121–130 of 236 posts
My wife and I went to a showing of Hackers at DNALounge in 2020 - https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2020/02-28.html . They set it up to look like Cyberdelia. After the movie they ran a costume contest. The showing was just weeks before the pandemic truly hit America, and we felt pretty lucky that we made it home with out anything.
Ripe fromage. If I were writing the sequel, it would be a series, and it would be about how they grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies. While reversing a worm that was unleashed by trolls to sabotage a social-credit/Nosedive-like app, Kate/acidburn finds the encoded string "that place where I put that thing that time," which has to be a reference to their old cre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world o…
John Carmack was also constantly working on the cutting edge. I think that makes a big difference. IIRC from reading MoD, he was the first person to get true side-scrolling working on an x86 chip, before it was thought to not be powerful enough vs the chips used in consoles at the time. Problem is that most of us just don't get to work on the cutting edge usually. A lot of the software that needs building often doesn…
For anyone saying it wasn't a realistic depiction - that was on purpose. The hacking scenes are visual metaphors, meant to "spice things up."
An analysis of all hacks in the movie: https://medium.com/h0llyw00d-h4x0rs/hackers-b93e78b95485
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
Ripe fromage. If I were writing the sequel, it would be a series, and it would be about how they grew up and now they all work leading security at platform companies and government agencies. While reversing a worm that was unleashed by trolls to sabotage a social-credit/Nosedive-like app, Kate/acidburn finds the encoded string "that place where I put that thing that time," which has to be a reference to their old cre…
Yes please! Bet it would have a killer soundtrack too
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
Sneakers really doesn't get enough love, probably because I'm not sure people knew what to make of it. Names so big the billboards couldn't hold them all, but doing things with computers that didn't make sense to your average viewer. So punk, even if half of them are in suits. I love Hackers, but it's like a generational sequel to Sneakers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It very much does exist. Just look for places trying to change the very basics of how the world works by hacking on new technology. You know, the places that naturally attract cypherpunks, people distrustful of 'the system' and the like. You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
Aside from crypto startups, could you share an example?
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street. It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists s…
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.