Laptops with Stickers
Posted2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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Laptop StickersSelf-ExpressionHacker Culture
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Laptop Stickers
Self-Expression
Hacker Culture
A website showcasing laptops decorated with stickers sparks a discussion about personal expression, hacker culture, and the significance of laptop customization.
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- 01Story posted
Nov 2, 2025 at 6:58 AM EST
2 months ago
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Nov 11, 2025 at 4:54 PM EST
9d after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
147 comments in Day 10
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Nov 18, 2025 at 6:29 AM EST
about 2 months ago
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ID: 45789674Type: storyLast synced: 11/22/2025, 11:47:55 PM
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Maybe I am just boring, lol. I did use an original copy of the PGP source code book as a monitor stand though!
My thoughts exactly. It feels very much like they're roleplaying as an ordinary person's idea of a "hacker".
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'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
Losing developer productivity for a few days because a new laptop has to be provisioned, shipped and set up is also not cheap, so I feel there is some value to your employer in you making it slightly less likely for your laptop to be stolen at a conference or coffee shop.
"You might want to give that a wipe."
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.
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.
https://dev.to/graystevens/preserving-laptop-stickers-on-mac...
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.
One currently sits on my Framework over the Framework logo. The edge of the Framework gear sticks out in the bite in the apple and the sticker is thin enough the black framework logo shows clearly through the white of the apple.
On first glance, it looks like "trying to make a cheap laptop look expensive". On second it's looks like doing a really bad job of it. Anyone who actually knows the brand at all or asked about it will know the truth... it's making an expensive laptop look like a different expensive laptop.
So I guess it's not just the absurdity of the sticker, but how you use 'em.
I've typically put dbrand skins on my laptops just to protect them from scuffs, I hand my work ones back with the skin on and no one has ever cared, or perhaps even noticed; I choose subtle ones like the hex or Carbon patterns that look like they could just be the actual lid from the manufacturer.
I don't sticker up my laptops (as much as I've always wanted to), but if it was done on top of one of these vinyl skins, it should be relatively easy to remove (never tried).
And seeing just /how/ many laptops are that way it made me feel a lot less weird about putting stickers on "my" work laptop.
A way to keep the memories of that the stickers represent.
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.
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.
As corporate principles in general go, they were decent, but frequently they were used to excuse poor behavior, so... Yeah.
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).
Now I'm tempted to make a set of: Perl, COBOL, Java Beans, Java EE, ActiveX, Silverlight, VB.Net, ActiveDirectory, Kerberos, ...
You absolute monster. I'd managed to forget that that had existed.
So far no one has ever been offended by this though. HN is far more sensitive than the average CTO.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Well there was that corporate-approved "bring your whole self to work" thing in recent years.
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.
My at home and around town laptop can be my canvas.
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."
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.
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'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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Considering that background, expect them to look more like a random Berlin lightpost than a conversation piece.
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.
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?
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.
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.
In America today, liberals feel very comfortable speaking about their views in public. Conservatives don't.
"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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrINRHeNDQA
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
That's the wildcard card option, you never know what you'll get.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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