How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley

newyorker.com

504 pointssajid301 comments

Silicon Valley is so realistic that I stopped watching a few episodes into the first season. I was going through a rough and very stressful time at work, and the show was reminding me too much of that rather than being an escape (as I usually want TV to be).

Thankfully I'm in a better place professionally now, and I recently came back to the show. Now I enjoy it a lot, even though it can hit very close to home.

For some reason that is the main reason why I watch the show somewhat religiously (and I don't even live in the US).

When suffering through push-backs, broken software, and no's frequently, sharing the pain with the Pied Piper team is my quiet way of balancing my mind.

i had exactly the same experience

Same reaction, although I have kept up watching it. It's too damn real and too close to what I deal with haha. My partner will refuse to watch it after first seasonal, same reason. It's brutal when you have lived through that before haha.

>I'm in a better place professionally now

Buy a gold chain!

Or if he's doing really well, some Tres Comas Tequila.

hummm "Tres Comas", I wonder what that stands for..

I don't quite have that feeling watching this show (I can relate to it, but I'm not in the Valley; the show is hilarious), but shows like Catastrophe or movies like This is 40 hit _very_ close to home for the same reason. Funny, but in an almost painful way.

So I get how you might feel that way if you're in similar straits as the show.

“A friend of mine who works in tech called me and said, ‘Why aren’t there any women? That’s bullshit!’ I said to her, ‘It is bullshit! Unfortunately, we shot that audience footage at the actual TechCrunch Disrupt.’”

Unfortunately, unsurprising.

If that's the case, why aren't there way more Asians in the show?

Dinesh. Jin Yiang.

Both of which have accents, one heavier than the other. Is that fair?

among those with Asian origins that I have worked with, I'd say at least half are foreign born, so I don't think its entirely unfair.

There is no proper English accent, to a New Zealander, people born in California sound weird.

Jin Yiang isn't Chinese-American. He's Chinese. Chinese people who were born in China have accents when speaking English. It would be ridiculous if he was Chinese and didn't have an accent. I haven't noticed Dinesh as having any accent, but if he does have one, it's the actor's actual accent. He's from Pakistan, so maybe he has a trace. Which is completely realistic and completely fair.

I think the point is that the show doesn't seem to feature Asian-Americans, even though there are a lot of Asian-Americans in the real Silicon Valley.

Even in a restrictive sense of "Asian-American" as meaning those of Asian descent who grew up in America, there are a few presumably Asian-American minor characters on the show, perhaps most notably the Indian "brogrammer" (played by Aly Mawji; imdb is oddly inconsistent as to the character's name, switching between Aly Dutta and Naveen Dutt). But yes, more Asian-American representation would be good (in particular on a show reflecting the demographics of Silicon Valley, but also on TV in general).

Having spent some time in India and Pakistan, the actor's accent (Kumail Nanjiani) is upper class/elite Pakistani English, most likely influenced by going to a good quality private school. His pronunciation of certain words is similar to the English spoken by, for example, senior Pakistani journalists on their domestic television channels or politicians in Islamabad.

Many Chinese-Americans were born in China.

Yes, Kumail Nanjiani (who plays Dinesh) grew up in Pakistan and moved to the U.S. for college. I believe Dinesh is also supposed to have grown up in Pakistan (albeit with a Hindu first name? Well, of course, even if rare, that can happen), and then immigrated to the U.S. as an adult. Hence, the accent.

Why is this being downvoted? I think it's a valid point. Being an Asian-American in tech, it pains me to see that SV doesn't have an accurate representation (both in number and in stereotypes) of us on the show.

Yea, and Dinesh has (so far) been falling into the "sexless asian man" stereotype (also jin yiang, though he's just a minor comic relief character).

Asian exist in real life: http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

It's a non sequitur. The original comment was about footage from TV Disrupt, not the cast

I don't know the show very well, but this is a much better article than I expected. The vignette about online forums is so perfect I can't resist quoting it in full.

“Silicon Valley,” a show about computer nerds, has a fan base that is particularly attuned to minutiae, and particularly apt to argue about them on the Internet. If a Post-it, URL, or line of code is legible on the show, it will be screengrabbed and scrutinized. Last year, a few hours after an episode aired, a Reddit user with the handle HeIsMyPossum started a thread called “Why did the writers just obliterate all the good karma they had built up with their core audience?” He made an impassioned argument that a plot point—the accidental deletion of data from Pied Piper’s servers—was implausible. “So the files were being converted live while coming through an FTP? And that affects disk deletion speed?… Come the fuck on guys.” Rob Fuller, a software engineer and a consultant on the show, logged on to Reddit to defend his work, mostly by displaying his own nerd plumage. “Stuff like this happens,” he wrote. “I think even Amazon had an outage because one of the admins fat fingered a DNS or ACL change at one point.” Another user responded to Fuller: “Thanks for engaging us here, we really appreciate it.” The thread amassed nearly three hundred comments. “Sorry for being a dick,” HeIsMyPossum wrote.

Edit: well, it's weirdly anticlimactic sitting here. But it was hilarious in the New Yorker.

I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P

It's sort of a metaphysical overarching joke rolled into the show. Anything on the show talking about their compression technology becomes necessarily unbelievable as a result.

Causality caused the file to be deleted on both ends!

> I think the premise of their technology is humorously on target. I mean, there's no limit to how much you can compress things, right? :P

There are of course limits to how much you can compress things, but only for a finite number of possible files can you ever prove that you've hit the limit. For almost all possible files/strings, you can't ever prove you've got an optimal compression algorithm, so if someone's new algorithm appears to work better, well, you've got the burden of proof to show you've already hit the Kolmogorov complexity of the file and they're cheating.

Well, I've compressed pi into a much smaller space.

That's because the The New Yorker is rather dull. Anything interesting stands out -- assuming your eyes haven't already glazed over from wading through descriptions of people's clothes and suntans.

Come now, there's more variety in it than that. (My pet peeve, ages ago, was the short-story-highlighting-the-little-things-of-everyday-life. Do they still have those?)

What seems like dullness starts to feel pretty good again after the sugar binge of sensationalism that we get nearly everywhere else.

I completely agree. Silicon Valley talked about the reality.

I founded a startup and headed engineering for another. I have seen more than half the things there as follows: Getting money in tranches. Investors making you spend invested money for personal gain. Having a business CEO who has no product insights. Board control issues. Employees trying to overthrow founders and getting fired because of that. Being forced to hire friends and family of investors. Lawyers represent the company and not you. Founding company with someone whom you do not trust. Investors getting involved in day to day running.

Luckily each of the startups had an happy ending. But it took a lot of hard work and a few miracles.

One more thing to add. Having a CEO who takes a salary of 180k/year after seed round (which was almost half of the seed round) and apart from this also charges part of his house rent to the company. Those were fun times.

If you want proof that the SV producers go the extra mile, a couple episodes ago there was a split-second appearance of a GitHub repository belonging to one of the characters. Turns out it's completely real (https://github.com/Stitchpunk/atari-ai ) and the owner has accepted pull requests!

Looks like they stuffed the fake account with a bunch of minor commits[1] to give the appearance of a daily coder.

[1] https://github.com/Stitchpunk/activity/commit/6b016dec5f52b9...

The forks are from https://github.com/emcmanus, which seems like a legit githubber.

edit: He works for the show, and is legit https://www.linkedin.com/in/emcmanus

We live in fantastic times, indeed. Last century there were just waves in an endless stream of names. Now we can check out their Linkedin profiles.

> Replace all spaces with poop emojis

This shit is hilarious!

In fact everything in her account is forked from another GitHub account[0] -- he's one of the lead tech consultants on the show.

[0] https://github.com/emcmanus

At one point you cease wondering what is fiction and what isn't: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/pied-piper https://www.pierpiper.com

Oh and Google went ahead and registered... http://www.hooli.xyz

> at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’

That does remind me of Atlassian: "... help teams advance humanity through the power of software" https://www.atlassian.com/company

That one is owned by HBO still, you must be thinking of http://abc.xyz, which does contain a hidden link to http://hooli.xyz :)

Google didn't register hooli, HBO did.

they're done worse with the hardware - in the garage with the GPU rigs there were a few brief shots of a cisco 6500 chassis with totally the wrong linecards for what they would be doing. actually a 6500 would be the wrong platform entirely.

And why do we take your word over Gilfoyle?

Is this your own brand of satire or are you not aware you're entirely the person being satirized?

it's more meta than that, the 6500 satirizes itself with how people use it

If you want to get into the garage hardware scenes at least mention the bandwidth required to pull that sort of thing off.

Or that in reality if they were using a p2p CDN the users would be absolutely losing their minds on reddit/HN/etc for using their bandwidth without permission

How so? I find it incredibly accurate given that:

a) 6500's are versatile and can be used (with vary degrees of success) for a variety of purposes: switching, core routing, edge routing (not great), load balancing, even IPSec services with things like the SPA modules.

b) They're incredibly power hungry, so the bit about needing more power is apropos.

c) They're still used in lots of places. Ever seen a budget hosting colo? Chances are there's a 6500 there.

d) They're stupid cheap on the used market. The fact that there's even still a used market for the 6500 shows how venerable and long-lived it is.

That said, I do want to stab the first person who suggested using it as an edge router exposed to Internet traffic.

In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is a magic xylophone, or something? Ha ha, boy, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

Before the start of this season, they created a job listing for the CEO position at Pied Piper http://archive.is/5W6Yz

400+ commits over 6 months. Damn, these guys don't fuck around with their level of detail.

Best part:

“Some Valley big shots have no idea how to react to the show,” Miller told me. “They can’t decide whether to be offended or flattered. And they’re mystified by the fact that actors have a kind of celebrity that they will never have—there’s no rhyme or reason to it, but that’s the way it is, and it kills them.” Miller met Musk at the after-party in Redwood City. “I think he was thrown by the fact that I wasn’t being sycophantic—which I couldn’t be, because I didn’t realize who he was at the time. He said, ‘I have some advice for your show,’ and I went, ‘No thanks, we don’t need any advice,’ which threw him even more. And then, while we’re talking, some woman comes up and says ‘Can I have a picture?’ and he starts to pose—it was kinda sad, honestly—and instead she hands the camera to him and starts to pose with me. It was, like, Sorry, dude, I know you’re a big deal—and, in his case, he actually is a big deal—but I’m the guy from ‘Yogi Bear 3-D,’ and apparently that’s who she wants a picture with.”

In last Sunday's show they were ramping up to launch a beta of their product and had a closed alpha session where the team could give out access codes to close friends. The three team members, all engineers, got universally positive feedback for how great their user interface was. Well except from Monica, who couldn't quite articulate why it was just off to the casual user [1].

[1]:http://www.piedpiper.com/app/themes/pied-piper/dist/images/i...

Essentially everyone in the engineering team's social circle either were engineers themselves who wouldn't recognize good design if it hit them in the mouth, or intentionally did not give criticism of the product in order to suck up to the promising new startup.

This is likely the plot progression for the next episode. (which is why the UI was hidden to the viewer)

They shown the screen a couple of times, may be not long enough to expose bad UI, but still.

No, the editor UI which is teased at the Pied Piper website.

And now the Weissman score is a real thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score

No, it's universally derided as a bogus metric which doesn't even make logical sense.

Well that was the actual point, but then they went and tied it to the dataset from the Hutter Prize, and now reality and satire have intermixed so thoroughly you'll never disentangle them.

Semi off-topic, but I think there was an Easter egg in that part of the episode. A few seasons ago Monica had to give some bad news to Richard, and she changed into white clothing before talking to him. I don't remember exactly how it came up, but she said she changed because studies had shown that bad news was less upsetting when the messenger was wearing white.

When Monica was in her office looking at the beta, she was wearing a regular suit. When she shows up at Erlich's house (presumably soon after the last scene), she's changed into a white/cream colored sweater. I thought that was a nice callback to the earlier season.

Close, but it was about dressing as plainly as possible: "as a study showed that the less sexual attraction a guy feels, the less it will hurt when he’s given bad news."

I must say that Pied Piper's interface is a dead-ringer for Handbrake[1] if you moved all controls from different tabs onto one. Maybe similarity is not to Handbrake only, but any 'expert' level video conversion tool is bound to be equally inscrutable.

1. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kq_VI7SJLxo/UASmKSHJDcI/AAAAAAAAIp...

I love how they have the chromecast addon for the browser in that screenshot.

For me the most realistic scene, one that only people in the field would understand, is when they made the "box". The lead up from hating the assignment to not being able to do shit work really hit home. I've probably had had a few projects that i hated but spent more time then needed. To either make it work faster or modulerized it even though it was probably never going to be updated, just to keep my interest or to learn something.

I am a consultant on the show. I am super impressed with them. I find it less "funny" and more "accurate" on a regular basis.

How did that come about?

I spend too much time cultivating my network...

SPOILERS ALERT

The article contains several spoilers. You may want to hold off if you follow the show.

If you follow the show, then nothing should be a spoiler. :p

Or I guess if you're familiar with the SV startup scene, not much should be a surprise :)

> In 2015, Weissman convened the Stanford Compression Forum, which resulted in a forty-page white paper outlining what middle-out compression might mean. One of his graduate students, Vinith Misra, worked out the math more explicitly in another paper.

The paper they link to from there (https://www.scribd.com/doc/228831637/Optimal-Tip-to-Tip-Effi...) is actually "Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency: a model for male audience stimulation". Not that I'm complaining, that is absolutely incredible, but does the compression paper actually exist?

> whereas naive unsorted schemes have increasingly ﬂaccid perfor-mance.

Oh my god

The chart at the end of the paper is very suggestive.

I think it's good that people in the actual tech industry and startup eco system can laugh about themselves. It's healthy. The day they/we stop laughing is the day we have a problem.

There was an article a while back on The Verge noting the irony in the show being "comedy". It's supposed to be a caracature of startup culture, stories, and the insane numbers that are casually thrown around. But as most people on HN know, Pied Piper would have had a similar path if it was a startup in real life.

What I'm getting at is that even in it's attempt to be more insane than what startup life is like, it's strangely... more accurate.

And I can't really tell if that's a good or bad thing.

This is also true for another current HBO comedy Veep. While it may not be as close to reality as Silicon Valley, many political insiders note that it is much closer than dramatic shows like House of Cards.

Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.

"Jokes? There are no jokes. The truth is the funniest joke of all." - Muhammad Ali

Good comedy can be a mirror. It reflects reality, makes you laugh, and then makes you think. I think all of those shows you mentioned would lose something if they weren't uncomfortably close to what they're making fun of.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

-- Mark Twain

See also "You couldn't make it up."[0]

[0] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/you-cou...

Surely you've heard, "it's funny because it's true"

"Many police officers maintain that the most realistic police show in the history of television was the sitcom 'Barney Miller,' far more so than that father of reality TV, 'Cops.' The action was mostly off screen, the squad room the only set, and the guys were a motley bunch of character actors who were in no danger of being picked for the N.Y.P.D. pin-up calendar. But they worked hard, made jokes, got hurt and answered to their straight-man commander."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/watching-the-detec...

Likewise, all the doctors I know say Scrubs is the most realistic show about being a doctor.

How can it not be? Every other program about being a doctor has so much personal drama and sex going on, they barely have time to look at patients. (Except House MD, but he's obviously unrealistic, even in the show itself.)

Episode about how unrealistic House is was one of the high points of the later Scrubs seasons.

In a similar vein, I believe that "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" is the most realistic portrayal of the dark ages that I know of.

Funny, I had the same feeling about Christianity watching The Life of Brian.

> Maybe similarity to reality is a hallmark of excellent comedy. This is certainly true of one of my favorite comedy shows Louie, which is almost hyperrealistic.

Similarly medical professionals seem to agree Scrubs is much more closer to reality than the "dramatic" Grey's Anatomy. Another show that comes to mind is Malcolm in the Middle.

Supposedly a court jester could state the facts with impunity...

i think it's one of the reason it's so hard for me to watch it -- the comedy/cringe parts hit too close to home.

By far the most unrealistic thing about "Silicon Valley" is the complete lack of technical obstacles and setbacks faced by any team in the show. But that's eminently forgivable -- no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging.

Everything else is so on-point that it can be uncomfortable to watch as a denizen of Silicon Valley.

Yeah that would be an artificial cliff hanger for sure. It's about the human interaction and politics.

Lets not forget we got the Mean Jerk Time because of a technical obstacle.

Obviously not a 3 week debugging issue, but still at least some notion of a technical obstacle...

>no one (certainly not I) wants to watch three weeks of harried debugging

Although they could potentially throw in a sequence designed to show that aspect. 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing.

Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the entire run of the show. As you alluded to, the reality of working through difficult problems would not make for good TV.

  Mind you, you could probably only do that once in the 
  entire run of the show.

HBO is the same network that aired this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyrM7GxyzGg

> 2-3 minutes of silence with a stationary camera showing a motionless programmer at their computer, frowning slightly. Eventually they break the silence by swearing.

Then you see them slowly click. Press backspace once. press the 3 key. Click again, and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"

> and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Finally!"

I think you mean:

> and their eyes widen as then they exclaim "Oh my god I am such a fucking idiot."

No, that's when Gilfoyle, who's been watching from the side, says "You are such a fucking idiot."

If you want a bit realism there you might casually show the clock to make the user realize that while it was 2 minute on camera the actual time was much more.

You could pretty much do it as a B-plot for an entire episode, and just end it with someone walking by the screen and saying something like: "find" "what?" "you wrote fond."

Add profanity as necessary.

For me it's more like "FUCK! ME!" when I notice a typo'd variable name or what-have-you.

And that one 2-3 minute clip would be passed around every year after the holidays when yet another relative asks if your startup life is anything like Elon Musk or The Social Network.

Yeah, but networks are keen to air bullshit debugging sessions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CtzaSzO2cE

Their servers did catch on fire.

They did kinda sorta almost delete everything. (ok, less realistic than a fencepost error or something. Just sayin')

Maybe it's just that I've only ever worked for YC companies since my first job (which was owned entirely by one person), but it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board - trying to force them to do things, installing a veteran CEO, and hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product. Those are all things that I know happen in startups, but a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product.

That said, 90% of what I see on Silicon Valley is remarkably accurate.

> it seems to me that they've given them the world's dumbest board ... hiring a shitload of salespeople without building the product.

That wasn't the board, that was the CEO.

> a company founded entirely by engineers doesn't seem like it would ever entirely give up on the product.

When did they? They fought, they whined, they tried to form a conspiracy, and finally they bargained and compromised. I don't recall them ever giving up.

What I've seen and heard of SV reminds me of when I posted an article by "Fake Lennart Poettering" (me), about getting around lkml hostility to systemd kernel suggestions by building systemd as a unikernel that chain-loads Linux and intercepts some of its system calls and replaces them with more systemd-friendly versions.

Someone replied: "This is like the movie Idiocracy: so close to reality that it isn't funny."

A dubious vindication of Mike Judge's satirical skills: reality catches up so quickly with his satire that it fails at comedy.

That's Mike Judge satire. It's always absurd but yet quite accurate

Isn't this just normal satire? I thought satire generally refers to works which exaggerate with the intention of highlighting the true absurdities of some person or group of people.

Agreed, but for me his satire is always somehow even more perfect.

You should also check out Betas (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3012184/), a light-hearted SF startup culture comedy show by Amazon. Sadly, it never got a second season.

In SV, one of the characters asks a call girl if she takes bitcoin. She says "I hate this fucking town." It's funny.

In an episode of Betas, on character slaps a bitcoin down on a table to place a bet. It showed how well they they did their research.

Absolutely. I don't like movies or TV 99% of the time. Especially comedy shows with vulgarity and goofy humor, not my thing at all. But the accuracy and relatability of Silicon Valley make it very enjoyable and funny for me. Every episode has a couple things that hit home.

Have you looked into British shows? They have a lot of realistic comedy, like The Royle Family, the original The Office, The Thick of It and, in a way, Yes Minister.

Related - Veep is based on The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci writing and producing both)

At least Pied Piper has some real technology to bring to the table (a compression algorithm).

Most real SV startups are, it seems, unfortunately just building a business around a CRUD application (see AirBnB, Uber, to name a few, but there are many many more).

How is AirBnB or Uber just CRUD applications? Seems to me there's a lot more than that involved in launching a nationwide rental or taxi service with a two-sided market. You have to solve regulatory issues (or ignore them strategically), routing and pricing algorithms, user trust issues, etc.

These two businesses in particular highlight that it's a lot harder than you think, otherwise the market would be saturated with clones.

That's after it's huge. Uber 0.1 was probably just WhatsApp to a couple of drivers.

And early Google was 'just' a search engine, something that already existed in some forms, that looked totally unlike the Google of today. You are correct, but what are you trying to say? All companies are going to be 'lame' early on by definition.

No, Google 0.1 did something technically nontrivial. These other co's only got technically interesting after scale, which is generically true. Since you don't know whether the startup will succeed, you'd better enjoy the work, eg scraper (FB 0.1) and forum software (0.5).

There are any # of co's not lame early on: Google, Adobe, Zee Aero, Joby, Viv/Siri, Cruise, Magic Leap, DeepMind, Vicarious…

> Google 0.1 did something technically nontrivia

Indexing and rating web pages based on links back to pages. Basically a massive "outer join" on the web. Basically a software implementation of how academic papers are rated, but technically a massive data processing exercise - not just a good idea in theory but required a great deal of engineering skill to implement.

Worldwide.

cough Facebook cough

Facebook is not a CRUD application.

Facebook is a graph theory application.

  > Most real SV startups are, it seems, unfortunately just
  > building a business around a CRUD application (see
  > AirBnB, Uber, to name a few, but there are many many more).

I think you vastly underestimate the technology that goes into the parts of Uber we don't see -- the logistics of dispatching and monitoring a couple hundred thousand drivers (or so?) in real time.

In the grander scheme of things, that's scale and concurrency. Nothing about the code is particularly novel or difficult.

True, but there's something to be said for companies that execute well. Providing a smoother service or more intuitive/sleeker product can be the distinguishing factor that makes a company stand out, and you want cycles of that mixed in with cycles of innovation.

Not that I'm making an argument that Uber itself executes particularly well. I have no idea about that.

>In the grander scheme of things, that's scale and concurrency.

I actually laughed out loud. I'm just the Postgres team would love your insight into how they can implement master-master replication because "it's not novel or difficult."

Right, but those are problems solved by database technologies. Uber can follow pretty well-defined patterns at this point to scale up. Especially since they have a natural sharding point built into their product (each city).

Pretty much this. Like Uber's unique problem is master-master replication?

Yes, so advanced that new versions by competitors that do the exact same thing seem to pop up weekly

Scale.

End of discussion. What works for 100 customers/drivers does not work for 100,000

You realize that Uber has to solve a huge multifactor optimization problem?

How so?

Spoilers follow.

One fairly recent episode involves pretty much throwing away all of the hard technology that the engineers want to work on in order to make an appliance that's easier for the sales team to sell. They came up with the idea after one of the engineers says something sarcastically like "yeah we could just ignore all the tech and make a dumb box."

I think it feels like a "more accurate satire" because it mixes things that are overexaggerated and underexaggerated, and only by a small amount in either direction. So some of the strange realities (an executive Rollerblading into a meeting) are mixed with dialogue and behavior that is only slightly more absurd than reality.

I've often heard the same about Scrubs. In a sea of medical dramas in TV, the light and warm-hearted show Scrubs is considered to be the most true-to-life... Apparently.

In a lot of ways, "epochs" of software development track to Mike Judge productions... a lot of things changed after Office Space lampooned the industry the first time... I wonder if Silicon Valley will have the same effect.

The thing about SV that always gets me is the forced "code" vs "hardware" rivalry between Gilfoyle and Dinesh.

"My code can beat your terrible hardware!" "My hardware is terrible because of your terrible code!"

That just doesn't happen in my experience. Has anyone else seen this?

From an outsider's perspective, bad collaboration between engineering and ops (or even among engineers, frontend v. backend) might sound like that. They're joking about the "looks good in staging" trope [1]

[1] https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/22605665.jpg

I'm not sure I agree - I feel like Gilfoyle writes plenty of code and also builds hardware. They have a natural rivalry, but I haven't seen it break down exclusively at the hardware/software boundary.

The final couple of episodes of the second season they make it an explicit point of friction between the two. It sounds pretty stupid and I'm glad they stopped it.

I think it led to a good payoff of a server being on fire.

I mean, that payoff would have been there if the distinction hadn't been made explicit.

It's not a code vs. hardware dynamic, it's a Gilfoyle vs. Dinesh dynamic.

Passive-aggressive bromances are a hallmark of comedy nowadays.

Jared does a good job of bringing them together though

Ever noticed he's like the maternal figure of Pied Piper?

When the actor was on Colbert he said he based the character on his mother.

In that way, no.

In the bad old days before dev-ops systems admins and engineers often had some pretty good pissing contests around blame shifting and pitching shit over the wall. Though it has come down, in tone, this relationship does exist to some extent still. I think they have captured the dynamic but skipped the actual exchanges/interactions to spare a less technical audience.

To a large extent, Dev has just had to deal with the fact that the they're coding for an AWS world and can't necessarily design for specific hardware. They're designing for a generic "cloud environment" with a few modifiable parameters, because they recognize the benefit in ease of deployment and scalability.

I'm sure it's solved some of their headaches while presenting other, new ones.

I have seen it, but in very traditional orgs, where system administrators and developers were in very different realms, and mostly communicate through a ticketing system. Similar things between DBAs and programmers in that environment. Why are the queries slow in production?

So it's not an uncommon problem to have wherever there's no clear line of responsibility, and no real shared ownership. It's only unrealistic in the sense that, if you have those kind of problems in a company as small as Pied Piper, I'd expect the product to not work at all.

Developers often make assumptions about hardware in their code, and then will complain when the hardware they're given doesn't match what they anticipated.

Even if it doesn't actually matter for performance reasons, they expected things to be one way, and want the environment to adapt to match their expectations, even if they might be expecting a wholly un-maintainable environment.

And I'm sure it works exactly the other way, too. The developer doesn't understand why the environment isn't what they expect, or isn't like the lab, or whatever.

Wait, so it's "Not uncommon"... so then it's..... ok got it.

I'm seeing this. I don't get much exposure to the hardware guys tho, so I'm just presuming that it's happening on their end.

It's just rare that you have a company making new hardware AND new software at the same time.

Well, if you replace "hardware" with "infrastructure", it starts making sense. Somewhat realistic scenario goes like this:

The CTO makes a decision to move to AWS. A couple of "server huggers" on the team start blaming AWS's "shitty infrastructure" for unexplainable latency spikes and increased downtime. The CTO responds blaming their "terrible code" for not being designed properly and points at Netflix.

Right. Or even bare metal vs VMs. How many VMs on what hardware? Many small VMs, or fewer large ones?

This is my life, except the CEO chose AWS and I'm the CTO.

Gilfoyle and Dinesh are just like real life brothers. The rivalry and Gilfoyle mocking Dinesh are what brothers do, not real rivals.

I found that the show was totally off on most of the issues involved in the process of coding and in working as a coder. I put that on Judge having worked in SV as an engineer rather than a programmer; I don't even think he codes at all.

Many moons ago, and it was mostly a developer telling a sysadmin "My code should be working a lot better than this!" and the admin saying something about "I told you, your shitty code isn't taking advantage of the awesomeness in this AMD chip!"

I think it was back in the day of the Pentium III vs some AMD Athlon. I don't remember the conversation verbatim, i was too busy petting my G4.

The attention to detail on the show is amazing. For example, during their move to the new office I noticed that they had Corovan moving boxes. If you don't know Apple uses Corovan exclusively and if you've ever moved offices chances are high that they moved you. Not sure why but it was amazing to me that they bothered with a detail like that.

Pretty sure it was product placement.

I personally didn't like the humor of the show and stopped watching it after 3 or 4 episodes.

On a related note, a few days ago [1] Marc Andreessen recommended another show based on startup culture: Halt and Catch Fire [2]

I haven't seen it, but I will probably give it a shot.

[1] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/ [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/?ref_=wl_li_tt

Halt and Catch Fire is definitely not about startup culture: it's a drama about the birth of the tech industry.

except that it's not set in silicon valley at all, it's set in the early 1980s Texas PC/semiconductor industry

Ah right. Fixed.

Silicon Valley isn't the birthplace of all high-tech.

I think S3 is about them moving to SV.

Halt and Catch fire is hardly about the birth of the tech industry. It's a character drama centered around a family electronics company being hijacked to produce IBM clones.

The first season, yes; the second is a radical departure from the first.

The eps I skimmed felt dumbed down for Hollywood. Unrealistically hot, oversexed people with tech as just a backdrop.

Halt and Catch Fire is great, definitely recommend.

I stopped after the first episode. It match ZERO percent of any of my silicon valley experience. Have never seen a backyard party with famous band. Have never seen a famous band with "nerds" not watching. Have never been to an SV party where hot women stand around looking to pick up rich SV men.

Maybe it gets better but I didn't give it the chance.

The first few episodes are slow. It gets MUCH better.

It's set in Dallas. They're finally going to Silicon Valley in the yet to be released third season.

> hot women stand around looking to pick up rich

Rosewood Hotel cougar night by Sand Hill.

This was a private industry party in someone's backyard, not a hotel lobby/lounge

Gotta work on your networking then. I don't even live in California but the one time I went to an event hosted by big Valley tech company hit two for three.

was it in someone's backyard? Sure I've been it parties with famous bands but they weren't in someone's backyard they were at club/music venues or convention centers

I watched a few episodes but could not get into it. Too breathless. The kind of people Silicon Valley rightfully mocks.

I disliked the over dramatic stuff and the early first season tried to treat the lead like a Steve jobs (yet again). I really like the 80s aesthetic and the Texas setting. Makes me almost wish I was around during those days.

I think it was more the lead trying to be a Steve jobs figuere (and mostly failing at creating actually good products)... The first season culminates in him seeing a Mac for the first time, and realizing everything he's done so far is not even in the same ball park. But it was a good show - and got much better in the second season if you stuck with it.

Yeah I did stick with it and totally agree, but I'd say Mr Robot far surpasses HACF for tech based drama.

One of my favorite parts of the show is the opening credits. Being an old Netscape employee, I still get a little sad when I see the Netscape logo fall off that building, only to be replaced by Chrome. tears

The Silicon Valley show makes me anxious. I laugh but I also feel the pain from experience. And I'm not sure if that's good. I want and need to catch up but I almost dread it. I wonder if it's the same for cop drama shows and cops who watch them.

>“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”

the world does seems to be a better place when you're making a lot of money.

I have really enjoyed watching this show but the last few episodes it seems like the writing has went downhill. There were a number of cringe worthy scenes like "tabs vs spaces".

I feel like a lot of the humor in the show came from Erlich Bachman who is no longer in the drivers seat this season.

> has went downhill.

Speaking of writing going downhill...

Seriously? I laughed out loud at the "tabs vs spaces" scene since I have seen it played out exactly like that at several jobs.

At my work, that tabs vs spaces ended up being the most discussed scene. I thought it was genius.

I wonder if they intentionally got the details of the tabs/spaces argument wrong (by implying that you type the spaces manually, by saying 1 tab can save 8 spaces -- I doubt many coders uses 8 space tabs, if any, ...) as a wind-up for the actual coders watching.

It seems weird to have the inside knowledge of such a heated but obscure topic, and then get the detail wrong. I hope it was intentional because it points to them playing with their audience in quite a Machiavellian way.

Disagree. I laughed out-loud at that scene, and enjoyed talking with my wife about it later. Also, spaces is the correct answer.

Have you seriously never seen or had this argument?

NPR Fresh Air broadcast a similar article today: http://www.npr.org/2016/06/09/481377115/in-hbos-silicon-vall...

My favorite from the article:

Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades.

On top of that, I loved the irony that it was basically too ridiculous to use on the show.

for a similar satire of high tech culture 20 years ago, check out Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs

Wait, That book was satire??

I didn't take it as such when I read it. But I can see how someone might think so.

It seems to me that "Silicon Valley" is somewhat of a Roman a clef, as such I think it would be great if the HN readers could provide the "key". Anyone out there willing to give it a shot ?

Hooli = Google

Gavin Belson = Marc Benioff

Denpak Singh = Deepak Chopra

Peter Gregory = Peter Thiel

Erlich Bachman = Sean Parker

Russ Hanneman = Mark Cuban

Laurie Bream = Marissa Mayer

Philz Coffee onsite = Facebook

Hooli tunnel = Zynga tunnel

I always thought Russ Hanneman was based on Dan Bilzerian[0] even thought Bilzerian isn't actually an angel or VC.

0. https://www.instagram.com/danbilzerian/ (NSFW)

And who's Monica?

OP plz

Monica is the associate you messed up the pitch with because she was alarmingly cute.

Something like that may have happened to me, or I had some responsibility for.

I remember pitching to her in 1997. Bessemer Venture Partners.

Monica is the person who left Silicon Valley to go live somewhere decent and to do something more personally meaningful with her life. We just haven't seen her do that in the show, yet. Kind hearted people like her are non-existent in an industry like that.

Monica is just there for the happy ending.

> Peter Gregory = Peter Thiel > Russ Hanneman = Mark Cuban

it's so obvious when you look at the sources - Peter Thiel and Blueseed/libertarian idealist offshore things, and the oil rig offshore thing in the first season.

and WHO PUT RADIO ON THE INTERNET?!?!?! THAT'S RIGHT - ME. Never met Mark Cuban, is he really anything like that?

Mark Cuban has a lot of personality similarities to Russ, but Mark is definitely a lot more intelligent and self aware than Russ is.

Plus Peter Gregory has an anti-college rant like Thiel.

Awesome, thank you!

>Laurie Bream = Marissa Mayer

Laurie Bream is still Peter Thiel. The character is nothing like Marissa Mayer. MM doesn't really have an analogue in the SV show.

>Kara Swisher, asked show creator Mike Judge if Laurie Bream was a little slice of Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, and got an assent that Mayer was "one of" the inspirations.

http://www.recode.net/2015/4/13/11561406/hbos-silicon-valley...

I'm not sure how that makes sense. Laurie Bream is a direct character replacement after the actor Christopher Welch passed away. The character barely changed at all. If MM was an inspiration, it must have been on a very subtle level, or possibly only in finding the right look of the actor to play Laurie Bream.

>Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo CEO who enunciates in a similar alien voice, makes cutthroat decisions based on metrics, and has difficulty holding eye contact with subordinates.

https://backchannel.com/who-are-the-real-life-models-of-sili...

What about Gilfoyle ? He is my favorite, I guess because I am an engineer and also I guess a NBA (Natural Born Asshole) so I can relate. Maybe he is just your typical NBA Engineer ? Not any particular well known person.

Probably Martin Starr's personality + libertarian engineer. The core cast are less parodies than fleshed out characters you're supposed to root for.

Jack Barker = Steve Ballmer

Lol, totally.

developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers

cocaine is a hell of a drug.

i would think that Russ Hanneman = Sean Parker. Radio On Internet (almost direct reference to Napster, ie. music on Internet) plus "cool" 3 comma drive, and secondary things like age and appearance.

Cuban made his money selling broadcast.com to Yahoo! - which was literally radio on the Internet.

Broadcast.com was more like corporate earnings calls on the Internet. Real Networks was radio (or more accurately audio) on the Internet.

Great article, with some glorious lines:

“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”

“Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”

“In the real Silicon Valley, as on the show, there is a cohort of people who have a real sense of purpose and actually think they’re going to change the world, and then there’s a cohort of people who say farcical things about their apps that they clearly don’t believe themselves.”

In addition to the TV Show a lot of the companies in SV have their own website, which absolutely nails the essence of what they're mocking (Warning: spoilers if you aren't caught up):

http://www.piedpiper.com/ (complete with a blog) http://www.hooli.com/ http://www.bachmanity.com/ http://www.coderag.com/ http://raviga.com/ http://www.endframesystems.com/ http://drinkhomicide.com/ https://github.com/Stitchpunk

"Smaller files take up less space on your computer. Less space = more stuff. More stuff = better life!"

For some reason I just couldn't suppress my laughter reading this...

Raviga's website is gold, here's hoping Fixxie Tech makes an appearance on the show.

Reviga's website has a bonus Bioshock reference: https://i.imgur.com/Eks4tuu.png

Except the "beneath" part, I think that's more of a reference to Peter Thiel and Blueseed/Seasteading.

Who said Bioshock isn't a reference to Peter Thiel?

I think the 'beneath' part (and then calling it out in parentheses) is precisely what makes it more than just a Thiel reference. Very clever!

Hm. I'm a libertarian in silicon valley - and while I'm not opposed to making money, I don't care that much about it (I've made a net of 9k this year, I run a nonprofit that seeks to develop open-source anticancer drugs). And my experience is that libertarians very much care about right and wrong, it's just they take a slightly more absolutist perspective about what makes something right or wrong, resulting in misunderstandings when what others percieve to be a method to "right a wrong" abuts against libertarian principle "primitives" and those others can't concieve of any other way to achieve that desired end.

To be fair, there are libertarians (notoriously PT, although i think he's been lightening up a bit) who do sometimes act as if they see making money as the only right.

I'm starting to think that Thiel is mislabeled as libertarian. I mean, he's a delegate for Trump, no? What libertarian could possibly support Trump? I'm starting to think Thiel is one of those people who falls into a category that doesn't really have a good name, but has a vague resemblance to "libertarian" and so people call him a libertarian. At the very least, I am doubtful that he's a principled libertarian who subscribes to the NAP.

I think it's just how colloquial definitions have taken over: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11873396

He's fairly closely aligned with the neoreactionary / dark enlightenment movement which does have some elements of libertarianism but is more focused on the rejection of democracy, taxes, and anything approaching egalitarianism.

He wrote an essay for Cato a few years ago that spells out his views fairly specifically:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education...

There are some stark quotes, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" or "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

In that sense, his support for Trump makes more sense.

Good point. This whole "dark enlightenment" stuff seems so ridiculous to me though. :-(

Those are the parts of that essay that people always quote -- which is odd, since they're just statistical observations about what the electorate will support. The real meat of the essay is what Thiel proposes we do about it: not some political project to seize power or disenfranchise people who disagree, but a few ideas for how to sidestep politics with technology that will make freedom easier.

In the face of these realities, one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.”

The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.

He then goes on to talk about the internet, space colonization, and seasteading. I'm not really seeing the neoreactionary angle here. Am I missing something?

The part where he says giving half the population the right to vote made impossible his perverse fantasy? Substitute "blacks" or "Jews" in that statement if his fascist leanings need to be made more clear.

The controversy of the quotes isn't around the statistical truth of what they say, it's that they reject the "democratist" assertion of a monotonically causal chain of more voting -> more democracy -> better. For "democratists", freedom lost to democratic decisions pretty much by definition isn't really lost.

Ancient and not-so-ancient democracies have predicated the right to vote on such things as military service, land ownership, not being on welfare and other things. The idea is that voters should have a substantial stake in the republic (not saying that either predicate is a good, much less perfect, proxy for such a stake), not merely inhabiting it. Returning to that, rejecting "democratism" is the reactionary part.

Heck man, I'm a "democratist" -- in the sense that I hold democracy to be a sacred value. But I don't beleive in that causal chain; and I probably don't beleive in the less sloppy alterntives you might think of given time.

Also freedom-first thinkers like Thiel (and me for that matter) can just say: sure I believe in democracy -- and the most effective way to get it is almost alway to let people rule themselves.

You can argue that that is playing with definitions -- but every republic since Athens that was worth a damn found ways to give individuals their space to do stuff that other people didn't like.

The concept of escape is of primary importance to neoreactionaries.

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative.

http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-b...

It's of importance to anyone with a political ideology they think stands no chance of being voted in on a large scale. Again, I'm not seeing more than a superficial resemblance.

My gut feeling is his support for Trump has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with throwing a gigantic wrench in the works.

In the best case it leads to a realignment of the electorate.

In the worst case a lot of things go to hell, but he's a billionaire so he can always just up and move.

I think Thiel supports trump because he wants trump to blow everything up. He says women voting was bad for his political block (libertarians). He thinks we shouldn't have got enforcing things like safety - instead just sue people who wronged you. just like he did to gawker.

I think that supporting Trump on alt-right grounds while once claiming to support the "NAP" style of "freedom" is a textbook example of being so sharp you cut yourself. One doesn't obtain freedom from state intervention of any kind by putting an egotistical fascist strongman into power.

Perhaps he has changed his views over time. Many libertarians have realized that NAP is self destructive and foolish and have moved away from libertarianism.

I meant that thiel has over time gone from an ayn-rand style objectivist libertarian to a squishier on "voluntary collectivism" principled stance that aligns with the nap more than less

> What libertarian could possibly support Trump?

A pragmatic one.

A pragmatic libertarian would be supporting Gary Johnson.

I think that while these lines are insightful, they kind of miss the point of an important belief that is often shared by libertarians: that in the end, following self-interest is the most effective way to help the common good.

> "Am I being selfish?"

> I pulled my blankie tighter around my shoulders, making a mental note the owner would require more bitcoin this month as I'd gone over my allotted 36 hours of blankie time.

> "No, it's for the greater good."

Jokes aside, you've lit on the fundamental part of this disagreement: In theory libertarians believe that; in practice it's hard to know what someone really believes and easy to see what they're doing. Speaking broadly, some people disagree that the actions of libertarian people are helping anybody else unless by accident. Take for example a straw libertarian who buys water rights in drought-stricken regions and sells the water back to the people living in those regions. This person claims publicly (and may or may not truly believe) they are helping people conserve their water. After all, the free market will quickly establish its true cost. To people who think this is fundamentally wrong, it doesn't even matter what the straw libertarian believes -- if it walks like vampire sucking you dry, it might be.

Interesting example. In it, how exactly did this water right transaction take place - was our strawman libertarian the only one trying to buy water rights? If so, why? May be he foresaw drought earlier than his competitors on the market - and in doing so, is rewarded for his climate prediction skills and willingness to investment in infrastructure?

If he wasn't the only one, how exactly did he outbid his competitors? I'm asking these questions because this example doesn't seem realistic in libertarian effective free market paradise - on the contrary, this kind of situation arises with some regulated monopoly, not with a freely traded good. And just let me clarify for clarity, paying bribes to get purchase preference (which, let us be realistic, is the most common scenario here) is certainly _not_ a part of libertarian ideology.

Well, the straw libertarian might be richer than god and the only person with access to enough capital to buy all the water rights at once. He's a straw person, he can be a lot of things. I'm aware it's not the most plausible example but I tried to pick an obvious one to easily illuminate the other side of the argument. I'm sure you could cut my examples down like Scotsmen (one down, n to go!), so I'll leave the remainder to your imagination.

> some people disagree that the actions of libertarian people are helping anybody else unless by accident

Are those the same people that can't seem to snap out of only caring about good intentions, and shrugging off bad policies (none mentioned, none forgotten) as long as they were well-intentioned? And conversely, tend to view as suspicious improvements when they happened motivated by pursuing profit, and not some higher purpose?

I don't know, your group of people seems very specifically selected by comparison, which would imply it's at most a subgroup.

and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.

What a load of bullshit. First of all, libertarians have hardly "taken over" anything. If anything, the SV scene (as seen from the outside anyway) seems markedly less libertarian now than it did 15 years ago. Back when Slashdot was full of techno-libertarian types, cyberpunks and crypto-anarchists were spending gobs of time planning how to use technology to enable the stateless society, and rich libertarian leaning folks like John Gilmore were suing the government over the right to travel without showing ID... back then, the SV technologist scene felt very libertarian indeed. Now, if anything, it seems that the progressives have taken over. You still hear a little chatter about Internet freedom and the need for strong crypto, and there is the crypto-currency crowd who have actually gotten somewhere... but by and large, the rhetoric you hear out of SV seems to have skewed in a distinctively statist direction the past decade or two.

Heck, just go back through the archives here at HN and compare the talk back at the beginning, to the talk now... you can't help but be struck by the profound shift that's occurred. Now it's commonplace for people to criticize capitalism, denigrate the value of hard work (after all, all success is just "luck"), promote more active government involvement in markets, etc. Heck, I guess you'd almost be hard pressed to find a libertarian on here anymore... or maybe most of us just don't bother saying anything because we know we'll get shouted down (and/or downvoted to oblivion) by the statists.

Beyond that, the essence of libertarianism is absolutely to care about "right and wrong", as expressed by the Zero Aggression Principle. And libertarianism itself doesn't say anything about making money... there are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making money. IOW, just because somebody is a Capitalist or is concerned with making money, doesn't automatically mean they are a "libertarian."

How statist are startup empires built around the idea of flouting regulations? How statist are Uber, AirBnB, and the other members of sharing economy?

Granted, perhaps you can label them crony capitalists or some other epithet instead, for using government failings to their advantage instead of trying to do away with government (though some, such as Travis Kalanick, are notoriously big Ayn Rand fans). But when the folk definition for "libertarian" these days usually rests on the side of "-capitalist", and not "anarcho" - more Koch brothers (and Peter Thiel), than Gary Johnson (and Richard Stallman). When people usually talk about civil liberties groups, and Pirate parties, and hacker collectives, they think anarchists. When people talk about "neoliberals", or objectivist billionaires, they think libertarians.

Have a problem with that? Take the label back. Work to fix the public perception.

Last I heard, Richard Stallman is closer to left-anarchism than nightwatchman-state-capitalism.

>What a load of bullshit

It isn't bullshit, just out of touch. That did happen. But it happened 20 years ago. Since then the leftists have taken over the way the libertarians did before. I can hardly fault people who have been away from the tech world for 20 years for basing their ideas on how things were 20 years ago.

> And libertarianism itself doesn't say anything about making money... there are plenty of "hippie libertarians" who don't give a shit about making money.

And yet... there aren't a lot of women or minorities in the libertarian movement, and despite your 'hippie' comment, most of the voices are from people with well-paying jobs.

Libertarianism doesn't mention money per se, but the effect of it is that people who already have money and network effects don't have to share their bounty.

Hell, I remember arguing with one libertarian who was crystal clear on property rights, and that property could never be taken away if you didn't sell it yourself; the government had no right to take land (yadda yadda, Zero Aggression Principle) and any land transfers after that are moot because it would have been taken by force.

Okay, says I, then give your property back to the Native American tribe it was taken from. The rhetoric then changed to 'oh, I could only give it to a person who could show that they owned the exact plot of land that I had'. What, the specific plot of land that is only described by the entity that violently took it? That communal ownership that was tribal lands meant that somehow you could claim individual ownership over it anyway?

This is what libertarianism means to me, and to a lot of what you deride as 'statists'. It's a lot of superficially nice-sounding rhetoric, which boils down to "I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff".

"I get to keep all my stuff, and don't have to share. So what if my bounty is built on the backs of others, my stuff is my stuff".

OTOH, I'd say it's closer to "I'm happy to share with others, as long as I do it on my own terms, without somebody threatening me into it, and furthermore, even if I don't 'share', I contribute to the overall good simply by participating as a productive member of the economy". Consider what Adam Smith had to say:

"But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence. But though this principle ultimately provides him with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for, it neither does nor can provide him with them as he has occasion for them. The greater part of his occasional wants are supplied in the same manner as those of other people, by treaty, by barter, and by purchase. With the money which one man gives him he purchases food. The old clothes which another bestows upon him he exchanges for other old clothes which suit him better, or for lodging, or for food, or for money, with which he can buy either food, clothes, or lodging, as he has occasion."

Now that's not to say that there aren't Libertarians out there with a "fuck you, got mine" attitude. Then again, there are people with that attitude who aren't Libertarians as well.

What happens when 'my own terms' are heavily asymmetric in the speaker's own favour? How often would 'my own terms' be against the speaker's own favour?

We've also been through times when people "contributed to the overall good simply by participating as productive members of the economy". It was awful, and is why we have welfare programs these days. Private charity and/or trickle-down economics just do not cut the mustard, especially for individuals with chronic or ongoing problems.

> But though this principle ultimately provides [the beggar] with all the necessaries of life which he has occasion for

If you define 'necessities of life' as merely 'keeps a heartbeat going', then that paragraph will probably make sense to you. Most people would also consider shelter against the cold, clothes that fit and are in good order, and regular food as being necessities, none of which are needed to keep a heartbeat.

The other thing is that people's own self-interest is rarely thought about in the long-term. It takes a lot of education to plan out far ahead, which is one of the reasons why the wealthy stay wealthy. People aren't the perfectly informed, perfectly rational actors that these kind of paragraphs (and libertarian ideology) suggest.

So, you talked to an idiot whoclaimed to represent a certain idea and ended up believing his claim?

Awesome, you've done both a No True Scotsman and a Strawman fallacy in just the one relatively short sentence.

No True Scotsman requires a non falsifiable hypothesis. And how exactly did I construct a strawman?

HN has not become explicitly more statist or less libertarian. More to the point, it has become far far more pro-establishment as its posters have seen success. The fact that progressivism is the zeitgeist of the establishment is ancillary to migration of poor hackers into establishment social classes.

The problem I see is that many of the most prominent media libertarians are far from the "hippie libertarians" that still have the "anarcho" in their anarcho-capitalist philosophy.

Exhibit A I would point to is Lew Rockwell's blogging group, a prominent self-proclaimed "libertarian" and "anarcho-capitalist". Sure, they have a strong disdain for "The System" (items like "Wall Street", "the elite", police corruption, spy agencies) combined with the standard right-wing (they love "market forces", a bit ironic given the Wall Street hate; they hate any social redistribution, hate environmental regulations, etc.). Unfortunately, I think their true colors have shown recently, in that they have shown quite a bit of love for strong "macho" leaders like Putin and Trump.

In reality, I believe that this group is fascist-capitalist: they are right-wingers that don't like the messiness of democracy and laws and rules that much (unless said laws and rules benefit them, of course). No true philosophical libertarian would support strongmen leaders, for fairly obvious reasons. But just like the word "liberal" has been perverted in America (it's not classic liberalism any more!), "libertarian" has been perverted into this capitalist-at-all-cost strongmen personality in the public mind, because unfortunately too many of the loudest "libertarians" are.

As far as SV goes, you are right that (from a distance) it appears less libertarian than 15 years ago. It seems interesting that one of the biggest pushes for "basic income" comes from this crowd for instance. But I can also see why the shift happened.

“It’s capitalism shrouded in the fake hippie rhetoric of ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ because it’s uncool to just say ‘Hey, we’re crushing it and making money.’”

One nice thing about the financial industry is that they generally seem to operate without this sort of pretext. Or the pretext is so flimsy that it's easily ignored. Or, if you're a glass-half-empty kind of person, they've lost enough of their humanity to not give a shit anymore. :/

I used to think honesty was always better than hypocrisy. Now I feel that it's not so simple. Hypocrisy can be a motivator for a bad actor to not go all-in on the bad actions (lest they be called out for this hypocrisy).

That's a false conflict.

Building new profitable companies and industries is actually how the world has been made into a vastly better place the last 250 years.

I have a really, really hard time understanding how anyone can watch the show and be offended.

OTOH, maybe it's just because I'm neither rich nor important.

Hint: nobody ever gets offended, they just get concerned that other people might be offended.

Just once I'd like to see Dinesh win against Gilfoyle.

Yeah, I guess Dinesh would like that, too.

As someone that works in enterprise storage, the last season has hit very close to home.

Have you seen them all?

As someone who works for a SaaS company that's trying to provide SaaS on-prem... the mole people are real.

Does anyone else find that the show is running out of steam ? I think the quality of the writing has gone down in this new series.

At times I had that feeling, but then something happens that has in me in stitches in a way that few other shows pull off.

My main issue is Bachmann. He's been a bit too much for a while, but judging by the last episode I think the writers did this on purpose.

I love the Sweet Valley High series. Glad to see it's enjoying a renaissance of sorts.

One question I'd like answered is how Richard lost controlling interest of his company. The ownership percentages are never really talked about other than Erlich's 10% and the two coders getting 7% each. One minute Richard is majority shareholder while Reviga has 20%, then Reviga has majority?

It's the only thing that gives me pause.

He sold shares to Russ Hanneman and Reviga bought those shares off of Hanneman.

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