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Comment by mschwar99 | Hacker News Reader

Fan of:

The headache inducing blue ribbon winner: Pi - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

The slightly corny but worthwhile: Sneakers - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/

Sneakers may be corny - but it's actually based on some serious math. Essentially one of the characters has developed a way to solve a prime factorization in what appears to be constant time (i.e. O(1)). Once you do that - well that's the end of basically all public key cryptography based on the RSA algorithm (pretty much everything in common use). Much more realistic than say, Hackers.

Indeed, Adleman, the A in RSA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman) was a consultant on that movie.

Very true. Must be the one of first times a major Hollywood studio employed a consultant that had taken something beyond College Algebra.

On the other hand, Hackers did take the time to name its characters after handles taken from 2600.

And there are a few other realistic bits:

                      PHREAK
                            (to Cereal)
                D'you bring those Crayola books?

                            CEREAL
                Oh yeah, technicolor rainbow.

     Cereal brings a book out of his bag.

                            CEREAL
                Green one.

                            JOEY
                What is that, what is that? Lemmie see. What
                are these?

                            DADE
                International Unix Environments.

    Cereal pulls out another book.

                            CEREAL
                Luscious orange?

    Cereal hands the orange book to Phreak.

                            DADE
                Computer security criteria, DOD standards.

    Another book comes out.

                            DADE
                The Pink Shirt Book, Guide to IBM PCs. So
                called due to the nasty pink shirt the guy
                wears on the cover.

    Another one.

                            CEREAL
                What's that?

                            DADE
                Devil book. The Unix Bible.

    Another one.

                            CEREAL
                What's that?

                            DADE
                Dragon book. Compiler design.

    Cereal brings out a large red book.

                            CEREAL
                Oh yeah? What's that?

                            DADE
                The Red Book. NSA Trusted Networks.
                Otherwise known as the Ugly Red Book that
                won't fit on a shelf.

    By now Phreak has made a pile of the books, and the Red
    Book looks wholly out of place on the top of the pile.

Every time I'm watching "Hackers" with someone, I can't help but point out which of those books I own. Inaccurate as hell, but still a fun hacker mindset movie.

It also had Angelina Jolie.

It... motivate me to be a hacker.

And yet now that I am a hacker... I am no closer to Angelina, funny that.

When I was young, I thought mechanical engineering would be my ticket to the space race, but after seeing the movie hackers for the 1st time on the engineering floor in college, I thought hacking was COOOOL.

I know it sounds lame, but I have to think that that movie got me fantasizing about it.

So, later on when I was struggling with Statics and Dynamics my teacher recognized that I was really a hacker and not an engineer. He asked how I did all of that stuff on my calculator, I then showed him my serial cable mod for the TI-82, and the other software i had written to make his class easier, because S&D was so hard. He suggested I change majors.

I AM SO HAPPY I DID, and today I have a job where I get paid to design the OpenWeb, and work on side projects. Maybe one will break out.

I still think I owe the campy fantasy of hacking to the movie 'Hackers,' for letting me think i had a better chance of getting a girl via hacking. I guess today i am still hopeful.

(I know I'm going to get downmodded to hell for this but it has to be said)

The reason why you're not closer to Angelina has a simple solution - you haven't yet hacked The Gibson.

but that's probably because Emmanuel Goldstein was a consultant on the production of the movie.

In Hackers, I never understood how the bad-guy hacker arranges a drop-off (he comes in on a skateboard no less!) of a floppy disk from Zero Cool that had the "garbage file".

As if Zero Cool didn't have the technical expertise to make his own copy of the disk's contents first. A drop-off wouldn't protect the bad guy in any way!

Actually The Plague (the bad guy) was just trying to determine how much of the "garbage file" they had - how much they knew... I have to admit that the movie sort of is a guilty pleasure...

The soundtrack is great.

They also did quite a lot of research in names and related "hacker stuff" (a Jolt Cola can in Plague's bedroom comes to mind)

And, of course, there is Angelina Jolie in her 18's. That more than compensates for any screenplay flaw.

The Soundtrack is the first thing I bought on eBay (it came from the US)

I also wanted the headset that Zero wears. Now all I need is a spinning Phonebooth.

Angelina hubba hubba

artlogic, I must have missed that detail. Now at least the plot won't be bother me so much then. I'll have to see it again sometime ;) It was overall fun to watch.

He still had a copy of the disk, that's how they were later able to figure out what Mr. The Plague was up to, and subsequently stop it.

Hackers is a great movie.

Man, I just lost 2 hours of my life to Sneakers. How did Redford, and company get sucked into that. What a horrible movie.

Sneakers is my favourite film. I don't find it particularly corny, but it's very deliberately paced and most of the acting is understated (I guess apart from Dan Ackroyd) which is why I think it never got the recognition it deserved.

I seriously wanted to name my first startup "Setec Astronomy", but the business people I worked with complained that it had nothing to do with data security (we were working on airgap software for secure file storage).

Perhaps you should have suggested "Acme Stoner Toys." ;)

As a funny aside I know the guy who actually built the little dog that does the back flip. The guy is a fun loving hacker type who loves to go caving around the world is really into http://www.wfmu.org/ etc. Basically the direct opposite of the supporting charter.

Pi is amazing. It's also the only full length movie that I've watched with the director's commentary.

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