Hacker Cinema
Burn After Reading
2008 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Ethan Coen, Joel Coen
When a disc containing memoirs of a former CIA analyst falls into the hands of gym employees, Linda and Chad, they see a chance to make enough money for Linda to have life-changing cosmetic surgery. Predictably, events whirl out of control for the duo, and those in their orbit.
10 positive1 mixed8 neutralfrom 19 commenters
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20 comments on Hacker News
(From "Burn After Reading", a wonderful movie)
I love stories and movies that are kind of just like "man a bunch of shit just happened, is there really a lesson? who knows" (like Burn After Reading for a comedic example).
There doesn't have to be a "point" for there to be beauty or something to learn from people and their lives and experiences, fictional or not.
Burn after reading is a very funny movie about CIA (and human) incompetence.
Definitely need the Coen brothers to make that movie. It's like something right out of Burn After Reading.
I keep finding winners of movies. Burn After Reading has been jumped up to my top 10 list just because of how benign and absurd it all is. A cool tragedy I think most people should see is "Into the Fade" with Diane Krueger and the drug addict from Babylon Berlin (dont know his name off the top of my head). A lot of mainstream "marvel-the-good-guys-win" type of people won't like it but if you want cold blooded reality it does it well.
>You do realize a laptop was stolen to give to Russian intelligence
No, but I do realize that the same tired "RussiaGate" trite zero-content faux-panic (with 0 actual results and proof, based on a dossier of random accusations made by a guy on behalf of the Dems [1]), was reheated when some "Burn After Reading (the Coen movie)" IQ-level person that was into the Capitol tried to sell a laptop they stole to the russians.
[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million
>Coup? Meh, agreed, it wasn't organized by the military. Violent protest? Absolutely.
I'll meet you halfway, and admit it was a protest. As protests go, it was hardly that violent - especially for a protest that got into a government building.
Then again, globally such protests are a dime a dozen. We had a couple in mine here parts...
Burn After Reading is becoming a documentary?
The wonderful comedic film "Burn After Reading" immediately comes to mind.
Cue the entire movie "Burn after reading."
Kid had the whole attention of the world for a few minutes, could've walked away a billionaire, start WW3, casino royale stock trading - everything, anything - CREATIVELY there's so much that could've been done and it all fell down to a bitcoin scam that netted less that 150K (wallet shows about 128k.)
That's a yearly salary of a help desk engineer on the west coast.
--I'm not sure which video to link of "Burn after reading" but the entire movie is how this was handled.
With every day that goes by, the more I become convinced that Burn After Reading was a documentary.
Yeah I don’t get hating on Intolerable Cruelty. The only Coen brothers film I truly disliked was Ladykillers. I didn’t really care for Burn After Reading either, but I feel like I probably just need to give it another chance.
My favorite segment of Buster Scrugs was The Gal Who Got Rattled, followed by Near Algodones. I found Meal Ticket too long and too dark. Didn’t care for The Mortal Remains all that much either.
Poor gal, she shouldn’t ought to have done it. Oh my.
>I simply cannot understand people who think like this.
Such people are the subject of several Coen Brother movies, including Fargo, Burn After Reading, Ladykillers, and so on...
(Not that I don't feel for them though. It sucks to lose your savings, even if you did it by being greedy/stupid).
not at all related - but this post reminded me of the movie "Burn After Reading" :) J K Simmons plays a hilarious [deadpan] CIA officer ..his character's responses to the situations that arise seem both hilarious and on point.
I felt like I arrived in the future when I spoke into my phone, "George Clooney movie with the penis chair," and "Burn After Reading (2008)" was the top result.
This is almost like the great Coen bros movie Burn After Reading
This comment is more amusing than educational, but for anyone who hasn't already, I recommend watching the Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading.
When you watch it, you get the strong sense that this, rather than Jason Bourne or James Bond, is the movie that comes the closest to depicting what the intelligence community is actually like: nobody knows anything and everyone's bumbling about helplessly while they pretend to be omniscient, except they have a lot of leeway to (figuratively and literally) bury the bodies when things go sideways.
Junior Mechanical Engineer (aka EIT) here. Interviews are pretty... standard I guess? Nothing like the interviews I read about on HN.
Most of the time is spent discussion my past projects, both technical and less technical aspects, like conflicts in team work and what not. Since I'm recently out of school, those projects are mainly a major design project I was a part of in undergrad (designing building a desert orienteering buggy from the ground up in 2 years), my master's research project, and coops (5) I did in undergrad.
Sometimes, especially if there is an HR person in the room, I'll be asked the really cliché interview questions, like name your 3 worst weaknesses. I hate that, it's a bullshit question, and (I hope) they very well know everyone will give them bullshit answers with the straightest face they can.
Exactly once I've been asked to solve relatively trivial mechanical (statics&dynamics) problems on a piece of paper. Honestly, I normally enjoy it when I get to write down FBDs and work out those kinds of problems. But it was the first I was asked to do it with an interviewer watching over my shoulder, and that was much harder than I thought. I totally choked up under pressure, and could only barely finish 70% of one of two problems. I feel for you devs now.
Funnily enough, in that same interview, there was a later part with an HR lady, that went well enough I think, until at the end she asked me asked the movie I thought was the funniest I ever saw. Sort of stressed and exhausted from the previous 3 hours of interviewing, not being a huge fan of comedies in general, and having recently re-watched Fargo, I went on about Coen Brothers movies, and how I think there is something hilarious about how trivial misunderstandings escalate into ridiculously life changing outcomes for every character.
Apparently she'd never heard of any of those films, and I'm not good at communicating my enjoyment of George Clooney's fuck machine in Burn After Reading. Didn't get that job, not sure if it was that or the paper problems that sank me.
(just kidding, I definitely did not bring up a fuck machine in a job interview, but I might have went on a bit much about Fargo, which she intially confused with Argo)
It's not often that women's sexuality gets celebrated so joyfully and without judgement in the media, this movie looks wonderful. Reminds of the VERY NFSW clip from Burn After Reading: Frances McDormand's reaction is so very satisfying after seeing decades and decades of women in the media being there to service men rather than themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUm2Im3SvtU (HIGHLY NFSW)
The Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading and Fargo.
Also I'd argue MASH, which was massively successful, though that might be stretching dark comedy. Depends on the episode I guess.
i think the word learning is a misnomer here, the term learning in itself is dubious enough
look to the best line, and i'd argue one of the most important ideas to ingestively portray to a mainstream population, in 2008 cinema, also an argument could be made to increase that reach.. perhaps in the last decade, century, however hyperbolically you care to extend the reach.. from the film burn after reading(i):
CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer? CIA Officer: I don't know, sir. CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again. CIA Officer: Yes, sir. CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
i think what victor is suggesting here would aide moreso in efforts to improve understanding than facilitate a traditional understanding of learning
when quantum mechanics was young there was a sudden rush of interest in quantum understanding and one of the modes of expressing improvements in that understanding was to create models(ii) sometimes completely replacing old models, if i remember victor even says bohrs name in relation to this concept
this i think is the sorts of things victor is alluding to, stead seeing it as learning think of it as new perspectives to improve understanding.. interestingly though one would have to learn the concepts, both current and avant, in order to know when a new expressive medium improves on the old
so knowledge accumulation is a part of this sort of environment, but arguable only subordinate to the true goals
the shot of the stick figure pushing on a bond between elements in a molecular model i feel is the best representation of this idea
i'd love to have a room like that:
a central tool with supporting data surrounding it the central tool is imbued with evidencial data w when i manipulate the tool new data is expressed in different ways around me i apply my changes physically the the data maps all changing in sync
lets say i want to try to bond a new element in place of an old one, i can do it physically and watch as the object changes before me
in the picture the stick figure is applying force on that bond, perhaps the idea the figure is testing is what if i bend this bond or strain it, what then? or if i move this bond over here does this better represent our understanding of molecules? .
my issue with the talk was two fold, i thought victor tended to talk down efforts others have already made or are making to do something with similar goals but in a wholly different means, and victor also failed to mention the number of people already doing the very things he is suggesting, it came off as unnecessarily dramatic and i found those were the times when he really lost me to wandering thoughts
and also i found it interesting that victor seemed to suggest this new dynamic reality would manifest without the use of current forms of creation
things like, ~programming of the future will be different than programming of today~ which i both agree and disagree with, i think both the current and future ways to program will be in tandem and it will be more of a matter of who touches what aspects of it,
i think like hardware design and manufacture programming will become a specialised field
look at compilers, that is people really interested in low level bit moving granting people with high level interests.. in the programming sense stead some cogitive nobile sense.. access to their expertise from within the comforts of the higher level
the same i believe will be true but that gap will likely grow as it has with hardware manufacture
there will always be a need and opportunity for tinkers to challenge the manufacture to keep it fresh, like the hardware scene(iii), but realistically this shift in software will most likely have the same dramatic effect on quality of life as the hardware model has
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(i) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887883/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt
(ii) https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/atomic-model-timeline--3
(iii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdcKwOo7dmM