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The movie Hackers was released 27 years ago
- beebeepka 4y agoDid not work for me at the time but pretty much everyone cool was super impressed with it. And why wouldn't they? We were the target audience. Somehow hacking computer things wasn't as appealing as shooting intelligent bugs. Would you like to know more?
- wslh 4y agoI am really curious: what do you find interesting about this movie in comparison with Sneakers (advised by Leonard Alemán [1]) and War Games? I don't remember any takeaway from Hackers. [1] https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/ https://molecularscience.usc.edu/sneakers/
- kloch 4y agoEveryone knows Angelina Jolie, but did you know Jonny Lee Miller (Zero Cool) has had a prodigious acting career after Hackers? https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001538/ https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001538/ My favorite character of his was Sherlock Holmes in "Elementary"
- onychomys 4y agoHe's also the owner of the all-time worst American accent, in the not very good movie Mindhunters. Here's a clip from the middle of the movie showing it. There are spoilers for the movie in the clip, but you should probably never see it, so spoiling things isn't such a terrible thing. https://youtu.be/UACodohFhPs https://youtu.be/UACodohFhPs
- racl101 4y agoHe was great as Sick Boy from Trainspotting.
- benj111 4y agoHe also played Graeme Obree in the Flying Scotsman. That's a good film too.
- eimrine 4y agoHackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
- 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!
- 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?
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- _chu1 4y agoCheesy but fun movie
- acidburnNSA 4y agoI only watched Hackers for the first time a few years ago and was really happy with it. Do recommend.
- bnt 4y agoI still remember watching it as a kid when it came out, it’s one of the reasons I got into programming in the first place. The alure of being a ninja hacker to a 8 year old was hard to escape. Funny enough, it took another 6 years until I got my first computer, and another 2 after that when I got access to the internet.
- basicallybones 4y agoType "cookie" you idiot!
- kiernanmcgowan 4y agoMess with the best, die like the rest
- dillutedfixer 4y agoThis is one of the best lines from any movie ever. I used it on a much younger co-worker of mine when he was having an issue with a website and it turned out to be a problem with cookies. It was clear to me from his facial response that he had never seen the movie. It didn't go over well.
- bitwize 4y agoBack in the 70s there was actually a piece of malware running on the PDP systems of the time called "Cookie Monster" that actually would halt the user's session and display "GIVE ME A COOKIE"; the only way to clear it was to type "cookie". This only worked temporarily, however, and some versions of the program demanded cookies more and more frequently. The Cookie Monster program was a part of hacker lore, including the Jargon File, at the time of the release of Hackers. I remember recognizing the reference when I saw the movie. Many of the other viruses and malwares in the movie ("Arf Arf Gotcha", the "Da Vinci Virus" being a reference to the Michelangelo virus scare of 1992) were also references to legendary real-world hacker lore. Even Zero Cool's crashing of 1507 systems in one day was a reference to Robert Morris's worm of the late 1980s.
- dpkirchner 4y agoI used to talk about hacking the Gibson all the time. Gotta bring that back for the anniversary.
- ridgered4 4y agoThis movie has everything, including Matthew Lillard!
- kgwxd 4y agoSadly, not as spit heavy as his other roles.
- pjmlp 4y agoI remember how this was a kind of cult movie around my university group, we had several watch sessions organized back in the day. We took it from the local movie rental shop, remember those?
- derwiki 4y agoMy video rental store sold it to me because I was the only person who ever rented it
- baldeagle 4y agoI always wanted the epic boot up sequences like they had in that movie... in Windows for a bit you could change your boot image, but I could never get it to be an animation.....
- DSingularity 4y agoI vaguely remember being able to hack it to display an animation…
- ramesh31 4y ago>I vaguely remember being able to hack it to display an animation… I can remember as a kid downloading executables that claimed they would do this for you. In retrospect they were probably just malware…
- ridgered4 4y agoIIRC the bitmap was saved as a .sys file to make it a secret for some reason.
- qbrass 4y agoThe image itself was 320x400 bitmap and the animation was done through palette cycling.
- baldeagle 4y agoAll these years later, there is an answer to years of lounging. Thank you for the closure. :)
- toast0 4y agoI've got a dorky 'matrixish' oembootlogo on my desktop cause the bios tool asks for an image. Doesn't animate or anything though. It would be difficult to use the windows 95 pallete animation to do a rotation effect, I think.
- savrajsingh 4y agoSimpler times...
- smmnyc 4y ago"Risc is good"
- ch_sm 4y ago"RISC architecture is going to change everything"
- esprehn 4y agoAnd they were right! Just 20 years too early.
- kragen 4y agoNo, no, RISC architecture was already changing everything. I mean, RISC made possible not only the Newton, but also the Alphas that shortly after that powered AltaVista, and the SGIs that powered significant parts of the US nuclear stockpile stewardship program (not to mention some movie visual effects). And arguably without the pressure from RISC we wouldn't have seen the adoption of OoO and the micro-op approach that was already starting to boost CISC performance when the movie came out.
- lancebeet 4y agoOne of the most amusing quotes in the movies given how obvious the statement must have seemed at the time. Tanenbaum made a statement hinting at the same development in the famous usenet debate with Torvalds in 1992. "Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
- zamadatix 4y agoHackers as a whole and hot pocket guy in The Core will forever be the best (worst?) hacker stereotypes to me.
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoPart of what made this movie so startling when it came out is it was the first (and really only) film that was plainly aware of hacker subculture at the time and is loaded with easter eggs demonstrating that. It was at once a ridiculous parody of it and an homage to it. It’s like a love letter to small-h hackers.
- ulkesh 4y ago> loaded with easter eggs Like a 28.8 Bps modem. Bps. Not kBps. Just Bps. Perhaps the actor just misread the line and the editors kept it. Still makes me itch to this day.
- hnuser123456 4y agoI wonder what the highest bandwidth you could get with smoke signals is. Have 288 fires and a bunch of people opening and closing lids on them in 10-second intervals. Awful latency though e: actually that's probably around the speed of morse code or human speech
- toast0 4y agoThe liner notes for the dvd have a chapter named Risk is Good, if you wanna be salty about more stuff.
- sleton38234234 4y agoyeah, he definitely misread the line and the editor probably didn't catch it. i mean, checking wikipedia, seems like even the very first router/modem had 300 bit/s and that was in the 60s. probably should have been 28KBps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem
- xenospn 4y agoI had a 300bps full length ISA modem. It was a beast!
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- gwbas1c 4y agoI was into dial-up BBSes when it came out. We always made fun of the noobs who showed up and named themselves after the movie. Great movie, though. It's one of the few DVDs I've hung onto, even though I haven't watched it in years. Makes me want to skateboard in a datacenter.
- claudiulodro 4y agoBetween 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 somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
- orblivion 4y agoVisit Noisebridge
- ramesh31 4y ago>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 of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
- ed312 4y agoAre startups the closest you can still get to "punk rock in tech"? I would love for the dream of the 90s to still be alive somewhere...
- codingdave 4y agoStartups are the least punk rock thing in tech. Follow patterns and rules to match the expectations of VCs so they give you money... and then they drive what you do. I'm not saying people should not work in startups - they have their place in the industry. But there is nothing "punk rock" about them. If you want to break rules and work outside the lines, we have come full circle to the 90s - bootstrapped small businesses are the way to go.
- ajaimk 4y agoHACK THE PLANET!!!
- _8j50 4y agoTalk about feeling old. Movies will never be as great as they were in mid/late 90s.
- ok123456 4y agoEric Corley was a technical consultant on that movie. Do with that what you may.
- archermarks 4y agoThis movie is one of my favorites. It's absolutely hilarious and so so 90s in the best way.
- hericium 4y agoHah. Just yesterday I was contemplating how awful Angelina Jolie's character's handle "Acid Burn" was. Like - who the fuck would choose such nickname for themselves? Other than that - cult movie. Love it. Awesome soundtrack, not that bad acting and not that bad script for back when computers and internet were hip, not just the usual thing. "Hackers" caricaturally but still somewhat properly presents the phreaking culture which was and is rather uncommon for non-niche movies, especially from that era. This movie aged well.
- marpstar 4y ago> Awesome soundtrack Hackers is my go-to movie as an initial test for a home theater system.
- ulkesh 4y agoMine is the opening to Tron: Legacy. But Hackers is a good one as well.
- pohl 4y agoBoth Acid Burn and Zero Cool had handles that came off as self-deprecating. I kind of liked that, as counterpoint to the competitive ego dynamic between them.
- ZeroCool2u 4y agoSame.
- onychomys 4y agoI think we all had some screen names in high school that seem pretty terrible now.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- derwiki 4y ago
- turdnagel 4y agoHackers is a fun movie. It has a fantastic time capsule soundtrack, fun sets (the arcade, the computer room) and some fun little performances (Matthew Lillard! Fisher Stevens!) It's interesting what the show gets right (little bits of phreaker culture, social engineering) and what it gets wrong (almost everything about how computers actually work). From a realism perspective, Mr. Robot blows this out of the water, but it's still fun.
- elymar 4y agoI listen to the soundtrack while writing code. Gets me fired up!
- imwillofficial 4y agoThere was a time where I fervently sought all the rainbow books and the hidden knowledge contained within those vibrant tomes of arcane wisdom.
- jgilias 4y agoI still use "there's a pool on the roof" when meeting someone new to see if I've met one of my own :D
- inanutshellus 4y agoYou get zero cool points out of pulling a prank like that.
- jgilias 4y agoVery nice :D
- robohoe 4y agoThat's awesome! I've used "the pool on the roof must have a leak" a few times as well. That movies has so many one-liner quotes that still live on to this day.
- toast0 4y agoMy kid's school has forbidden stairs up to attic storage or something, but the kids think there might be a pool up there for the teachers.
- shawxe 4y agoI very regularly refer to the act of writing code as "hacking the Gibson."
- fudgy 4y agoThe Hackers soundtrack is the root node of all my electronic music discoveries… It all started with Orbital, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield…
- pixelpoet 4y agoI literally listened to Halcyon & on & on for something like 2 years on loop while teaching myself programming in QBasic and assembly language.
- gw99 4y agoCompletely agree with that. One of the best soundtracks in a film. Shame about the film!
- bamboozled 4y agoThe film was good
- Justin_K 4y agoUnderworld still tours here and there - I've seen them 3 times now.... such a great act!
- motohagiography 4y agoRipe 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 crew, but she can't let anyone know because the scandal against the social platform company would swing an election. Story unfolds as a mix of tracking down Dade/zerocool, who apparently made money in crypto and disappeared to live on boats and vanlife away from technology, and who may be the one behind the worm. Busting him busts her, so she has to find her old ex and talk him down somehow. He may also be the father of her first kid and she still has unreconciled feelings, and he doesn't know. Homages to the Before Midnight sequels about finding each other again, and the Thurman/Carradine Kill Bill finale. Working title is, "Defcon 30" Who wants to fund it?
- theprincess 4y agoThis is an amazing concept. It got me searching through Hackers content on AO3, haha. Thank you for sharing! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hackers%20(1995)/works https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Hackers%20(1995)/works
- derwiki 4y agoYes please! Bet it would have a killer soundtrack too
- motohagiography 4y agoWould recruit Richard D. James and Max Richter (former FSOL) and maybe Nils Frahm to score it. Floria Sigismondi to direct or at least DP, or Jolie to self direct. Writing team members from For All Mankind and Mr. Robot. Cameos by everyone. Easter eggs by Parker Warner Wright. It's so close to reality already it becomes an ARG pretty fast.
- derac 4y agoDefinitely needs Underworld and Orbital on there. That movie had such a beautiful soundtrack.
- E39M5S62 4y agoMy wife and I went to a showing of Hackers at DNALounge in 2020 - https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2020/02-28.html 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.
- lallysingh 4y agoDon't click the link please. There's a "special" redirect image when the referer is HN. Just go ahead and copy-paste the link to a new tab.
- kstrauser 4y agoI was there for that! DNA is one of my favorite places in the world.
- bitwize 4y agoI hated it when it came out for its inaccuracy, but man it's just so much fun I'm developing a video game inspired by it! Actually, I take that back. In terms of culture it was not that far off the mark. I went to college near New York City, and it turned out to be a local hotbed for activity in the MOD/tracker scene. I used to pal around with one guy who was a big deal in the KFMF, and he looked like he could have come right off the set of Hackers. Even used the handle "Phreak" for a bit and had Hackers soundtrack posters on the wall. Because you know, awesomest soundtrack(s) of all time and that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Asmod4n 4y agoJust watched it a few days ago, i would argue its the only movie which can visualize it how you feel the flow when you are hacking on something.
- MDGeist 4y agoMy local cinema recently showed this and it was great to see it on a big screen, I think the older you are the funnier and more ridiculous it gets. When I was a kid and saw it I was totally inspired seeing them hacking from a payphone outside on the street, I thought it was so cool!
- Foxboron 4y agoDuring Chaos Communication Camp in 2019 we held a veryvery improvised screening of Hackers. The people at the Norwegian hackerspace I was with had never seen the movie, clearly this was a mistake we needed to fix! For those unaware of CCCamp here are some pictures; http://smtw.de/cccamp19/ http://smtw.de/cccamp19/ We managed to steal^Wborrow the projector screen from an empty workshop tent. Hauled it across a veryvery busy whiskytasting event (called Whiskeyleaks). Got a small projector and then we rigged the sound. A single concert speaker was our sound source, but we had no AUX cable long enough. So we found a headset with an AUX output on it and chained it together with the AUX cable :) The end result https://twitter.com/MortenLinderud/status/1165029639640760322 https://twitter.com/MortenLinderud/status/116502963964076032... Also had a screening at May Contain Hackers this year, and it was great having 30 people scream "Hack the Planet" during the movie and loudely complain when the RISC line came :)
- christianboyle 4y agoBest movie ever. 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 https://medium.com/h0llyw00d-h4x0rs/hackers-b93e78b95485
- stevenhubertron 4y agoWhoever wrote that and I would be great friends.
- doublerabbit 4y agoYo! Check this out. This is insanely great. It's got a 28.8 bps modem. One of my favs: The Plague: We are samurai. The keyboard cowboys. And all those other people who have no idea what's going on are the cattle. Moo.
- par 4y agoI saw this movie in theaters and reviewed it for my 8th grade newspaper. :)
- kloch 4y agoHackers was released September 15, 1995. The newest version of Netscape you could have been using the day it came out was 1.22. Netscape 2.0 came out three days later (September 18, 1995) and included first support for javascript, java, and plugins. The Dot-Com craze was just getting started but nobody knew how big it would become. Few worked for Internet startups and nobody had been to a launch party yet. I had registered my first domain name just two months earlier. What an amazing time (1994-2000) to be alive and just out of school. It was our "Roaring 20's"
- racl101 4y agoI was just entering my teens during those years. Few things I remember vividly were - Hackers (1995) - Mortal Kombat the Movie (1995) (both of these movies used Orbital's Halcyon +On +On) song and a bunch of other electronic music - And I remember the Windows 1995 release. That was a HUUUUUGE software release.
- bitshiftfaced 4y agoIirc, the movie's official website got hacked, saying it was a terrible movie and to go see "The Net" instead. Also, the movie's website got in to some hot water for hosting some kind of hacking information on it.
- didgetmaster 4y agoMy wife who is a doctor rented this for us to watch when it first came out on video since I am a programmer. She couldn't understand why I kept rolling my eyes at many scenes. I think she understood when I got her back by renting some hospital drama movie and watched her roll her eyes at all the improbable medical situations it presented.
- meatsock 4y agothe hackers soundtrack is fantastic and includes some of the best electronic music from the era. the version of halcyon and on is in my opinion almost as good as the original 11 minute 12" uk promo edit [0], which may not have fit on this soundtrack. in 2020 varese sarabande released an expanded 2xCD of the hackers soundtrack [1]. the second disk includes full length versions of the instrumental electronic music composed for the film by simon boswell [2] but not included on the 1 disk soundtrack and is absolutley essential listening while rollerblading to the payphones at penn station. [0] https://www.discogs.com/release/42711-Orbital-Halcyon https://www.discogs.com/release/42711-Orbital-Halcyon [1] https://www.discogs.com/release/15991139-Various-Hackers-Original-Motion-Picture-Soundtrack https://www.discogs.com/release/15991139-Various-Hackers-Ori... [2] https://www.discogs.com/artist/68855-Simon-Boswell https://www.discogs.com/artist/68855-Simon-Boswell
- benj111 4y agoGet with it grandad. we scoot to the Uber while using our iPhone these days.
- NGRhodes 4y agoHighly flawed film; bizarre sense of style, ropey acting, terrible culture references, insane computer representations. All so bad, its agelessly bad, like only a true cult film can be. But there is one huge redeeming thing for me, and that is I find it a really fun caper.
- Findecanor 4y agoYou forgot one redeeming thing: the soundtrack is pure gold.
- optimalsolver 4y agoHalycon on and on! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k07cflKCl-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k07cflKCl-Y
- wernsey 4y agoThere's a YouTube channel building replicas of the character's laptops. Lord Nikon's Laptop [1] is really what I consider a true _Cyberdeck_. P.S. Hackaday is running a Cyberdeck competition [2] if you're into that kind of thing. [1] https://youtu.be/uxY6CUimZ9M https://youtu.be/uxY6CUimZ9M [2] https://hackaday.io/contest/186672-2022-cyberdeck-contest https://hackaday.io/contest/186672-2022-cyberdeck-contest
- gw99 4y agoAbsolutely dire film but a good soundtrack.
- leotravis10 4y agoHackers is still one of those films that are influential and still resonates to this day. If you haven't seen it yet, I would advise to get the Region B (UK) Blu-ray release from 88 Films since not only it has the better surround mix (5.1 compared to 2.0 on the Shout Factory US release) it also has a director commentary track only seen in the UK release. It's pretty easy to get a region free Blu-ray player these days.
- SergeAx 4y agoMy guilty pleasure. Re-watching it every 4-5 years. Still turning on the soundtrack on repeat for pulling an all-night coding session.
- ZeroCool2u 4y agoHere I am still looking for the pool on the roof.