6 ms·
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
by eimrine 4y ago
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
- nh23423fefe 4y agoyou didn't love swordfish?
- sp332 4y agoI liked one bit of that movie, when Hugh Jackman is pacing around muttering "I'm too old for this shit" and finishing a bottle of wine during a coding session.
- acidburnNSA 4y agoThat "building the worm" scene has got to be my favorite depiction of software development of all time. https://youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ds9CeG-VY https://youtube.com/watch?v=u1Ds9CeG-VY
- achr2 4y agoWhy did I just watch that again. I knew it was going to be pure cringe, but I clicked it anyway.
- usgroup 4y agolol -- brilliant. Notice he was using Github Copilot -- that's what all those green blocks are. He' just got the 31337 CLI version.
- CodeMage 4y agoOh, man. I forgot how much I hated that particular scene. It was almost as bad as the "60-second crack" scene.
- Octoth0rpe 4y agoI mean, it got the "% of spoken words that are profanities" part correct.
- gwbas1c 4y agoI hated it, personally. The special effects were so bad that I lost my suspension of disbelief; and the ending where John Travolta (it was a long time ago) was part of a super-secret organization that was so secret that no one knew about it nearly made me laugh.
- Brajeshwar 4y agoThat was not a bad movie. Prior to the movie, I read about the Carnivore and the Magic Lantern program. Then heard them mentioned in the movie, and thought "Ah! Nice".
- scoutt 4y agoI hated it. IIRC, there is this part where the main character is trying to assemble a virus, shouting "compile, compile, please compile... YES!". I wasn't convinced about this hacker having problems to compile a program... OR There is another possible explanation but I have to check dates since I think the movie was released way before the first version of Rust!!!
- TheMaskedCoder 4y agoVulnerability discovery and programming are different skill sets. I've seen terrible code written by talented security researchers.
- sschueller 4y agoThe only good part was Halle Berry...
- liampulles 4y agoMy dad always used the ball bearing explosion scene to demonstrate his surround sound system to guests :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiHZWeeoEUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiHZWeeoEUg
- Overtonwindow 4y agoWhat about War Games ?!
- genghisjahn 4y agoWar Games resonated with me a lot. That montage of him trying to find the password was great. Looking things up the library, sadistic microfiche, news papers and getting BUZZ ERROR, BUZZ ERROR, BUZZ ERROR over and over. If you'd like to fill your days with that, programming is for you.
- gwbas1c 4y agoOnly if your corn is raw.
- genghisjahn 4y agoI take pills and cook the corn.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago+1 for Sneakers. I'd add the original "The Italian Job" to the list as well.
- djbusby 4y agoThe bus at the end, right?
- CodeMage 4y ago"Sneakers" and "War Games" were my favorites, because they were so realistic and thought-provoking. "Tron" was my favorite from the "magic disguised as computers" category.
- colordrops 4y agoNot a movie but have you seen Mr. Robot?
- cantSpellSober 4y agoFight Club is the same plot in movie form right? Unreliable narrator, secret society (starting with "F") of anarcho-capitalists bent on bringing down Big Credit, cheesy hacking lingo etc?
- colordrops 4y agoThe creator of the show doesn't hide that Fight Club is an influence. The hacker stuff is pretty legit though. Characters use Termux on their phones, Kali Linux, python scripts etc
- mewse-hn 4y agoThe first season of mr. robot borrows a hell of a lot from fight club, but it diverges as the show goes on. One of the rare shows that sticks the landing.
- j0hnyl 4y agoMr. Robot has a lot of obvious nods to its influences, and that's fine. I loved the series, hated the ending thouugh.
- ralusek 4y agoWhat about The Core where he has to "hack the planet," and is able to do so because "his Kung Fu is strong."
- badocr 4y ago> "his Kung Fu is strong." Was this a reference to Mitnick's phone calls to Tsutomo?
- kragen 4y agoI'd recommend The Internet's Own Boy, Buckaroo Banzai, Real Genius, Office Space, or Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle ahead of Hackers and Sneakers. Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it. I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them. The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... which I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine. The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy. I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
- sleepybrett 4y agoI'm a huge fan of buckaroo banzai but there is like one scene with a computer in it.
- kragen 4y agoVon Neumann was a hacker since his childhood, not just after computers were invented. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for being a hacker 340 years before computers were invented.
- pfarrell 4y agoI notice no on has mentioned "The Net". With good reason, if I remember correctly.
- inanutshellus 4y agoJust hold down the control key when you click the Pi symbol on this website and BAM instantly you've hacked the FBI database.
- cantSpellSober 4y agoIt's a great "cheesy movie night" movie. It's aged terribly, Angela is a 1337 hacker because she orders pizza ONLINE!
- shadowgovt 4y agoI often tell people that if they want to see a fun movie, see Hackers, but if they want to know what hacking is like, see Sneakers. ... though the all-nighter scene in Hackers where they just "flow" out some code while techno plays over the montage is also pretty accurate.
- alisonatwork 4y agoI tend to describe Hackers as depicting what coding feels like on the inside. All those great visuals, the pumping music, it captures the emotion of getting your teeth into a really gnarly problem, and the exuberance of eventually coming up with a solution. People watching over the shoulder of a developer at work are just going to see a bunch of scrolling text and tedious iterations of red, red, red, green, reload, alt-tab, change a thing, wait, red, red, red, green, and so on. But that workflow - if you dig the work - is enthralling. And when you solve the problem, it's worth throwing your hands up with glee, and (internally) belting out a cheesy action hero oneliner. Not to mention when you are real-time dealing with attackers trying to compromise your systems, the chaos and exasperation and desperate attempts to block them very much match the climactic scene of The Plague and his hapless techno weenies typing "cookie". I'm probably biased because of my age and the time in my career when I first watched the movie (around the same time as my first job) but to me it still feels like the most authentic silver screen portrayal of what I do. More modern shows often capture the cold, hard reality of the work better, which admittedly is just a bunch of text scrolling on a screen. And there are definitely works that better satirize the office culture, like Office Space and Silicon Valley. But there still hasn't been much that captured the excitement of the time, and can really explain to people outside of the industry why at least a certain subset of 1990s teenagers felt compelled to get into this apparently boring and nerdy career. I suppose it's very "of its time", because nowadays everyone understands why kids want to get into IT - it's one of the most flexible and lucrative careers there is.
- linsomniac 4y agoVery much agree, many people I've talked to about Hackers don't seem to get this "it shows what it feels like", and get hung up on interpreting details literally, like the favorite complaint "screens don't project a sharp image onto the wall behind you". I also like Swordfish for this. Him dancing at the keyboard while programming is very much what it feels like when you have a good hack going.
- mtberatwork 4y agoWhat about "Three Days of the Condor"?
- yamtaddle 4y agoAntitrust was fun. Not good, but fun.
- eddieroger 4y agoSneakers 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.
- greggman3 4y agoI re-watched Sneakers a few months ago based on comments like this. I didn't really enjoy it when it came out and I didn't enjoy it this time either. Not sure why it doesn't work for me.
- eddieroger 4y agoTruly sorry to hear that. I guess not everything can be for everyone. But maybe there are some movies out there you do enjoy more!
- fodmap 4y ago'23' is a great movie. 'Who am I' deserves a mention too.
- dpkirchner 4y agoDo you have any tips for finding 23 with English subtitles? Obviously I'm trying Google (and excluding "Number 23" and attempting to exclude "23 blast" (Google is treating my minus as a plus when excluding both)).
- fodmap 4y agoThat movie is on Archive.org, so maybe you could try to look for subs for those specific titles. https://archive.org/details/23-nichts-ist-so-wie-es-scheint-1998 https://archive.org/details/23-nichts-ist-so-wie-es-scheint-... https://archive.org/details/Hackers_-_23_part_-II_- https://archive.org/details/Hackers_-_23_part_-II_- The second one says part II but is the complete movie.
- dpkirchner 4y agoI always forget about archive.org, thanks!
- Apocryphon 4y agoJust posted a Sneakers story yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32858840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32858840
- dehrmann 4y agoSneakers was the better movie. More accurate, better actors, better plot.
- jrnichols 4y ago"Antitrust" was a fun movie as well.
- xenospn 4y agoI still remember being awestruck by Sneakers. It made a lifelong impression on 13(14?) year old me. I'll never forget watching it for the first time.
- e12e 4y agoI reco the German "23" (not that horrible American flick). https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/