Agnès Varda
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Off the top of my head, her most HN-relevant movie is The Gleaners and I. In France, there’s a right to glean — to harvest food that will not otherwise be harvested. (Actual French people should help explain that better.) Varda made a movie about gleaners, which covers everything from people living without a home to people making art from found objects to herself.
It’s HN-relevant because finding usefulness in seemingly useless material has the hacker nature. It’s also HN-relevant because she used a new fangled digital camera and it’s absolutely wonderful watching a master director explore what she can do with new technology.
She was always enthused about working with technical constraints. One of her lesser movies, Daguerréotypes, was a documentary about the street she lived on. She was pregnant when she made it, so her limitation was the 300 foot long power cables for her equipment.
Varda is also one of the few directors I know who loves postmortems. Both the movies I mentioned above have sequels revisiting their topics and discussing how the act of making those movies affected the people who were observed. She also revisited her own life with two late career retrospectives, and her husband Jacques Demy’s career with a biopic, a retrospective on his overall life, and a specific retrospective about one of his movies.
She was above all else an observer of life. I recommend her work highly. It’s easily available on the Criterion Channel and much of it is on Kanopy, free with a US library card.
This was historically a problem (to the point where in the 80's whatever was unsold was actively made uneatable, I do not remember what the reason was - at least for agricultural unsold goods there was something about getting a refund from the state).
Then it became more widespread, where some supermarkets put the unsold (but still good) stuff in clean trashbins. They had to formally throw it away for some tax reasons. I think this restriction was abolished because I see now supermarkets sometimes openly donating these goods, without going through a trashbin.
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the article -
> Varda's work employed location shooting in an era when the limitations of sound technology made it easier and more common to film indoors, with constructed sets and painted backdrops of landscapes, rather than outdoors, on location. Her use of non-professional actors was also unconventional for 1950s French cinema.