Engineers as Heroes | Hacker News Reader

Engineers as Heroes

refer.ly

44 pointskevin_morrill47 comments

It should have Iron Man. Maybe also A Beautiful Mind.

Closer to home, if we're doing documentaries, Revolution OS maybe ought to be there.

Feature idea: make it so other people can add stuff to collections and then the article's owner can moderate it in or out. Would you use that?

I'd use that. It would also be nice to be able to suggest better versions of products to replace the products in some people's lists.

Collaborative list building is a great idea.

Iron Man is by definition what a heroic engineer is (with a lot of sex and addiction issues along the way).

A lot of the Iron Man franchise focuses on Stark as an action hero, with the engineering bit existing solely as a plot device. (In the movies, compare how much screen time he spends designing/building against how much screen time he spends beating up bad guys.)

Iron Man doesn't really even try to capture the way real engineers work.

Agreed; I'm referring more to the comic book narrative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man#Fictional_character_bi...

Really? I thought the first Iron Man movie was a great depiction of iterating on a product design.

I guess it isn't quite as much an engineer's movie as Apollo 13 or October Sky, but I definitely view it as one.

Yeah, it's been a while since I saw the movie, but I left it off because I remember it being more action scenes than a dramatization of engineering. It's partly why I made the collection, because it's so hard to find movies that do it well.

You could make a case for putting Star Trek on that list. How often were Scotty and Geordi, chief engineers, literally heroes on those shows?

Yeah how did I miss that one! Just put a solid Geordi centric episode up there. Him and Data are my favorite STNG characters.

Should definitely add Primer to the list. I've never seen another movie that uses scientific language that is not dumbed down -at all- for the audience.

I love the first half of the movie, because it shows a lot of what a real startup is like. It's incredible how they did the overlapping dialog to show the fast pace of thought. Adding it right now.

I feel uneasy about this - pushing affiliate links to HN? Oh well, if the crowd likes it, you win :-(

This comes up every time we post a collection from Referly to HN, regardless of it being very relevant to the community here. I think it bears pointing out that every content site makes money from getting traffic on HN - for us we make money if people purchase products but don't have any ads. For Techcrunch, CNET etc. they primarily make money from ads. Furthermore, most writers don't ever see the proceeds of these ads (they do far better as full time writers). In our case we pass through revenue to our contributors directly (in this case Kevin is a cofounder of Referly so his earnings go to the company).

If the argument is that the content is somehow altered because of affiliate links, to guarantee some better payout or something - pretty much ANY movie is covered by affiliate programs these days and payouts are all about the same (even on the front page this article only stands to make ~$10 in commissions). As always, the content has to stand on its own, and we hope that Referly could be a new format for product/list blogging.

Lists are discouraged on HN anyway, iirc. That list just didn't seem so impressive to me, so I suspected it was less made out of passion and more out of "let's see if we can get on HN for fun and profit".

Anyway, as I said, if the crowd votes it up, you win. My complaining is irrelevant.

Haha okay, I told him he needs to make the list better

Flight of the Phoenix (1965) - The heroic engineer is a German model airplane designer who rebuilds a crashed air freighter.

Threshold (1981) - Jeff Goldblum plays a biomedical engineer who designs and builds the world's first self-contained artificial heart.

Buckaroo Banzai (1984) - A stretch, I think, but BB and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are all techies to one degree or another.

Real Genius (1985) - The heros are physics and CS majors, but that's close enough.

Thank you sooo much for recommending Flight of the Phoenix. I just watched it last night, and it's one of my new all time favorites.

Minecraft: The Story of Mojang[1], just released this morning, is really good. It looks at Markus' original idea, the expansion of the company, the small team environment working on something huge, and lots of the other areas that the game has infiltrated in the past 3.5 years.

If you're including The Indie Game Movie, I'd say it's as least as qualified.

[1]: http://redux.com/minecraft-movie

Steve Jobs was a great salesman. I've never encountered any record that said he was a great programmer, let alone a shitty one.

It's evident from the interview he actually did program, granted no where near as well as Wozniak. I think he easily makes it on the list as a leader of engineering organizations.

Pirates of the silicon valley, a must add..

The fact that you recognized 21 is a win in itself! One of my favorites!

Batman movies would be great for this list - he's one of the few superheroes that doesn't claim to have any actual super powers, but rather derives his power from kickass, well-engineered gear.

He derives his power from engineered gear, but he himself isn't an Engineer.

Also, the batmobile is rather poorly designed. With its underbody being so flat against the ground, it is incredibly vulnerable to IEDs, to say nothing of a stray bit of rubble.

Yeah, I don't know much about the comic, but at least in the latest Christopher Nolan movies the engineering is all behind the scenes by Morgan Freeman's secret division. No slight to the series, just saying.

If you are including fictional engineers, I'd suggest Hiccup from the "How to Train Your Dragon" movie. It was basically through his engineering skill that he captured Toothless. It was also engineering to provide Toothless with a prosthetic tail and figure out how to fly with him. Learning how to train dragons was a mix of science and engineering. He's continued demonstrating an engineering and scientific approach to problems in the "Gift of the Night Fury" short and several of the "Riders of Berk" cartoons.

I.Q. is a nice one http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110099/

Although not sure if it qualifies as "Engineers as Heroes".

Some context on this: I found myself really loving movies that were able to tastefully dramatize engineers and the work they do. There are precious few movies that do this. Let me know if I missed any good ones.

Hopefully it will be some inspirational fuel going into the New Year.

Thank you for sharing this, I'm the programming son of an engineer and grew up watching Apollo 13 and Sneakers. :)

Cheaper By the Dozen http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042327/, The Aviator http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338751/

> Cheaper By the Dozen

The remake had Steve Martin cast as a football coach, though.

Have any of the Howard Hughes documentaries or dramatizations been any good?

I've seen some fairly positive reviews of "the Flying Scotsman", about a bicyclist (Graeme Obree) who built his own rather innovative designs and broke several world records.

While Contact may be inspirational, for me, it's also one of the saddest movies I've watched more than once.

I agree, I wonder why they decided to end it the way they did.

I've never read the book; not sure if that is how it ends.

Neither have I, downloaded!

The Right Stuff http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086197/

I'd add Numb3rs to this list.

I just added it to the list. Perfect timing, because I need a new TV series to get addicted to now Dexter and Homeland are over for the season.

Numb3rs fits with the genre of the list, but it's kind of meh as a show. If you're looking for something to watch that's actually good, try The Newsroom. I think the entire first season is available on HBO on demand.

Wonder how the obvious qualifier, Social Network misses the list.

Mark Zuckerberg is a badass, but I hardly think that movie portrays him as a hero

The Aviator?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com