I remember going to one of these, many years ago. Sounded cool, hackers meeting up. I was pretty adept at reverse engineering and was just getting into vulnerability research, so I figured it would be right up my street.

Unfortunately it ended up being a talk about making websites with some framework or other, and some uninspirational speech about some startup. I didn't bother going to another one.

Though from this I did find out about the HN website itself, which is worth a browse now and then. So I suppose it was worth going anyway.