Laptops with Stickers

I love this. Will submit a few of mine soon.

I get the feeling about 90% of those laptops belong to either cyber security folks or rust developers. Just a gut feeling.

Good thing they're not yours, then

It's funny awkward when you get fired and your laptop is covered in stickers

I'll submit mine later today to this comment, I'm a poser lol eg. I don't daily drive Rust but I like the crab and the Gopher

Kinkpad lol that's good

This makes me wanna go buy some stickers...

Can you point us to a resource that would layout guidelines for placing laptop stickers in an aesthetically pleasing manner?

There used to be a startup that sold ads on laptops. You got sent a sticker, had to put it on your laptop and take photos with the laptop and varying sets of people in them to get paid. Wonder what happened to them.

I really like the massive Beagle Bros Software sticker. Someone has good taste.

Unfortunately, my company asked me to remove the stickers, as they don’t reflect the company…

Wow most of these are quite the contrast to what I used to see back in the day. At least in my circles it was just a collection of the technologies you’ve learned and enjoy. These are more like bumper stickers on the back of car. To each their own I suppose.

I absolutely hate stickers too. You're not alone.

That work-related aspect is what I was thinking about too. I’m not sure what it looks like in various workplaces, but I’m always a bit curious around the policies they might have around putting lots of them on employer-owned laptops. I think in tough times when maybe it’s not easy to replace hardware, it can be annoying for an IT person to receive some where they have to peel them off and use Goo Gone on them.

This was super fun to browse!

I am a bit curious about the amount of politically progressive stickers however. Like, is sticker-ing your laptop just more of a 'progressive' thing to do? Do political conservatives not sticker their laptops in the same way that they generally do with their bumper stickers?

There are laptops with a display on the outside to display stickers.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrINRHeNDQA

The above is a self-referencing comment.

You can put them on your car, bike or rucksack

Civics are more based, though.

I think of it as optimism/a power move, I'm here for the long run.

You can heat most of them and take off easily. If the IT transfers laptops to other people, they surely have a system for cleaning already.

It's interesting that these are labelled 'creative'. They all look the same. They all reflect similar taste. Quite a bit of politics, but is there a single right wing sticker? I couldn't find one.

I was at SIGGRAPH many years ago in a line behind some artists. They were talking about how all the engineers dressed the same. This is true. But was also true was that you easily tell the artists as well, they all dressed carefully and differently, within the bounds of their style and were just as easily distinguished.

Likewise, that one really stood out!

When I was going to conferences, my laptop stickers were a public display of "these are technologies that I use and you can strike up a conversation with me about them." To an extent, a resume that you can glance at from across the room.

It's a bit of a statement for what you're trying to communicate with that lid - professional experience, political statements, personal "this is neat"...

And part of this is a for me the lid of the laptop is something that I'd need to be able to be comfortable with displaying in front of a CxO without worry about if they may be offended or not (though perl might be offensive to some).

At least those cars exhibited some kind of aesthetic merit, albeit of opinable taste. Most of these pileups of stickers are just an incoherent mishmash of corporate trademarks and political orientation signals. They only share the attention grabbing attitude.

I expected better from the title.

Ha, what a throwback!

I remember this one with the Intel SSD sticker:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-320-ssd-300-gb/imag...

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_6571.JPEG

"The Intel SSD 320 is the much anticipated follow-up to the Intel X25-M, easily the most popular consumer SSD to date."

https://www.storagereview.com/review/intel-ssd-320-review-30...

Time flies, such a nice upgrade back in the day; now we take these things for granted.

[EDIT]

I just saw the fon.com sticker too… nostalgia hits hard.

I used that on a vacation in Madrid back when Starbucks was filled with people on their laptops, mostly white MacBooks.

These comments are rough. Some weird hostility to self-expression in here.

"Back in my day, laptops were about TECHNOLOGY! Where's the conservative stickers!?" Ok, put some "conservative stickers" on your laptop and submit a pic to the site-- no one's stopping you.

I was born in early 90s; all laptops in my memory have weird, silly stickers on them.

I think there's just a link between sticking stickers on things and being somewhat expressive, artistic, willing to stand out. While leaving the laptop blank is more likely someone more dry, reserved, etc. There's also a link between stickers and graffiti culture which I wouldn't describe as progressive but more just unconventional/rebellious.

Looks like many people here in the comments don't hang out at hacking events that are not purely tech-focused. In European hacker camps these kinds of stickers are the norm, especially the political ones that, because of the very nature of those camps, lean heavily progressive if not anti-capitalist/anarchist.

The company I work at has a strict no stickers policy, that's why each and every one of my laptops is covered in them.

I've never seen a conservative sticker on a laptop before. Then again, stickers, tags, etc. are more of an anti establishment thing. Those things don't mesh well with conservative views.

The only one I liked is the HAL sticker.

Hmm... Does the current crop of Apple laptops have a glowing Apple logo? ... and is there a HAL sticker that has a red lens in the middle that would glow red if I put it over the Apple logo?

I think it is a wonderful pop-art exhibit!

Where do people buy laptop stickers these days? My wife got a new computer a few months and couldn't find anything cute and tasteful. Everything was brands and anger. The places she used to use are gone, and Amazon proved useless.

Like covering a Lamborghini with cheap bumper stickers.

> though perl might be offensive to some

Now I'm tempted to make a set of: Perl, COBOL, Java Beans, Java EE, ActiveX, Silverlight, VB.Net, ActiveDirectory, Kerberos, ...

I always associated these battle-jacketed MacBooks with Ruby developers. But Ruby developers were the Rust developers of their day.

It's like people want to show what they care about rather than how much they spent on the hardware... There may be a reason.

apple.com

Etsy has some, but you can also print your own for not much.

I've got stickers on my laptops. None of them are political, but I've got various indie fashion brands, music related, furry stickers, etc. If someone managed to be offended by them that's more their problem than mine. I can go work anywhere and have enough savings that it would be no inconvenience to me. I wouldn't want to work with someone who couldn't handle some trivial self expression on the back of a laptop.

So far no one has ever been offended by this though. HN is far more sensitive than the average CTO.

I absolutely love this website.

I've been putting stickers on all of my laptops for decades. I get all my laptop stickers from @HackerStick3rs mainly and then cybersec conferences (like DEF CON, BSides, Saintcon, Nolacon) are my other main source of them.

Stickers are kinda like currency at hacker conferences and a great way to meet new people.

Drink bottle is a good one. Large stickerable canvas that sits on your desk and is your own property.

Not mentioned: overtly vulgar in language.

A system for cleaning!

"You might want to give that a wipe."

Try redbubble, I have a lot leftover stickers, because I got too excited ordering

HN is still not a quarter as sensitive as most corporations that aren't tech.

Seems to be in line with those I've seen for the past, oh, twenty years. Nerdy media (lots of Star Trek, video games), tech stickers, Linux users of course, a lot of political ones (oft left-leaning and lots of tech-related causes and groups like the EFF), some just plain silly/funny. Generally I see laptops with stickers in larger urban areas or university towns. Though honestly even ones I've seen in very small rural areas are generally similar, but maybe that just reflects the culture of those who tend to go to coffee shops and libraries and also wants to adorn their laptop.

I believe bumper stickers are only really a thing in the US.

Most of the stickers I've got have just been given to me. At house parties or conventions or with clothes I bought. I've then commissioned an artist to draw my own stickers which I got printed and hand out.

Stickers get handed around like business cards so the stickers on your laptop/fridge are almost like a record of the people you met.

Plenty of room on my forehead.

No glowing logo since before the USB-C/touchbar generation, about 10 years ago

This one is really cool.

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/20250221_00333...

I love the sticker bomb aesthetic on the others, but there needs to be more like this. Anyone got any other examples?

Based. Right from the 4chan cringepool.

Most of the owners probably feel the same way about you :-)

> If someone managed to be offended by them that's more their problem than mine.

That can be a healthy attitude outside of work. People love personality.

But at work, that's not a healthy attitude. You're there to work together, not to be uncompromising in expressing yourself. Your stickers are probably fine, but I can also imagine plenty of musical artists that would certainly be offensive (and rightly so) to some people, whether for their lyrics or for their criminal behavior -- and then the attitude of "that's more your problem than mine" is not gonna fly.

One time when I left a job and had some really rare stickers I bought an identical ThinkPad and swapped the entire upper half of the machines with each other.

Definitely a lot of cybersecurity stickers, but that aside, I see many, many different opinions, positions, and preferences represented in those stickers.

There's a laptop with multiple Amazon stickers, a laptop with Google Cloud stickers, and another laptop with a "There is no cloud, only other people's computers" sticker, and various self-hosters. There are people with local stickers from many different countries. There are people who care about repairability, people who care about reproducibility, people who have nostalgia for specific technologies, people who would love less of specific technologies, Windows fans, Apple fans, Linux fans, Intel fans, IPv6 fans, heavy metal fans, Pokemon fans, Simpsons fans, television fans, Vim users, tabletop gamers, cycling fans, shoe fans, coffee fans, tea fans, anti-AI people, pro-AI people, anti-blockchain people, pro-blockchain people, people who like to layer stickers, people who like to carefully arrange stickers.

Among the politics alone, there are many many opinions expressed, and I'd bet the owners of those laptops could have vigorous political arguments about the right way to do things.

In general I agree, left-leaning ones are way more common. Maybe you are correct regarding the reasons. But I've definitely seen conservative ones too, with libertarian ones being more common among those (e.g., saw a number of "Who is John Galt?" stickers some years ago).

I think I still have a ThinkPad around somewhere with that SSD sticker on it. Upgrading from a spinning drive to the X25-M is still to this day the most effective upgrade I've ever had in a system, more effective than any 2-3 generations of laptop upgrades combined.

Sure there is some content that is obviously not appropriate, but I'm not seeing it in the OP link. Meanwhile the comments here are filled with a thinly veiled anger over seeing rainbow flag stickers. These are the people I'd be quite happy to self filter themselves out in the workplace. Though I've never met someone like this in the office. Or at least they keep their thoughts to themselves offline.

yeah, its exactly like that. if that is something you want to do, you should do it.

Etsy

just search for like "hacker stickers" or "cybersecurity stickers" or whatever you are looking for

Or a policy forbidding stickers.

I started putting them on the covers of my notebooks instead. Gives me a brand new canvas to besmirch every few months.

Wasn't long ago that opposition to fascism was the conservative position. Why is a sticker expressing the same considered "progressive"?

That DS9 "in the pale moonlight" sticker is awesome.

It's funny, I am in cybersecurity but I have always liked keeping my laptop free of stickers. Always seemed like "trying too hard" to me. And as much as I love my laptop, much like my Fluke 87V, I value it as a tool, not a means of self-expression.

Maybe I am just boring, lol. I did use an original copy of the PGP source code book as a monitor stand though!

Same thing as devlids:

https://devlids.com/

Why indeed? Why is this something people now have to care about again? https://www.realtimefascism.com/

Thats a weird takeaway, why can't you let people enjoy things that don't affect you?

On my M2 Air I've got In-N-Out, Python, the little flame from my solo stove, and the entire bottom of the chassis is an enormous tux penguin.

miss my first laptop I had while interning in SF. Each sticker was its own memory

How am I stopping anyone's enjoyment? Why can't you let me voice my opinion?

Please don't post unsubstantive comments and mean-spirited slurs on HN.

I've met people like them in the office. My first job, people were deadnaming Chelsea Manning in the internal chat. One time I got stuck in a lift with two other people and they assumed I was a guy, and started talking about which of the HR reps they wanted to fuck. It was tedious and stressful, and the company did have an anonymous reporting system, sure; but fuck, there were only three people in the lift, anonymity goes to shit when there's only three total people present and two of them are in on it.

My work quality tanked shortly after because, a) I have ADHD so I was putting 200% into my job to tread water, b) the rampant misogyny and transphobia within the workplace was just suffocating, and c) I dared to use the anonymous reporting system to report people for being shitheads, and I stupidly admitted that to HR. I am 70% sure it was the last point there that got me fired lmao

This kind of shit is why I am no longer aiming to work in tech.

> These are the people I'd be quite happy to self filter themselves out in the workplace.

Same. If my stickers serve as a self-filter away from companies I'd rather not work at, or people I'd rather not work with, then that's a positive thing for me.

If someone's offended by, for example, a rainbow sticker on my laptop, well I'd rather not work with them, or for that company. I'll look elsewhere.

Its signalling. Instead of stickers on their laptop, conservatives have crosses (the thing jesus got nailed on) on their neck and cars.

I slapped a nice sticker of a boat anchor on my work laptop. Seemed fitting. Slow (thanks to 4 separate malware/virus scanners), weighs a ton, lasts for an hour on battery.

You might be shocked if I tell you how little effort it takes to put on a sticker that someone gave you. My record: I once applied a sticker in less than 3 seconds, and that included peeling off the backing!

True. At my workplace, every engineer gets a Lamborghini and many people do, in fact, cover them with stickers.

Please see here for HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45239791

It's got the same vibe as going into a circle of people having fun and telling them they're trying too hard. What's the effect you're going for?

You're not being stopped from having an opinion - your comment is visible - but sharing one that'll only serve to bring down people's moods makes everything a little bit worse I think.

From the top post on the creator's Mastodon account (see the 'socials' link on the site):

"I’ve had a long-standing love of stickers on laptops. I know a lot of you do too! So I built a site to highlight them. At Hope next week I’ll take as many pics (with permission) of the best stickered laptops I can find and post them.

It’s always sad when a laptop gets upgraded, the old one tossed, and that sticker canvas is lost. I’m trying to preserve it.

Please submit pics of your laptops so I can “seed the tip jar,” as it were."

I'm sure there's people out there with laptops blaring their right-wing opinions but I doubt many of them were at a hacker con like HOPE.

You might find that a lack of right wing stickers has to do do with the fact that most educated people today, such as hackers, who also historically deal with otherness and thus form protective communities, have zero interest in supporting fascist, hateful ideals nor their institutions.

It is positively ridiculous to ridicule a group of people for being "samey" while also lamenting that they do not support policies which historically aim to keep things the same and assimilate/homogenize those who do not fit into perceived societal norms.

I've never seen anyone get offended by a rainbow sticker at work, at least not anywhere I've ever worked.

I have seen things that came across as misogynistic or very sexually suggestive, however, and the employee had to be asked to remove them.

There are plenty of cases where the problem really is with the employee and the sticker, not the people taking offense.

I don't have a great picture of mine that isn't obscured by other "stuff" in frame, but for an idea of what my laptop looks like, see:

https://fogbeam.com/free-kevin.jpg

I used to keep my laptop sticker free. I changed that once I discovered how much easier it makes it to recognize which laptop is mine. This was really driven home when one year everyone at work was gifted the same macBook Air as a holiday gift by the company.

Sometime around 2015 American political conservatism abandoned a substantive policy identity for demagoguery and nihilism, and while electorally successful to an extent, it's socially unpopular among the general population that's of working/laptop-using age.

It's a Faaaaake!

This is why I've always wanted some sort of removable skin I can put my stickers on and be able to take them with me when I need to depart with my device

I regularly see pallets of laptops turned in (either due to refreshes or end-of-employment stuff) for a major manufacturing / engineering (car) company. They are just as stickered, but with automotive nerdery. It's pretty neat.

And seeing just /how/ many laptops are that way it made me feel a lot less weird about putting stickers on "my" work laptop.

I never understood people siding with Kevin. He always struck me as a fraud/pseudo-hacker and never did anything technical or substantial.

Safe to have a perl sticker as while it’s easy enough to put it on, nobody (including yourself) be able to read it.

how many people do you think have both a SAAB SCANIA and VIM logo on their laptop. odds are i am 1 of 1

You're not a real programmer if you don't have a "I vibe code AI slop in NextJS" sticker on your MacBook

I’ve seen it fairly commonly for people to have company stickers on their laptop and have worked places that distribute these stickers. I always found it terrible security, it’s basically advertising what someone would get if they stole your laptop.

Self expression is fine, I personally want the most boring looking computer possible

To be fair, I bet pictures with "Yay Facism!" stickers are probably taken down, as they should be.

I'm continually amazed at how grown adults haven't come to the realization that different people enjoy different things.

I wonder if stickers in general are more common in the US just like bumper stickers are.

As someone based outside of the US, I rarely see people with stickers on their laptop. The very vast majority of cars also do not have bumper stickers here (and those that do might have one at most).

When I got an internship at Amazon, I (ironically) plastered my cubicle with all the leadership principles ("LP's"), in over-happy fonts. But the leadership did not realize I was being tongue-in-cheek, and I suspect my cubicle decorations had a significant positive impact on my success there, lol. In the end I even started to believe the LP's, so maybe they knew something I didn't.

> I always found it terrible security, it’s basically advertising what someone would get if they stole your laptop.

One day the company was giving employees some swag, little retractable lanyard-things, branded with the company name and logo, for each of our anonymous white RFID keycards.

I, uh, escalated my concerns that this meant anyone who stole/found a keycard would also know where they could go use it. For whatever reason, that particular swag stopped being available.

When Apple was making a comeback from being all but dead, the logo was a quick way to identify other members of your tribe. And you could walk into a coffee shop and get an instant tally of how Apple was doing. It was really precarious for a time, and then after some months it became reassuring and then some more months and you could stop worrying altogether.

Hard to believe that was ever the case!

Iconic photo from 2007: https://macdailynews.com/2007/10/02/lecture_hall_photo_shows...

One of mine is on quite a few laptops and at least one server: https://shop.kyefox.com/products/were-here-were-queer-connec...

I was hoping, though not expecting, to spot it in here.

I'm getting soyjak vibes

That's why I always have a clear case on my Macbook I cover with stickers. That way, I can take them with me when I leave, or take them off if I have a big meeting/presentation!

I definitely got one or more of those stickers with some Intel SATA SSDs... sadly those I think have been the ones I had the worst luck with. I think they were one of those series that had some really bad write amplification problem or something like that, due to I think some issue with their power-saving implementation.

Stickers are popular in loads of places. They are all over the street in Australia. While I was in Italy and the UK they seemed even more common.

During undergrad/grad school it was always whatever free stickers were available at hackathons. Now I usually just put 1 or 2 unique stickers to distinguish my MBP from others. Currently rocking one that's an illustration that my friend made of their dog with its tongue out.

I always put stickers on work laptops specifically, in order to make mine recognizable among other identically looking laptops in the office.

But my stickers were always small, and usually lonely. A purple Emacs logo, a red Debian twirl, an orange lambda, stuff like that. Still was often enough to strike a conversation.

Shameless plug for those who still need more stickers for their laptop:

  ssh stickr.shop

Some pen test teams use laptop stickers as an excellent resource for proper social engineering.

Some cyber companies explicitly prohibit stickers on company laptops.

"STOP HAVING FUN, SELF-EXPRESSION IS CRINGE"

Ok, chudjak.

Whoa, a little too edgy there, I’m calling HR

It's fairly readable. https://imgur.com/a/jWhyBmI

It does effect me. If it didn't effect anyone, no one would do it. Tattoos, stickers, etc. are a form of social signalling.

Maybe they disagree with what's being signalled, or the act of signalling itself.

Hey i like it , but i can see most of them appear to have original filenames on them when i mouse over them.

Considering how many of these stickers are about being gay or trans, compromising about expressing yourself sounds pretty grim. I wouldn't want to put that aside to get on with my co-workers.

I have this recollection of some framed / shadowboxed clear case covers that were covered in stickers. Either the laptop was replaced and the new model didn't fit... or the cover was filled up and a new one was used.

A way to keep the memories of that the stickers represent.

I agree, I much prefer to just use stickers of random stuff I get

but damn $14

It seems to me that about 10-15 years ago, laptop stickers were a little more like patches on a punk jacket; that is, they were meant to show something about the cons or competitions you have participated in. A few such places would give out stickers.

At some point, people saw the cool-looking stickered-up laptops and thought they would also look cool and put fun stickers on their laptops to show that they also can google things. This diluted the original social signal value until it was completely ubiquitous, kind of like if everyone started putting whatever patches appeal to them on whatever jacket they wear without any thought to the idea of their origin. By that time, the original sticker-signalers had all moved on to other signals.

This tech looks like it would be annoying to other people in a cafe/workplace/etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1drVhn0hLiI&t=40s

What I think would be ideal with current tech is non-backlit e-ink color. Maybe displaying a static image that usually doesn't change while at a location.

You could use e-ink display changes when switching between modes, for example:

* corporate in-office staid, or internal team flair;

* trade conference switch to promoting company brands, rather than internal flairs;

* corporate in-office using it to indicate when you're in focus mode or on a call and less interruptible (actually, you could maybe use the LEDs for on-call mode, a rare instance when you might want the more attention than e-ink);

* traveling with work laptop, but at a cafe or lounge, and want to signal social sensibilities for meeting people personally.

In the early to mid 90's, geek culture had a thing for ironic agitprop. Great stuff... deeply cynical and very Gen X.

> As someone based outside of the US, I rarely see people with stickers on their laptop.

I see them at technical conferences in many different parts of the world, with people from many different parts of the world. It's not a US thing.

And many of the sticker pictures on this site appear to be from European countries, including at least Finland and Germany.

Tattoos have a very different level of commitment, and neither need to be anything more than decoration or affect you. They can be vaguely amusing, totally innocuous, slightly differentiating for practical purposes, all kinds of things. I used to have an "I <3 Beaver" sticker on mine, no need to overthink it.

Good catch. Like the reason that house key ring lost&found tags have an intermediary's address on them, rather than identify the other directly.

I guess it makes you more fireable...

Self-expression is cool, do your thing.

It's hilarious how ready to be angry people are, these are mosaics and all we have if pro laptops are destined to be grey or less grey

Because of that keyword, "was." The conservative stance has shifted to become more aligned with fascism.

Some of those books seem interesting, how were the memory, attention, behaviour ones?

That's why even though I like the weird and esoteric stickers you see here, I myself prefer the `unixstickers` style I think you're talking about. Debian, Arch, GNU, Python, bash, Ruby, Git, Vim, fork bomb, Tux, DEFCON, 127.0.0.1, &c. These are great for starting conversations, even in cafes. And you end up meeting some interesting people with shared culture.

"Libertarian" and "Conservative" are not inherently linked, even though sadly they're often associated. There are many left-libertarians.

Maybe. When I was in Uni (3 years ago), everyone had stickers on their laptops and water bottles. Generally related to ones interests and hobbies.

> They all look the same. They all reflect similar taste. Quite a bit of politics, but is there a single right wing sticker? I couldn't find one.

If one of the laptops had a libertarian flag added, suddenly it would become "creative"? All these photos⁰¹²³⁴ are aesthetically distinct. Sure, you can see trends in the website but that's always a thing, specially considering nobody there is designing stickers.

I also find it curious that you conflate social signaling with lack of (true) creativity. If all you ate was bacon, would you sneer at the foodies for making homemade pesto and not unleashing their free will by adding strawberry jam to it?

[0] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/image-5.jpg

[1] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/cyberpunkd-chr...

[2] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_4174.jpg

[3] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/PXL_20251111_2...

[4] https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_4148-1.jpe...

I too have wanted this. There are now laptop skin products that they claim are removable and re-attachable.

There will be a time when people putting svastikas will be considered brave heroes. And then it'll be banned again. And then it'll resurface again. Turns out, "things that are obviously morally right" radically chances over time and across cultures.

I haven't really bought stickers off the internet, but I'm guessing t-shirt or art stores might have some, or your favorite brand of thing might have some.

If you keep your eye out for stickers, you'll start to notice them at many types of smaller establishments like cafes, book stores, boutiques, breweries, music venues, galleries, etc... they're often by the register, and sometimes free!

As a long time sticker collector, I love how the stickers found at random places have some memories attached to them. Finding them, especially when traveling, sometimes feels like finding treasure!

It is about advertising one's (possible) shared culture. For me, my laptop is part of my professional culture and thus I try to keep it as crisp and professional in appearance as one's resume since its a bit... difficult to laptop lids in certain cases.

For my personal shared culture, that is the sort of thing that can be exposed (or hidden) on a case by case basis. My choice of t-shirt where I can button up or down depending on the context says a lot more about me than the lid of my laptop. Granted, it' one message at a time - but there are things that I've had on t-shirts that I made sure to button up before going into the office and seeing the boss (old school, and I still have it - those were durable shirts - https://www.flickr.com/photos/strihs/8536766235/ ). On the other hand, I wouldn't put https://www.spreadshirt.com/shop/design/let+me+work+on+your+... on my laptop no matter how much I agree with it.

I would be amendable to putting a square of #22b7f2 on my laptop, and that opens up an entire discussion if recognized (I'm not quite ambitious or passionate enough to color the entire laptop that color).

In another comment I linked https://imgur.com/a/jWhyBmI as my laptop lid.

maybe I just want a way to identify my macbook on a table with 5 other space grey macbooks, and I can express some pithy humour like 'zfs is a cult with integrity' at the same time. if you really think that's "trying too hard" i'd hate to see what "trying the right amount" is to you

>one of the laptops had a libertarian flag added

That's the wildcard card option, you never know what you'll get.

Would love to see your commissioned stickers, if you were inclined to share.

Any group that gets its kicks out of pretending to be fools will soon find itself filled with fools who think themselves in good company - Abraham Lincoln

> a time

... and a duality within the present forms of society in which either expression is interesting enough or leads up to a significant event such that we will remember it in the future. No time has been one-sided as in the way you put it.

I'm sure buying cute cat stickers is the one thing stopping the downfall of the capitalist machine.

Where do you draw the line? One of them says "Socialist alternative".

I don't really have any public share links for them, but the last one I got was my fursona as an Among Us character. I've wanted to get another set drawn up for a bit but the artists I was interested in either had really long wait times (1 year) or were quite expensive. I might just draw some myself when I get some time.

> could use e-ink

E-ink is getting affordable. A 7.5" display for stickers would probably add under $100 to the price of a laptop.[1] Not many colors, but supposedly good saturation.

[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807067268678.html

Most other industries are very exposed to external clients or customers. Software developers who sit in an office and only see other internal employees have no reason cover up their personality like that.

Agreed, some weird hostility. I have laptops going back to the 90s all slapped up!

BTW I've been following LK for quite a while now and hope to use it sometime in the future. My regular DM is committed to a different platform, but I have a story that might turn into a campaign and I'd sub to LK to run it. Keep up the great work!

In my professional experience the number of stickers on a laptop is generally inversely proportional to the owner’s ability to write software, or even use said computer for that matter.

Hilarious! You faked it and then you made it! Love it.

There are clear cases for that exact use.

All good, thanks for the description!

Inspired by Talia Smiley, I’ve started wearing a roll of dinosaur stickers on my belt and offering them to random strangers and at networking events.

“Hi I’m Kimberly, can I tell you about my startup” lands way worse than “Hi I’m Kimberly, would you like a dinosaur sticker for your coffee / MacBook?” Sometimes they even stick around for the pitch, but it’s nice to be able to instantly make someone smile in three-second interactions

Every laptop has encrypted storage and most of them are MDM locked to the company so you can't even reformat and use them. Stealing a corporate laptop would basically just be for the parts you can resell like the display and such.

"Do Not Crush", "BASH".

I blame the EFF a bit for that.

The first soft-politico stickers I saw all over cons in the 90s/00s were their 'FUCK MICROSOFT' and 'FUCK GATES' stickers that exploded after the MS/Linux/SCO conflicts.

Before the MS debacles (was there a before?) it was mostly FREE KEVIN everywhere.

..which for reasons lead to 'this machine hacks oligarchies', and 'piss: it's whats for dinner' stickers shown in the link.

Speaking on that : Woodie Guthrie was better at marketing slogans than himself -- kind of interesting to consider how many more people are familiar with the 'This machine...' than his music.

When I was going to these things I tended to avoid 'extreme' ones -- I was often job hunting and didn't need to project an image that may hinder that effort.

they need to make laptops with a color e-ink lid so you can easily create and update your

Do you have examples? If anything there have been cases of left aligned activist employees being fired from companies like Google not too long ago. Or cases like Basecamp where they asked people to avoid politics at work or leave the company.

I think it's cool, but I could never see myself doing it, because I used to go through a new laptop every couple of years.

In any case, the point is moot, now. I switched to using a desktop, in my last upgrade since retiring.

On that particular day I was going through a bunch of different books, trying to work out what my plan was going to be for the next little while. Of those ones, I wound up finishing A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance and the Sensation and Perception one. I also knocked out a pretty good chunk of the one titled just Memory. The rest got bumped down the stack a bit.

I kinda getting back to the place now where I want to revisit The Organization of Behavior. That's the seminal work by Hebb that introduced Hebbian Learning and I'm on this big quest now to revisit a lot of old school approaches to learning & neural networks (in something at least approximating chronological order, although I won't be super strict about it) and code up implementations of each. So basically, some sort of Hebbian Learning system, a "McCulloch & Pitts Neuron", a Perceptron with the Perceptron Convergence Algorithm, Selfridge's Pandemonium Architecture, and so on, gradually working my way up to the current SOTA.

I'm about to finish up the Minsky & Papert Perceptrons book, and once I finish that I will probably read Volume 2 of the Parallel Distributed Processing series, then go back to Hebb.

FWIW, that Memory book was pretty fascinating. The general subject of human memory is, both simply taken for its own sake, and taken as inspiration for approaches to AI. I'm slightly more interested in AI than human memory qua human memory, but in either case it's fascinating material.

I'm glad to hear it; thank you! Reach out if you have any questions or recs. :D

Implies that the stickers are more precious than the hardware, which is an attitude I love.

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think that everyone thought Naziism was morally right at its peak?

Sticker of a Fluke 87V for the laptop?

At defcon, laptop stickers have imo always been vibrantly political. What you saw on laptops may be more a sign of the crowds you ran with than the times!

I'm not really here to defend OR condemn Mitnick. I was just always fascinated with his story, from the first time I read that Hafner & Markoff book Cyberpunk back in the early 1990's. Anyway, one of the notable aspects of his story was the way he was held for a rather long time without even so much as a bail hearing... something many people believed (and still believe) was blatantly unconstitutional. That was, as I recall, the motivation for a fair amount of the "Free Kevin" rabble-rousing, even among people who acknowledged that he had broken the law and deserved some sort of punishment.

By the time I bought that particular laptop and put that sticker on it, (about 3 years ago now, I guess) Kevin had long since been out of jail, had gone legal and was running his own security consulting company. I put one of those one mostly out of nostalgia and as a conversation starter. Perhaps surprisingly, I've had a modest number of people approach me when I was out in public and ask "Who's Kevin?" or say "Kevin Mitnick, right? Yeah, I remember that guy... I was at DEFCON this one year and ... <conversation ensues>".

you can tell who's old... i see 6 cDc stickers, 3 L0pht stickers, 1 HNN, 1 attrition. i see SUN and 3dfx, that's pretty tight. i lol'd at "libc.so.6"

You've never seen anyone get outwardly offended but I'm sure there have been a few. It's just a statistical probability. I fully support the cause and would not be offended but I encounter people everyday who most certainly are.

Just tell those people you're a big fan of Noah and the Old Testament. Then ask them about why they are wearing a cotton blend shirt.

I keep my travel laptop clean of any outward expression. Saves a lot of potential grief crossing borders or cultures.

My at home and around town laptop can be my canvas.

Gives me the same ick as tattoos.

I suspect it's a little like bumper stickers, in that people with conservative opinions might be less likely to want to put stickers on their laptop. With bumper stickers (at least in the US), the rule of thumb I've seen is that the more bumper stickers adorning a car, the more likely they are to espouse leftist opinions. One or two bumper stickers: a tossup between whether it's "Elect the liberal politician running for President this year" or whether it's "Elect the conservative politician running for President this year". More than ten bumper stickers? 99% of the time they're liberal. Only once in my life do I remember seeing a car with more than ten bumper stickers which expressed politically-conservative opinions.

I suspect, but would have a hard time proving, that the same dynamic that leads liberal people to want to cover their car in opinionated stickers but conservative people not to do so... would apply in a similar way to laptops as it does to cars.

Political bumper stickers are also a thing up here in Canada, but probably like 1-5% as common. I'm often shocked to see how common they are when I'm down in the US. Like I find it weird that so many people are eager to passive agressively advertise their political views to the public (and usually the more polarizing views).

The most common sticker we've got is the infamous "F--- Trudeau" sticker. And I'm even seeing fewer of those these days since he's no longer PM.

I'm from europe, and the political ones are very, very rare... at least not in the tech world (macbooks of HR departments might be different though).

Mostly zero stickers, here and there you find some progamming language ones, a tux here and there, kali, anonymous masks, "my other computer is your computer" etc. on security events, i've even seen a phpBB one this year on a relatively new computer, but no trump, lgbt flags and anything anti/nazi related.

It entirely, entirely depends on what part of the country you live in. Near me a car with a lot of stickers usually indicates Q anon/Trump/Lets go Brandon etc.

That's an interesting point, but I've never really seen the cross as a conservative symbol. I probably know about as many progressive christians as I do conservative ones (mind you I'm not in the US).

Several other European countries imitated German fascism in the 1930s (e.g. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia). This is well known in Eastern Europe because that brief period has cast long shadows to this day. Even in relatively faraway South America, Germany and Italy inspired several political movements.

Sure, not everyone thought Naziism was good, because you can’t find any political philosophy in human history that everyone has the same opinion about. But it was still seen as a model by millions of people outside Germany until Germany started obviously losing the war.

Correction: very often it's "elect the (whichever) politician running for President two or three years ago", because people rarely remove the bumper stickers they've applied. Once the next Presidential election starts up they'll slap the new sticker on top of the old one, but in 2006 you were still likely to see "Vote for Bush" or "Vote for Kerry" stickers, despite the fact that Bush was ineligible to run in 2008 (having served two terms) and Kerry was unlikely to run in 2008 (failed candidates rarely get nominated again by their party — not never, obviously, but rarely). By 2008 the Bush stickers had been mostly replaced by McCain stickers and the Kerry ones by Obama stickers, but in 2006 you would still see plenty of bumper stickers from the 2004 elections.

Come to the south, I see more "Don't tread on me" snakes, there was a lot of FJB and other Biden hate, "Come and take them" stickers, "Charlie Kirk American Patriot" stickers, all sorts of heavily religious stuff like "One nation under GOD", etc. Liberals around here will have small lgbtq/ally stickers and pro evolution/science stickers but it's not like liberal enclaves where you'll see plastered subarus.

How long ago is back in the day? I’ve seen stickers like this for 20 years in SF/NYC.

“We’re all unique and special, just like everyone else”

(Some of the stickers are kind of cool, but I just can’t understand the logic behind thinking your MacBook #12,372 with a Python sticker on the back is worth flaunting online)

I don't see much hostility at all. A few people don't like them. That's not weird hostility, isn't it just self-expression? Like the stickers that oppose or express a dislike of something, which presumably aren't weird hostility either. People are allowed to dislike or disagree or make not entirely positive comments. Sure some would just scroll on, arguably that's the better thing to do, but commenting in self-expression is really fine too. It seems like a strange kind of fragility and inability to tolerate or understand that people don't all think alike which would jump to thinking that is "hostility".

Ever since Framework laptops arrived on the scene, I've been waiting for someone to create thicker bezels that piggyback onto the webcams' USB 2.0 interface via a USB 2.0 hub, to integrate a color eInk display facing outwards. Just for the infinite stickers.

Bonus points for integrating an outward-facing webcam dedicated to a continous background facial recognition daemon to change the stickers on the fly depending upon who is approaching while the laptop is running.

Hasn't the establishment been non-conservatuve at least half of the time for the past 20 years?

I have had the opposite experience living in the south. The cars with the most bumper sticks around here are owned by conservatives. Today I saw a truck with a US flag in place of its tailgate, "I back the blue" painted on the rear windshield, a Trump sticker, a sticker that said "Don't steal! The government hates competition." and more.

Thanks for the link. I like how devlids links to the user's socials.

I like stickers from conferences but I also love my notebook clean, and if I ever do it, my brain won't let me do it wrong, I will put them well and organized. There has been some times that I saw people receive stickers and immediately put them in their notebook lid like, however their hand lands on the notebook, crooked, overlapping other stickers and I'm like "holy crap no please don't".

There was some paper that associated number of stickers on a car with extremety of their tribal group beliefs and more aggressive driving. I don't think it transfers to laptops

this one's mine https://i.imgur.com/22gSTuB.jpeg plenty of real estate left

Agreed. Some forget that the US has this beautiful great thing called freedom of speech, meaning that some can express to like things, as well as dislike things! It's not uncommon to find stickers among laptops where some are excited for environmental safety and conservationism, and some are for Tesla / Palantir and the values and ethos that they want to perpetuate across the globe.

There are a lot of flagged comments at the bottom

Some people like naziism.

Those people were wrong.

This isn't some kind of "oh morality is relative and somethings are cultural", it's just objectively wrong, regardless of who or how many people claim to like it.

They would be, for me.

Covers are a possibility, but Apple always used to make minor changes to the laptop layout, so you could seldom reuse a cover.

A rule of thumb among your friends: those who don’t talk politics are the conservative ones. Similarly, I’d wager most of the examples here without overtly progressive stickers are conservative.

I'm taking up vampire hunting - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

I would be interested in seeing images of "anti-stickers"

I've seen a few movies where apple laptops are show with a clear apple logi...

But I've also seen movies where the logos are removed or altered. It would be interesting to see images like that.

I've never understood why people were so proud to brag that they can't understand a relatively simple language like perl.

Wow. Impressive collection!

it is the general lifestyle of self-expression which does. The kind of person who expresses themself through "be gay and do crime" stickers does not seriously threaten the system through crime. Totally individualistic self-expression acts as a release valve for frustrations against the system. It attracts narcissists, who counteract any meaningful goals.

In the old world, when you got a tattoo or something it showed you were a member of a community of people who knew each other. A society of people who were organized and could precipitate some change. In the new world, you get a tattoo or something to signal you are a member of a demographic.

rofl. It goes full circle. You should see the shit that b2b sales and support reps say.

At a prior job, employees wearing the logo started getting a lot of unexpected targeted attention outside the office. This ranged from lots of questions from randos about future products, to desperate passers-by handing off resumes on the sidewalk and begging for jobs, to even stalking and targeted theft. OPSEC culture wasn't something practiced there, and it was quite the rude awakening for some.

I do sticker the everloving snot out of my (removable) laptop cover with memes vaguely opposing or otherwise orthogonal to the local culture. No references to my job or place of work. Any interactions have generally been amusing to all parties involved.

> comfortable with displaying in front of a CxO without worry

In today's timeline, you'd need to be concerned about what some random TSA agent felt about your stickers and if that might get you pulled aside for additional screening.

> Some people like naziism. Those people were wrong.

In your individual opinion. In mine, too, and hopefully everyone else’s here. But the OP was clearly talking about what views are presented as “morally right” by normative social forces, and those clearly differ across time and place, often as political power waxes and wanes.

Yeah, even in those. There was like one low effort obvious troll, others are just self-expressing their dislike, pretty similar to many others here expressing their like of the stickers or the website with similar kind of quips.

I tend to just scroll on if I don't like something, rather than commenting about it. But I would be lying if I said I've never done it. It's a very human thing, on a forum like this that invites open discussion about things it is fine, and pretty obviously if the pictures have a bunch of political messages on them you would not be flabbergasted to see a some political comments. Maybe the comments are cringy, silly, wrong, not aligned with your beliefs, or unnecessary, but seeing hostility in disagreement or dislike is a pretty bad place to be.

The thing is, once you add a sticker, it becomes visually distinguishable. If you're the teacher handing out thirty of the same exact thing for a workshop, an incoming class, whatever. We give out a notebook/laptop/piece of paper to each student. The first instruction is to write your name at the top of the page/book or otherwise somehow make it distinguishable. Because the problem is inevitably someone will lose theirs and the teacher just has this notebook with no name on it.

For laptops at work, everyone has the same IT issued laptop. You go to anything where there's more than one of you, go for a coffee break that runs long, the class does a standing exercise, whatever, the point is the laptops get mixed up. Now there are 29 indistinguishably the same laptop, and one with a sticker on it.

Guess who's getting their laptop back first?

You forgot to add Flash ;)

All the cars with political stickers I see are conservative ones. I live in Texas, in a blue city too but still its all punisher stickers and other wannabee-badass-signalling, or pro trump / liberal tears type stuff. Never anything pro liberal

My work computer is spotless. My personal conference (and work appropriate - security wouldn't find anything unprofessional or untoward on it) laptop is the one with some stickers that are technologies that I want to put on there. My personal computer at home is desktop... so no stickers there.

Even crossing company culture borders could be problematic if one is a consultant or sales engineer or professional services... This is one of those "in the wrong environment, something could scupper a deal - and you don't want that to be pinned on you."

Like I said in another comment, other coworkers of mine have tried to express themselves through misogynistic or sexually suggestive stickers. I wouldn't suggest having a Diddy sticker or anything right now.

My only point is that the "if someone is offended, that's their problem" attitude is not so black and white. People often use it to justify being an a**hole too. Obviously, gay or trans stickers are not in the category of offensive things. There are things that are appropriate to express, and things that are not. So yeah, sometimes you need to compromise on your self-expression at work because not all of it is appropriate for everyone, you know?

Socialist Alternative is an Australian political org. They're one of the tiny Trotskyist factions that always seem to form any time two or more Trotskyists work together. That's why it's on a laptop next to a bunch of other far left political stuff. They're pretty much the opposite of "Yay Nazism!"

Or were you drawing an equivalence between the two?

My laptop has stickers, one of which is a photo of my previous laptop and its stickers. One of those is a photo of the laptop before that…

All people who make lazy and baseless generalizations are boring and a waste of time to listen to. This is fun, we should do it more often

Same is true of tattoos. Having a tattoo at all used to be a signal of it's own somewhat regardless of what that tattoo was - not so much anymore

I ended up having a work laptop that looks exactly like my personal laptop. After making an embarrassing mistake once, I picked up some stickers and stuck them on my office laptop.

Now, my work laptop looks clearly distinct, not just from my own personal laptop, but also from all the identical laptops other people at work bring to meeting rooms.

You joke, but I had someone tell me they were taken for questioning on entry to the US because their laptop had EFF stickers with some slightly edgy hacker culture phrases on them.

Do you publish the SSH key? Feels odd to order if I can't authenticate the connection.

Fair point. I didn't mean to imply people's politics means they are creative or not.

But surely the bar to being creative is higher than putting stickers on your laptop. No doubt many of the people here are creative and code creatively, write creatively, draw creatively or make music.

If you said to someone who is a comedian or a writer that you were 'creative too' because of your laptop stickers. Well. C'mon.

The politics shown is interestingly similar. No doubt many and probably most lean left. But not all. I've been worked with many people who code and a significant number are conservative. But I've never seen anyone with a right leaning laptop sticker. Tattoos you see exhibit more variety than these laptop stickers.

I should have added that I have stickers on my laptop. But that is orthogonal to whether I'm creative or not.

I'm annoyed by the political stuff. I haven't always worked at 100% left leaning companies and I find it really uncomfortable when someone e.g. calls the centre-left party I voted for a pack of communists. I don't like encouraging a norm of political self-expression because I have direct experience being on the other side of it and feel that it leads to both a less effective workplace and a more polarised society.

Avery 03383

I mean, why do people like doing those wine and painting evenings, even if they’re all going home with similar paintings? Why do people perform at recitals when they’re performing music that already exists? Why do people share any art, even if it’s not guaranteed to be the most original, profound, or technically proficient expression of creative intent?

Sometimes it’s fun to just enjoy something, and to share that you enjoyed it. These pictures aren’t here to impress anyone, they’re here because each one is a record of someone who had a bit of fun decorating their laptop, and an invitation to share in the fun. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

I like Curtis work but I still find the whole theory kinda weak-sauce. Correct, the revolution can be repackaged and sold to you via hip marketing. So what? What's the counterfactual? If someone was an entirely superficial anti-system person and you retroactively deleted all shiny trinkets would they become the perfect freedom fighter?

John Q. Left is just one step away from doing effective change because his water bottle has "Punch Fascists" sticker or his hobby is cosplay. Not the captured media landscape, the digital panopticon, the razing of public space or the destruction of most grassroots political organization in the workplace or education. They weren't exactly giving out stickers in Kent State.

>Totally individualistic self-expression acts as a release valve for frustrations against the system. It attracts narcissists, who counteract any meaningful goals.

In the good old times the release valve for frustrations against the system was getting shitfaced on the cheapest alcohol. Narcissistic power struggles also predate all this shit.

>In the old world, when you got a tattoo or something it showed you were a member of a community of people who knew each other. A society of people who were organized and could precipitate some change. In the new world, you get a tattoo or something to signal you are a member of a demographic.

Sailor tattoos are exactly the type stuff you are decrying. People precipitating change in the past didn't tattoo themselves like Bond villains to identify each other.

>The kind of person who expresses themself through "be gay and do crime" stickers does not seriously threaten the system through crime.

If we go by threatening the system I find it highly likely that Maia Crimew⁰ has done more of that than both of us, and they are the most "be gay and do crime" sticker human ever.

[0] https://maia.crimew.gay/

I'm sorry, but what makes you think I was joking? I have seen a co-worker get pulled aside for additional screening because he wore a t-shirt that had the words of the second amendment or some such printed in a way of looking like a pair of pistols. On the same flight, we sat with another individual who got himself arrested, missed his flight, and was eventually released to sit on our flight because he wore a belt adorned with bullet shells cut in half.

I'm not saying either one of them were the deepest of thinkers when choosing the garments for the day, but TSA also isn't employing the deepest of thinkers either, so why poke the hornets' nest

I wish I could buy the Aaron Swartz sticker

Thank you so much. I had to dig out my old laptop from computer science college. I remember that I love doing this and that it changed appearance over nearly 5 years.

It brings back good memories. It was really a cool idea.

However it affects you, I think you’re kind of volunteering for it.

Every American conservative knows the feeling of being at work and your liberal coworkers, not knowing you're conservative, start going on a rant about how terrible Republicans are and how stupid they are and how they all deserve jail etc.

In America today, liberals feel very comfortable speaking about their views in public. Conservatives don't.

> Ok, put some "conservative stickers" on your laptop and submit a pic to the site-- no one's stopping you.

I didn't see any Java or COBOL or even .NET stickers, but there was at least a fairly clean one with a Sun sticker. And some Debian stickers, but those were a bit more cluttered. And maybe even that one with the cat around the Apple logo.

Do you see me petitioning the site to remove their comment? They are welcome to have bad taste and a bad attitude.

(I misunderstood you then, sorry!)

Well, the subtitle is "a unique collection of laptops adorned with creative stickers from around the world". Meaning that the sticker themselves are creative, not necessarily the collage, which it also can be art by itself (I wouldn't say it fits here)

>But surely the bar to being creative is higher than putting stickers on your laptop. No doubt many of the people here are creative and code creatively, write creatively, draw creatively or make music.

I think a certain selection and positioning can be creative.

>If you said to someone who is a comedian or a writer that you were 'creative too' because of your laptop stickers. Well. C'mon.

Depends, is the comedian Jerry Seinfeld?

I'm kidding (kinda). I personally understand creativity as something very much lower stakes, but that might be my ESL showing.

I was just telling my buddy the same thing. It was our first SSD in HS. Mine eventually died with double the guaranteed TBW.

In which countries? Most have major parties that are conservative and conservative-light.

My friend sells cute stickers she designs herself on Etsy.

The same logic applies to commenting on forums. Or doing anything publicly really.

Haven't heard about cDc in about 20 years. Are they still active as a collective in any way?

For the precious stickers, I stick them on magnetic sheet and then cut the sheet to shape, turning the stickers in to fridge magnets.

If you go to an art show and are like, "Wow, these all suck! Why didn't any of you artists do art the way I think it should be done?!"

That's not self-expression. That's being an asshole.

Google (sorry) for "James Damore".

Non sequitur. I was addressing what I did see in your comment, and nothing I wrote suggested or implied that you did or even thought any such thing.

"You know who else made laptops wear pieces of flair?"

> But at work, that's not a healthy attitude. You're there to work together, not to be uncompromising in expressing yourself.

Well there was that corporate-approved "bring your whole self to work" thing in recent years.

OK, that is awesome.

Yeah, that was the big takeaway from the social experiment that was 4chan. If you ironically pretend too long to be trash, you will gradually become trash.

Okay. Were you hoping I would address this scenario of your own fabrication, or are you able to make your point using this actual situation right in front of us that we are discussing?

People self-expressing dislike for some content under a link on public forum that explicitly invites comment is not hostility. Making comments and disagreement about politics is not hostility (particularly in response to political content being posted). It just isn't.

If you posted up a page of pictures of "Lifted trucks of West Virginia adorned with creative bumper stickers" here you would get a lot of negative opinions and politcial commentary. That also would not be "weird hostility", it would be completely obvious and understandable preferences and opinions ranging from people who don't like the trucks or covering them with stickers, to those who feel strongly about politics.

Again, you're allowed to discuss things and disagree with them. People aren't assholes or hostile for doing it. Learn to live and let live, no need to try to guilt people about it.

A lot of these seem to be from the German left-wing hacker culture (e.g. the recurring yellow CYBER-Stickers are a dead giveaway) from about 5 years ago (considering the mix of stickers presented). Think ccc-adjacent.

Considering that background, expect them to look more like a random Berlin lightpost than a conversation piece.

Political conservatives run a huge American flag off the back of their pickup. Same motivations. Different venue.

Daniel Tosh said the best:

Don’t put stickers on your car. Despite what you think they say, know they read, “I’m poor.” No one cares who you cheer for or what you believe in. Just drive a little faster.

I mean, some of these stickers could just represent self expression of anger.

It’s interesting the top comment is a self expression against people’s self expression against the self expression of the stickers.

Everything here seems to boil down to self expression. Even the flags and downvotes of the content at the bottom is a form of self expression.

This comment is my self expression about all the inception of self expression.

And now my brain hurts.

Depends on where you live. Around me the conservatives are more than willing to offer their political opinions even when the context doesn't fit. Progressive/Liberal folks tend to be less vocal because we already know where we stand with each other and don't want to invite the loudmouth to go off.

> Obviously, gay or trans stickers are not in the category of offensive things.

It's at least plausible to taxonomize them under either politics or sexuality. Either of which larger categories some might consider categorically offensive or inappropriate.

Yes, I'm also saying that "vote for $PARTY" (categorically; regardless of which party) and anime catgirls are both potentially offensive or inappropriate. Depending on how much of a stick-in-the-mud people in your local environs are.

Considering where most of the pictured laptops (likely) originate from, I would beg to differ.

> Okay. Were you hoping I would address this scenario of your own fabrication, or are you able to make your point using this actual situation right in front of us that we are discussing?

It's not a "scenario" - it's a comparison, an example. It's no different to this forum - people choose to come here. Someone chose to share TFA. People chose to enter these comments and shit on people's design choices and take weird stands about political balance.

> If you posted up a page of pictures of "Lifted trucks of West Virginia adorned with creative bumper stickers" here you would get a lot of negative opinions and politcial commentary. That also would not be "weird hostility", it would be completely obvious and understandable preferences and opinions ranging from people who don't like the trucks or covering them with stickers, to those who feel strongly about politics.

Sure, these are obviously the same...

> Again, you're allowed to discuss things and disagree with them. People aren't assholes or hostile for doing it. Learn to live and let live, no need to try to guilt people about it.

Those people could "learn to live and let live" with regards to people harmlessly putting stickers on their laptops.

I've done this on my current laptop, and when it eventually stops serving me I will frame the lid as a humble piece of art for my office. (7 year old HP running linux, need to replace the battery soon but otherwise still perfectly serviceable)

I have a bunch of stickers from hobbies like bikes and sim racing. I guess it serves a similar purpose!

Once you understand that everything in this world is a system, then you'll see how he was a true hacker.

Just about every enterprise has tech, and there are many, many sectors. There's also far more "tech folks" than developers at most companies, nor do all companies have devs on staff.

> On the same flight, we sat with another individual who got himself arrested, missed his flight, and was eventually released to sit on our flight because he wore a belt adorned with bullet shells cut in half.

I've heard of similar things before, and had the sense that this was less screeners being dumb and more legislators not fuzz-testing their work.

I agree, in Australia you see plenty of them on laptops, water bottles and just out in the street like you said.

We do have a lot of stickers on cars too but it's more common to see them on windows of the car not the car body, and I think in general they're socially quite different to what you'd see in America. More like brand stickers and hobby stuff, or jokes, not so much politics or religion.

In my personal experience the number of stickers on a laptop is directly proportional to the owner's ability to have fun, or even get a joke.

> It's not a "scenario" - it's a comparison, an example.

Semantics. You invented a scenario and you attempted to make some point that presumably you were unable to make with the situation at hand.

> It's no different to this forum - people choose to come here. Someone chose to share TFA. People chose to enter these comments and shit on people's design choices and take weird stands about political balance.

I think it is different. If it were not different you would not have been compelled to think of it.

> Sure, these are obviously the same...

Now you don't like "comparisons"? It's more similar than your one.

> Those people could "learn to live and let live" with regards to people harmlessly putting stickers on their laptops.

Expressing a dislike for something is not incompatible with live and let live. It is participating in a conversation. It's not hostile, it doesn't need to be guilted or suppressed or name-called.

It's a good observation, I certainly don't see much of it in agency meetings. I meet with a lot of different industries too and it's pretty rare, I imagine they all have company laptops.

Ha! That's great. I have a little box of small Japanese train headmarks I offer. They're like little raised button stickers.

It's a great way to filter for the fun and curious people.

> I think it is different. If it were not different you would not have been compelled to think of it.

Not actually responding to the essence of the comparison.

> Now you don't like "comparisons"?

Just bad-faith comparisons that equate "Just Be Yourself" stickers with "I hate fags" stickers

> Expressing a dislike for something is not incompatible with live and let live. It is participating in a conversation. It's not hostile, it doesn't need to be guilted or suppressed or name-called.

Again, if you consider a group of people sharing their art between each other and having a conversation about it, and someone comes in and is like "This art is stupid." that is hostile. That is exactly what is happening here.

"liberals feel very comfortable speaking about their views in public. Conservatives don't."

Maybe conservative folks aren't comfortable speaking about their views in public because they know the Christo-fascist undertones of their core values are abrasive to non conservatives?

I basically never applied a sticker to any laptop I owned until I got a Framework. Just hoarded them like a dragon sitting on his pile of sticker-gold.

Finally figured hey, I might have this laptop more than a single upgrade cycle... it's worth burning a weird sticker or two.

I still try and buck the trend a little--instead of advertising technologies or something, my general goal is that, at first glance, nobody would question anything or think it looks unlike any other developer laptop, but that anyone paying attention will instead be met with a fractal of confusion. E.g., one on there is a "STOP, DROP, AND ROLL" fire safety sticker. In Quebecois French. From a small town volunteer fire department.

I consider it sort of a personal art project and have fun trying to collect up the most "wait, what?" stickers I can.

This. My personal daily driver of a laptop has a collage on it. My work-issued laptop is a lot cleaner but it has a small red sticker declaring it to be "Editor's Choice Bestseller of the Month".

Several years ago, it was new laptop day at the startup I worked for. We didn't have an office as much as a coworking space. When people went to lunch, they just left their new MBAs on this big communal table. Some shut the lid, some didn't even lock the screen but those would've been taken care of in ~5min.

Anyway, I may or may not have switched some laptops around but the point is someone definitely did. Half an hour later people returned. Some of them were instantly confused. Some of them entered a wrong password a couple of times. Some of them were greeted by an unfamiliar Google Chrome window.

I may or may not have wasted a collective forty or so man-minutes in the span of five but I definitely enjoyed watching the confusion unfold.

> Not actually responding to the essence of the comparison.

The comparison was a bad-faith strawman that did not reflect the conversation here. In that situation a person might be an asshole, possibly even hostile. That does not automatically make these commenters hostile assholes, that's just the height of intellectual laziness.

> Just bad-faith comparisons that equate "Just Be Yourself" stickers with "I hate fags" stickers

No I didn't make that comparison, and you're a nasty and intellectually dishonest person for trying to say I did.

> Again, if you consider a group of people sharing their art between each other and having a conversation about it, and someone comes in and is like "This art is stupid." that is hostile. That is exactly what is happening here.

No that's not hostile. Somebody submitted this content inviting the HN community to comment on it and oh my god not everybody loves it. Some even hate it and are blunt about it. That's not weird hostility, it's people self-expressing their dislike of things in not always polite terms. Like some of these laptop stickers are doing.

If you're in a circle of people whose moods can be brought down because of a shared opinion, you're in a circle of prepubescent children who haven't learned to regulate their emotions like a grown up.

Thank you for proving my point.

I think some people would be very interested in similar satirical stickers.Unfortunately, this link is sold out.

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005005801847872.html

Leave the backing on the sticker, put it on the laptop with rubber cement.

I was hoping for a link to a series of stickers such as "spit", "gum", "string", "paperclips", with graphics including a band-aid and a pair of tin cans.

Our cyber security team told people not to put stickers on the laptop as it can be used to spear phish the owner, can open to industrial espionage.

They even showed us this cheesy video showing.

1. A woman chatting up a developer based on their stickers on the laptop they saw earlier. 2. Someone targeting the laptop for theft because of the stickers.

People still do it, but I've only seen it on the junior people trying to express who they are.

> I always found it terrible security, it’s basically advertising what someone would get if they stole your laptop.

My work laptop has a hard-to-damage sticker on the bottom with inventory control information. Company name, serial number, hostname suffix, etc

"People expressing their hatred for art in impolite terms" is not hostile to you? What exactly would hostility in this context look like to you? Or is it just not possible to be hostile about this?

My favorite laptop anti-sticker https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Stickers-are-Prohibited-...

Would fit well here judging from some of the sentiments expressed.

I've never been able to bring myself to put stickers on my laptop - not since the Titanium PowerBook came out.

Everything else in my life? Covered in them. But my laptops are always pristine. This has always made me faintly sad.

We like to exercise the 1st Amendment.

i need more stickers

Evidently you're also unable to comprehend that criticism is something grown adults do as well.

thats very cool

Wow, absolutely alternative.

Semantic drift.

No but that's my point, the nazis had to march entire classes of people to death camps at gun point to be considered "normative," and even then there was a resistance movement not only in every occupied country but also Germany itself. The reality is a minority of people were willing to use extraordinary violence and propaganda to present their viewpoint as "normal," but I don't agree that that made it "normal" even for the times.

And even now we see that the normalization of naziism is apparently impossible - I was incredibly cynical about the American right wing happily embracing naziism, but I guess I was partially wrong: there's a schism this week over popular American right wing media figures platforming the nazi Nick Fuentes.

Beagle Bros!!! <much respect>

> It's got the same vibe as going into a circle of people having fun and telling them they're trying too hard.

Strange analogy, considering this is a public forum, and I'm expressing my opinion about the shared link.

If you don't like it, you're free to engage or ignore it. The idea that only positive opinions should be expressed is infantile.

Would love to see them!

A lot of German users. I guess they have a much active hackerscene. Which is true because I literally got my laptop sticker cut out with a cricut cut at a Berlin computer club.

Ah, yes, downvoted and flagged comments is how I know someone is wrong and not worth reading.

Thank you for being a voice of reason within the hive mind.

I have Alpina stickers on my monitor stand. I treat laptops like 1 an done for travel.

I haven't tried putting any on my Framework 12 yet, because the ABS has this sort of rough texture that's very soft and pleasant to touch but seems like it wouldn't hold stickers well long-term. I've been putting mine on retro machines instead, like on my 900MHz HITACHI (actually Acer OEM) PⅢ: https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/GWgVHXHaoAIPiB...

These days I also flatbed-scan any rare stickers before using them, to slake that FOMO “what if something better comes along and I regret using it now?” feeling.

Stickers themselves can be fun and quirky, but I for the life of me can't figure out why people would put such extremely divisive and workplace-unnecessary messaging on their MAIN WORK DEVICE as many of these have.

The kind of lack to integrate to a team having your pride flags, literal death threats to perceived enemies, furries, loli anime, etc on a thing you intend to bring to the workplace to do all your work on isn't good for your career and sure as hell won't not be noticed by people whose responsibility is to judge risk and liabilities for example.

Tech stacks, not party flags.

What's wrong with a pride flag? People commonly display their hetero marriages etc. at workplaces too. If either of those cause division in a workplace, that's a matter for HR or legal to resolve (if it is indeed a disruption).

Anyway it's unclear which of these are brought into offices.

>Some pen test teams use laptop stickers as an excellent resource for proper social engineering.

How?

If anything all the transgender/pride and left-wing political cases just make me notice the more "original" ones more. It's like Where's Waldo. I still find stickers tacky though.

It's annoying to me that you're not allowed to even slightly critique things anymore without people blurting out the thought-terminating cliché "Let people enjoy things!", which attempts to do nothing more than shut down interesting conversation because somebody doesn't like said conversation. (Let people enjoy critiquing?) It's behaviour like this that makes me dread the inevitable Reddit exodus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

Equating right-wing ideas to fascism and hate is not a healthy or realistic mindset. One might say that left-wing ideas are hateful and fascist because of deaths under the Soviet Union.

> lamenting that they do not support policies which historically aim to keep things the same and assimilate/homogenize those who do not fit into perceived societal norms.

Are you familiar with Libertarianism? Conservatism is not the only right-wing ideology.

>People commonly display their hetero marriages etc. at workplaces too

what :D Don't see a single sticker about those and no people don't go out of their way to flaunt their marriages at the workplace. There is a place that is flaunted though, and that is on the behind of their car. "Just Married". How those are used is at the right scope and visibility too.

>If either of those cause division in a workplace, that's a matter for HR or legal to resolve.

If you immediately go to HR (and expect there to be a HR, and for them to take you seriously for minor things) to balance interpersonal issues at work that might just be a sign those issues wouldn't be there without you. Just don't bring your issues to work, be a human.

>it's unclear which of these are brought into offices.

Well I hope for the sake of the users they don't. Sowing discord doesn't reduce just personal success but can soil any project.

> Always seemed like "trying too hard" to me.

My thoughts exactly. It feels very much like they're roleplaying as an ordinary person's idea of a "hacker".

I for the life of me can’t figure out why anyone would post such an extremely divisive comment.

If they’re turning the laptop in due to end-of-employment, what’s IT gonna do?

I'd suggest political conservatives are more likely to enjoy an undecorated laptop. There are a few Libertarian ones though.

My favourite sticker is a play on „Atomkraft? Nein danke!“ [0] (nuclear power? No thanks!) and says: „Atomzeit? Nein danke!“ (Atomic time? No thanks!)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power%3F_No_Thanks

Well he wrote a memo saying the women at Google were "neurotic" and that's why women biologically are predisposed to not be software engineers.

If that's conservative ideology, then I guess it is fair to say such ideology might not be appropriate for a workplace. In reality, he just said stupid stuff to be provocative, and tried to post-hoc justify it as vilifying conservatives instead.

Showing a pride flag at work isn't bringing an issue (just like having a photo of a husband and wife on a desk is not). Someone else having a problem with that and causing a disruption over it, is sowing discord and bringing an issue to work.

Because on HN, people are allowed to express things you disagree with.

For 15 years I have seen only one laptop sith sticker. Its unprofessional for most corporations...

Somewhere I have a "RUN GCC" sticker from the Free Software Foundation that I was given by Daniel Stenberg (author of curl) at some meetup here in Stockholm.

That would actually be kind of cool, I always end up not being able to make up my mind about what would be worthy.

It's moistly about being able to recognize your laptop from others when the company has standardized on as sdinglke model. I have an Epson ColorWorkjs C4000e label printer and design and print my own, but some my 13 year old daughter designed for me and are extra special.

Thanks for the reminder to put a pride flag on my new work computer. Can't for the life of me figure out why it'd be divisive though.

Also, why do you assume these aren't people's personal computers? Many people surely own computers personally, and of course people can express themselves on personal property.

When humans are lost into the screens, the screen-backs make a desperate attempt to talk to other humans.

You know what to do!

You could also put a layer of vinyl on the laptop and then put the stickers on that. That way you can peel the whole thing off when you upgrade. I remembered reading about it on dev.to a few years back.

https://dev.to/graystevens/preserving-laptop-stickers-on-mac...

> and the political ones are very, very rare... at least not in the tech world

That's what I said: events (especially hacking camps) that are not purely tech-focused. We're just going to different kinds of events :)

Not the OP, but I have heard something similar from a sec conf before. Gist being if a laptop has stickers like this, then the chances of the owner being an engineer is significantly higher, so pentest teams / malicious actors can better focus their efforts on those individuals, and have a higher chance of gaining access to internal systems than if they targeted random folks in public.

Doesn't help as well that arguably the kind of stickers a laptop displays tends to hint at who's a sysadmin or not, etc.

Wireshark, doo doo doo doo doo doo.

That's how git commits work.

Current laptop stickers: current state.

Photo of the previous laptop: reference to previous commit.

Framework is the only laptop regarding which I've had someone ask "what brand is this?".

There's genuine interest (well, at least until they hear about the price) and I guess people intuitively understand that laptops don't really have to be replaced every now and then, it's just that mainstream offerings are built this way.

The other day I wrote a lengthy essay about all the pros and cons of the device from my perspective for one 18yo son of a friend, who insisted this would be his college laptop, because he's seen some YouTuber present it. I think he's decided already, so I focused on managing expectations.

> The reality is a minority of people were willing to use extraordinary violence and propaganda to present their viewpoint as "normal," but I don't agree that that made it "normal" even for the times.

Before modernity, extraordinary violence and propaganda were, well, ordinary. Hitler just made that work on industrial scale, but the underlying moral ideas weren't anything new. During antiquity, people didn't mind slaughtering entire cities. Even more modern history is full shit like that, look up Mongol invasions.

BTW don't you think that it's a little awkward that in modern times "pirates", which were people that'd literally kill seamen for profit, are considered a fun Halloween theme for children? I can imagine that in 500 years Nazi costumes will be similarly normalized.

I used to put stickers on my work laptop. Then one day I upgraded my laptop, which meant handing over my old one with stickers.

Which meant scrubbing it (there's no reason I'll let whoever receives it to scrub it for me)

Which was an absolute pain.

I don't put stickers on my laptops anymore.

This is definitely the case!

For me it was having to replace my MacBook's screen and loosing all the stickers in the process that made me realize I would loose any sticker used on a Laptop eventually.

I sandwich them between my phone and a clear case now. Don't even have to take the stickum protector part off, so when you get a new phone, you can take your favorite stickers easily. Disadvantage: you get like 2 stickers total.

I think the only stickers I saw on cars in France and Switzerland are the "baby one board" and "<stick figures of the members of a family>".

That sounds like info you would already have by taking a look at LinkedIn or am I missing something?

I really really like the feel of the textured ABS though :)

-> bad OPSEC ;-)

In case you’re wondering, this is 我 (me).

https://stickertop.art/content/images/2025/11/IMG_4148-1.jpe...

It depends on what parties you go to :). Business events are where you get logos of programming languages and various technologies; hacker events are where you get the more opinionated and artsy ones.