Tron Legacy (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Tron Legacy (2010)

jtnimoy.net

657 pointsrsingla143 comments

this is courtesy of Hilary Mason's twitter feed, @hmason.

Open articleView on HN

(2010)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2404976 80 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3212825 0 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3107258 0 comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3598197 0 comments

Well that's embarrassing. Looks like I need to revamp my searching skills. I did do a search before posting, but evidently it was a poor one.

My bad!

If it makes you feel any better, this is the first time I've ever seen this before, so reposting isn't always a bad thing. Was an interesting read, love the effects in Tron and it's good to see some insight into it (especially those not on HN in 2010).

Of course if you really cared you might do a search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=emacs+tron

Why on Earth would I ever think of searching for that? I didn't even know the terminal screen was an Emacs terminal because guess what, I don't use Emacs. No need to be an asshole buddy.

Sure, the post was useful as passive entertainment. I get it.

Please calm down, you guys. This is a reposted article we're talking about.

Can't search for unknown unknowns

"You don't know what you don't know" — my mentor

Got mentored by a fortune cookie? Empty platitudes are detrimental to clear thinking; yours is a prime example.

If you cannot see depth where others do, where is the depth lacking?

(playing devil's advocate) The emperor's new clothes.

> yours is a prime example.

Glad I could help. tips hat

Don't worry, I'm not reading HN articles from 2010, so it's a rediscovery for me when this events occur.

If you do want to read classics from HN checkout my http://waybackletter.com project. :-)

I really enjoyed reading this an hadn't seen it before. I think that posting the date, like you did, should remove anybody's expectation that this was fresh content anyway. Regardless of previous posts on HN.

Actually, this title was edited from my original. Thanks to whoever did that!

I use Hacker News'd which is a pretty cool Chrome extension that tells you (and links to) HN submissions for any URL https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-newsd/njdnd...

Just remove all of the weird cruft from the end of the query string, check to see if the link still works, and submit. HN will tell you if you've duplicated an old url.

Submitting "jtnimoy.net/?q=178" would have sent you to the original submission.

> Well that's embarrassing. Looks like I need to revamp my searching skills.

Shouldn't be your job, the web site should take care of it.

Then again, Hacker News' code base looks like it hasn't been touched in six years.

So does the interface. And how about a "notify" if someone responds to a message? What's up with the use of tables? How about Mobile?

You can use http://hnnotify.com/ to get a notification.

Thanks! Didn't know about that.

It's still awesome even if it is a couple of years old.

I tried to pick up SideFX Houdini after this article was published the first time on here.

After a month I admitted total and utter failure.

Whoever came up with that program is a mad genius. It's absolutely mind blowing what you can achieve with procedural operators and networks.

It's somewhat similar in spirit to Cycling 74's MAX and other visual programming environments.

I wish this paradigm(*) was more mainstream, it open your minds and flip your view of computers.

The CmiVFX tutorials about building towns, nature.. anything procedurally were a long and dense brain rewiring. It's almost not about using Houdini, it's about solving a problem with generic functions.

Houdini earns a paradigm name as many things in Houdini are built in Houdini, which is .. well math with interfaces. At least back in 2005, the skeletal animation system component was a encapsulation of geometry primitives bound by some arithmetics, you could open and edit it as any other surface or object. Turtles all the way down. Beautiful. Reminds me of Emacs/Lisp actually, once inside, you won't leave.

I've watched those tutorial videos as well. They blew my mind.

Just speaking about Houdini makes me want to pick it up again.

I found that the complexity lied in knowing all the different nodes, the jargon, and of course when to use what (which comes with experience).

After a month or so I bailed out because of time constraints, my daily job, and other side projects.

May I asked what is your job ?

If you're a programmer does it affect the way you think about things ?

I was highly infected by such programs (Maya hypergraph, SekD Samplitude non destructive virtual tracks; all share this lazy composition of generic nodes) before entering a computer cursus and it shapes everything I do ever since. And since few people experienced that level of generative-ness, I often look like a fool.

I'm a programmer. Dataflow programming is of interest to me and I'm currently trying to put reactive programming into practical use.

I think in a way all those roads lead to functional programming.

Of course, in an enterprise world most people's eyes glaze over when you mention any of this.

To answer your question, I do think it influenced my thinking and made me a better programmer. Even at work, where I mainly program in C#.

I'm in general not that big a fan of visual programming and prefer text myself.

posting the ones with comments is helpful; posting the others is not.

I think it helps with the point, there's been a large influx of reposts lately.

It would be an interesting hack to do something like the dup filter for age and indicate when something is a repost and automatically include the previous versions as the first comment in the thread. I agree that sometimes bringing something back for another round is worthwhile, of course some times not.

My DupDetector bot could do that. I got some very nasty emails and decided to retire it.

If someone is running such a bot, I'd rather it be you than anyone else (you're probably one of the bigger assets to HN as a community, because you submit often and submit lots of great material). But I think essentially the act of doing so is useless, it just takes up screen space. I notice HN includes a system that prevents one from re-submitting things for a certain frame of time -- that is good enough. If there's a good reason to re-link old discussions, someone will probably take the initiative to do so.

That was the first thing I thought of. And I still wish things had turned out differently (both because of what it said about the community and how useful it was).

Lately?

Like a good book, movie, or music, repeat enjoyment isn't necessarily bad. It doesn't detract from my enjoyment of HN, especially when you actually through the links from previous submissions. It's been reposted a number of times for obvious reasons.

Regardless, if the point of the comment is to note the number of reposts, then it's purpose harms HN more than simply using existing means to resolve reposts. Again, within the context of trying to make a point, it is worthless.

If the intent was to post additional commentary found elsewhere, then it's valuable.

Yes, their is a distinction between the two.

I wonder if that has come with an influx of new users also?

From a slightly different perspective here are the detailed and technical case studies from the movie's VFX designer Bradley "GMUNK" Munkowitz:

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Opening-Titles

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Solar-Sailor

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Rectifier-Globe

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Throne-Room

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Fireworks

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Portal-Climax

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Board-Room

- http://work.gmunk.com/TRON-Disc-Game

Thanks. I was wondering what tools they were using to create those effects (openframeworks, cinema4d).

In Tron and The Social Network it was very obvious that a real hacker had been involved in designing the terminal scenes. It makes a big difference to how seriously I take the rest of the movie - Kudos to them!

I was also impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (also by TSN's David Fincher), there was Ubuntu on Lisbeth's Macbook, SQL queries for searching through a crime database, and some other small touches. Really impressed with Fincher's commitment to detail even in the world of programming.

Ironically, Josh (the author) references The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when criticizing Hollywood's choice of using nmap almost ubiquitously.

Yeah, but he also criticized Jurassic Park despite the fact that most of Jurassic Park's OS views were genuinely Unix (SGI's IRIX, to be precise):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y12_WrlPaw

In that clip, you can see fsn, which is a genuinely real 3D file manager for IRIX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ

Granted it's fair to say that the average theme park wouldn't be running IRIX, but Jurassic Park wasn't the average theme park (movie quote: "no expense spared"). So I think some of his criticisms are completely misplaced.

I did see that, but like in the original Matrix, I think it was one of the few times it was appropriate.

Did you also watched the swedish (trilogy) version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"? Can't remember which tools they used.

In the Swedish version, they just make up the commands.

Ebert commented in his review that the film was unique in that it just showed OSX and standard programs like mail.app and iphoto instead of having everything be obviously faked. I like that approach but for whatever reason it is pretty rare in films.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...

I've always wondered why films and TV series (with limited budgets) don't just use off-the-shelf screens from Windows, OS X, or Linux distros. Are there some copyright/trademark issues that get in the way? It seems like a lot of work to develop your own UI that will only be on the screen for a few seconds.

I did notice that in an episode of Homeland that Saul was runing Media Player Classic on Windows to watch a video from an SD card, with the titlebar blurred out (so the name of the app wasn't visible). Later, another character watches the same video but there's a total custom UI used to bring up the video. In the same episode.

Personally I get annoyed whenever I see product placements, like Macbooks, or iPhones, or Windows screens in movies, not to mention Google/Bing searches or Xbox/Playstations in futuristic settings.

Especially when I go to a movie theater, I go there to watch a movie that I pay for. I'm not paying between $7 and $20 to watch a commercial.

Why? These are brands and products the vast majority of the public use and know. It would make a film less realistic if their products didn't appear.

I agree that blatant product placement is offensive (Bond), but just having a Macbook on a table doesn't annoy.

Actually, it's highly unrealistic to see everyone using the exact same platform or exact same software. Especially the Apple products, as their perception of ubiquity is highly inflated by their advertising.

It's also highly unrealistic to see everyone looking like actors and supermodels. Especially within the set of people who know emacs and nmap.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Trinity uses nmap and then an OpenSSH exploit that was published a couple months before the film officially opened in theaters. Contrast this with Swordfish, where you get lines like (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "We have a DS3, allowing you to access eight systems simultaneously." Ugh, just hit stop and go outside.

Back on topic, Tron: Legacy to me feels like a highly technological father/son movie, in the same way that Google is a highly technological advertising company. So it seems we're already living in the future. "The Matrix has you..."

Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, says that getting the technical details right ends up coming through even for those who don't know about the field. Somehow, it just reads better. They went to extraordinary lengths on the episode "Dead Freight" and I while I don't know anything about the stuff in that episode (no spoiler here) I agree. All the little touches add up and make it dramatically more engaging.

Click Episode 505 for relevant making-of podcast:http://www.amctv.com/shows/breaking-bad/insider-podcast-seas...

Ha, I cracked up when they said they had to repaint all the train cars because they were covered with graffiti. They didn't have a problem with the graffiti itself, the problem was that they couldn't get copyright clearances from all the graffiti artists!

Interesting read, nice to see a movie making this kind of effort.

On a side note: I watched this movie on a streaming site... (i.e., I watched it in poor quality).

That was a bad choice.

The plot, storyline, and dialogue is kind of weak. The visuals certainly are not. Watch this in high-res quality, and think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie, and you'll have a great time watching it.

I think in this way it was a perfect successor to the original. Beautiful impressive visuals (each for their time, remember) with a 'cyberpunk-lite' plot to provide a reason for those visuals.

As far as cyberpunk in media that dare actually include cyberspace aspects (so for example, not Blade Runner), I think it stacks up pretty well. The Matrix 'cheats' by explicitly declaring that their cyberspace was built to seem real, and Johnny Mnemonic, rather bluntly, falls on it's face when trying to pull it off (I do love that movie though).

Maybe because I grew up with the original Tron but I found legacy in no way a perfect successor to the original.

Rather than spam HN here's why http://blog.greggman.com/blog/tronlegacy/

Opinions are a very nebulous thing, there is no "right or wrong" in the subject. So while I disagree with all of those points (for reference: when I grew up Tron was in the same class of movies as the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana Jones movies, I can't even begin to count how many times I watched them), those are nevertheless legitimate points for you.

There is objective vs subjective. Subjective: I thought the club scene sucked. Subjective: The vehicle scenes were not exciting. Objective: There's no reason to believe Flynn Jr is good at the games he's asked to play inside the computer. Objective: Holding a disc over your head in an i/o beam is not how you leave the computer in the universe of Tron.

You might enjoy Tron Uprising, the Disney cartoon, as a modern take on Tron. Brilliant sound and art design and the story makes more sense since taking place only in universe.

My counterpoint on why I liked it far more than I thought would going in: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2906

It is amusing though that pretty much everyone agrees that both movies have deep flaws. The disagreement seems to arise in whether the things the movies do uniquely correctly (or at least differently) make up for it. Not exactly a ringing endorsement no matter how you slice it.

>think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie

Check out the Disney cartoon Tron Uprising -- it has a similar but different visual style, a dash of Aeon Flux, and gorgoeus sound deisgn that builds directly off the Daft Punk soundtrack. The story is okay too especially as it gets much darker towards the end of the season.

The show is 5 seconds from being cancelled but the first episode is still free on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbwVzJR8w4

Rest on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/whatever

Sadly, it has been canceled. Disney will let the season play out, but no more episodes after this season.

aw, man. I just discovered this. Looks really cool.

If you want to see another Daft Punk movie, I recommend checking out "Interstella 5555"

They also made 2 more movies, "D.A.F.T.: A Story About Dogs, Androids, Firemen and Tomatoes" (1999) and "Electroma" (2007).

This, I think, is what Daft Punk was born for.

This is so true. I know that band since i was 14. Homework from Daft Punk was absolutely great.

But... This soundtrack, fits so perfect, and i still listen often to it while chilling or coding. So. Awesome.

If you haven't already, try the remix album. I love them both, but the remixes are amazing.

The Tron Legacy now turns up in lots of other places - e.g. the Top Gear Mini vs. Amy Williams race:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzxS-3vO6Gw

Top Gear used a whole bunch of the songs from it over a season or two - I guess they bought the rights to use the soundtrack and wanted to get their money's worth ;-)

A few weeks ago I watched the pilot episode of Lewis, a British TV detective/crime drama that is set in the surroundings of Oxford university, UK. One of the characters in the episode was a PhD student in mathematics and the key to the mystery could be found in one of the papers for his PhD dissertation. The detectives found the paper in question on the character's computer and opened it up for the viewers to see. Lo and behold, the paper was clearly typeset in LaTeX. Someone apparently went out of their way to make this little detail look just right!

Maybe its just me, but it seems like movies are getting better and better in getting those tiny but ever so important technical details right.

It's probably cheaper to pay a PhD candidate to create realistic visuals than to pay a graphic designer to create bombastic claptrap.

Question for any graphics programmers or CG people: As a graphics programmer, how appealing is the CG industry? Based on this, the picture I got was that a lot of the programming he did was driven by shortcomings in the preexisting CG software that artists in the field use.

I'm a Computer Engineering student interested in the field and I haven't entirely decided if I'm interested in the applications of graphics programming yet, although I don't have much to go on because I have limited graphics programming experience.

My personal opinion is, it depends (how's that for a cop-out)

My take is as follows. You can have a restaurant with just a chef. You can have a trading company with just a trader. You can have a tech company with just a program. And you have have a CG animation company with just an animation.

That means that at each of those types of companies, the rest of the people are support staff for the company's main line of work.

At a trading company everyone not a trader is support staff for the traders. At an animation company everyone is support staff for the animators. etc...

That's reflected in your position at the company.

Now for the "it depends" part. If it doesn't bother you to be support staff because the stuff you do you enjoy or because being part of the team of someone making that kind of entertainment is enough reward then fine.

There's also always exceptions. For example there are programmers who have advanced the state of the art of CG while at those companies (the hair in Monsters Ink, The water in The Perfect Storm, the crowds in Lord of the Rings) etc.. so if you fancy yourself someone who can advance that state of the art you might find that appealing. On the other hand I suspect it's getting harder and harder to have a big contribution there.

If you start a shop or work there early on and you take off - it's about the same as any startup - big highs, big lows, big work, impressive product, big impact, big money.

If you work there after it becomes big - it's like working at any game dev shop for EA.

The work is tedious, the industry a sweatshop, but the final output awesome.

The emacs part is cool, but this article mostly just illustrated how little I understand about the effects in movies. Each thing he talked about making seemed simple, but then the effect in the movie was mindblowing and overwhelming. Great read (also, the font is so big and beautiful, love that).

I hate the font. It's practically unreadable in Chrome on Windows. Not eased by the fact that I'm dyslexic so struggle to follow a line of text anyway.

I really wish web developers stopped cocking about with type-faces. Most of the time they don't test it on other platforms, and nearly all of the time they don't consider the usability for people with either poorer eye site or other reading difficulties.

Quite frankly, I'm gutted and annoyed at this site because the content looks interesting but I can't read more than 2 lines of the fucking thing (thus ended up having to edit the CSS in Chromes inspect tool). Very annoying and completely necessary.

If found the font pretty hard to read, being so big. Evernote Clearly made quick work of it: http://evernote.com/clearly/

Just tried Clearly and it worked brilliantly.

Thank you so much for the recommendation. I have a feeling it's going to be used heavily.

How does he use Emacs without Ctrl, or Alt?

edit: For that matter, how did he type "ps -ef | grep -i os12" with no "|" key?

Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>

I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.

Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.

It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.

As joke acronyms go, I preferred "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" back when Eight Megs was a lot of memory. "Eighty Megs" worked for a while after that. These days you'd have to rename it EGACS to use that joke.

Actually, it stood for "Editing MACroS" [1]. There are other expansions though -- see [2] below.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-faq.html#Origin-of-t...

[2] http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html

Also there is the totally useless capslock key, it could be mapped to meta just fine ^_^

See point 1 on Steve Yeggies's list of things to consider with emacs.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

Maybe his keyboard is modal, but we never see it change. ;)

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/FootSwitches :)

He could have remapped the keys arbitrarily, and he also could have used unicode input methods to type | with more than one keystroke.

https://github.com/greboide/emacs-gestures

For what it is worth I use an "otaku" Happy Hacking KeyBoard Pro 2 (HHKB Pro 2) with "blank" black keys and I remapped | to HYPER+[ (and I'm of course using right alt as a "new" modifier, HYPER).

tl;dr: you can't never be sure how Emacs hacker have configured their keys/modifiers ; )

I just discovered Alias and my wife and I have been watching episodes back to back. The show does a good job of making the contents of various displays legitimate. In one scene, the 'tech guy' (Marshall) has to build some source code - and I saw various familiar libtool/autoconf symbols scroll by.

It's been years since I've seen it, but I remember a hilarious scene where Jack Bristow is talking to someone in an IM-like window; his choice of text is giant red Comic Sans and his messages are devoid of grammar and punctuation.

You could argue that this is typical of the average IM user in the early 2000s, but it seemed incongruous for the character.

The text on this site hurts my eyes.

Agreed. I gave up a couple sentences in and had to run it through Readability to read it. Hairline fonts (Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, in this case) are not really intended for body copy.

Of course, the font choice is not the only thing that makes this practically illegible. It's too large, the leading's cramped, and it could probably use a max-width to prevent excessively long lines in larger viewports.

Fascinating article, though!

It borders on unreadable. I feel like I'm in the first row of a movie theater.

I arrived late to the opening of Tron:Legacy (+IMAX/3D) and had to sit in the front row. THAT was a hurt on the eyes. This, I can deal with.

I really like how most browsers have a very usable webdev tool, so I just changed the font, line-spacing and document width until it was good. I don't always go through that trouble, but ihn this case the page was simple enough and the content seemed worth it.

It was pretty obviously only tested on OS X: http://i.imgur.com/g1thFBk.png

The OS X rendering is ugly, but the windows rendering is unreadably thin.

In Firefox:

Alt+V, y, n

I'm always suprised by the inflexibility of window managers. I would imagine we should be able to have something similar to this by now.

I always dreamed how much fun a job making these computer "GUI" scenes would be. You would go apeshit adding all sorts of dashboards and widgets and things that look pretty but not work.

See: CSI, NCIS, Bones, etc.

Why don't you have fun making functional dashboards that look like they belong in Hollywood?

More importantly than emacs, design orientated people use wxWidgets? Frankly that's far more surprising!

This is pretty incredible stuff on the terminal. Aside, if you'd like to code up tron bots (AI), you can try them here: https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/tron

Why does he have an issue with Jurassic Park? Lex was using fsn, which would have been available at the time for IRIX - although not used in any serious production environments that I'm aware of.

I suspect it was more the "I know UNIX!" child hacking that threw him off. :)

Maybe she hadn't used fsn ever but could tell from the file system structure that it was in fact a UNIX system. Then she concluded that she need to find the correct file - which is how UNIX does things.

I did find the scene ridiculous at the time but it was because I didn't know UNIX or fsn. Now I find it very plausible.

Exactly, I cringed at that scene.

I'd be surprised if there weren't more than a few HN users who'd installed a Linux distribution by age 12.

Probably not when the movie came out in '93 tho. The easiest Linux install was a sad chore until at least '95 or '96.

Not strictly true, really. Ygddrasil was a bootable Linux distro on a CD which was available during the '93/'94 period .. I was always pretty sad that they stopped the project. It could've been a contender ..

But...her grandfather clones dinosaurs. Why is so beyond belief that she'd have used Unix at some point?

Because it's a click-and-point graphical 3D maze-like diagram thing.

If she'd piped ps through grep into kill then nobody would have ever mentioned it again.

"The easiest Linux install was a sad chore"

It really wasn't that bad - not quite as super slick as OS installs these days but most of the grief tended to come from having to do things like install it from a stack of floppy disks.

shrug I was using one of the first versions of Slackware at that time. I can't remember exactly how easy it was to use as it has been a while. Probably I'm just blocking it from memory as it was Slackware :P.

How can someone who is a designer choose such a poor font for their won website? Specially given that he is talking about designing text graphics

I thought I was the only one who suddenly felt like I needed glasses. Very blurry/out of focus looking

It seems like movies are going to some trouble to get "real" computing into movies. I mean, real computers aren't dramatic so they don't get much screen time, but still. Another recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047807

"So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep"

http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/post/39827269109/when-one-...

Hehehe

I'm horrible about remembering specialized commands, so I "ps | grep" all the time. Sometimes grep shows up in the output, sometimes it doesn't, and yet life goes on... :-)

For more of this sort of thing: http://www.reddit.com/r/FUI (that's short for Fantasy/Fake User Interface)

I think it would be interesting to see an open source OS for mobile touch devices that worked like that.

Holy cripes, I cannot actually read the copy at all. It does look like an interesting read though.

I wish there was an OS for a tablet with this UI. I would be in heaven.

Same, maybe someone can make a good Android skin, but I doubt it would have the commitment to detail the movie showed. I was thinking it would also be cool to have a table-computer like Dilinger Jr. was using (sort of like the original MS Surface), but then I wondered whether looking down all the time would be bad posture...

Battle Royale used nmap before The Matrix trilogy did…

Fascinating read.

I wonder why he used eshell not term.

The article doesn't say but it has piqued my interest in it. Is eshell of any usefulness? Can it be used to create scripts?

You can think of Eshell as a Unix shell that is 100% customizable, and those customizations are done in a very high level language like Elisp, not in C. Sometimes it's great to use macros in a shell script.

Yes, it can be used for running scripts: https://github.com/emk/eshell/blob/master/em-script.el

incredible. simply incredible.

One more Tron movie please.

First thing I did was go into the Chrome inspector and change the font.

Often when there's some coding stuff like a terminal inside movies, it's not only the programmers paying attention anymore. Very often because I'm the "computer guy" my entourage ask me: "Is it realistic?" or "Do you really use stuff like that?".

So it's not just to please "us" that they pay a little attention to being "correct". People like it when you answer "yes, we do this kind of stuff" and hate it when you say "no, it's complete utter rubbish bullshit". It's like if the movie creators where making fun of them by showing them bullshit and that they didn't like that.

In a way I care less than them: because I know when a movie is bullshitting me on a computer-related scene. Non programmers don't.

The problem is that if you notice that they are bullshitting you on computers, it makes you wonder how much other stuff is bullshit too, that you might not have the expertise to recognize.

Most things - eg: practically every "destructive" explosion in a movie is BS - "real" explosions lack flames and tend to make objects (like cars) cease to exist.

Some do, some don't. I've had a car bomb go off near me and there were plenty of flames to go around.

A giant fireball erupting from the bomb? Or random stuff around the blast catching fire?

Sorry for the late reply, I missed this. A giant fireball from the bomb - or more accurately, from the contents of the gas tank when the bomb exploded.

Programmers have entourages now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com