Preaching to choir. Hacker News is like the nerdiest of nerds.
Seriously, I came from Ukraine when I was 12 and being an out-of-shape immigrant and a nerd made my life in American school a living hell.
The problem I remember having the most was isolation. It's interesting because people did make fun of me in Ukraine all the time, but we made fun of everyone and were pretty much all friends, we conversed a lot, even when we were fighting.
In U.S. it's just different, people ignore you. Spending 8 hours in a place where no one talks to you except for teacher (and several accidental buddies) is pretty miserable. I often thought it'd be easier if I was bullied, at least someone would fucking notice me. Took me a around 4-5 years before I became a misantrophist and just started hating everyone by default and that's sort of how I managed living here.
Dungeons and Dragons players, Star Trek geeks, anime fans, weapons geeks, LARPers, fantasy enthusiasts. Wanting to make money instantly boots you a step or two above the absolute dregs.
Please let's not argue terminology. Article opening:
Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood. Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends. Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well. Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight. It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers
He's talking "cool kid" versus "uncool kid." End of discussion.
I've never found a use for the word "dweeb". I always refer to the people that zimbabwe describes as "geeks", nerds with no particular interest or skills in an area of academics (but they still like to engage in nerdy activities).
My "startup" - http://www.obsidianportal.com - caters directly to several of your targets. By combining my entrepreneur bent w/ my shameful D&D playing, I've made a pretty penny.
By attempting to identify the true 'nerdiest', as people distinct from present company, you've fed into the very same stigmatizing separate-and-point primary-school behavior highlighted by the original article.
The willingness of those excluded to try to redirect the labels/taunts/stigma to someone else of even lower status helps keep the whole sordid enterprise going.
I trust that wasn't your conscious intent, but it can just as easily be a reflex. "At least we're a step or two above those people."
My comment was joking. I actually don't believe in the labels, and I find that labels generally only apply to the people who worry about them.
I've known some very cool people who LARPed, some of the biggest jocks I've met play WoW, D&D and MtG are huge among the drama cliques in the Northeast, and the NYC hipster crowd has made stuff like web design a social boon. YCombinator's own OMGPOP is probably the ultimate example of that.
But I've gotten into some fairly heated arguments on HN about just how accurate labels are, and I'd rather not get into that again.
Seriously, I came from Ukraine when I was 12 and being an out-of-shape immigrant and a nerd made my life in American school a living hell.
The problem I remember having the most was isolation. It's interesting because people did make fun of me in Ukraine all the time, but we made fun of everyone and were pretty much all friends, we conversed a lot, even when we were fighting.
In U.S. it's just different, people ignore you. Spending 8 hours in a place where no one talks to you except for teacher (and several accidental buddies) is pretty miserable. I often thought it'd be easier if I was bullied, at least someone would fucking notice me. Took me a around 4-5 years before I became a misantrophist and just started hating everyone by default and that's sort of how I managed living here.