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Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

179 pointsby todsacerdotitoday at 1:49 PM106 commentsview on HN

Comments

herodoturtletoday at 5:27 PM

I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.

And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.

Hack the planet <3

You’re in the butter zone now, baby!

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bilekastoday at 3:15 PM

Hack the planet. This is such a call back and what a nice touch to add the sound to it too. That whole OST is incredible, I still pull orbital and prodigy into my current work playlists. What a fun movie.

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partoday at 5:17 PM

Damn dude this hurts. My friend took his own life last year, and Hackers was our absolute favorite movie back in high school. I mean even as late as 2022 we were messaging each other the Hacker manifesto, hack the planet, you know all the good stuff. Sam Singh, you would've loved this man. I miss you homie. hack the planet.

syxtoday at 5:37 PM

Last month they had a rerun of the movie at the cinema in Dublin (IE) and went to see it with a friend. It was such a surreal experience because after watching it on my laptop so many times I could hear the laughter and the jokes of the audience on the cheesy hacking scenes, it was like watching the movie in 4D, I enjoyed it a lot!

I even brought my PowerBook Duo 280c along with me

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enkontatoday at 3:03 PM

This movie had an unreasonable influence on me as a kid...as cheesy as it is, it still holds up as one of my top ten favorite movies.

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jghntoday at 3:40 PM

I couldn't find the garbage file. I'm such a failure, now Davinci is going to overturn all the oil tankers

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jus3sixtytoday at 5:57 PM

Some of you tough tech guys are talking a lot of sh$@ but I bet you couldn’t hack a Gibson.

JaggedJaxtoday at 5:02 PM

Love it, what a great throwback, especially with the OST.

In Firefox is there a way to play this without FF popping up the search box on every key press? Maybe there's a way for the JS to override the default FF search functionality?

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trentnixtoday at 3:11 PM

The animation is cool, but I just wanted to note for Hackers fans and movie nerds that the scenes inside the "Gibson" that this animates were actually done via practical effects.

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mackmantoday at 4:41 PM

OK who is gonna turn this into a functional terminal emulator for me?

TheSilvatoday at 3:28 PM

Sadly, looking through the code, doesn't show up any "GARBAGE" file easter egg to be found.

Amazing stuff, nevertheless!

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echelon_musktoday at 4:09 PM

> You're gonna love New York. It's the city that never sleeps.

k6hkUZtLUMtoday at 5:59 PM

Hack the Planet!

nickthegreektoday at 3:55 PM

I highly recommend the 88 films 4k blu-ray release for those who love Hackers. I recently was able to purchase an unopened VHS tape as well. I have a brand new VCR coming so I can have a proper experience.

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shontoday at 3:36 PM

The Gibson! Very cool. did you make this?

I made a Tron lightcycle game: https://new.af/tron

Now that AI accelerates dev so much, I suspect we'll get to see a lot of cool throwbacks.

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benruttertoday at 4:05 PM

This is awesome, and remimds of my favourite fact which is that the jurrasic park unix system was actually a real unix system running a real file browser. File browsers ended up converging om a more useful, but way less cool design[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

RazerWazertoday at 6:02 PM

You have now become The Plague.

diggyholetoday at 3:36 PM

It's in the place I put the thing that one time!

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erickhilltoday at 5:29 PM

Oh dang I made it to the end of the grid/world. Got scared in the darkness and retreated back to the light.

axustoday at 4:11 PM

The addressing on that hex dump is all over the place.. and not even byte-aligned!

evan_today at 5:29 PM

This is great, is there any way to just have it fly around autonomously?

waldopattoday at 5:45 PM

Phenomenal work!

LandoCalrissiantoday at 3:59 PM

Easily my biggest guilty pleasure movie, warts and all, I still love it.

cmrdporcupinetoday at 5:46 PM

I never saw this movie back in the day, but now I want to.

Just listening to Halcyon & On & On is putting a lump in my chest. That era in time was just so fantastic and I don't think it's just because I was 21 and utopian.

I think I could perma stay in 1995/96, Groundhog Day style. Just relive those same "halcyon" days over and over perfecting and absorbing everything over and over.

"We have to go back!"

runjaketoday at 4:14 PM

I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.

Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.

Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:

- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.

- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.

So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.

And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.

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fred_is_fredtoday at 3:31 PM

This is really slow for me on my laptop. Does it need a P6 to run? I heard those have a killer refresh rate.

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JCattheATMtoday at 4:46 PM

This is really cool! Thanks for making and sharing.

myvoiceismypasstoday at 5:28 PM

This absolutely made my week! (I still have the Hackers movie poster framed in my office.)

krirotoday at 4:51 PM

A+ app, I turned on sound and was not disappointed.

Love the movie, got a spray can and sprayed my whole keyboard army green after watching it then realized I can't 10 finger type. What a golden age of interesting young people in computer security. Roughly one year later (iirc), I read "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" which might have been my most influential IT related read. It's probably tied with "Man-Computer Symbiosis" :)

aenistoday at 4:02 PM

very cool. i made my own version of the final wargames sequence. now, whenever i am in a boring meeting i am adding something to the game mechanics.

ethintontoday at 3:09 PM

That's delightful - thanks for sharing!

Undoubtedly a film that inspired a generation.

anthktoday at 5:03 PM

I like Wargames much more. Still, people is right that we should take the 'hacking' (cracking) scenes artistically, as a metaphor on what's happening inside the mind of a cracker.

KeybInterrupttoday at 4:10 PM

Yeah! Hack the Planet :D

fvvtoday at 5:16 PM

wonderful

29athrowawaytoday at 4:12 PM

This is good progress but the 1995 movie is still superior.

There many details in the movie, like the sound of electricity going through the circuit, the camera path is more like a spline with rotations in more axis, etc.

It does perform really good on mobile.

RRRAtoday at 4:16 PM

Now add a flashing red box with:

/root/.workspace/garbage

(was that it?) and a VJ mode that scrolls around to the beat and you have something for the next party!

stewartjarodtoday at 3:50 PM

LOVELY :D

pjmlptoday at 3:47 PM

"RISC architecture is gonna change everything." :)

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bitwizetoday at 3:42 PM

"Okay, we need proof that we were here... right uh... Okay, yeah, Garbage, gimme Garbage."

My wife and I both love this movie. I thought it was cheesy and unrealistic when it dropped, but it's reflective of a mid-90s era when technology was something to be excited about and there was a lot of hype about "cyberspace" and such nonsense. That's also when I got into internetworking, Linux, and all that stuff. And electronic music. Hackers made people with my interests seem way cooler and sexier than we really were.

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0xcb0today at 4:05 PM

I love it. Hack the planet. Thank you so much.

anthktoday at 5:08 PM

Ironically aestheticically wise the best hackers (as in the original sense) would just depict a half busy and utterly boring plan9/9front desktop and tons of physical (and digital books). Forget about ricing (except for constrast and readability, such as using Zukitre instead of Adwaita for GTK). Usability first.