Good job, thanks for sharing!
Should I be looking at the code for easter eggs? :)
Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
271–280 of 294 posts
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#272I love the ethos of this movie. That it was about hacking and building things for fun, not for money and profit. This to me is what hacking and programming has always been about. It's too bad that overinflated salaries and the hype that if you go into software you will make a lot of money has watered down the culture to an extent. And now, with the advent of AI and vibe coding, it's been increasingly difficult (for m…
It was right in the tagline: “Their only crime was curiosity.”
Taken straight from The Mentor: https://phrack.org/issues/7/3
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember being at Summercon before this movie opened and Ericb addressing hotel conference room we were seated in talking about how Iain Softley had directed Backbeat and how happy he was that he was doing this movie and that you had to get in the right headspace to understand what it was going for. (I think the movie is wildly overrated just as a piece of storytelling; the hacker fan-service in it is just fine, th…
It’s not a story driven movie, it’s a movie about a stylized subculture and youth. Compare it to Dazed & Confused instead of Chinatown. The point is to make you want to hang out with those people on those days and it does that tremendously well. If you disagree your a flake.
See, I can push back on that! Dazed & Confused barely has a plot. It knows what it's about. Hackers has one of those shake-and-bake 80s plots; it's like a Save The Cat movie. I get that people like the subculture stuff in it, but the movie was trying for something else and faceplanted.
Honestly I think Lawnmower Man might have had more cultural impact.
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#274A silly movie but I love it so much. Such nostalgia too.
In the spirit of hackers I have to share this - I just asked Claude 4.6 to make a file system browser that works kinda like this, and it took 5 minutes to make something that actually works. Directories as skyscrapers with files as text on the side, moving around by wasd.
It uses three.js and a browser so it's just a toy of course but still, I can navigate my filesystem like they do in Hackers (1995) and it was a 5 minute interaction with a computer, using natural language. Another few hours and I'm sure I can copy garbage files too.
I've never felt more obsolete but still had to laugh. What a time to be alive!
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#275I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile. And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho. Hack…
> crush as a young teenager was Burn Who hadn't? I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.
I had just started getting an interest in computers and went to the cinema with my boyfriend at the time who was (and remains) a classic computer programmer. I remember sitting in the cinema with him, both of us laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of it all. I felt like I was in the in-crowd to understand the film was all artefact and fashion, but for all that it captured something accurate about the community's need for belonging, in spite of the anarchic messaging. I feel that hasn't changed much and maybe it's why we still love this movie, along with Sneakers, Silicon Valley, Office Space and War Games. Maybe it's also why coder movies like The Social Network and Ex Machina don't resonate as community favourites because they don't bring an inclusive experience.
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Content creators I'd argue the very words creating "content" implies something commercial is already in mind and is a driver, rather than just doing your own thing online and not caring (such showing a video of your band/hobby on YouTube in case anybody is interested). To a Gen-X'er, the former sounds like they are already a sell out :-) I certainly agree with you that perceptions have shifted.
I agree with you and I find the term "creating content" awful, even though I'm forced to use it because it's something people immediately understand. "Content creator"... what happened to artist, playwright, painter, hobbyist, etc? It makes it seem as if they were making stuff for a corporation to sell.
Content is an intentionally chosen word in order to make "feeding from the corporate trough" not seem so repulsive.
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#277Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.
As ytcracker says: Lost a lot of my people to drugs and jail And suicide cause we do or die Thats the way this thing goes with my crew and i But i guess that we all keep it moving right Terminal eternally but you know that i ain't sick Out here idling on my nick While i go ahead and do another magic trick I'm sorry for your loss. I've lost many to all of these. The worst is someone I was in federal prison with and wo…
ytcracker still the greatest 2/26/2026 NES forever (9'.')9 (9'.')-o
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
The movie is obviously technical garbage but one thing it did well was capture that early hacker counterculture spirit. I think a lot of us can appreciate that for the warm blanket it is and forgive its technical accuracy and story flaws.
I find this and Starship Troopers to fit in a similar niche for me. When I first saw them I found them very cringey, horrible, couldn't stand it. Hackers for the reasons being discussed here. ST because of how bastardized it was from the source material. But over time I grew to love both of them. In both cases I started to appreciate how they weren't trying to be faithful representations, but rather capture a particu…
Starship Troopers is actually nothing like Hackers? Verhoeven's Troopers is a straight-up satire of the USA's industrial-military complex.
Re: Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
#279Hack the planet. This is such a call back and what a nice touch to add the sound to it too. That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists. What a fun movie.
I, too, have such a work playlist entitled "Hack the Mainframe." It's got this type of stuff along with 90s/early 2000s breakbeat songs that ended up shoehorned into car and techno thriller movies at the time. I know a lot of this music was reviled as sellout trash at the time but I was too young to know any better when I first heard it and think it still holds up phenomenally well.
I was never into this kind of music back in the day, but I had heard A LOT of it from PSX games. going back to it as an adult, I freakin' love it