What talks did you attend at HOPE? There were tons of hard technical presentations. The two guys who cracked the Iridium satellite network in particular were amazing, going into deep detail on the techniques and methods used to decode the frequencies. The talk on medical device hacking was also awesome - I mean they showed you how to get on a radiology machine and other exploits. And after I saw the talk on hacking your cars internal computer I was able to go home and start futsing around with that stuff on my garage (after buying some hardware).

Maybe they don't do a lot of talks on the intricacies of C anymore (which is a bummer) but there is still a lot of technical knowledge going down at these events. I had s great time and learned so much