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Comment by nicgrev103 | Hacker News Reader

'Halt and Catch Fire' (Fictional but good) 'Sillicon Valley' (Fictional and comedy but also good) 'The Playlist' (About Spotify, which isn't failure)

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Halt and Catch Fire was a great show! Leaving this gem here: https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/

I love this show, re watched it recently, but did not know this site. Thank you for sharing!

I certainly liked the first season, even the second, but I wonder if the last season even had anyone in front of a computer. Or doing anything other than complain about other people.

It seemed to turn 100% drama, no tech. I couldn't get past episode 2 of the last season!

There's at least a few computer scenes in the last season.

I don’t know about that, that scene where they are sitting in front of their computer working on their portal and someone shows them the first release of Netscape 1.0 with yahoo included as a nav bar item seems pretty significant in my memory.

I think it also reminds me of how the web changed my interaction with my computer. Of course I was in front of it more, but it made it more about other people and sharing information than just me, alone working on my algorithm.

I didn't see this, and according to wikipedia, this was in the second last episode. This makes sense, because (as I indicated) I stopped watching at season 4, second episode.

And I had to fast forward through loads of "he said / she said" drama and people arguing about personal "stuff" to even get to the end of episode 2.

Like I said, first season rocked. 2 and 3 I watched, although 3 was harder to get through. 4 was just a soap opera, and citing the second last episode as 'something tech happened!', doesn't make me feel wrong here.

Anyhow, to each their own. You can tell what I don't like, others may have more tolerance, or even enjoy more drama orientated dialog.

HaCF has an amazing line in it: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing." (1)

I still think abut it frequently. It's true. It's a statement about systems - often the utility is what they enable, not thing "thing in itself".

Even deep into software development, this is true. e.. I really appreciate git and github, but I don't need to focus on becoming a "git maestro" , I just need to get by in git, because git for me "isn't the thing", it's just "the thing that gets me to the thing".

Likewise, we can make software for people who are clever, even brilliant in what they do but who don't care abut the details of that software because for them it's not "the thing".

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeY_5n75zPM

I use that quote similarly. It's about knowing where you stand, where the value is, and of course not chasing the shiny new thing.... Perhaps Its pragmatic humility. That's how I see it.

> and of course not chasing the shiny new thing...

The thing is that in that scene, Joe (Lee Pace) is being the salesman to Gordon the engineer, and is just starting to grasp that there is a shiny new thing about to be born, that building computers is going to enable something much bigger than just "we'll sell some hardware, and make some money"; that change is coming, it's going to be for a wider audience than just computer enthusiasts; computers would be the way to get there, but are not the thing itself.

Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.

He is totally chasing the shiny new thing that the others don't even see yet. Even as they bring it about.

There was a discussion earlier about innovations in tech in the past 10-15 years.

It's tempting to identify the iPhone (and smartphones broadly) and that's not totally wrong. Yes, it replaces a bunch of discrete devices from times past reasonably well for most purposes: telephone, still camera, video camera, iPod/Walkman, voice recorder, GPS, etc.

But that's not really what makes a modern smartphone so transformative. It's doing all those things while being essentially ubiquitous, mostly always connected, open to an amazing ecosystem of apps that take advantage of the hardware capabilities, and with access to an amazing amount of online information.

Modern smartphones are great products for the most part but it's how they function as part of an ecosystem that makes them transformative.

I don't feel that this is a reply to the parent comment at all?

>Now we call that thing "the internet", "the huge software industry", "being online all the time", "social media" etc, but then they were not sure what it would look like.

It seems like very much a comment about the broader ecosystem being a bigger factor than an individual device.

"The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts" is not the same as "gets you to somewhere else entirely"

Same here, I think about that line often. It applies to a lot of different scenarios in tech.

The most common one is probably pointless redesigns. Outside of games, users usually aren't pulling up a particular app for the pleasure of using it, they just want to use it to accomplish some other goal with as little trouble as possible.

> they just want to use it to accomplish some other goal with as little trouble as possible.

I feel much the same way about git.

There is more SFBA startup reality in Silicon Valley than there is in a lot of these docudramas about startup flameouts; even The Dropout, which is the best of them, is much worse than Carreyrou's book. Honestly, Silicon Valley has so much verisimilitude that it suffers from it; towards the end, it starts to veer into fan service.

Having done a few startups (only one of which was based in Silicon Valley; incidentally, Arrington was involved in that one, while getting Techcrunch off the ground in his bedroom next to the offices we first started in...), I really wonder how much of the fun of Silicon Valley is lost on people who haven't experienced it. I regularly caught myself thinking I know a guy like X, or "I remember when this happened to us".

Right, that's because they went way out of their way to drag a bunch of startup people in as advisors, and they worked all their stuff into the plot (it helps that there's something innately comedic about startup culture). Watch the credits sometime and look for names you recognize; you'll see them.

The startup advisor I know said they told the writers of an incident that happened to them, but the writers rejected it as being too outlandish and audiences wouldn't believe them.

It later made it into season 2.

What was the incident?

Silcon valley was brilliant, although they blended the stories of several companys fatal errors into one company, turning it into a Hans in Luck

HCF uses the same technique

Silicone Valley is one of my favorite series I've seen. I just finished rewatching the final series since all the AI conversation lately had me thinking about it.

I'll have to check out this Halt and Catch Fire everyone is talking about!

>About Spotify, which isn't failure

I feel like Spotify’s value is mainly to the big 3 music publishers to gain negotiating power against Apple/Alphabet/Amazon. It has existed since 2006, and still losing money. And lots of it.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...

Well, that's the typical startup trajectory, isn't it? As long as the revenue goes up year-by-year (which seems to be true for Spotify), investors are happy to subsidize the net losses, then once they have cornered the market, they can get rid of as much costs as possible and raise prices as much as possible.

It's a fucked up system, but it seems most companies go through this.

>then once they have cornered the market

Unless Spotify obtains copyright for all the popular music in the world people want to listen to, or media or whatever, I do not see how this is a possibility.

Currently, Spotify has to buy from the 3 big music publishers (which limits the amount of expenses it can reduce), and it sells to people who have the option from buying from at least 4 streaming services which are relatively trivial to switch to (which limits the amount of revenue they can earn). The exact opposite of the situation you want your business to be in.

Well, in my experience in traveling around the world, Spotify is available in every country I've ever been to (according to https://support.spotify.com/us/article/where-spotify-is-avai... at least), while others are spottier coverage.

Sure, not all songs are available everywhere, but there is at least some coverage. Apple Music seems to have pretty widespread coverage too (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411) but I could find at least a few places I visited recently where it wasn't available while Spotify was (Bangladesh and Haiti are two examples)

The question is: How's Tidal doing?

Why is that the question?

In any case, looks like Tidal has never earned a profit, but was bought by Block for $300M a couple years ago for unknown reasons. I cannot imagine that worked out for Block shareholders.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/03/08/square-just-bought...

> At best, analysts estimate the company has 5% of the music streaming market

> it has lost money every year since it started

It's the question because the fact that Spotify has to buy from the three big labels has a friend - the big three labels have to sell to Spotify. Tidal's lack of success tells us that.

Since 2006? That’s a long time to not be profitable, right?

Yeah, I agree, I have no idea why people keep investing in companies that don't turn a profit, or companies that seemingly don't care about being profitable. It doesn't seem like most startups are interested in being sustainable, they're just interested in reaching the next funding stage, and eventually getting a big payout.

I can see the rationale for investing in a company that isn’t profitable but could be, and has just opted to grow instead. Amazon, right? But I don’t see where Spotify’s “profit” switch is.

Exactly the same for Spotify, they haven't started squeezing yet which Amazon started doing a long time ago. Spotify reinvests a lot of money in itself still.

Who is Spotify expected to be able to squeeze?

Amazon would briefly “come up for air” to demonstrate it could earn profit if it wanted. Spotify hasn’t done that and I don’t think they could earn a profit.

Also, Amazon didn’t go 17 years without profit. Is there any company that went that long and then went profitable?

I like Spotify, but do they even have a roadmap to profitability? Are they even projecting profitability any number of years out?

HCF was a great show, and one of the only shows that goes as far back as the BBS days before the Web “caught on”. The cast is pretty good. Highly recommend watching.

Re watched recently HaCF, supplementing it now with book "The soul of the new machine" which also enjoy. The book also appeared in last episode.

Soul of a New Machine is one of the best books chronicling product development. (Showstopper about Windows NT is another good one.)

There were a lot of parallel threads in the early 80s that didn't really intersect a lot. You had the PC/BBS world, the ARPANET/Internet, and the minicomputer & mainframe worlds.

I knew a lot of the people in Soul of a New Machine and actually dotted-lined into Tom West for a while. (Later on when Data General was coming out with big Unix servers.)

I don't think I quite made it to the end of HaCF as it's not available (legally) on non-premium subscriptions. I'll have to hunt it down.

I will check Showstopper, thank you for recommendation. It was definitely a fruitful time, a lot of meaningful job was done. I envy you that you could work with those folks.

It was a different time. In general, things happened more slowly. Things were a lot less interconnected and a lot less transparent from the outside. Information was really hard to get. It was a good time. It was also a time that I would probably find incredibly frustrating to get anything done in if I were to suddenly be transported back.

Silicon Valley was the best in my opinion... Having worked for a startup in the 90s, it nailed the pain points perfectly, as well as the passive aggressive management styles and office culture underlying the entire industry. Mike Judge is a unique cultural comedy documentarian of the highest order, I like most of the stuff he does like Office Space and Idiocracy as well.

I really loved Halt and Catch Fire. It's among the greatest shows I have watched in any genre.

Highly recommend.

Such a great show.

> About Spotify, which isn't failure

Is that true? They are still losing money after, what, 10 years?

I like Spotify but I don’t think they are out of the woods yet.

Just like I wouldn’t call WeWork (isn’t a failure) in 2018.

I guess I meant all the other suggestions documented failures or at least 'falls'. Spotify may not make money but it is still running and hasn't suffered a fall to the same extent as the other real life examples.

There are degrees of failure. WeWork has raised $23B and they’re currently worth $350M.

Losing $22B is a pretty insane failure.

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