Is the Hacker News community aware of the free unconference phenomena, like BarCamp/PodCamp/MacCamp, etc.? They're community-organized conferences for hackers, geeks, techies, webheads, and entrepreneurs.
There's a huge list of BarCamps at: http://barcamp.org/
For those of you in the Boston area, I hope you'll come to BarCampBoston3 May 17th & 18th, and give a talk or otherwise participate: http://www.barcampboston.org/
Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software,
startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking,
robotics,mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software,
programming languages, and the future of technology.
A neat thing I saw at last year's BarCamp was an early demo of Dropbox by Drew Huston who went on to be part of YC Summer '07. I think Reddit demoed at the Boston BarCamp the year before that too, before they went into YC Summer '06.