from Hacker News

Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

by rx_tx on 12/14/23, 6:23 AM with 146 comments

• by mportela on 12/14/23, 3:10 PM

  This movie is the reason why I became a programmer.

  I watched it when I was starting in high school and got inspired by it. Then, I literally googled "How to become a hacker" and found this incredible page by Eric Raymond [0], which I used as an mentor throughout my high school and college years. I ended up developing the recommended hard skills (learning programming, UNIX, open source culture...) but also the "points of style" (martial arts, science fiction, meditation, music). In fact, when I was trying to search for a hacker community online, I stumbled upon Hacker News and haven't left ever since!

  As expected, I didn't become a black hat hacker as in the movie but, to this day, I still believe this movie changed the course of my life.

  [0] https://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

• by dusted on 12/14/23, 9:00 AM

  I wrote about hackers too, http://www.dusted.dk/pages/phlog/2023-12-02.txt the gist of that rant is that what you see in hackers is not what's not their screens, but what's in their minds, through a poetic lens.

• by rwmj on 12/14/23, 11:07 AM

  Interview with the guy who made the perspex "buildings"(?) props that represented the central computer database, with a photo of one of them if you scroll down a bit:

  https://web.archive.org/web/20180301013110/http%3A//hackersc...

• by tecleandor on 12/14/23, 12:45 PM

  Funny that I didn't notice until very recently that the computer operator was Penn Jillette, the magician!

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2OYNMO_mNw

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYE2amC9vMY

• by ynniv on 12/14/23, 4:08 PM

    Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon, and Phantom Phreak, real names not given.
  

  Disappointing because Cereal Killer's given name was Emmanuel Goldstein, an alias made famous by Eric Corley, editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Eric consulted on the movie, and it probably would have sucked without him.

• by k2enemy on 12/14/23, 1:08 PM

  If you're a fan of the movie, this youtube channel has amazing interviews with cast and crew. So many great anecdotes buried within...

  https://www.youtube.com/@HackersCurator/videos

• by Mainan_Tagonist on 12/14/23, 9:03 AM

  This is a nice website, with an interesting purpose. Though i suppose reviewing sci-Fi movies notions of interfaces will soon clash with the dryness of reality.

  The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus.

  The noughties were way more grounded in reality, even the Matrix had Trinity hacking into a server using a OpenSSH exploit on a black and white terminal.

• by Zelphyr on 12/14/23, 3:50 PM

  I remember seeing this movie when it came out and, while I enjoyed it, I chuckled at how silly the UI graphics looked. However, after rewatching it years later I really enjoyed it even more because I realized that, yes, the UI graphics weren't realistic, the movie did a great job of capturing what tech felt like at the time.

  I just rewatched it again recently and find it a thoroughly enjoyable film.

  It doesn't look like this site has done a review of Sneakers yet but I recommend they do. The interfaces are much more realistic for the time (even if the cryptography mathematics do suffer a bit)

• by secretforest on 12/14/23, 9:11 PM

  I liked the movie and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my dad bought me a Commodore 64 and 5 1/4 floppy drive and a 1-year subscription to Creative Computing magazine. I spent so many hours learning programming and then wasted it all by going into the military because my parents couldn't afford to send me to university. Rural community and only my dad worked since my mother was injured. When I got out and returned back up north, I got a "job", got married, and had a neighbor who was a Unix programmer. His home office was decked out with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD servers, BSD magazines and literature everywhere. He talked me into using my GI Bill to go get a degree in CS, which is what I did. My unofficial hero since has been Theo de Raadt. Still using a *nix OS, still in IT.

• by dschuetz on 12/14/23, 9:30 AM

  Who else is hearing the legendary soundtrack seeing those screengrabs?

• by badrabbit on 12/14/23, 10:26 AM

  Bit embarrased to say I tried to implement the 3d file browser from this movie and failed when I was first learning C. I did get the 3d boxes to show up and display files/folders and it was cool (to me) to move them around in 3d but doing even slightly complex stuff required "polynomial math" which was beyond my skill level.

  It still saddens me irrationally to see the state of UX today. It isn't cool and i have many visions of doing all this stuff with webgl and more (not 3d boxes but futuristic yet practical UI). Modern UX feels like art majors designed it by a committee and MBAs+lawyers were the target audience. I no longer even see anyone in tech thinking out if the box with radicallu new windowing systems and alternatives to hypertext and browsers.

• by Reason077 on 12/14/23, 1:15 PM

  Oh man. Legendary film. Young Angelina Jolie in her hacker outfit with her Spock haircut … am I right?

• by LeoPanthera on 12/14/23, 8:00 AM

  "The scene starts with Joey sitting in front of his Macintosh personal computer"

  Oops. Joey's computer is an Apple IIgs.

• by PrimeMcFly on 12/14/23, 10:02 AM

  Not exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people, older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.

• by ulfbert_inc on 12/14/23, 11:46 AM

  I think City of Text thing is onto something, and reminds me immediately of memory palace[1] method.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

• by lanternfish on 12/14/23, 8:26 AM

  Hmm. Now I'm curious if you could actually get a 3d interface with all that information dynamically rendered running with reasonable performance on period accurate personal hardware - it's definitely in the scope of the 95 demo scene stuff.

• by lagrange77 on 12/14/23, 12:04 PM

  I recently stumbled upon this

  https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary

  and it reminded me of the city of text.

• by devjab on 12/14/23, 10:23 AM

  I think the thing I was/is most disappointed about is that I can buy the key caps that Cereal Killer uses for a Nordic keyboard layout. God damn those were cool.

• by lubujackson on 12/14/23, 3:32 PM

  My favorite line from the movie - they are huddled around someone's new computer and a character compliments them with: "Killer refresh rate!"

  With so many great and much more accurate hacker movies like Sneakers, this one was just so much fun to see evry aspect of hacking amplified to the "X-treme!!!"

• by thomastjeffery on 12/14/23, 4:52 PM

  My favorite movie hacker tech is Tron: Legacy.

  They literally just used Linux and Emacs, and it looks beautiful.

• by ptek on 12/14/23, 10:38 AM

  Hack the planet

  A fun movie

  I wonder if it was filmed 10 years later if everyone would be wearing Crocs and not rollerblades.

• by nier on 12/14/23, 8:59 PM

  This movie introduced me to the Wipeout racing game on Playstation.

  Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI

  More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...

• by aethelyon on 12/14/23, 12:07 PM

  This is awesome, but there were a couple of great laptop interfaces from that movie too. Spent some quality time in the 90s getting AfterStep/Litestep to look like them.

• by ChrisArchitect on 12/14/23, 4:27 PM

  This whole article is so draaaaawn out. It's not supposed to be realistic, it's for delivering the story. Hardly any, if any at all, UIs back in the 80s and 90s were realistic. This level analysis just isn't necessary. It's a classic, legendary film for both the content/representation of the subculture, and the 90s "so bad it's good" style.

• by scroot on 12/14/23, 12:14 PM

  Has anyone written about the computers/interfaces in HBO's "Silo"? I've been trying to find information about that because they seem quite interesting.

• by throwaway743 on 12/14/23, 5:26 PM

  The 3rd and 4th screenshots (more so the 4th one) remind me of the interfaces from the older Armored Core games

• by zshrdlu on 12/14/23, 3:53 PM

  How nice! I've been mulling over doing exactly this for a while :D