Silicon Valley: Season 3 Tease (HBO) | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley: Season 3 Tease (HBO)

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124 pointschirau27 comments

Context if you forgot the end of season 2, since it is relevant to the trailer:

SPOILERS

Richard Hendricks was ousted as CEO of Pied Piper by the board. (the website has a great joke in the team roster regarding that event: http://www.piedpiper.com/)

Is Carla still working with Pied Piper though? I thought she quit with the rest of the new hires. My suspicion is that they'll find a way to keep her character in the show either way.

The show has faced criticism for having a male dominated cast, so I think the producers will continue with all the female characters on the show.

So its art imitating life imitating art imitating life?

Actually it's just life imitating art imitating life

Thats funny. I remember checking out this site a long time ago. They took away the detail that Erlich also spent some time at Oberlin...

So funny story -

Pied Piper fooled our crawlbots into thinking it was a real company. Not only that, but it fooled our first line of human research and only got caught when someone who had seen the show before we pushed the update to our platform saw the name and thought "huh... I don't think that's actually a real company."

Our bots index all of their sources as well, and they had fake fundraising press releases and the wonderful Pied Piper website listed as a legit source to warrant including this company in their scrape.

We kept it in our platform as an easter egg for a while.

It's interesting how this show gives a glimpse of what life in Silicon Valley as a founder is like.

Obviously it's by no means an accurate representation but it is in some ways a source of inspiration for people working on their startups.

In the show Hooli claims ownership of the underlying IP since Richard worked on Pied Piper during Hooli time and ran some tests on Hooli hardware. How likely is such a scenario to actually occur? I know it's technically possible, but I am not aware of any such high profile case.

As a counterpoint to the Silicon Valley show accuracy, I recently marathoned Betas, which is an Amazon original series which attempted to add comedy to Silicon Valley culture (and actually predates the HBO show). The problem is that it played the culture completely straight.

The issues with the show can be summed up in one scene: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/682261750222209024

Wait I don't understand, how is that playing it straight? Is it supposed to be accurate?

The scene I linked to is done completely unironically.

just wow. it is played unironically, but so self-unaware that it then becomes funny, which must be enjoyed in an ironic manner. so:

```

  def change_tone tone
    tone = ironic
    change_tone tone
  end

```

#change_tone :unironic

#SystemStackError

How technically possible? cuz I also don't see how likely such a case could even occur or the whole idea of it occurring to start with

When you join a company as an employee, you will sign a contract.

That contract will typically stipulate that everything you produce whilst an employee belongs to your employer.

More forgiving contracts will limit this to just things created on company time or using company resources.

If you turn up at work and use your work machine for a side project, your work owns the IP you create in that project. Period.

Universities used to require undergraduates to sign something similar, but that's fallen out of fashion.

> Obviously it's by no means an accurate representation

No, because the reality is even crazier than the show.

I don't know about specific legal cases, but that kind of rule in employment agreements is basically de rigueur, and there's a big body of established law around it. It's potentially an issue for any new company/invention started by an employee, and for University students.

Even university students? But most of the great startups were started by university students, so why wasn't there any issue about it so far?

In some cases, the student knows the legal issues and drops out first to avoid the Uni claiming IP ownership.

Some quick research suggests that funding may play a key role, particularly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act . So perhaps the IP claims are less important if the student is developing things on their own time, on their own dime.