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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

In the associated blog post he says:

  Methodology:
  I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images
  (yay wget -- “The Social Network” inspired
  me to not use curl)

Could some who's seen the film enlighten me on why wget is better than curl?

Thanks.

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I think this is mostly one line in which Mark Zuckerberg says something along the lines of "time for a little wget magic". Certainly not a major plot point.

Here's what I think is the relevant scene on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOzMz-fOOw

Wow, I was surprised on how realistic that was. Maybe I should watch the movie after all.

It's actually quite a good film if you ignore the character assassination of Zuckerberg (not that he really needs defending, just it seems a little cheap).

I don't think it's fair to call it character-assassination. He didn't paint Zuck with a pretty brush, but I'm not sure any first-tier founders made it to where they are without delivering a few cheap blows themselves. There's definitely some sense of admiration for "Zuck the Doer", not "Zuck the Dreamer".

Especially the empty search part. In my experience, the three search terms most likely to return all results are:

  1) %%% (many sites limit the minimum search term length to three so a single % will not do the trick).
  2) '   ' (trhee spaces)
  3) '' (empty string)

Edit: formatting

That's about as much tech talk as there is in the whole movie - you may be disappointed. Bit of a storm in a tea cup I thought.

I don't remember any discussion of wget vs. curl in the movie and couldn't find anything specific to the movie about that on Google; I'm guessing that the the OP just decided to use wget instead of curl because that was what they were using in the movie. (If I'm wrong, somebody please correct me.)

Here is a comparison of wget and curl that was posted on Hacker News a little over two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1241479

HTTPie[1] is better than both. ;)

1. https://github.com/jkbr/httpie

(I am in no way affiliated with this project. I'm just a happy user.)

But wget and curl aren't for humans, whereas HTTPie is. I've done plenty of `wget -m -np`s (and `puf -r` when I've had to saturate my Internet pipe...) which isn't what HTTPie does.

Ok, httpie is prettier and has some syntax shortcuts, but it doesn't even do a fraction of what curl or wget does. No recursive downloads, no simulating diferent HTTP protocol version, no SSL options, no even retry options! #fail

(I am in no way an httpie hater.)

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