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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

Debugging on a computer that is down is not a very exciting process.

In the movie Hero[0], two kung fu masters fight a battle purely in their minds. And when the mental fight was over, they only execute one physical move to finish the battle.

Think of this as the computer equivalent of that scene.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0299977/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Like the battle between Sherlock and Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?

Yes. A lot of Western action movies owe their inspiration to Chinese movies (and I suppose, viceversa). In this case Hero (2002) -- or a similar movie, since I doubt it invented this trope -- is likely an inspiration for A Game of Shadows (2011).

HK movies clearly inspired the action movies of the 90s.

This sounds amazing!

Ugh, such a good movie... If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and go see it.

In case anyone wants to watch a clip of the fight:

https://youtu.be/AeeoEpmyb2Y

_Hero_'s always been one of my favorites. A lot of kung fu movies try to strike a balance between aesthetics and realism - I really enjoy a movie that picks one (in this case the former) and goes all in on it. It's got a fight that takes place entirely on the surface of a lake, and another that takes places in a forest of falling leaves that change color several times throughout the scene. It's an incredibly beautiful movie.

Both: Dance around for 10 minutes trying to out-physics each other

Guy 1: Why don't I just poke him with the pointy bit

Great scene though, makes me want to watch the whole movie.

Yeah, this is strictly artistic kung fu, which is basically high-mortality ballet. There are also many "realistic" martial arts films, if that's your thing. I enjoy both styles, depending on mood.

Agreed. Wuxia to be specific, which is kinda like fantasy kung fu and has a long tradition.

It includes powers like becoming weightless, killing with a single movement, flying, etc.

What a wonderful visual representation of the notion that, "a battle is won before it begins."

Which is a Tsun-tzu reference presumably, he says don't enter a battle unless you have 'already' won (through preparation, numerical supremacy, etc.).

No, but "Debugging on a computer that is down... in space," does sound more interesting, right?

You have a computer that you can only interact with over a radio link, and need to make it start working again with only what you know about how the system is built and a limited set of remote commands. Sounds like something I'd get obsessed with solving.

There is a game in here, somewhere, somehow.

Paging Zachtronics (https://www.zachtronics.com/).

Speak for yourself

I did something like that when trying to boot my brand new root server in Finland a few weeks ago (tried ~50 times while having UEFI enabled plus mdadm raid1 on GPT partitions, never worked, asked support to disable UEFI, worked).

Confirming that not being able to ping/connect to it during the failed attempts was absolutely not exciting :)

I'll settle for the post-mortem

pg down

Sigh.

pg down

Sigh

...

Repeat for hours.

especially with extremely long response times.

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