In some ways they are actually much easier to find.

Now we have makerspaces, like Noisebridge, chock full of geeks hacking on all sorts of crazy and interesting stuff.

There are forums like Hackaday and various engineering blogs and vlogs.

HN itself occasionally has a good lead.

All of these people are easily contactable now, whereas in the past you might struggle to get in touch with them even if you'd heard about them somehow, especially if they were in another country.

Now distance is not really an issue any more, and you can even do video communication with them, easily trade schematics or anything else you may wish to know or have pretty much instantly.

This is truly the golden age of hacking right now. Enjoy it while you can.