes my love letter to the Harvard St. Commons—thank you to everyone who makes the place so special.

Live Deeply,